John Levi Martin’s impressive book is an astonishingly bold, grand project. A three-part story, it stretches across centuries from Plato to Kant and beyond, tracking the changes in ways that humans have understood the physical and social world and their freedom of action within it. Martin incorporates up-to-date, incisive, and lucid interpretations of the ideas of historically familiar theorists and many who are less so, questioning how they fit into the overall story to gain new insights into the human and social sciences.

- Steven Lukes, author of <i>Emile Durkheim: His Life and Work</i>,

Unpacking the continuities and contradictions of a vast array of theoretical stances, John Levi Martin bravely fashions a genealogy of philosophies that treat the relationship between kinds of knowing and action from Plato and Aristotle all the way down to Parsons and Habermas. This book should be on every social theorist’s desk as a primer when thinking where to go from here.

- Roger Friedland, coauthor of <i>Powers of Theory: Capitalism, the State, and Democracy</i>,

This book is a major statement meant to stand the test of time. Connecting philosophy, social theory, and sociology, it explains in a new way what centuries of thinking about society and human action were actually about and what the underlying intellectual issues driving all this effort were. Radically novel, fun to read, and deep both in learning and insight—a rare combination.

- Stephen Turner, author of <i>Explaining the Normative</i>,