Cold War Social Science Research Articles

In Search of a Schema in a Joyfully Serious Life: Robert Bellah, the Cold War, Psychoanalysis, and Intimate Experimentations

A rejoinder to comments by Amy Borovoy, Chad Alan Goldberg, Arvind Rajagopal, and Joan W. Scott on my book, A Joyfully Serious Man. I begin with a brief narrative of how I came to write the book and how I worked on it with the help of many different people. I then move to the place of psychoanalysis in the book, my analysis of Bellah’s early positioning in Cold War social science, and a few questions regarding American culture, religion, and politics. The article ends with a few remarks on my current research on the life and work of Clifford Geertz.

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

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

The discipline that came in from the cold: American human geography becomes a Cold War social science

The high–Cold War period – from the Truman doctrine to the Cuban missile crisis – brought not only profound changes in geography but also profound changes to Geography. The discipline moved from a museum-like, fusty subject to aspiring to be a Cold War, cutting-edge hybrid social science (or behavioural science) ‘cross-bred’ with physical and applied sciences. The vehicle was social physics. Its origins were in the 17th century, but the actual name was not coined until 1835 and then in French, ‘Physique Sociale’, by the Belgian astronomer, statistician and social tabulator, Adolphe Quetelet (1796–1874). As a project, social physics rested on the belief of monism in which the same formal explanatory scientific principles held in both natural and social worlds. In the particular case of Cold War geography, monism meant asserting that specifically Newtonian equations describing the movements of celestial bodies in the heavens could explain equally as well movements of human bodies down on earth. In American human geography, social physics was pioneered from the early 1950s by William Warntz, who collaborated early on with the Princeton astrophysicist, John Stewart, who, in turn, had previously worked with the Harvard linguist, George Zipf. Together Warntz and Stewart using home-made early computing devices and drawing on Newtonian formulations of potential cast geography as social physics, extolling its virtues as ‘macrogeography’ and on par with other disciplines that already had entered the Pantheon of Cold War social science.

News and notes.

This article introduces the publications from H. Heft's Visual art history and the psychology of perception: Perspectivism and its 20th century abandonment in the visual arts and in Gibson's ecological psychology, Wayne Viney's William James's Pluralism: An Antidote for Contemporary Extremism and Absolutism, and Mark Solovey and Christian Daye's Cold War Social Science: Transnational Entanglements. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Social science and Marxist humanism beyond collectivism in Socialist Romania

This article brings together the history of the social sciences and the history of social thought in Socialist Romania. It is concerned with the development of ideas about the social beyond collectivism, especially about the relationship between individual and society under socialism, from the early 1960s to the end of the 1970s. The analysis speaks to three major themes in the current historiography of Cold War social science. First, the article investigates the role of disciplinary specialization in the advancement of new ideas about the social in the postwar period. Specifically, it asks how the debate over the relationship between sociology and Marxism-Leninism has challenged ideas about collectivism from Stalinist social science. Second, the article shows how social practice, individual and collective agency, and people's subjectivities became theoretically relevant in the 1960s, and how they were integrated, via empirical sociological research, into the reworked conceptual apparatus of post-Stalinist Marxism-Leninism. This complicates accounts about the role of quantification and theorization in postwar social science by foregrounding the intense reflection on the role of empirical research in sociology under state socialism. Third, the article shows how the relationship between individual and society became a topic of interest across social sciences in the 1960s and 1970s. The Marxist humanist approach to the social, although it never achieved the institutional status of a distinct discipline, adds an important perspective from East Central Europe to the existing historiography of the ‘thinning’ of the social in social sciences and social thought beginning in the 1950s.

Armed with Expertise: The Militarization of American Social Research during the Cold War

