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Decentering Cold War Social Science: Alva Myrdal’s Social Scientific Internationalism at UNESCO, 1950–1955

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Cold War Social Science

Abstract

Set up in 1946, UNESCO’s Department of Social Sciences (DSS) quickly became one of the key promoters of international social science during the early Cold War era. This essay focuses on Alva Myrdal’s “social scientific internationalism” in her role as DSS director from 1950 to 1955. By analyzing Myrdal’s vision in the context of other contemporary ideas on international social science and with regard to the changing geopolitical landscape, I argue that her social scientific internationalism included a commitment to a modern, empirical, and U.S.-inspired style of social science. However, equally significant, she introduced a power-sensitive analysis of the geography of knowledge, according to which the case of Indian development emerged as an increasingly important exemplar in her call for a decentered international social science.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Alva Myral, “The cost of national isolation in the social sciences,” manuscript, 25 January 1951, vol. 405/2/3/16, The Swedish Labour Movement’s Archives and Library, Stockholm (ARBARK), 4. The purpose of the manuscript is revealed by Myrdal’s initial comment: “Notes for an editorial for the International Social Science Bulletin.” The text never appeared in the mentioned UNESCO journal, but was published in a slightly revised version in Swedish as “Forskningen om individ och samhälle måste internationaliseras,” in Människan och samhället: En bok till Tage Erlander på 50-årsdagen (Stockholm: Tidens förlag, 1951), 155–161.

  2. 2.

    UNESCO, Basic Texts (Paris: UNESCO, 2004), 8.

  3. 3.

    See Akira Iriye, Global Community: The Role of International Organizations in the Making of the Contemporary World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 37–59; Mark Mazower, Governing the World: The History of an Idea (New York: Penguin, 2012), 214–243; Glenda Sluga, Internationalism in the Age of Nationalism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 79–117.

  4. 4.

    On Cold War science, see Hunter Heyck & David Kaiser, “New perspectives on science and the Cold War,” Isis 101 (2010), 362–366; Naomi Oreskes,” Introduction,” in Science and Technology in the Global Cold War, eds. Naomi Oreskes & John Krige (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2014), 1–10; John Krige & Jessica Wang,” Nation, knowledge, and imagined futures: Science, technology, and nation-building post-1945,” History and Technology 31 (2015), 171–179.

  5. 5.

    On “anti– or counter–Cold War social science,” see Mark Solovey, “Cold War social science: Specter, reality, or useful concept?” in Mark Solovey & Hamilton Cravens, eds., Cold War Social Science: Knowledge Production, Liberal Democracy, and Human Nature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 18–19, and Nils Gilman, “The Cold War as intellectual force field,” Modern Intellectual History 13 (2016), 521–522. For other general overviews of Cold War social science, see Joel Isaac, “The human sciences in Cold War America,” The Historical Journal 50 (2007), 725–746; David C. Engerman, “Social Science in the Cold War,” Isis 101 (2010), 393–400; Joel Isaac, “Introduction: The human sciences and Cold War America,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 47 (2011), 225–231; Philippe Fontaine, “Introduction: The social sciences in a cross-disciplinary age,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 51 (2015), 1–9.

  6. 6.

    Johan Heilbron, Nicolas Guilhot & Laurent Jeanpierre, “Toward a transnational history of the social sciences,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 44 (2008), 146–160; Ivan Boldyrev & Olessia Kirtchik, “On (im)permeabilities: Social and human sciences on both sides of the ‘Iron Curtain’,” History of the Human Sciences 29 (2016), 3–12; Adela Hîncu, “Introduction: ‘Peripheral observations’ and their observers,” in Adela Hîncu & Victor Karady, eds., Social Sciences in the Other Europe since 1945 (Budapest: Central Euopean University, 2018), 1–25.

  7. 7.

