Reader’s Guide to the Social Sciences

I frequently find myself criticising encyclopaedias and encyclopaedic dictionaries on the grounds that they do not contain adequate bibliographic references to help anyone who wants to enquire further into a subject. I am rather surprised, therefore, to find myself in the opposite situation. Here we have a massive two‐volume work of an encyclopaedic appearance which does not directly say much about the subject it covers, but does say a lot about the literature on it.

The elegantly named Fitzroy Dearborn have, in recent years, published a number of handy two‐volume encyclopaedias broadly in the areas covered by this book ‐...