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The Grudging Modernizer: A Trip to the Middle East and Cold War Social Science

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Abstract

The postwar era is generally recognized as a unique moment of impetuous growth of the social sciences, due to the interest of Western internationalist elites in the development of a set of pragmatically-oriented intellectual tools that could be of use in the confrontation between the self-proclaimed “Free World,” the Soviet bloc, and emerging postcolonial nations. In the last twenty years, however, doubts about the impact of the Cold War syndrome on the development of ideas, methods, and infrastructures of Western social science in the 1950s and the 1960s have been cast by historians and social scientists alike. This article uses the episode of the 1959 Middle East scholarly trip of a Harvard sociologist, Robert N. Bellah, to highlight the complexity and the ambivalence of individual trajectories, as well as the adumbrations of critical ideas and themes in the work of an intellectual who was a recognized, if peripheral, member of some of the most influential Cold War Social Science circles. A final hypothesis on a paradox of Cold War social science is advanced, according to which the need to staff centers and institutes for the training of Cold War technicians and elites put humanists and orientalists in the condition to influence those very students who should have been trained in the most advanced and practically-oriented social sciences.

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Notes

  1. On the social sciences during the Cold War era, see Isaac 2009; Solovey and Cravens 2012; Erikson et al. 2013; Heyck 2015; Milne 2015; Pooley 2016; Robin 2016; Bessner and Guilhot 2018. On the role of philantropic foundations, see Solovey 2010; Parmar 2012; Rohde 2013; Solovey 2020. On the role of the U.S. Federal Government, see Klausner and Lidz 1986; Cravens 2004; Haney 2008, See also Mattingly 2017 and Geiger 2015 on the consequences of postwar funding for American higher education. On the creation of novel conceptual toolkits for the social sciences and the humanities, see Reisch 2005; Steinmetz 2005; Abbott and Sparrow 2007; Wax 2008; Isaac 2012.

  2. Modernization theory champions Walt Rostow, Edward Shils, and Lucian Pye are examples of first order CWSS, while Ashley Montagu, C. Wright Mills, Immanuel Wallerstein, and Paul Goodman are seen as some of their vocal antagonists. Future studies and small group theory are instances of second order CWSS, while Jerome Bruner’s and Herbert Simon’s work on creativity, and early Chomskian linguistics fall into third order CWSS.

  3. On the nexus between theories (and practices) of modernization and development, see Geiger 1993; Latham 2003; Engerman et al. 2003; Ekbladh 2009; Latham 2011; Parmar 2012; Immerwahr 2015.

  4. See Parmar 2002: 13. David H. Price (2016: xiv-xv) introduced the expression “dual use” to conceptualize “the symbiotic relationships between the ‘pure’ and ‘applied’ sciences, relationships in which academic theoretical developments are transformed into commercial products or military applications.”

  5. I thank Mario Del Pero for suggesting this point.

  6. On these and similar stories, see Gallagher 1994; Geertz 1995; Tiryakian 2007; Wallerstein 2000; Apter 2009; Suleski 2005. See also Citino 2017: 18 ff.

  7. See Parmar 2012: 97 ff. On the experiences of foreign students, see Gossett 1963: 156, but also Parmar 2002: 25.

  8. See Robert N. Bellah, “Notes R.B. 1951-1952,” Robert Bellah personal files (RBPF). See also Bellah 1964.

  9. See Wilfred Cantwell Smith to Ford Foundation Secretary, September 23, 1955, McGill University Archives, RG0084, Container 0063, File 0000-0865.01.139. See also Wilfred Cantwell Smith to Robert N. Bellah, November 27, 1954, McGill University Archives, RG0084, Container 0181, File 1996-0025.01.621.

  10. Four unpublished papers have survived from Bellah’s days at the IIS (RBPF). Among the associates of the Institute with whom Bellah created friendly relationships were his tutor, professor Nyazi Berkes from Turkey, Abdul Mukti Ali from Indonesia, as well as fellow Americans Omar Pound and the future IIS chairman, Charles J. Adams.

