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   Order is a topic, concept, and objective which traverses the many methodological and disciplinary divides within the social sciences.  Economists ascribe an order to the circulation of material goods, resources, and wealth.  Sociologists look for the institutional arrangements and relations which give order to various social groups.  Anthropologists study the cultural, symbolic, and discursive forms through which different societies and cultures define social and natural order.  Political scientists seek to explain the organization and patterning of power in different societies.  Psychologists look for the underlying explanatory order informing dreams, perception, and mental disorder.  In short. much of what holds the social sciences together is their mutual quest to discover the secrets of social order.
   In recent years, however, voices from various quarters within the social sciences and humanities have begun to question the ways in which the quest for order has limited the scope of social-science inquiry.  These challenges to the ways in which we think about order have come from two related fronts.  First, the ambiguously defined arena of postmodern theory has made its affects felt in uneven, though insistent, ways in each of the different social sciences.  One level of this discussion has focused on whether the fragmentation, contingency, and decentered voices privileged by postmodern theory constitute a new and fundamentally distinct type of social order, or simply the continuation (or evolution) of a modern social order which as always celebrated movement, flux, and the cult of the individual.  Another, more inclusive, arena of debate concerns the postmodernist attack on the Enlightenment roots of European science in general, as well as on the social scientist's more particular goal of arriving at empirically grounded, unified, and truthful representations of the social order.  "Social order," the postmodernists argue, can only be perceived as a set of shifting and illusive fragments, each of which is in turn defined by the structurally contingent and temporally ephemeral perspectives of different social actors.  History, which postmodernists perceive as a set of random and essentially equal events, is likewise denied any definitive chronological or narrative continuity in either memory or fact.  From this point of view, neither the historian nor the social scientists is authorized to represent the historical past; instead they must remain content to analyze and translate the discordant voices and sites from which diverse representations of history and society have been constructed.  While these postmodernist incursions into the social sciences have had the troubling effect of denying the possibility of what we once thought of as objective scientific inquiry, they have also had the countervailing - and largely positive - effect of shifting the focus of much recent social-science research from a "top down" to a "bottom up" perspective on the issue of social order.
    A second front from which the social sciences have felt a challenge to accepted notions of order has come from outside the walls of the academy.  New social movements based on religion, race, gender, sexuality, and ethnicity have contributed to a decline of traditional political institutions and identities in Europe, Latin America, and, to a lesser extent, the United States.  In Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, the fragmentation of empire has spawned a disorderly process of resurgent nationalism and warfare.  In Latin America and Africa, modernist and humanist schemas of order based on progress development, and national community have been replaced by a new social and economic order orchestrated by transnational financial institutions and based on the permanent marginalization of large sectors of national populations.  In Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and Europe the national foundations of world order have been further threatened by the consolidation of seemingly permanent refugee populations.  Finally, from the non-European world a chorus of voices has actively contested not only reigning notions of progress and modernity, but the privileged status traditionally claimed by U.S. and European social scientists who have constructed prevailing intellectual and cultural representations of the "social order."  Order, these critics charge, must now be rethought to accommodate multiplicity and difference - to speak with, and not for, the diversity of cultures, societies, and peoples that make up the global order.
    Do these new processes and emergent national and global orders constitute radically new types of order?  Or can they be explained as continuations of older forms of order?  Does an explanation of the "new world order" require a substantive rethinking of the notion of order itself?  Is one notion of order even sufficient to account for the multiplicity of experiences, discourses, and histories at work in shaping the post-cold-war global system?  The responses of social scientists to such questions have been in large part determined by the precarious theoretical divides defined by the post modernism debate.  Given the postmodernist assault on science and the Enlightenment quest for truth, those social scientists who would adopt a historical or modernist framework to define these global processes must simultaneously mount a defense of both the "scientific" status of the social sciences and the privileged perspective on truth afforded to an empirically grounded social science.  Others within the social sciences have found the postmodern concern with contingency and flux useful in accounting for the systemic qualities of the "new" postmodern order.  Still others have embraced the critical perspectives opened up by postmodern theory to rewrite disciplinary histories and to inspect the concepts of order that have shaped their own understanding of society and culture.
    The articles collected in this issue of Social Research present various responses to the discussion of postmodernity, modernity, science, narrative, system, and order within the social sciences.  Each author was invited to reflect upon the ways in which his or her discipline was engaged (or not ) in rethinking accepted understandings of such concepts as order, pattern, normalcy, prediction, structure, and organization in the 1990s.  Their responses range, predictably, from the defense of traditional concepts of order to reflections on the irreducible contingency of order itself.
    Anthropologist Jonathan Friedman opens the issue with a discussion of the "current global disorder and discourses that reflect upon that disorder."  Arguing that traditional understandings of entropy and order no longer apply to the new global system, Friedman posits the need to think about social systems in terms of multiple, uneven, and necessarily fractions "levels of order."
    In the following article, historian Elizabeth Fox-Genovese reviews the feminist challenge to received notions of order.  While she is in fundamental agreement with the postmodernists' deconstruction of the public and private distinction, Fox-Genovese takes issue with their assumption that "mystification adheres only to modernism."  Postmodernism, she argues, must itself be similarly deconstructed in order to identify the economic forces propelling the postmodernist surge.  In pointing toward the economic forces behind the new forms of cultural discourse, Fox-Genovese would seem to echo Friedman's argument for the existence a new world order in which the transnationalization of both capital and identity are complicitous with what Friedman refers to as "the breakdown of the public sphere of scientific activity."
    The following articles turn a critical eye on the rhetorical and discursive mechanisms through which concepts of order have been constructed in specific social-science disciplines.  Postmodern concerns with the contingency and constructedness of social and natural phenomena have been particularly threatening to those social sciences with direct states in modeling and policy formulation.  For economists, argues William Milberg, such critiques challenge the very identity of a discipline whose theories have historically been grounded in the rhetoric of nature and natural law.  Attempts to reformulate a postmodern economics have rejected this traditional emphasis on the naturalness of economic life to suggest new readings of this history of economic thought, to develop new theories of prices and exchange, and to rethink the outlines of Marxian economics.  Similar concerns are raised in the following study by anthropologist Hugh Gusterson of the ways in which the international order has been theorized in the "realist" school of international relations.  Gusterson argues that unquestioned notions of order, predictability, and manipulability blinded political theorists to the dramatic reordering of the international system in the 1980s.
    In the following article anthropologist Benjamin Orlove examines colonial and republican constructions of social geography in Peru.  Though bearing the trace of sixteenth-century and modern European notions of natural and social order, the divide between colonial and postcolonial geographies in Peru does not precisely conform to the European distinction between premodern and modern discourses of order.  Rather, Orlove, argues, the case of Peruvian geography "demonstrates the difficulty of applying to universal a notion of modernity" and opens up the necessity of examining the plurality of both modernities and "modern" concepts of order.
    The following two contributions argue for the universality and distinctiveness of modern conceptions of social order.  Pauline Vaillancourt and Harry Bredemeier examine the conflicting preferences informing modern and postmodern conceptions of social order.,  Because the modernist's insistence on scientific method is designed precisely to minimize the acknowledged influence of personal and cultural factors, the postmodernist attack on modernist objectivity is, they argues, a mute point.  Daniel Little perceives a similar disjuncture between critical assaults on scientific objectivity and the "clear set of empirical procedures" which he sees at work in the social sciences.  Contrary to the postmodernist claims for the contingency of all social facts, objectivity is, Little argues, attainable within the social sciences.
    Eviatar Zerubavel calls for a flexible conception of social order.  Social order, he argues, necessarily "presupposes some underlying mental order."  Only by examining the conceptual and perceptual distinctions through which we define the "horizons" of our moral and cultural communities, Zerubavel suggests, can we gain a fuller appreciation of the cultural and psychological factors informing our concepts of social order.

