Among the hopes I had when writing Experts, Social Scientists, and Techniques of Prognosis in Cold War America (Dayé, 2020; ESSTP hereafter) was that it would show how techniques used in the production of social knowledge can function as strategic research materials (Merton, 1987) for scholars interested in the history and sociology of science and knowledge. As cultural artifacts intended by its creators and users to provide “truthful” representations of the social world, scientific techniques and procedures encapsulate a particular understanding of how the world works. These understandings are rich, complex, and unstructured, and so are their traces in the techniques of knowledge production. In turn, these traces—“[i]nformation that was not meant to inform and evidence that did not expect to possess evidential character” (Comunello et al., 2022, p. 1)—can be used by later scholars to reconstruct how those who invented, developed, and used the techniques thought and felt about the world—with the thinking part covered by explicit arguments and the feeling part by traces that the creators inadvertently left. By exploring arguments and traces in the microworld of techniques of knowledge production, as well as the social practices they rely on, one can construct a multi-layered image of a macroworld, a culture of which these techniques are an element.

This symposium assembles an outstanding collection of essays by brilliant scholars, and I feel a deep gratitude for the generosity with which they engaged in debates that are partly explicitly covered, partly implicitly touched upon in my book. What is more, the contributions leave me confident that the hope of mine mentioned above was not misplaced. They do so despite, or rather just because they point to shortcomings of ESSTP. The breadth of the topics addressed in the contributions indicates that the book delivered starting points for analyses and arguments that went well beyond the book’s intentions and capacities. Accordingly, the majority of the critical remarks raised in the contributions concern some form of expansion. They point to aspects that ESSTP has not delivered, although its approach would have allowed for it or the topic chosen would even have required it.

It seems to me that the comments suggest three types of expansion: Expansion of scope, expansion of analysis, and expansion of focus. As regards the expansion of scope, to begin with, Pietruska (2023) builds on the approach described in my book to explore the history of prediction before RAND’s creation. She shows how RAND’s efforts to create (scientific) techniques of prognosis that rely on interactions amongst knowledgeable people can be seen as belonging to a broader movement of (organizing) prognostic knowledge in the United States that had been underway already in the nineteenth century. In this case, then, the expansion of scope is temporal. Another expansion of scope is suggested by Anne Warfield Rawls. Her comment contextualizes the story told in ESSTP by bringing RAND’s focus on interaction in touch with co-eval developments in US sociology. Based on her own research on the history of qualitative sociology (e.g., Rawls, 2013, 2018), she explores the elective affinities between the RAND’s techniques of prognosis and evolving theoretical approaches to interaction (along these lines, see also Jaworski, 2019, 2023). Expanding the scope towards a consideration of the relations between RAND research and the social sciences at large adds an important layer of meaning not explored systematically in the book—as is also pointed out in the comment by Oreskes (2024, p. 4).

Referring to the methodological criticisms of Delphi mentioned in the book, Cuhls (2023) adds a sophisticated description of a new approach, the Argumentative Delphi Survey, that shows how futures studies scholars reacted to a feature that they themselves had increasingly perceived as problematic in the original Delphi procedure: the exclusion of qualitative reasoning. Cuhls’ contribution thus expands the temporal scope of the analysis by directing our attention towards the present. By and large, current research in futures studies builds on research design that attempt to combine qualitative and quantitative methods.

Karlheinz Steinmüller’s essay, in turn, does not call for an expansion on the temporal, but rather on the geographical axis. His essay explores the history of futures thinking in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) based on the insight, similar to the one that the book developed, that the way in which a society approaches futures thinking “casts much light on pivotal elements of that society, on its specific knowledge culture and on the integration of futures intelligence into political procedures” (Steinmüller, 2023, p. 2). His conclusion is that futures studies, as a coordinated and systematic effort to explore possible, plausible, and desirable futures through social scientific methods, presuppose democratic principles of knowledge production.

The techniques of prognosis explored in my book emerged in a democracy, yet they certainly showed certain “non-democratic” traits. By and large, they were elitist procedures: Well-paid researchers invited other well-paid researchers to share their views about the future, and then conveyed the results to well-paying decision-makers. The aspect of secrecy is a core motif in those comments suggesting an expansion of analysis, in my reading the comments of Lukas Griessl and Stephen Turner. Both expand the analyses presented to include the role of secrecy in organizing scientific creativity and power. As Turner points out, “RAND figures did appear in prominent conferences, […] [b]ut they were largely invisible to the larger academic community and the public […].” (Turner, 2023, p. 4) By deliberately restricting the circulation of the knowledge it produced, RAND set in place a regime of secrecy that engendered a new form of research organization: No students, no need for disciplinary boundaries, high orientation of research towards the problems of its sponsors, but at the same time high intellectual creativity.

