Cold War Social Science: Transnational Entanglements by Mark Solovey and Christian Dayé, eds.

Abstract

One of the pleasures of Cold War Social Science is that the structure of the book performs transnational social science at three levels: the sites of research, methods and questions, and the social scientists themselves. In terms of the sites of research, the volume includes essays about (among other places) the Soviet Union, Brazil, the Philippines, China, Czechoslovakia, and Turkey (the only major region not included is South Asia), as well as transnational institutions such as the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). In terms of the transnationality of methods and questions, the volume considers a wide variety of disciplines, including area studies, economics, political science, psychology, anthropology, and sociology. In terms of the contributors themselves, they hail from Turkey, Austria, Russia, Colombia, China, Britain, the Czech Republic, Canada, Norway, Sweden, and Germany. In sum, this book enacts a version of the social scientific transnationalism that it seeks to explore, and as such it represents the fruit of calls to go beyond U.S.-centered accounts of Cold War social science.As Mark Solovey and Christian Dayé lay out in the introduction, the existing literature on social science during the Cold War era has so far had two main limitations. First, it has been too bipolar in its conception of the Cold War, seeing the Cold War as primarily about the Soviet-U.S. rivalry rather than a complex matrix in which that particular bilateral geopolitical and ideological rivalry tended to intersect in complex ways with regional, national, and local concerns to produce inconsistent and sometimes surprising results. Second, the literature has been too linear in its causal claims, asserting that the Cold War “shaped” social science in a more or less direct fashion, as opposed to being one contextual variable among others shaping the decisions of individual social scientists about empirical issues and questions they choose to investigate as well as the theoretical frameworks and methods they develop and deploy. Instead, the editors of the volume propose the concept of “entanglement”—a much looser and less causally precise notion that over the last couple of decades has become increasingly fashionable among interpretive social scientists and historians.Let me confess that I am not a fan of entanglement as a theoretical concept. It either evades efforts to be precise about causal claims, or insists on particularity over generality, or both. That is, the concept of entanglement rejects efforts to say that “X caused Y” in some regular pattern and instead retreats to suggestions about murky resonances that varied across cases in ways that cannot be effectively generalized. One might rejoin that it is better to be vaguely right than precisely wrong, but the concept of entanglement nonetheless represents a kind of loss of explanatory nerve—a loss that raises fundamental questions about the motivation for historical inquiry in the first place. Why should we be interested in any particular historical case unless it helps illuminate some larger phenomenon? Pure antiquarian interest cannot be enough. Even if we do not insist that social science be nomothetic, we must recognize the limited interest of purely idiographic modes of inquiry. Those concerned with falling enrollments in the humanities and the interpretive social sciences might do well to consider this point carefully.Regardless of what one makes of “entanglement” as a theoretical construct, the empirical cases presented in Cold War Social Science make the case that, although the Cold War influenced the shape of social scientific activity in many places, the form of this shaping was inconsistent, depending not only on the local political significance of the Cold War but also on myriad other local factors, ranging from funding options and systems to the organizational structure of research centers in which social science took place. The volume is convincing in its claim that earlier unidirectional “diffusionist” accounts of the influence of American social science on non-U.S.-based social science are no longer plausible, but it is important to note that the United States did, in fact, represent the dominant force in global postwar social scientific knowledge production, and its theoretical and organizational models were often hegemonic. This was partly about sheer numbers. During the quarter century from 1945 to 1970, the number of social science doctorates awarded at U.S. universities grew by an order of magnitude. The goal of the postwar American academy was, in an intellectually unprecedented way, to know everything about everywhere—an objective intelligible only as a dimension of U.S. global hegemony and political ambitions in the context of the Cold War, as Nicolas Dirks and I recently explained in The Cambridge History of America and the World, vol. 4 (Cambridge University Press, 2021).Still, the authors are right to point out that the significance of U.S.-led or -sponsored work often changed when it moved across national borders and into dialogue with local political and social scientific research contexts. Many U.S. social scientists were themselves well aware of this, often producing their work in partnership with local social scientists who were not just passive recipients of American social science but would instead actively shape the thinking of their U.S. partners—as was the case with the anthropologist Charles Wagley, who collaborated closely with Brazilian colleagues in developing his ideas (as Sebastian Gil-Riaño's contribution suggests). Conversely, ideas that emerged out of a disciplinary or local political context that might have little per se to do with the Cold War could, upon traveling across borders, become enrolled in Cold War disputes, as was the case with dependency theory, which began as a debate within the Latin American left over industrialization strategies, but which upon arrival in the United States was deployed primarily as a counter–Cold War social scientific critique of modernization theory (as Margarita Fajardo's contribution explains).A particular strength of the volume is its clear focus on the importance of UNESCO as an early Cold War–era institution for promoting social scientific inquiry worldwide. Several essays in the volume mention UNESCO's role as a vehicle for funding the production and transmission of social scientific knowledge, but Per Wisselgren's piece in particular highlights how the vision of social science promoted by UNESCO during its first decade was in fact at odds with the kind of social science that became hegemonic in the American academy during the 1950s and 1960s. Under the leadership of Alva Myrdal, UNESCO's Social Science Department promoted methods and forms of social science whose normative baseline was not the promotion of liberal democratic capitalism but the development of world government, international peace, and “One Worldism.” An intriguing question left by this volume is how global social science might have unfolded differently had UNESCO rather than U.S. government-aligned visions of social science become the globally hegemonic ones in the second half of the twentieth century.