Prudence in the twenty-first century

Like other large-scale modernist projects-the Soviet Union, Los Angeles, agribusiness-the human sciences now face the possibility of systemic collapse. Likewise, they are threatened not by other large-scale competitors but by smaller yet pervasive changes in the social environment. Big science is no threat, while cell phones and laser eye surgery lead the way to a cyborg society engineered by design technologies in which neither social explanation nor social critique are valuable commodities.