    For earlier studies on UNESCO’s DSS, see Peter Lengyel, International Social Science: The UNESCO Experience (New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1986); Perrin Selcer: “The view from everywhere: Disciplining diversity in post-World War II international social science,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 45 (2009), 309–329; Teresa Tomás Rangil, “The politics of neutrality: UNESCO’s social science department 1946–1956,” HOPE working paper no. 8 (2011); Teresa Tomás Rangil, “Citizen, academic, expert, or international worker? Juggling with identities at UNESCO’s Social Science Department, 1946–1955,” Science in Context 26 (2013), 61–91; Martina Mösslinger, Assimilation and Integration Discourses in the Social Sciences (1945–1962), Diss. (Vienna: Universität Wien); Per Wisselgren, “From utopian one-worldism to geopolitical intergovernmentalism: UNESCO’s Department of social sciences as an international boundary organization, 1946–1955,” Serendipities 2 (2017), 148–182.

  8. 8.

    Myrdal’s role as Director has been examined in different ways by earlier studies on UNESCO’s DSS. Selcer, “The view from everywhere,” 314, for example, notes that “SSD suffered from disorganization due to lack of steady leadership until the dynamic Swede Alva Myrdal [took] over the department in 1950.” Similar observations have been made by Lengyel, International Social Science, 15, and Rangil, “Citizen, academic, expert,” 86. Among the many biographies on Alva Myrdal most studies mention her time at the DSS very briefly, see, for example, Yvonne Hirdman, Det tänkande hjärtat: Boken om Alva Myrdal (Stockholm: Ordfront, 2006), 314–318; Thomas Etzemüller, Die Romantik der Rationalität: Alva & Gunnar Myrdal—Social Engineering in Schweden (Bielefeld: transcript, 2010), 316. Three important exceptions that have paid special attention to Myrdal’s years at the UN and UNESCO are: Hedvig Ekerwald, “Alva Myrdal and a planetary government,” paper presented at Sveriges Sociologförbunds årsmöteskonferens, Uppsala 25–26 January 2001; Hedvig Ekerwald & Örjan Rodhe, “Notes from the private life of a public intellectual: Alva Myrdal in the service of the United Nations, 1949–1955,” in Sven Eliaeson & Ragnvald Kalleberg, eds., Academics as Public Intellectuals (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008), 153–172; Glenda Sluga, “The human story of development: Alva Myrdal at the UN, 1949–1955,” in Marc Frey, Sönke Kunkel & Corinna P. Unger, eds., International Organizations and Development, 1945–1990 (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 46–74.

  9. 9.

    The selection of the fifteen texts is based on the criteria that they are concerned with Myrdal’s “social scientific internationalism,” defined as her vision and thoughts about “international social science” with regard to its “international” or “social scientific” forms (rather than its contents and topics), that they are programmatic, and that they were produced during the period 1950–1955. Seven of the texts are listed in Barbro Terling’s bibliography, Alva Myrdal: Kommenterad bibliografi, 1932–1961 (Stockholm, 1987), posts no. 423, 424, 428, 432, 433, 441 och 442. The other texts, such as unpublished manuscripts and so on, are presented with full details in the notes. It is worth commenting that the defined criteria mean that questions about the contents and themes of the actual research produced and practiced at the DSS during the period fall outside the scope of this essay. Themes such as race, gender, and development were all central at the DSS and UNESCO, as well as in Myrdal’s more general social thought. For instance, her and Viola Klein’s coauthored Women’s two roles (1956) was produced and published during the half decade, as well as a number of other projects and reports on women’s role. Nevertheless, these issues were not part of her “social scientific internationalism” as defined in this context. The literature on “scientific internationalism” is broad—and varied—and the research on “internationalism,” not surprisingly, even more so. Three useful overviews that focus on the visions and strategies of “international science,” with regard to its “international” and “scientific” forms, are: Aant Elzinga, “Introduction: Modes of internationalism,” in Internationalism and Science, eds. Elzinga & Landström (London: Taylor Graham, 1996), 3–20; Mazower, Governing the World; Sluga, Internationalism. Although a more systematic overview on “social scientific internationalism” remains to be written, Heilbron, Guilhot & Jeanpierre, “Toward a transnational history of the social sciences,” offers a good starting point.

  10. 10.

    Sluga, Internationalism, 393; Glenda Sluga, “UNESCO and the (One) World of Julian Huxley,” Journal of World History 21 (2010), 393–418. Mazower, Governing the World, 231–234.

  11. 11.

    Akira Iriye, Global Community, 44.

  12. 12.

    H. H. Krill De Capello, “The Creation of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization,” International Organization 24 (1970), 9.

  13. 13.

