Abstract
From the end of World War II to the early 1970s, American social science expanded in dramatic and unprecedented fashion. Moreover, nothing like it has happened again. Consider the following figures in total membership for the major national professional society for sociologists, the American Sociological Association (ASA, and prior to 1959 known as the American Sociological Society). Founded in 1905, this organization had 1,021 members in 1920, 1,530 in 1930, and, after a significant decline during the Great Depression, 1,034 in 1940. Though World War II saw little change, rapid growth quickly followed, as ASA membership rose to 3,241 in 1950, 6,875 in 1960, and 14,156 in 1970. The peak came in 1972 with 14,934 members, before a sudden leveling off and even slight decline to 13,304 in 1980. As of 2010, total ASA membership had climbed over the 14,000 mark once again, but the total was still lower than the 1972 peak.1 Other major national professional associations for economists, political scientists, and scholars in nearby disciplines such as those for anthropologists and psychologists follow this general pattern. The steep rise in professional association membership was accompanied by impressive growth in related areas— college courses, undergraduate majors, graduate programs, university departments, academic journals, and scholarly publications.2
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Notes
See Doug McAdam, “From Relevance to Irrelevance: The Curious Impact of the Sixties on Public Sociology,” in Craig Calhoun, ed., Sociology in America: A History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), membership graph p. 414. Between 1947 and 1967, membership rose from 4,598 to 14,687 in the American Political Science Association, from 7,529 to 23,305 in the American Economic Association, from 1,692 to 6,634 in the American Anthropological Association, and from 4,661 to 25,800 in the American Psychological Association.
Figures from Hunter Crowther-Heyck, Herbert A. Simon: The Bounds of Reason in Modern America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), p. 336.
Unfortunately, information on these topics is not gathered in any one place. A good starting point is Roger E. Backhouse & Philippe Fontaine, eds., The History of the Social Sciences Since 1945 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), which also contains a very useful bibliography. On sociology specifically, see Calhoun, Sociology in America.
For a sense of the development, recent activity, and salient themes in this literature, see Joel Isaac, “The human sciences in Cold War America,” The Historical Journal 50 (2007), 725–746;
David Engerman, “Social science in the Cold War,” Isis 101 (2010), 393–400.
Christopher Simpson, Science of Coercion: Communication Research & Psychological Warfare, 1945–1960 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994);
Solovey, “Project Camelot and the 1960s epistemological revolution: Rethinking the politics-patronage-social science nexus,” Social Studies of Science 31 (2001), 171–206;
Ron Robin, The Making of the Cold War Enemy. Culture and Politics in the Military-Intellectual Complex (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001);
Matthew Farish, The Contours of America’s Cold War (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010).
Bernard Brodie, “Strategy as a science,” World Politics 1 (1949), 467–488.
For example, see Nils Gilman, Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003),
and the essays in Christopher Simpson, ed., Universities and Empire: Money and Politics in the Social Sciences during the Cold War (New York: The New Press, 1998).
Robin, The Making of the Cold War Enemy; Simpson, Universities and Empire; Michael E. Latham, Modernization as Ideology: American Social Science and “National Building” in the Kennedy Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000);
S. M. Amadae, Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy: The Cold War Origins of Rational Choice Liberalism (Chicago University Press, 2003).
For a recent examination of such concerns when they were first widely manifest during the 1960s, see Joy Rohde, “Gray matters: Social scientists, military patronage, and democracy in the Cold War,” Journal of American History 96 (2009), 99–122.
See the essays in this volume by Engerman and Isaac—Chapters 2 and 5. Also see the following essays that take up this historiographic issue: Engerman, “Social science in the Cold War”; Isaac, “The human sciences in the Cold War”; Peter Mandler, “Deconstructing ‘Cold War Anthropology’,” and Philip Mirowski, “A history best served cold,” both in Joel Isaac & Duncan Bell, eds., The Cold War in Pieces: Exploring the Boundaries of Postwar American History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012 forthcoming);
Janet Martin-Nielsen, “A forgotten social science: Creating a place for linguistics in the historical dialogue,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 47 (2011), 147–172. During the 2010 workshops at Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute and the University of Toronto, the notion of Cold War social science received significant attention and provoked debate.
Steven Shapin, “Discipline and bounding: The history of the sociology of science as seen through the externalism-internalism debate,” History of Science 30 (1992), 333–369.
Peter Galison, “Ten problems in history and philosophy of science,” Isis 99 (2008), 112–113.
For a provocative analysis of the ways historians have used (and perhaps misused) the notion of Cold War for the purposes of description, explanation, and periodization, see Anders Stephanson, “Cold War degree zero,” in Isaac & Bell, The Cold War in Pieces. Also see Odd Arne Westad’s important recent effort to reinterpret the Cold War and its periodization: The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
For a useful discussion, see Paul Erickson, “Mathematical models, rational choice, and the search for Cold War culture,” Isis 101 (2010), 386–392.
David Price, Threatening Anthropology: The FBI’s Surveillance and Repression of Activist Anthropologists (Durham, NC: North Carolina Press, 2004);
Mike F. Keen, Stalking Sociologists: J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI Surveillance of American Sociology (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2004);
George A. Reisch, How the Cold War Transformed Philosophy of Science: To the Icy Slopes of Logic (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
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© 2012 Mark Solovey and Hamilton Cravens
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Solovey, M. (2012). Cold War Social Science: Specter, Reality, or Useful Concept?. In: Solovey, M., Cravens, H. (eds) Cold War Social Science. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137013224_1
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