Dueling Deweys: Moralism, Scientism, and American Social Science History

Abstract

Following Dorothy Ross and Peter Novick, anyone writing about the history of the social sciences in the United States, or debates about objectivity within the social sciences and historical professions, risks being regarded as doing supplementary work.' Maybe so. But John M. Jordan's Machine-Age Ideology and Mark C. Smith's Social Science in the Crucible are fine studies and deserve attention for the contributions they make to the intellectual and cultural history of social scientists' uses of metaphor and debates over values and the uses of social knowledge. These studies are both complementary and at odds, which makes reading them together quite interesting. Jordan and Smith provide useful guides to the institutional forces, intellectual developments, and ideological debates which shaped the American social sciences from the end of the nineteenth century through the end of the 1930s. Both convincingly illustrate how social scientists' emulation of natural and applied science models led to the dominance of scientistic thinking and prescriptive metaphors which expressed the shared goals and common lexicon of the different social science disciplines. By extension, they show how the obsession with objectivity, rationality, and technique, combined with financial dependence on culturally and politically conservative institutional bases of support, made the social sciences agents of tepid reform, at best. As Smith shows in his fine first chapter, the emphasis on method and technique (as opposed to reform-driven research or more critical and speculative thinking about the social order) along with constant proclamations of objectivity and value-neutrality, made the social sciences appealing and safe for their benefactors, especially the big