    UNESCO Preparatory Commission, Report on the Programme of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (London, 1946), 7.

  14. 14.

    UNESCO Prep. Comm., Report on the Programme, 105.

  15. 15.

    Lengyel, International Social Science, 5–6.

  16. 16.

    James P. Sewell, UNESCO and World Politics: Engaging in International Relations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), 109, 129–131; John Toye & Richard Toye, “One World, Two Cultures? Alfred Zimmern, Julian Huxley and the Ideological Origins of UNESCO.” History 95 (2010), 308–331.

  17. 17.

    Luther H. Evans, The United States and UNESCO (Dobbs Ferry, NY: Oceana, 1971), 35.

  18. 18.

    Wisselgren, “From utopian one-worldism,” 167–174.

  19. 19.

    Elzinga, “Modes of internationalism,” 3–4.

  20. 20.

    Patrick Petitjean, “The joint establishment of the World Federation of Scientific Workers and of UNESCO after World War II,” Minerva 46 (2008), 251.

  21. 21.

    Sewell, UNESCO and World Politics, 100.

  22. 22.

    Arvid Brodersen, “UNESCO’s 10th anniversary: A retrospective sketch,” International Social Science Bulletin 8 (1956), 402–3.

  23. 23.

    UNESCO and Its Programme XII: The Social Sciences (Paris: UNESCO, 1955), 12. See also Jennifer Platt, A Brief History of the ISA: 1948–1997 (Quebec: ISA, 1998); Thibaud Boncourt, “The transnational circulation of scientific ideas: Importing behavioralism in European political science (1950–1970),” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 51 (2015), 195–215.

  24. 24.

    Brodersen, “UNESCO’s 10th anniversary,” 404. Marie-Anne de Franz, “Implanting the social sciences - a review of Unesco’s endeavours,” International Social Science Journal 21 (1969), 407.

  25. 25.

    Selcer, “The view from everywhere,” 314, 317. See also Lengyel, International Social Science, 25–27, and Thibaud Boncourt, “What ‘internationalization’ means in the social sciences: A comparison of the International Political Science and Sociology Associations,” in Johan Heilbron, Gustavo Sorá & Thibaud Boncourt, eds., The Social and Human Sciences in Global Power Relations (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 111.

  26. 26.

    Robert C. Angell, “UNESCO and social science research,” American Sociological Review 15 (1950), 282.

  27. 27.

    Hans Hederberg, Sanningen, inget annat än sanningen: Sex decennier ur Alva och Gunnar Myrdals liv (Stockholm: Atlantis, 2004), 183, 188; Ekerwald & Rodhe, “Notes from the private life,” 153; Sluga, “The human story,” 51.

  28. 28.

    Alva Myrdal to Gunnar Myrdal, 31 October 1949, ARBARK; Hederberg, Alva och Gunnar Myrdal, 186; Hirdman, Det tänkande hjärtat, 311.

  29. 29.

    Alva Myrdal’s application to the Rockefeller Foundation, 28 February 1929, vol. 4.1.1, ARBARK.

  30. 30.

    Myrdal quoted in Jan Olof Nilsson, Alva Myrdal: En virvel i den moderna strömmen (Stockholm/Stehag, 1994), 140—my translation of quote in Swedish.

  31. 31.

    Terling, Alva Myrdal, 97, lists 410 publications up through 1949. On Myrdal’s extra-academic social scientific activities during the period, see Per Wisselgren, “Kollektivhuset och villa Myrdal: Om samhällsvetenskapens rum i folkhemmet,” in Erland Mårald & Christer Nordlund, eds., Topos (Stockholm: Carlssons, 2006), 136–138; idem, “Reforming the Science-Policy Boundary: The Myrdals and the Swedish Tradition of Governmental Commissions,” in Eliaeson & Kalleberg, eds., Academics as Public Intellectuals, 173–195; idem, “Women as Public Intellectuals: Kerstin Hesselgren and Alva Myrdal,” in Christian Fleck, Andres Hess & E. Stina Lyon, eds., Intellectuals and their Publics: Perspectives from the Social Sciences (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 225–242.

  32. 32.

    Alva Myrdal, Efterkrigsplanering (Stockholm: Informationsbyrån, 1944), 13—my translation.

  33. 33.

