Reviews 257 Mary Jo Nye, Michael Polanyiand his Gen- eration. Origins ofthe Social Construction of Science (Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 432 pp. This is without doubtan interesting and even important book.I mustconfess, however, that I came to this conclusion after having read the whole work. In the beginning, when I saw its title and table of contents, I was more skepti- cal,because Nye does not only treat people of Polanyi’s generation: Polanyi was born in 1891 and so belonged to the ‘generation of 1914’ (that is: the men drafted for army-service at the beginning of the first World War) and then later on to the generation of emigrated Hungarians who came to Germany after the FirstWorld Warand then underwent a second emigration after their dismissal from Nazi Germany. Nye, however, distinguishes three generations in the introduction (p. xx), which were instrumental in bringing about whatshe calls the ‘social turn’ in the philosophy of science. These include the first generation that according to Nye consists of Fleck, Mannheim, Bernal and Merton as well as Polanyi, a second ‘transitional’ generation with Kuhn,Ziman and Ravetz and then the gener- ation that encompasses Harry Collins, Steven Shapin and Bruno Latour. Laterin the book (p. 279)one learns that Polanyidid notreferto the majority of the firstgeneration in ‘Personal Knowledge,’ his most important philosophical book, and did not even mention Karl Mannheim and Robert Mer- ton, although he had been in contact with them. Instead Polanyi concentrated on discussion and polemics with Bernal as the main representative of an outspoken Marxist view ofscience and the responsibility of scientists towards society. Only around 1960 did he have some limited exchange with one figure of the second gen- eration, namely Thomas Kuhn, especially dur- ing the 1961 Oxford conference on ‘Scientific Change.’ The third generation is included only insofaras its members inherited, transformed and sharpened the ideas of Polanyi, Kuhn and others. What binds all of them together is their  2012 John Wiley & Sons A/S