This book adds to a library of material on social science and U.S. foreign policy after 1945. Joy Rohde examines the origins and growth of the Special Operations and Research Office (SORO) that the U.S. Army established in the mid-1950s. SORO was formally a social science institute of American University in Washington, DC, but it did contract work for the military. The organization was of midrank among the proliferating groups of social scientists who served the national security interests of the United States during the Cold War. But Rohde effectively shows how SORO embodied the convictions, hopes, and tensions that many historians have found in the dominant trends of social science from 1945 to 1974. The experts of American University–SORO believed that their know-how could benefit the world and enhance free societies. To some extent, moreover, the armed forces took the researchers at their word. The men and women of SORO also often worried that the government could co-opt them, and they fretted about their moral responsibilities to their profession and to the state. These scholars tried to work out the cognitive status of their enterprise: to what extent, and how, was it related to the culture in which it had emerged? Finally, and not least, Rohde explores the supremacy of the army in this marriage; the essential message is that social science was “militarized.”SORO was officially disbanded in 1966 after only ten years of doing business, when the radicalism of the Vietnam War began to shake up national politics. The erudite were embarrassed when activists publicized the connection of the generals to higher education, and SORO collapsed. In various guises, however, the institution survived into the 1980s, although it had fewer and fewer traceable ties to ordinary university life. Rohde tracks SORO’s successors in the 1970s before she offers a final chapter offering provisional ideas about the trajectory of social investigation, post–Cold War, in the interventions of the United States into the Middle East from the early 1990s on.Rohde intimates that the 1960s triumphs of radicals in exposing the links between social science and the military were ambiguous at best. Not wanting to give up on the quest for operational information, the defense establishment funded other entities less coupled to the collegiate system. Social-scientifically trained PhDs were employed in ways that allowed the brass to avoid the scrutiny Americans associated with academic transparency. The victories of critics in the 1960s may have led, Rohde claims, to less oversight than existed when warriors’ social science was more ensconced in universities. She will get no argument from me with this observation. Nonetheless, she finishes up by saying that in the 21st century militarized social science has taken over and fosters the opposite of freedom in foreign policy. This conclusion speaks more to her own liberal politics than anything else.Armed with Expertise is intelligently argued and fluently written, and its set of theses is clearly stated. Yet it is, initially, only the story of SORO from 1956 to 1970, followed by 30 pages of informed speculation on the national security enterprise and social science from the 1980s through the Global War on Terror. Hence, the subtitle is more than misleading.Rohde also exhibits the shared assumptions of intellectual historians of policymaking—assumptions that are questionable. Three of them are relevant here.First, Rohde takes us down a one-way street. The social scientists and their projects are continually “militarized.” No thought is given to the notion that the thick, mal-educated, and non-reflective soldiers may have craved some aspects of the cerebral prestige of the professoriate. The military may have been civilianized as much as the professoriate was militarized.Second, Rohde truly thinks that the social scientists had something to teach the Army and that they advanced the aims of soldiers. At times she allows us to believe that specific research reports are blather but that overall the scholars produced useful “knowledge.” We have little consideration of the idea that, in general, what was manufactured may have been just some kind of informed verbiage. More important, the effusions of social science may have had little effect on U.S. foreign policy and little influence on what the military did. High-ranking military personnel may have simply gotten new names for old ways of thinking.Finally, with a historian’s hindsight, Rohde is easily able to make out how affairs of state influenced Cold War social science. Yet she does not so clearly grasp that her own left-liberal ideas have swayed her thinking, especially her ideas about recent foreign policy. For her and those she has studied, scholarship is too often the carrying on of politics by other means.

The Grudging Modernizer: A Trip to the Middle East and Cold War Social Science

The postwar era is generally recognized as a unique moment of impetuous growth of the social sciences, due to the interest of Western internationalist elites in the development of a set of pragmatically-oriented intellectual tools that could be of use in the confrontation between the self-proclaimed “Free World,” the Soviet bloc, and emerging postcolonial nations. In the last twenty years, however, doubts about the impact of the Cold War syndrome on the development of ideas, methods, and infrastructures of Western social science in the 1950s and the 1960s have been cast by historians and social scientists alike. This article uses the episode of the 1959 Middle East scholarly trip of a Harvard sociologist, Robert N. Bellah, to highlight the complexity and the ambivalence of individual trajectories, as well as the adumbrations of critical ideas and themes in the work of an intellectual who was a recognized, if peripheral, member of some of the most influential Cold War Social Science circles. A final hypothesis on a paradox of Cold War social science is advanced, according to which the need to staff centers and institutes for the training of Cold War technicians and elites put humanists and orientalists in the condition to influence those very students who should have been trained in the most advanced and practically-oriented social sciences.

Cold War social science in action. The Ford Foundation and liberal adult education in the United States (1945-60)

ABSTRACT This paper scrutinises the Ford Foundation’s Fund for Adult Education from the perspective of Cold War social science. Its massive Experimental Discussion Project was an attempt at scientifically grounded social engineering in American communities in the field of liberal humanistic education. This civilisation-saving mission to foster critical democratic citizenship and world-understanding ran into aparadox of scientific social engineering and organic community growth, expertise, and planning versus lay leadership. Discussion groups opened up space for discussing politics during the McCarthy era, while its scientific evaluation was characteristic of the 1950s Culture Wars in its value neutrality and race-blindness.

