16 SOCIAL SCIENTIST liberatory influence of science, and uncompromising opposition to tradition and superstition. Among the ripostes to this document, Ashis Nandy's is the most well-known, and this reflects a philosophical strain that emerged in the twilight of the enlightenment, ironically refuting its early claims of universal betterment through the application of science and the scientific method.7 A later volume edited by Nandy under United Nations University auspices, bears the provocative title "Science, hegemony and violence: A requiem for modernity", and draws together a broad range of critiques from amongst scientific practitioners, social activists, and philosophers. Acknowledgements are made to Feyerabend, though Nandy's interpretations could be contested: science in an earlier colonial dispensation, he argues, was a slave of the state. But in the contemporary context, the order of precedence has been inverted, and the state has been subordinated to science.8 To place this critique of science in context, it is necessary to appreciate the different connotations attached to the word "science" in Feyerabend's work. Against Method is devoted to showing how radically the actual course of scientific investigation has deviated—at most critical junctures in its evolution—from the law-and-order approach that positivism and modern empiricism have sought to sanctify. The subsequent work. Science in a Free Society, is taken up with answering critics of Against Method, and with sharpening the polemical attack against science as a contemporary social institution. The latter work is concerned not so much with science in its evolutionary context, with all its rich associations with social progress, as with science as an adjunct of state politics, science as the ideological underpinning of the Eurocentric consensus on world development, and science as the arbiter of different peoples' access to political and material benefits. Feyerabend remains convinced that the institutionalised methods and processes of contemporary western science do not explain the progress of science in its most creative phases. Nowhere does he question the excellence of science qua science—his differences with the rationalist tradition are that he does not "take the excellence of science for granted", though he often assumes it "for the sake of argument". Rather, what he tries to show is wherein this excellence consists, and "how greatly it differs from the naive standards of excellence proposed by rationalists".9 Nandy's critique, in contrast, seems completely oblivious to such subtle distinctions, and ranges with little discrimination over different notions of science. His ire seems primarily directed towards science qua science, and derivatively to science as institutionalised social process. To sustain the argument, he requires to ascribe a method to science, in terms of which the complex processes of scientific discovery could be understood. In Nandy's terminology, the method is that of "isolation". Derived from Freudian psychoanalysis, "isolation" refers to the