15 - Gerald Rosenberg and The Hollow Hope

Summary

It is the dream of every scholar or budding academic to be relevant to others – to influence how others think and understand the world – or even “to make a splash.” Few books have done that quite in the way that The Hollow Hope did. The book has generated much subsequent research and debate, and it is frequently used in the classroom, but the measure of its impact does not end there. As Gerald Rosenberg discusses in this interview, it was the surprisingly unprofessional response of some academic audiences that marked his entry, as a graduate student, into academia. What had he done? The answer gets at the calling of the researcher, to ask an important question and seek out the best available data. Yet, as he recounts, the process of inquiry was not as simple as question-data-theory. Would the data speak to him, and was he listening?

The researcher is a product of an age and is not free of all the limits in vision that accompany that. It is an imponderable question of whether The Hollow Hope could have been written any earlier than it was – can one even identify the presumptions of the current faith, to question them? He began work on the dissertation that would become this book at the cusp of the 1980s, when a conservative legal movement was rising to power, challenging the belief in courts as appropriate tools of social change. Although Rosenberg did not share their commitment, he was prepared to be led by his data.