    Alva Myrdal, “Rapport från UNESCO:s generalkonferens i Paris nov.-dec. 1946,” vol. 405/4/1/7/1a, ARBARK; Julian Huxley to Alva Myrdal, 27 November 1946, ARBARK.

  34. 34.

    See Marc Frey Sönke Kunckel, “Writing the history of development: A review of recent literature,” Contemporary European History 20 (2011) 217; Daniel Speich Chassé, “Technical internationalism and economic development at the founding moment of the UN system,” in International Organizations and Development, 1945–1990, eds. Marc Frey, Sönke Kunkel & Corinna R. Unger (Palgrave MacMillan, 2014), 23–45; Nils Gilman, Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 24–71; Fredrick Cooper & Randall Packard, eds. International Development and the Social Sciences: Essays on the History and Politics of Knowledge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 1–41. On Myrdal’s role at the UN, see Sluga, “The human story,” 49–57; Ekerwald & Rodhe, “Notes from the private life.”

  35. 35.

    Alva Myrdal, “The welfare of people and one world,” manuscript, 24 March 1949, vol. 405/3/1/3/4, ARBARK.

  36. 36.

    Correspondence between Alva Myrdal and Jaime Torres Bodet, 17 April–11 July 1950, vol. 405/4/1/7/4, ARBARK.

  37. 37.

    Alva Myrdal, “Assumptions for establishing the 1952 programme of the social sciences department,” 11 September 1950; idem., “Submitting first draft of 1952 programme for the Department of Social Sciences,” 18 September 1950, SS/Memo./50/2410; Alva Myrdal to Director-General, “Defence of social science programme 1952,” 6 November 1950, SS/Memo./50/2583; UNESCO conference press release no. 510, “UNESCO’s social sciences work plans praised: General conference approves 1952 programme,” 6 July 1951, ARBARK, vol. 405/4/1/7/8.

  38. 38.

    See Note 1.

  39. 39.

    [Alva Myrdal:] UNESCO and Its Programme XII: The Social Sciences (Paris: UNESCO, 1955), 1–9. That Myrdal authored the introductory chapter is confirmed by Myrdal’s handwritten comment “AM skrev inl.[edningen]” (AM wrote the intro[duction]) on the archival copy in vol. 405/4/1/7/14, ARBARK.

  40. 40.

    [Myrdal], UNESCO and Its Programme, 6–7.

  41. 41.

    Alva Myrdal, “UNESCO and the social sciences,” Institute of International Education News Bulletin 28 (1952), 15.

  42. 42.

    Myrdal, “The cost of national isolation,” 4.

  43. 43.

    Myrdal, “UNESCO and the social sciences,” 6.

  44. 44.

    Alva Myrdal, “The social sciences in UNESCO,” Educational Outlook 26 (1952), 127.

  45. 45.

    Myrdal, “The cost of national isolation,” 4; [Myrdal], UNESCO and Its Programme, 3.

  46. 46.

    Myrdal, “The social sciences in UNESCO,” 127; Alva Myrdal, “A scientific approach to international welfare,” in Alva Myrdal, Arthur J. Altmeyer & Dean Rusk, eds., America’s Role in International Social Welfare (New York: Columbia University Press, 1955), 44—quote in italics in original.

  47. 47.

    Myrdal, “Forskningen om individ och samhälle,” 162—my translation. See also Alva Myrdal, “UNESCO brings social sciences to bear on problems of international character—race, tensions,” U.S. National Commissions News 5 (1951), 13.

  48. 48.

    Lengyel, International Social Science, 17.

  49. 49.

    [Myrdal], UNESCO and Its Programme, 2–3, 24.

  50. 50.

    Jennifer Platt, Fifty Years of the International Social Science Council (Paris: ISSC, 2002), 9–20; Lengyel, International Social Science, 20.

  51. 51.

    Myrdal, “Forskningen om individ och samhälle,” 157—my translation. Myrdal, “The Cost,” 2.

  52. 52.

    UNESCO and Its Programme, 15.

  53. 53.

    Myrdal, “The Cost,” 4.

  54. 54.

    Myrdal, “The social sciences in UNESCO,” 127.

  55. 55.

    Alva Myrdal, “UNESCO and the social sciences,” 15.