Theoretical psychology at the University of Alberta as social science during the Cold War.

We examine the University of Alberta's Center for Advanced Study in Theoretical Psychology (1965-1990) in the context of social science conducted during the Cold War. We begin by considering the center with respect to three important properties of social science at this time: an emphasis on interdisciplinarity, a focus on theory, and a preference for quantitative methods. Our analysis suggests that center activities also exhibited these characteristics. They were highly interdisciplinary, they were concerned with the development of psychological theory, and center members were experts in a variety of formal, mathematical, or statistical techniques. We then discuss the center in relation to a subdomain of research known as Cold War social science, which also was interdisciplinary, theoretical and quantitative, but in addition focused on research that contributed to national security against the rise of communism. Center members also believed that their research had social implications, but these were related to a humanistic psychology that served as a positive social force, and diverged from typical Cold War applications. We end by considering the center as an example of a different kind of Cold War science that emerged from a unique set of contextual influences. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

A Discussion of Aviezer Tucker's The Legacies of Totalitarianism: A Theoretical Framework

The concept of totalitarianism emerged between the two world wars in twentieth-century Europe to become a central concept of Cold War social science designed to highlight similarities between the Nazi and Soviet regimes and implicitly to contrast these forms of dictatorship with liberal democracy. While in the 1960s and 1970s many critics challenged the concept’s Cold War uses as an ideology of “the West,” the idea of totalitarianism and later “post-totalitarianism” played important roles in East Central Europe, where they helped dissident intellectuals, academics, and activists both to understand and to challenge Soviet-style communism. The concept of “totalitarianism” remains heavily contested. But whatever one thinks about the concept’s social scientific validity, there can be no doubt that it played a crucial role in both the scholarship of communism and the public intellectual debates about the possibilities of post-communism. Aviezer Tucker’s The Legacies of Totalitarianism: A Theoretical Framework (Cambridge 2015) addresses many of these issues, and so we have invited a range of political scientists to comment on the book and the broader theme denoted by its title.

A Discussion of Aviezer Tucker's The Legacies of Totalitarianism: A Theoretical Framework

The concept of totalitarianism emerged between the two world wars in twentieth-century Europe to become a central concept of Cold War social science designed to highlight similarities between the Nazi and Soviet regimes and implicitly to contrast these forms of dictatorship with liberal democracy. While in the 1960s and 1970s many critics challenged the concept’s Cold War uses as an ideology of “the West,” the idea of totalitarianism and later “post-totalitarianism” played important roles in East Central Europe, where they helped dissident intellectuals, academics, and activists both to understand and to challenge Soviet-style communism. The concept of “totalitarianism” remains heavily contested. But whatever one thinks about the concept’s social scientific validity, there can be no doubt that it played a crucial role in both the scholarship of communism and the public intellectual debates about the possibilities of post-communism. Aviezer Tucker’s The Legacies of Totalitarianism: A Theoretical Framework (Cambridge 2015) addresses many of these issues, and so we have invited a range of political scientists to comment on the book and the broader theme denoted by its title.

A Discussion of Aviezer Tucker's The Legacies of Totalitarianism: A Theoretical Framework

The concept of totalitarianism emerged between the two world wars in twentieth-century Europe to become a central concept of Cold War social science designed to highlight similarities between the Nazi and Soviet regimes and implicitly to contrast these forms of dictatorship with liberal democracy. While in the 1960s and 1970s many critics challenged the concept’s Cold War uses as an ideology of “the West,” the idea of totalitarianism and later “post-totalitarianism” played important roles in East Central Europe, where they helped dissident intellectuals, academics, and activists both to understand and to challenge Soviet-style communism. The concept of “totalitarianism” remains heavily contested. But whatever one thinks about the concept’s social scientific validity, there can be no doubt that it played a crucial role in both the scholarship of communism and the public intellectual debates about the possibilities of post-communism. Aviezer Tucker’s The Legacies of Totalitarianism: A Theoretical Framework (Cambridge 2015) addresses many of these issues, and so we have invited a range of political scientists to comment on the book and the broader theme denoted by its title.

