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After the brilliance of Derrida, Foucault, Barthes--what? By most accounts, the French intellectual scene, poststructuralism, has split in two. On one side, a few select philosophers as media stars are pressed for their opinions on virtually every subject; on the other side, an atomized community of scholars in the social sciences are bound up in technicalities and muffled by the lack of a common language. This great divide, Francois Dosse contends, augurs a tremendous change in the structure and conduct of intellectual life. What this shift means--how it has occurred and what parts various thinkers have played in shaping it--is the subject of Empire of Meaning. An outgrowth of Dosse's magisterial History of Structuralism, Empire of Meaning is an extended encounter with some of the most influential French intellectuals. Through interviews and readings, Dosse reveals what has become of the intellectuals of the generation of '68 as they have tried to work out the implications of their revolt against structuralism and the problem of Cold War existence. Paul Ricoeur, Bruno Latour, Isabelle Stengers, Roger Chartier, Marcel Gauchet, Dany-Robert Dufour, and Michel Serres are among the many figures whose words and work unfold in these pages. A thorough and thoroughly engrossing work of intellectual history, Empire of Meaning is a firsthand look at the reshaping of French intellectual life in our time. "For the reader seeking rich historical detail, including names, places, schools, and research agendas, Empire of Meaning proves a veritable gold mine of information. The territory covered by Dosse is vast and impressive; the detail of his surveillance is overwhelming." --Rhetoric & Public Affairs "Dosse reveals a new paradigm that might make us forget the great old ones: functionalism, structuralism, and Marxism. . . . Decidedly, this book is full of good news." --Le Nouveau Politis "The immediate history of ideas is an undertaking as daring as it is risky, and Dosse here forces the relationships of trajectory and thought. . . . This book offers, in a very readable way, an overview of the current research in the social sciences." --Le Monde Francois Dosse is a historian and author of numerous books, including History of Structuralism, Volume 1 and Volume 2. Hassan Melehy is assistant professor of French at the University of Connecticut

A respected thinker points the way ahead. "Immanuel Wallerstein has long conceived of social science grandly. He was an innovator of world systems analysis, which portrays societies, sectors within societies, and the very disciplines of the social science as linked, bound, and analytically inseparable: To parse them is to misconceive them. As recent president of the International Sociological Association (1994 to 1998), Wallerstein continued to develop such grand thinking through numerous addresses on the state of the social sciences, capitalism, political justice, and the world. Here, he offers these collectively. He divides them into two topics-the world of capitalism and the world of knowledge. Toward both grand worlds, his thesis is similar: they are in crisis. . . . The scope of his career's thought is remarkable, his expertise impressively broad." Political Science Quarterly This book is nothing short of a state-of-the-world address, delivered by a scholar uniquely suited to the task. Immanuel Wallerstein, one of the most prominent social scientists of our time, documents the profound transformations our world is undergoing. With these transformations, he argues, come equally profound changes in how we understand the world. Wallerstein divides his work between an appraisal of significant recent events and a study of the shifts in thought influenced by those events. The book's first half reviews the major happenings of recent decades--the collapse of the Leninist states, the exhaustion of national liberation movements, the rise of East Asia, the challenges to national sovereignty, the dangers to the environment, the debates about national identity, and the marginalization of migrant populations. Wallerstein places these events and trends in the context of the changing modern world-system as a whole and identifies the historical choices they put before us. The second half of the book takes up current issues in the world of knowledge--the vanishing faith in rationality, the scattering of knowledge activities, the denunciation of Eurocentrism, the questioning of the division of knowledge into science and humanities, and the relation of the search for the true and the search for the good. Wallerstein explores how these questions have arisen from larger social transformations, and why the traditional ways of framing such debates have become obstacles to resolving them. The End of the World As We Know It concludes with a crucial analysis of the momentous intellectual challenges to social science as we know it and suggests possible responses to them. Immanuel Wallerstein is Distinguished Professor of Sociology and director of the Fernand Braudel Center at Binghamton University. Among his numerous books are The Modern World-System (1974, 1980, 1989), Unthinking Social Science (1991), and After Liberalism (1995).