Where Are We Going? Reflections on Social Science Research in the 2020s

I will devote a significant part of this paper to discussion of the state of the social sciences in the United States. I’ll not apologise for this. It is simply because, by virtue of the sheer numbers of social scientists working in the United States, and the resources they dispose of, there is a tendency for them to define the development of our disciplines. Some years ago, it seemed to me that, in the United States especially, the social sciences tended to be rather polarised between, on the one hand, the dominance of deductive rational choice theoretic research, allied very often with an emphasis on quantitative modelling, and on the other, post-structuralist work focused on language and signification that appeared to me quite often to reflect relativism.