Riding natural scientists' coattails onto the endless frontier: the SSRC and the quest for scientific legitimacy.

Abstract

This article proposes that the postwar National Science Foundation (NSF) debate constituted a critical, transitional episode in American social science and partisan politics. I show that by responding to powerful conservative critics in the scientific and political communities, the Social Science Research Council's (SSRC's) leading scholars (re)asserted a contested scientistic strategy-to advance the social sciences by following the natural sciences. Further, I reconstruct a wider and longer framework of analysis in order to recover central challenges to the scientistic strategy raised by prominent liberal scholars who rejected the associated commitments to value neutrality and disinterested professionalism. In developing this framework for understanding the contrasting fortunes of each strategy, this article argues that the NSF debate has a deep historical significance-for the social sciences, for American liberalism, and for the nation.