Abstract
In 1939, Robert S. Lynd was irritated, even grumpy, about the contemporary state of American social science. In Knowledge for What? (1939) this famous Columbia University sociologist, the senior author of the well-known studies of Middletown, themselves classics of social science research, groused that social science and its practitioners worshipped at the altar of scientific objectivity and refused to take a stand on contemporary problems. Yet it “is precisely the role of the social sciences to be troublesome, to disconcert the habitual arrangements by which we manage to live along, and to demonstrate the possibility of change in more adequate directions,” he insisted. In a society such as ours “in which power is normally held by the few” and used “offensively and defensively to bolster their instant advantage within the status quo, the role of such a constructive troublemaker is scarcely inviting.” Lynd tartly charged that today’s social scientist “confines himself to professing facts, and radical criticism and generalization must wait ‘until all the data are gathered.’“1
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Notes
Robert S. Lynd, Knowledge for What? The Place of Social Science in American Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1940 [1939]) quotes at pp. 181, 182, 184.
See George A. Reisch, How The Cold War Transformed Philosophy of Science To The Icy Slopes of Logic (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 1–136 et passim.
Bernard Berelson, ed., The Behavioral Sciences Today (New York: Basic Books, 1963) is a manifesto of the movement with a helpful bibliography.
Garland E. Allen, The Life Sciences in the Twentieth Century (New York: Wiley, 1975);
Hamilton Cravens, Before Head Start. The Iowa Station and America’s Children (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1993).
Cravens, Before Head Start, passim, makes this argument; see also Alan I Marcus and Howard P. Segal, American Technology. A Brief History (San Diego: Harcourt, Brace, and Jovanovich, 1988), chapters 3–5.
William Graebner, The Age of Doubt (New York: Waveland, 2001).
Howard Chudacoff and Judith E. Smith, The Evolution of American Urban Society (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1994), 141.
Paul F. Lazarsfeld, Bernard Berleson, and Harriet Guadet, The People’s Choice: How the Voter Makes Up His Mind in a Presidential Campaign (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1944). The sheer variety of Lazarsfeld’s research is suggested by, for example,
Paul F. Lazarsfeld, “The use of detailed interviews in market research,” Journal of Marketing, 2 (July, 1937) 3–8;
Marjorie Fiske and Paul F. Lazarsfeld, “The Columbia Office of Radio Research,” Hollywood Quarterly, 1 (October, 1945): 51–59;
Paul F. Lazarsfeld and Raymond H. Franzen, “Prediction of political behavior in America”, American Sociological Review 10 (1945): 261–273.
On Lazarsfeld, see David Paul Haney, The Americanization of Social Science. Intellectuals and Public Responsibility in the Postwar United States, (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008), 60–61;
Jean M. Converse, Survey Research in the United States: Roots and Emergence 1890–1960 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987), 267–304 et passim.
An interesting—and arresting—account of its subject is Jennifer Platt, A History of Sociological Research Methods in America 1920–1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
John Dollard, et al, Frustration and Aggression (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1939);
John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern, Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1944);
Mary S. Morgan, The History of Econometric Ideas (New York: John Wiley, 1990).
See Sir Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1963 [1931]) for a trenchant dissection of this happy, not to say sappy, view of history.
W. W. Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960);
an able recent account of modernization theory is Nils Gilman, Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003).
See also Michael Latham, Modernization as Ideology: American Social Science as ‘Nation Building’ in the Kennedy Era (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2000).
On RAND, see, for example: Bruce L. R. Smith, The RAND Corporation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966);
Philip Mirowski, Machine Dreams. Economics Becomes a Cyborg Science (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), especially 94–240, 309–426;
Sharon Ghamari-Tabriz, “Simulating the unthinkable: Gaming future war in the 1950s and 1960s,” Social Studies of Science, 30 (Apr. 2000): 163–223.
James R. Hackney, Jr., Under Cover of Science. American Legal Economic Theory and the Quest for Objectivity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), xiii–xx, 1–80.
hoc. cit., 81–120; Nicholas Mercuro and Steven G. Medema, Economics and the Law (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 51–83 et passim.
On this point, see Donald Fisher, Fundamental Development of the Social Sciences. Rockefeller Philanthropy and the United States Social Science Research Council (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), which combines assiduous archival research and a “soft” Marxian class analysis, inspired by, among others, Robert S. Lynd’s Knowledge for What?
Richard A. Posner, The Problems of Jurisprudence (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990) represents his views; see, for example, 302–309 for his dismissal of Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954). On the law and economics movement, see
Neil Duxbury, Patterns of American Jurisprudence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 301–420.
See the able monograph by Yuval P. Yonay, The Struggle Over the Soul of Economics. Institutionalist and Neoclassical Economists in America Between the Wars (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998) passim, and
Mary S. Morgan, “Economics”, in The Modern Social Sciences, ed. Theodore Porter and Dorothy Ross (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 276–305.
See the very smart book by Ellen Herman, The Romance of American Psychology. Political Culture in the Age of Experts, (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995) passim.
Leonard Doob, Becoming More Civilized: A Psychological Explanation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1960);
David McClelland, The Achieving Society (Princeton, NJ: Van Nostrand, 1961).
Lucien Pye, Guerilla Communism in Malaya: Its Social and Political Meaning (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1956);
Pye and Sidney Verba, eds. Political Culture and Political Development (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965);
Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba, The Civic Culture, Political Attitudes in Five Nations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963);
Seymour Martin Lipsett, Agrarian Socialism: The Cooperative Commonwealth Federation in Saskatchewan. A Study in Political Sociology (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1950);
V. O. Key, Jr., Southern Politics in State and Nation (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1949);
David B. Truman, The Governmental Process: Interest Groups and Public Opinion (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1951).
Irving Louis Horowitz, comp., The Rise and Fall of Project Camelot: Studies in the Relationship between Social Science and Practical Politics (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1967).
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© 2012 Mark Solovey and Hamilton Cravens
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Cravens, H. (2012). Column Right, March! Nationalism, Scientific Positivism, and the Conservative Turn of the American Social Sciences in the Cold War Era. In: Solovey, M., Cravens, H. (eds) Cold War Social Science. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137013224_7
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