Ellen Condliffe Lagemann's (2000) "An Elusive Science" provides the most comprehensive history of education as a field of academic study. As such it is important for those in the education community to read and reflect upon the text in order to take stock of the field. Foundations scholars who read Lagemann's work may be struck by a stark irony, however. While Lagemann is an eminent historian of education and scholar of educational foundations whose work explicitly champions foundations as an important arena of educational inquiry, her vision of the future of the field leaves little room for historical, philosophical, and other conceptual scholarship. This article aims to identify the intellectual assumptions that led Lagemann into this contradiction. It also aims to illuminate how a sustained examination of one historical moment in particular--the turn to "critical" work in the field in the late 1970s and early 1980s--highlights the problematic nature of Lagemann's position and opens up possibilities for a counter-vision of the role of foundations in the field of education. (Contains 21 notes.)