Stanislav Andreski’s Social Science as Sorcery (first published 1972) is not a book—it’s a Molotov cocktail in hardcover. Andreski was a Polish-born sociologist who’d had his fill of the ivory tower’s gobbledygook. Instead of bowing to the sacred cows of academia, he sharpened his pen into a bayonet and went trench-to-trench against the social sciences.

His claim? That much of sociology, anthropology, and political “science” was little more than ritual language—empty jargon dressed up to look like insight. Professors as shamans. Citations as incantations. Peer review as priesthood. He names names, too, skewering Talcott Parsons and his kin for constructing castles of words with no soldiers inside.

I came across my copy in a bombed-out university library in Kraków. The ceiling had caved, snow drifted onto the shelves, and all the psychology texts had gone to pulp. But Andreski’s book was there, dry as a bone, glowing like uranium. I read it by candlelight while artillery rumbled in the distance, and every page stripped another layer of illusion from the edifice of “knowledge.” I realized then: the mandarins of theory are no better than witch-doctors rattling bones, only they wear tweed instead of feathers.

Andreski was too honest, too sharp. The guild hated him for it. He showed their discipline as a deck of tarot cards masquerading as a calculus textbook. And once you see it, you can’t unsee it.