Volume 33, Number 9 · May 29, 1986
In The Big House of Theory
By Frederick C. Crews
The Return of Grand Theory in the Human Sciences
edited by Quentin Skinner
Cambridge University Press, 215 pp., $8.95 (paper)
It has been more than a quarter-century now since C.P. Snow first told us that we educated Anglo-Americans belong to two mutually uncomprehending and antagonistic cultures, one scientific and the other humanistic. In 1959, with the beeping of Sputnik still echoing in the public ear, no one expected Snow to accord the two camps equal sympathy, and he did not. The forbidding technical intricacy of the sciences, he declared in The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution, was hardly a sufficient reason for humanists to turn their backs on science, retreating into spiteful ignorance and misrepresentation. Nonscientists grumbled under Snow's tongue-lashing, but many of them secretly agreed with the consensus that they had better mend their ways. Certainly it would have been an unpropitious moment for anyone to launch a major counter-offensive against scientific authority.
Review, 5978 words
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