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I love this book. I do. It offers a tight case for researching the human social world in a way that I hold dear. “All sciences”, Agar writes, “make their case based on evidence according to the rule of some logic, and then they try to prove the case is wrong in order to show that it might be right” (p. x). The lively science Agar proposes is not different from this, but “once a human makes other humans in their social world the scientific focus, all sorts of problems come up that didn’t appear with material objects or with most non-human forms of life” (p. x).

When the humanities are under attack, they either Duck and Dive or Go to War. The Public Value of the Humanities (Bate, 2011) is an example of the latter. There are three points the authors want to make. The first one is that the value of the humanities is manifold. Some authors discuss the economic value in terms of direct commercial benefits for or indirect inputs into creative, cultural and tourist industries, but most authors stress the moral value the humanities have for the public.