The Uncertainties of Knowledge The dilemmas faced by the social sciences from a world-renowned historian

"Immanuel Wallerstein is both a redoubtable world historian and visionary prophet. Such a combination is unusual...[and] makes him a commanding figure, whose rhetorical address, radical ideas, and remarkable erudition challenge ordinary, established patterns of professional discourse."
â??William H. McNeill, Diplomatic History

The Uncertainties of Knowledge extends Immanuel Wallerstein's decade-long work of elucidating the crisis of knowledge in current intellectual thought. He argues that the disciplinary divisions of academia have trapped us in a paradigm that assumes knowledge is a certainty and that it can help us explain the social world. This is wrong, he suggests. Instead, Wallerstein offers a new conception of the social sciences, one whose methodology allows for uncertainties.
Contents

Introduction: The Uncertainties of Time

Part I. The Structures of Knowledge
1. For Science, Against Scientism: The Dilemmas of Contemporary Knowledge Production
2. Social Sciences in the Twenty-first Century
3. The End of Certainties in the Social Sciences
4. Braudel and Interscience: A Preacher to Empty Pews?
5. Time and Duration: The Unexcluded Middle, or Reflections on Braudel and Prigogine
6. The Itinerary of World-Systems Analysis, or How to Resist Becoming a Theory

Part II. Dilemmas of the Disciplines
7. History in Search of Science
8. Writing History
9. Global Culture(s): Salvation, Menace, or Myth?
10. From Sociology to Historical Social Science: Prospects and Obstacles
11. Anthropology, Sociology, and Other Dubious Disciplines

Acknowledgments
Notes
References
Index