This is the delightfully short, exuberant, slightly jerky and certainly tumultuous product of five lectures that could have been advertised under the ponderous title 'Human Knowledge and the Social Order'. The lectures were weighty, I think, but ponderous they were not. Douglas dances over an amazing array of topics. The effect is some sort of intellectual hopscotch; the reader hops from square to square, sideways, diagonally, sometimes landing with feet in different squares. The squares have amazing titles like 'Institutions remember and forget' or 'Institutions do the classifying'. The second square is titled 'Institutions cannot have minds of their own', but only as a proposition to be rebutted. The assertion that institutions think is never seriously put in question. But what does it mean?

LRB 18 December 1986 | PDF Download