Science, Democracy, and the American University: From the Civil War to the Cold War. By Andrew Jewett. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. xii + 402 pp. $99.00 cloth; $32.99 paper.

Abstract

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)Science, Democracy, and American University: From Civil War to Cold War . By Andrew Jewett . New York : Cambridge University Press , 2012. xii + 402 pp. $99.00 cloth; $32.99 paper.Book Reviews and NotesCambridge University Press has released a paperback edition of Andrew Jewett's ambitious investigation into how it is that many of America's intellectual and cultural leaders in first half of twentieth century came to see country's universities--as opposed to its churches--as arbiters and even generators of character traits that sustain a democratic culture. Beginning with advent of modern research university in decades after Civil War--and subsequent rise of social sciences--and ending with rebellion against social sciences and their fatuous optimism about human perfectability (338) that was launched in 1940s and 1950s by historians such as Perry Miller and Arthur Schlesinger, Jewett has written a book that will probably become a staple on exam lists of many future Ph.D. candidates in American intellectual history. I am not sure it should become a staple on lists of those students who wish to specialize in American religious history, but Jewett certainly tells a story that will be of some interest and use to anyone who wants to interrogate so-called secularization of American culture.Jewett's subject is massive effort to mobilize science, so successful in its industrial applications, as a resource for strengthening American democratic practices (1). This effort, according to Jewett, was rooted in belief that offered Americans the cultural and political benefits that flowed from mainline Protestantism, without divisive theological claims and metaphysical baggage (2). Those benefits were thought to include formation of a collective cultural character in United States that would strengthen state as a counterpoint to big and make possible modes of self-government endorsed by republicans, liberals, and democrats (1-2).This belief in potential of science, which Jewett calls scientific was held by politicians and business leaders such as Andrew Dickson White and Ezra Cornell, founders of Cornell University; it found a popular audience in last few decades of nineteenth century, thanks to publishing efforts of Edward L. Youmans, founder of Popular Science Monthly ; and it was articulated most vociferously--and perhaps most effectively, if educational reforms and regulations of industry are to be standard of judgment--in early twentieth century by psychologists such as John Dewey and William James, sociologists such and Talcott Parsons and Louis Wirth, philosophers and journalists such as Herbert Croly, Horace Kallen, and Walter Lippman, and anthropologists such as Franz Boas.Scientific democracy, we are told, was an alternative to liberal Protestantism, though it did not stand in opposition to liberal Protestantism. Indeed, Jewett places some of early architects of social gospel movement in same camp as Croly, who was known to have had a sympathetic attitude toward August Comte's calls for a secular religion of humanity. Jewett notes that George Herron referred to Sociology as a science of sacrifice; of redemption; of atonement, and that Walter Rauschenbusch aligned himself with progressive reformers who had been trained at Chicago's School of Social Service when he insisted that his task as a minister was not one of getting individuals to heaven, but of transforming life on earth into harmony of heaven (75-76). …