The contribution of Lukas Griessl also concerns the regime of secrecy, as he argues that it provided RAND researchers with privileged access to restricted government information. Secrecy and ignorance became productive forces, encouraging the development of new epistemic practices while closely linking them to political power. These new epistemic practices, to which the techniques of prognosis explored in my book belong, corroborated the social status of the experts by endowing them with “oracular power,” as Griessl (2023, p. 7) writes with reference to sociologist McGoey (2019). Taken together, these perspectives emphasize that the role of secrecy in the organization and societal positioning of scientific research deserves further exploration, and hence, an expansion of analysis, along the lines described in their comments, which draw both on the political sociology of science and the sociology of ignorance.

When it comes to knowledge (or science) and its relation to policy, the tensions between secrecy as a precondition of access to those in power and the principles of political democracy do already fill hundreds of meters of bookshelves, with presumable a few more to come over the next decades. These tensions—and their effects on status and practices of social science—should be analyzed in a comparative way, Steinmüller emphasizes. Against the ethos of science, polities do have an interest not to disclose every bit of information that they have, not only to maintain their power, but also to safeguard citizens, both on the individuals and on the collective level (cf. Popitz, 2006 [1968]). Griessl reminds us that if used strategically and diligently, secrecy and ignorance are also used as temporary remedies for cultural insecurities like the one that dominated the Cold War era. Beyond that, secrecy and privileged access to those in power can also be factors in increasing the quality of scientific work. Turner suggests that with universities today struggling to be (seen as) less elitist and secretive and more democratic places, organizations that resemble the RAND Corporation of the late 1950s might find a new ecological niche in the near future.

Assessing scientific quality is, of course, no trivial matter. Is knowledge produced à la RAND successful because it caters to the needs of decision makers, corroborates their worldview and provides justifications for the decisions they wanted to take regardless of the science? Or is it successful by scientific standards? The techniques of futures studies covered in the book, Naomi Oreskes claims in her essay, fall into the first category. The complicated philosophical arguments provided by some of the book’s protagonists on why expert opinions are more than just opinions are misleading to her, suggesting a superficial, false remedy for cultural insecurity. In her view, the results of RAND’s prognostic efforts look “in hindsight like mere opinion” (Oreskes, 2024, p. 9). Opinion, maybe, but nonetheless with social consequences, as Rawls adds, since the experts’ techniques “may have succeeded in creating a false sense of certainty that renewed faith in the value of consensus.” (Rawls, 2023, p. 5) If in the near future, organizations that resemble the RAND Corporation may establish themselves as even more serious players on the scientific scenery, as Turner suggests, what will be the consequences for society? And what may be appropriate means to enforce a clear distinction between opinions and findings?

The comments by Griessl, Turner, and Oreskes add perspectives on knowledge in society that received some space, but no comprehensive treatment in my book, although I hold that it comprises sufficient materials to craft stable arguments in these directions. Oreskes, however, identifies another shortcoming, which is also the main concern to Rose M. Brewer’s comment: Who is said to be an expert, and who is not? To me, this is the third type of expansion addressed in the comments, the expansion of focus. Both the well-paid researchers asked and the well-paid researchers asking did not include a mentionable share of women and, as far as I could find out, no non-White person (apart from administrative staff). RAND’s internet page on its own history opens with a 1958 photography of Anna Elizabeth “Nancy” Nimitz (1915–2003), but this should not have us concluding that RAND was a forerunner of diversity.Footnote 1 In 2011, I interviewed a women researcher who as a young graduate of sociology had worked in New York City for Lazarsfeld and Merton at the Bureau for Applied Social Research (BASR) before following her husband, who had taken a position with RAND, to California (on women at the BASR, see Simonson, 2012; Hristova, 2022). Her husband, she told me, never talked to her about his work (cf. Dayé, 2020, p. 122, note 22)—yet another aspect of the secrecy-power relation. Despite her academic background (and she being without care duties, as the couple had no children), it took quite some time until RAND offered her a position. “I sort of worked, [I mean] I helped unofficially and did a lot of unclassified and unrewarded work for RAND. Eventually I worked into a position, but that took a long time.” (Interview by the author, August 24, 2011) In a sense, this couple followed the nineteenth century pattern of highly-trained wives doing unacknowledged and unpaid work for their scientist husbands. How far this was a common situation for RAND, I cannot tell.

An interesting question is whether social research at RAND and the results it produced would have looked differently if the research staff would have been recruited more openly. Would RAND’s structure and its organizational embedding (with tight relations to the US Air Force, to the Pentagon etc.) have allowed for alternative interpretations to emerge? Certainly, the futures envisioned by RAND researchers were bound to their standpoint as white males, and Brewer is rightly pointing out that large parts of the coeval Black (feminist) thinking can and should be read as establishing compelling and inspiring counter-narratives about the future and how to think about it. These counter-narratives did not only reject RAND’s techniques of prognosis, but more radically the whole worldview—or rather, to take up a concept used in Jamie L. Pietruska’s comment, the whole “knowledge infrastructure”—of which the techniques were an element. But this knowledge infrastructure extends far beyond RAND, and whether or not RAND would have been in a position to trigger such a far-ranging change across the whole knowledge infrastructure is a fascinating question to address, but—like so many interesting questions—a What if? question that a priori lacks means of confirmation.

