Ratings

Bentley has really put the cat among the pigeons here. We like to believe that the evolution of academic discourse is a cumulative process, whereby good ideas get taken on and bad ones dropped. Indeed, this is precisely what the Enlightement was supposed to achieve by freeing us from the dead hand of tradition. Bentley shows that we academics have a long way to go if we are to fulfil this goal, especially in the social sciences. The notion that many of the most popular concepts in these fields might simply be winners in a random lottery of ideas is as convincing as it is disturbing.