  56. 56.

    [Alva Myrdal et al.], Gandhian Outlook and Techniques: A Verbatim Report of the Proceedings of the Seminar on the Contribution of Gandhian Outlook and Techniques to the Solution of Tensions Between and Within Nations held at New Delhi from the 5th to the 17th January, 1953 (New Delhi, 1953), 22.

  57. 57.

    Alva Myrdal, “Report on missions to India and Egypt IV: Research on social implications of technical change,” UNESCO Archives, Paris, vol. X07.83, SS/Memo.53/3253, 4 February 1953, 1.

  58. 58.

    Myrdal, “Report on missions to India and Egypt IV,” 2.

  59. 59.

    Myrdal, “Report on missions to India and Egypt IV,” 2–3. See also Jawaharlal Nehru, The Discovery of India (Penguin 1946/2004), 436–449; Sugata Bose, “Instruments and Idioms of Colonial and Nationalist Development: India’s Historical Experience in Comparative Perspective,” in Cooper & Packard, eds., International Development and the Social Sciences, 45–63; David C. Engerman, The Price of Aid: The Economic Cold War in India (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), 22–85.

  60. 60.

    Myrdal, “Report on missions to India and Egypt IV,” 2–3.

  61. 61.

    See for example Alva Myrdal, “A world picture of social and educational needs in relation to community development,” in The Neighbourhood and the World: Community Associations at Home and Overseas (London: National Federation of Community Associations, 1954), 3–19.

  62. 62.

    Eveline M. Burns, “Introduction,” in Myrdal, Altmeyer & Rusk, eds., America’s Role in International Social Welfare (New York: Columbia University Press, 1955), xi.

  63. 63.

    Myrdal, “A scientific approach,” 43.

  64. 64.

    [Myrdal], UNESCO and Its Programme, 2.

  65. 65.

    Correspondences between Alva Myrdal and Gunnar Myrdal, Ulla Lindström and Östen Undén, December 1954–April 1955, vol. 405/6/3/1/6, ARBARK.

  66. 66.

    Lengyel, International Social Science, 15–30; Rangil, “The Politics of Neutrality,” 29; Selcer, Patterns of Science, 61; Sluga, “The human story,” 53. Of special importance in the latter context was Margaret Mead’s Cultural Patterns and Technical Change (Paris: UNESCO, 1953). See also Alfred Metraux, “Dangers on technical change,” Courier no. 3, vol 6 (1953), 3.

  67. 67.

    Wisselgren, “From utopian one-worldism,” 167–174.

  68. 68.

    Gilman, “The Cold War as intellectual force field,” 507–523.

  69. 69.

    Wisselgren, “From utopian one-worldism,” 167–174.

  70. 70.

    Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 5.

  71. 71.

    Myrdal, “Assumptions,” section 3a.

  72. 72.

    See Mazower, Governing the World, 250–272; Westad, The Global Cold War, 97–109; Mark Philip Bradley, “Decolonization, the global South, and the Cold War, 1919–1962,” in Melvyn P. Leffler & Odd Arne Westad, eds., The Cambridge History of the Cold War, vol 1: Origins (Cambridge University Press, 2010), 479–482.

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Acknowledgments

The work for this essay has been funded by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (project grant P12-0273). An earlier version was published in Swedish as “‘Forskningen om individ och samhälle måste internationaliseras’: Alva Myrdals samhällsvetenskapliga internationalism 1950–1955,” in Lychnos 2018, 234–253. This revised version in English has been presented at the ISA World Congress in Toronto 2018 and a subsequent workshop, also in Toronto, in 2019, as well as the Sociology of Education Seminar in Uppsala. I am grateful for stimulating discussions at those three occasions as well as for more detailed comments by Rebecca Woods, Mark Solovey, and Christian Dayé.

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  1. Department of Sociology, Umeå University, Umeå, Sweden

    Per Wisselgren

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    Mark Solovey

  2. Science, Technology and Society Unit, Graz University of Technology, Graz, Austria

    Christian Dayé

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Wisselgren, P. (2021). Decentering Cold War Social Science: Alva Myrdal’s Social Scientific Internationalism at UNESCO, 1950–1955. In: Solovey, M., Dayé, C. (eds) Cold War Social Science. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70246-5_10

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