  11. The first paper, written in Cambridge, was published only in 1970 as an appendix of Bellah 1970. The second paper, written in Montreal, remains unpublished. On the Parsons-Bellah-Geertz triangle, see Bortolini and Cossu 2019; Cossu 2019.

  12. On traveling by junior scholars, see Lockman 2016: 77; Lockman 2010: 130 ff.; Babai 2004.

  13. In fact, thanks to Parsons’s and Gibb’s support, Bellah got tenure in 1961.

  14. Douglas Little (2002) reports the ups and downs of the ambivalent relation between the United States and Egypt during Nasser’s rule. See also Khalidi 2009: 17 ff.

  15. Robert Bellah to Melanie Bellah, May 9, 1959, RBPF. Bellah left Boston on May 2, 1959, and reached Cairo two days later. Apart from a couple of days in Luxor (May 14-16) he stayed in Cairo until May 21, when he flew to Jerusalem. After five days between Israel and Jordan, he flew to Beirut on May 26, then was driven to Damascus on May 30. Back in Beirut on June 2, he took a plane to Ankara via Cyprus and dwelled in Turkey’s capital until June 6, when he moved to Istanbul. On his way back to the U.S. he stopped in Athens and Rome. He finally got home on June 15, 1959, after having being abroad for 44 days. On Lerner’s trip, see Shah 2011: 129.

  16. See Wilfred Cantwell Smith to Robert N. Bellah, April 24, 1959, McGill University Archives, RG0084, Container 0181, File 1996-0025.01.621. According to David Webster (2009: 95), Arnold C. Smith was “sometimes portrayed as Canada’s equivalent to George Kennan” for his fierce anti-communism. See also Kay 2010 and Smith and Sanger 1981.

  17. See, among the others, Robert Bellah to Melanie Bellah, May 3, 1959; Robert Bellah to Melanie Bellah, May 25, 1959; Robert Bellah to Melanie Bellah, May 29, 1959, all RBPF. A more detailed description of Bellah’s personal experiences during his Middle Eastern trip can be found in Bortolini (forthcoming). Two versions of the paper survive (Bellah 1959a; 1959b), and I will cite from from the latest one.

  18. On the origins of the expression “Judeo-Christian tradition” and Protestant Neo-orthodoxy, see Silk 1984; Moore 2004; Finstuen 2009.

  19. For the concept of “knowledge culture,” see Somers 1996. On Bellah’s ambivalence about the meaning and the prospects of America within the postwar world order, see Bortolini 2010. In a late letter to his former student Arvind Rajagopal (February 3, 2013, courtesy of A. Rajagopal), Bellah explicitly denied to have ever been controlled or censored by his funders in the 1950s.

  20. To be sure, the hermeneutic revolution was also the product of the work of other social scientists, among them Peter L. Berger, Thomas Luckmann, and Victor Turner (see Rabinow and Sullivan 1979; Bortolini 2014). For a parallel assessment of Geertz, see Cossu 2019.

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Acknowledgments

Thanks to Harvard University Archives, McGill University Archives, and Hally Bellah-Guther and Jennifer Bellah Maguire for the permission to publish excerpts from unpublished documents. Thanks to Minerva’s reviewers, Richard Bulliet, Mario Del Pero, Zachary Lockman, Armando Salvatore, Christian Dayé, Mark Solovey, Chad Alan Goldberg, Cécile Stehrenberger, the participants in the RC08 session on “Cold War Social and Behavioral Sciences: International and Transnational Entanglements II” of the XIX World Congress of Sociology (Toronto, July 20, 2018), and the participants in the Colloquium of November 26, 2019, at the Max-Weber-Kolleg für kultur- und sozialwissenschaftliche Studien of the University of Erfurt, Germany (where I was a fellow in the year 2019), for their help.

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Bortolini, M. The Grudging Modernizer: A Trip to the Middle East and Cold War Social Science. Minerva 59, 261–284 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11024-020-09413-6

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