Abstract
In his reply to Hans Joas, Immanuel Wallerstein suggests that if we are to be relevant to the debate on the future of the social sciences, we must try to overcome the still very powerful conceptř of the "two cultures" in the university and scholarly areas , and that amid the chaotic bifurcation that the modern world-system as an historical system is undergoing. Particularly, he sees three urgent questions on his agenda: (1) clarification of the historical choices before us as the modern world-sytem passes through its anarchic period of disintegration; (2) developing a language that will permit us to dissolve the categories of the political, the economic and the sociocultural into the unified kinds of action in which actors in the ral world engage; (3) finding the right balance in our role as intellectuals in pursuing analytic truth, moral choice and political wisdom to enable us to move from here to where we want to go.