Joel Isaac works on the history of modern economic, social, and political thought. His current book project, Fraught with Ought: Philosophy and the Social Sciences since Wittgenstein, examines the long and controversial debate about the distinction between "positive" and "normative" science, with a special focus on the claim of economists that there is, in economics, a clear dividing line between positive (or predictive) and normative forms of economic theory. His first book, Working Knowledge: Making the Human Sciences from Parsons to Kuhn (Harvard, 2012), won the Gladstone Prize of the Royal Historical Society. He is the co-editor of States of Exception in American History (Chicago, 2020), The Worlds of American Intellectual History (Oxford, 2017) and Uncertain Empire: American History and the Idea of the Cold War (2012).