These suggestions to expand the focus, however, point to the historiographical limits of traces: How far can you go with just traces? At the time of writing the book, it seemed to me that traces I found in the two techniques of prognosis sufficed to describe aspects of a culture, but were by themselves not strong enough to warrant arguments about social structure, let alone the reconstruction of knowledge infrastructures—these “robust networks of people, artifacts, and institutions that generate, share, and maintain specific knowledge about the human and natural worlds.” (Edwards, 2010, p. 17) The in-depth analysis of techniques of (social) knowledge production allows for a fine-grained exploration of explicit and tacit expectations and cultural images, but first of all, these images are themselves only parts of the surrounding culture. In the case of the two techniques of prognosis studied in ESSTP, the analysis crystallized around the concept of the expert, as it was central both for the techniques and for coeval American culture and society. Secondly, and more importantly, while the capacity of traces to inform us about aspects of a culture is strong, the restricted focus that comes with the decision to look for traces offers no inherent option to capture broader socio-structural aspects. The detailed and scrupulous description of a technique of knowledge production is no appropriate means to seek for relations of power and inequality, homophily and exclusion. Such analysis must be achieved by other means, and although throughout the book, I tried to add historical context, I share the viewpoint that an expansion of focus to include structural issues (perhaps through a dynamic network analysis of people and institutions) would certainly be a valuable intellectual endeavor.

Writing Experts, Social Scientists and Techniques of Prognosis in Cold War America was an exercise in following traces of an era which was falling into oblivion. As I write these lines (February 2024), the final three scholars from the group that I had interviewed for the book left us: Daniel Ellsberg died in June 2023, and Nicholas Rescher and Theodore J. Gordon both died in January 2024. The book is committed to approaching the work of past researchers, them amongst them, with a genuine interest in its substance. I am very grateful for all the outstanding reactions assembled in this symposium, not least as they show that this respect towards the works (and lives) of others is possible even when engaging critically with cultures and knowledge infrastructures that (re-) produce inequalities. I also want to express my gratitude to the editor of The American Sociologist, Lawrence T. Nichols, for offering this opportunity to look back once again.

Traces are enticing to the historian. Following them quickly leads to a situation in which “[t]he strangest things come together through one place, one time, one strange resemblance, a mistake, some kind of chance” as Novalis wrote. In such situation, “strange unions and peculiar combinations arise—and one thing reminds us of everything—it becomes the sign of many and is itself signified and called forth by many.” (Novalis, 1997, p. 160) Indeed, the strangest things came together at RAND. European émigré scholars who had been planning to pursue more or less quiet careers as academics were thrown together with young, highly-talented, ivory-tower trained and careerist members of the American elite and mingled with officers from the armed forces, high-level bureaucrats, and political decision-makers. The global culture of insecurity that the Cold War engendered did its own to blurry the boundaries between the systems of science, the military, polity, and the state, and RAND was particularly designed to foster exchange across these different system logics.

In searching for traces, one thing becomes the sign of many. As information that wasn’t meant to inform, a trace has to be deciphered and interpreted. Its meaning has to be constructed by those who found it and identified it as trace. And the best way of deciphering is to establish relations to other traces found nearby. This is intellectually intriguing and absorbing; and of course, such endeavor needs a proper knowledge infrastructure. In particular, it needs properly trained scholars, and they need time. Without training and time, we tend to see the one trace only as a sign of many. Hastiness pushes us to forget about rule number #1 of good research on traces: Look for those traces that contradict the web of meaning you are weaving.

Despite providing rich materials for understanding society, the history of sociology still lacks such knowledge infrastructure. There are hardly any career options in sociology for those exploring the discipline’s history, particularly if their focus is on something else than theory. Also, there are hardly any specialized training programs. Opting for a historiographic project is a risky decision, because according to experience, you need much more time than in other branches of sociological research. Both Matteo Bortolini, my esteemed colleague, friend and co-recipient, for his biography of Robert Bellah (Bortolini, 2021), of the 2022 Distinguished Scholarly Publication Award of ASA’s Section on History of Sociology & Social Thought, and I worked more than twelve years to complete our books. The awards are proof that the effort was worthwhile, and they also were the reason for our books being featured in symposia in this journal. While we were both also working on other projects (and trying to keep a somewhat normal family life), the main reason for why it took us so long to complete the books is the fact that deciphering traces needs time.Footnote 2 Sociology can learn from its own history in ways that extend far beyond the mere historiographical interest (cf. Dayé, 2018), provided it deals with its traces in a careful and considerate manner. Yet in order to allow for learning, such historical research needs to be a part of the discipline; and as I see it, despite all the efforts undertaken by various members of our scientific community over the last decades, the discipline’s actual knowledge infrastructure is still not conducive for historical research (cf. Albanese, 2023).