The Concept of Order in the
Social Sciences                                                                                                               Deborah Poole, Guest Editor

Introduction                                                                                                                                                            199

Order and Disorder in Global
Systems: A Sketch                                                   Jonathan Friedman                                                              205

From Separate Spheres to
Dangerous Streets:
Postmodernist Feminism and the
Problem of Order                                                   Elizabeth Fox-Genovese                                                       235

Natural Order and
Postmodernism in Economic
Thought                                                                   William Milberg                                                                    255

Realism and the International
Order After the Cold War                                       Hugh Gusterson                                                                    279

Putting Race in Its Place: Order
in Colonial and Postcolonial
Peruvian Georgraphy                                               Benjamin S. Orlove                                                              301

Modern and Postmodern                                         Pauline Vaillancourt Rosenau
Conceptions of Social Order                                   and Harry C. Bredemeier                                                     337

Evidence and Objectivity in the
Social Sciences                                                       Daniel Little                                                                         363

Horizons: On the Sociomental
Foundations of Relevance                                       Eviatar Zerubavel                                                                397

Harry C. Bredemeier is professor of sociology emeritus at Rutgers University.

Elizabeth Fox-Genovese is Eleonore Raoul Professor of the Humanities at Emory University.  Her most recent book is Feminism Without Illusions: A Critique of Individualism (1991).

Jonathan Friedman is professor in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Lund, Sweden.  His Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained: A Global Anthropology of the Hawaiian Cultural Movement will be published soon.

Hugh Gusterson is assistant professor of anthropology and science studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Daniel Little is professor of philosophy and associate dean of the faculty at Colgate University.  His most recent book is Varieties of Social Explanation (1991).

William Milberg is assistant professor of Economics in the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research.

Benjamin S. Orlove is professor in the Division of Environmental Studies at the University of California, Davis.  His most recent books is State, Capital and Rural Society (1989).

Deborah Poole is assistant professor of anthropology in the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research.  She is the author of Peru: Time of Fear (1992).

Pauline Vaillancourt Rosenau is associate professor in the School of Public Health at the University of Texas, Houston.  Her most recent book is Post-Modernism and the Social Sciences (1992).

Eviatar Zerubavel is professor of sociology at Rutgers University.  His most recent book is Terra Cognita: The Mental Discovery of America (1992).