Justin McBrayer
Free the Inquiry, Heterodox Academy
In March 2026, the journal Theory and Society published a sweeping analysis of academic social science research spanning 1960 to 2024. The paper, “The ideological orientation of academic social science research 1960-2024,” ran over 600,000 article abstracts through a large language model to map the ideological orientation of an entire field across six decades.
James Manzi, a DPhil (PhD) student in sociology at the University of Oxford, unleashed a wide-ranging discussion across social media with the publication of his paper. In the conversation below, Manzi walks us through the paper’s central findings, responds to questions about methodology, and sketches next steps.
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