About

Joel Isaac is an historian of philosophy and the social sciences, with a focus on American and British traditions of social thought. His research initially examined how theories of knowledge influenced significant developments in the human sciences during the twentieth century, culminating in his book 'Working Knowledge: Making the Human Sciences from Parsons to Kuhn,' which was awarded the Gladstone Prize by the Royal Historical Society, UK. Currently, he is working on two books: one exploring the history of the relationship between philosophy and the social sciences in the twentieth century, emphasizing the emergence of social science as involving the study of concepts and non-empirical investigation of social practices, featuring figures such as Wittgenstein, Keynes, Rawls, Habermas, and Geertz; and another studying the political foundations of economic thought, particularly the origins of neoclassical economics. His broader interests include issues in the history of modern philosophy, American history, and the history of the Cold War. Prior to his current position, he held academic roles at the University of Cambridge and Queen Mary, University of London.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Social Science
• Law
• Humanities
• History
• Epistemology
• Philosophy
• Economics
• Political economy
• Positive economics

Selected publications

• The History of Economics: Decline or Renewal?

  History of Political Economy · 2025-12-01

  articleSenior author

  Abstract Historians of economics are haunted by the marginalization of their field. What was true at the birth of the field is even truer today: To most economists, historical thinking is hardly relevant. Viewed from a different perspective, however, the history of economics thrives as never before—only now it is written as much by historians and social scientists without formal training in economics as it is by economists who specialize in the study of past ideas. A profound transformation in the constitution of the community of historians of economic ideas has been underway for at least a generation. This introduction tracks the gradual expansion of the field along two fronts: the history of science and intellectual history. Those expansions represents an opportunity for the exchange of research questions, topics, and methods among economists and noneconomists who work on the history of things economic.

  PublisherDOI

• Frontmatter

  University of Pennsylvania Press eBooks · 2022-08-10

  book-chapterOpen access
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Durkheimian Thoughts on <i>In the Shadow of Justice</i>

  Analyse & Kritik · 2022-05-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This paper uses Durkheim’s distinction between cause and function to explore the aims and implications of Forrester’s critique of liberal egalitarianism in In the Shadow of Justice . I suggest that there is an interesting tension in Forrester’s argument between the portrayal of Rawlsian justice theory as a vestigial institution—a ‘survival’—left over from 1950s liberalism, and its continuing presence in political theory as a doctrine that has a strong function in policing the bounds of permissible philosophical discourse on politics. I then suggest that liberals are, in their nature, functionalists about politics, and that this may mean that they cannot easily countenance the kind of realism for which Forrester advocates at the end of her book.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• History in the Humanities and Social Sciences

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2022 · 13 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Social Science
  • Sociology
  • Social Science

  This interdisciplinary volume explores the relationship between history and a range of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences: economics, political science, political theory, international relations, sociology, philosophy, law, literature and anthropology. The relevance of historical approaches within these disciplines has shifted over the centuries. Many of them, like law and economics, originally depended on self-consciously historical procedures. These included the marshalling of evidence from past experience, philological techniques and source criticism. Between the late nineteenth and the middle of the twentieth century, the influence of new methods of research, many indebted to models favoured by the natural sciences, such as statistical, analytical or empirical approaches, secured an expanding intellectual authority while the hegemony of historical methods declined in relative terms. In the aftermath of this change, the essays collected in History in the Humanities and Social Sciences reflect from a variety of angles on the relevance of historical concerns to representative disciplines as they are configured today.

  DOI

• Anthropology and the Turn to History

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2022-12-08

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Among the social sciences, the discipline of anthropology displays perhaps the greatest affinity for the methods and assumptions of historical enquiry. Anthropology’s turn to history began as early as the 1950s, but the relationship between the two fields was cemented a generation later. Yet because it is now disciplinary folklore, the precise character of anthropology’s turn to history is less well understood than it should be. In this chapter, I seek to explain why the methods of historical enquiry became so attractive to a generation of anthropologists. I make two major claims: first, that it was the problem of the origins and persistence of institutions that drew social and cultural anthropologists toward history; second, that this concern with institutional reproduction was part of anthropology’s long struggle to offer an alternative to a post-Hobbesian state-centred politics. In defending these claims, I examine in particular the writings of Émile Durkheim, Bronislaw Malinowski, and Clifford Geertz.

  PublisherDOI

• The Political Economy of Context: Theories of Economic Development and the Study of Conceptual Change

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2021-09-28

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  In this chapter, I shall examine some of the ideological aspects of how historians and social theorists have learned to think about conceptual change. At issue in this enquiry is what ‘historicism’ in the contemporary human sciences amounts to. Historicism is often seen as the product of the changing understanding of time and human action brought about by the emergence of raison d’état and the rise of the modern state; some also trace its roots to the interest in anthropology and the history of civilisation that emerged from early-modern natural jurisprudence.1 Whatever the vocabularies used in earlier forms of historicism – reason of state, natural law, nationalism, the philosophy of history – today the historicist is more likely to speak in the language of economics.

  PublisherDOI

• Intellectuals and society

  2021-08-10 · 1 citations

  book-chapterSenior author

  In this chapter, we discuss research in both intellectual history and the sociology of intellectuals, as well as the link between these two sub-disciplines. We elaborate on the etymology of the terms “intellectual” and “public intellectual” and on the various arguments about the transformation of intellectual (and public intellectual) life in the course of the past century. We argue against two well-established perspectives about changes in public engagement of intellectuals: the widespread view that intellectuals have lost their way by embracing political ideologies and the equally popular view that intellectuals have abandoned their erstwhile political edge by withdrawing into academic settings.

  PublisherDOI

• Sovereignty

  2021-01-01

  otherSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• A<scp>min</scp> S<scp>amman</scp>. <i>History in Financial Times</i>.

  The American Historical Review · 2021-06-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  What has happened to the historical imagination in our present age of financialization? This is the question explored in Amin Samman’s insightful and pathbreaking book, History in Financial Times. To some, it might seem quixotic to return to the careworn problems of historical theory in order understand the heady world of global finance. As Samman notes, the triumph of finance-driven neoliberalism “is often thought to correspond with an extinguishing of history by economics, such that everything appears and is administered through the logics of investment, appreciation, and growth” (2). This is perhaps the tenor of much recent work in the history of capitalism and in social studies of finance. On the contrary, History in Financial Times shows us that thinking and acting through constructions of the past—through narratives, memories, analogies, lessons, proper names—is in fact a crucial feature of the culture of finance. This persistence of history, Samman argues,...

  PublisherDOI

• Moral Economy in Its Place: The Contribution of James C. Scott

  Humanity · 2020 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Sociology
  • Social Science

  Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development - Volume 11, Number 2, Summer 2020

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Emma Kimberley

  81 shared

• Andy Mousley

  De Montfort University

  81 shared

• Corinne Fowler

  University of Leicester

  81 shared

• Nick Everett

  University of East Anglia

  81 shared

• Alex Dunst

  University of Nottingham

  81 shared

• Erica Arthur

  University of Cambridge

  81 shared

• James Campbell

  81 shared

• Rich- Ard Foulkes

  Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis

  81 shared

Awards & honors

• The Gladstone Prize by the Royal Historical Society