Book Reviews : TIRTHANKAR ROY, The Economic History of India, 1857-1947. Oxford University Press, Delhi, 2000, pp. 318

Abstract

University system, which through its departments and disciplines, displays and perpetuates this logic of the division of knowledge into facts and values or the sciences and the arts. The social sciences (or anything that has both mind and body like medicine), then, are not a mediating third but schizoid children of an original schism that renews itself by replication. This is a persuasive story. A story with many variants that usually begins with Descartes rather than Kant and recounts how all the solutions offered by postCartesian theorists-solutions that essentially attempt to put res cogitans and res extensa back together-have failed. And usually it is a story that is told about one side of the fact-value divide: how the attempt to study values modelled on the study of facts (positivism) is either doomed to failure, and/or the study of values ought by the same logic to be constituted differently (interpretation/narrative). This story presupposes-and Abbott’s argument certainly does-that the sciences (with the exception of the biological sciences) are not subject to this kind of