SOURCE: “Social Science: The Public Disenchantment,” in American Scholar, summer, 1976.

In the following symposium, written by James S. Coleman, Morris Janowitz, Harry G. Johnson, Robert Lekachman, Martin Mayer, Daniel P. Moynihan, Harold Orlans, Thomas Sowell, and James Q. Wilson, the writers debate the merits of Nisbet's characterization of social scientists as discredited, inept meddlers in public policy.

In a most interesting and too-little-commented-upon article in the New York Times Magazine last year entitled “Knowledge Dethroned,” Robert Nisbet remarked upon the disenchantment that has of late set in with the public in its view of scholars in the sciences and social sciences. If the scholar-scientist was a heroic figure as recently as a decade or so ago, today, Professor Nisbet contends, he is considered a good deal less than heroic. If he is not, as in the view of some, “a combination ne'er-dowell and enemy of both nature and...