Pursuing Truth, Exercising Power: Social Science and Public Policy in the Twenty-First Century. By Lisa Anderson. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. 176p. $29.00.

The large question looming over this series of lectures by Lisa Anderson is the perennial problem of the relationship between social inquiry and political practice. Her engagement with this issue takes the explicit form of parsing the political—and specifically the public policy—aspirations, achievements, and failures of American academic social science from its founding in the late nineteenth century to the present. None of this is new territory, and Anderson's debt to the historical and analytical work of many (for her, mostly contemporary) scholars is both obvious and readily acknowledged (p. x). However, it is not really Anderson's intent to make a contribution to the historical or philosophical literature; rather, this is an argument with a definitively presentist goal, namely, understanding the conditions that define (as the title of her book intimates) what it means to be committed to a public role for scholarship and scholars today.