A Discussion of Aviezer Tucker's The Legacies of Totalitarianism: A Theoretical Framework

The concept of totalitarianism emerged between the two world wars in twentieth-century Europe to become a central concept of Cold War social science designed to highlight similarities between the Nazi and Soviet regimes and implicitly to contrast these forms of dictatorship with liberal democracy. While in the 1960s and 1970s many critics challenged the concept’s Cold War uses as an ideology of “the West,” the idea of totalitarianism and later “post-totalitarianism” played important roles in East Central Europe, where they helped dissident intellectuals, academics, and activists both to understand and to challenge Soviet-style communism. The concept of “totalitarianism” remains heavily contested. But whatever one thinks about the concept’s social scientific validity, there can be no doubt that it played a crucial role in both the scholarship of communism and the public intellectual debates about the possibilities of post-communism. Aviezer Tucker’s The Legacies of Totalitarianism: A Theoretical Framework (Cambridge 2015) addresses many of these issues, and so we have invited a range of political scientists to comment on the book and the broader theme denoted by its title.

A Discussion of Aviezer Tucker's The Legacies of Totalitarianism: A Theoretical Framework

The concept of totalitarianism emerged between the two world wars in twentieth-century Europe to become a central concept of Cold War social science designed to highlight similarities between the Nazi and Soviet regimes and implicitly to contrast these forms of dictatorship with liberal democracy. While in the 1960s and 1970s many critics challenged the concept’s Cold War uses as an ideology of “the West,” the idea of totalitarianism and later “post-totalitarianism” played important roles in East Central Europe, where they helped dissident intellectuals, academics, and activists both to understand and to challenge Soviet-style communism. The concept of “totalitarianism” remains heavily contested. But whatever one thinks about the concept’s social scientific validity, there can be no doubt that it played a crucial role in both the scholarship of communism and the public intellectual debates about the possibilities of post-communism. Aviezer Tucker’s The Legacies of Totalitarianism: A Theoretical Framework (Cambridge 2015) addresses many of these issues, and so we have invited a range of political scientists to comment on the book and the broader theme denoted by its title.

‘A fiction of long standing’

There appears to be a widespread belief that the social sciences during the 1950s and 1960s can be characterized by an almost unquestioned faith in a positivist philosophy of science. In contrast, the article shows that even within the narrower segment of Cold War social science, positivism was not an unquestioned doctrine blindly followed by everybody, but that quite divergent views coexisted. The article analyses two ‘techniques of prospection’, the Delphi technique and political gaming, from the perspective of a comprehensive set of ideas attributed to ‘positivism’. Both techniques were developed in the early 1950s by researchers at the RAND Corporation, a Californian think tank with tight relations to the US Air Force. Despite the closeness of origin, the two techniques show considerable differences in their basic epistemologies. The article thus concludes that more important than positivism in uniting US Cold War social science was the shared sense of urgency and of the potential of social science to put decision-making in foreign policy on a rational basis. In this sense, as far as the Cold War social sciences were of a piece, they were made so by the sense of danger and urgency of action evoked by the image of the Iron Curtain.

American geography, social science and the Cold War

ABSTRACTThis article argues that the history of geography should be written from an externalist perspective; that is, its history should be directly related to the larger historical context in which it is embedded. My example is American human geography during the early Cold War period. The argument is that as a result of America's experience during the Second World War, the USA mobilised its academy to help it win the Cold War. America drew not only on the physical sciences, but also the social sciences. Given the success of the physical sciences in winning the Second World War (especially the Manhattan Project that produced the atomic bomb), the model for Cold War social sciences were the physical sciences. Therefore, like them, American social sciences increasingly carried out large, multidisciplinary projects, which were generously funded by the state, and which used formal, mathematical techniques and models to analyse big numerical data sets using the cutting-edge computing machines of the day. Because of some powerful individual gatekeepers, human geography initially resisted the kind of change that other American social sciences experienced. By the mid-to-late 1950s it could resist no longer. As exemplified by the work of William Warntz, American human geography also became another Cold War social science.

Cold War Social Science: Knowledge Production, Liberal Democracy, and Human Nature ed. by Mark Solovey and Hamilton Cravens (review)

Godin reviews Cold War Social Science: Knowledge Production, Liberal Democracy, and Human Nature by Mark Solovey and Hamilton Cravens

Context and Contours of American Cold-War Social Science

Perhaps because of its anomalous and imprecise quality (as befitting its name) the Cold War has been the object of considerable speculation, commentary, and analysis. Early reflections on the meaning and significance of the Cold War (primarily a psychological rather than a material struggle) helped to shape and fuel it, becoming part and parcel of what strategists and theorists originally sought to define (e.g., Lippmann 1947, Zacharias 1950, Lukacs 1961). As the Cold War began to fade into the past, increasing attention was given to making sense of what happened and why, and how specific decisions and policies intersected with broader strategies (Friedman 2000, Gaddis 2000). More often than not, the historiographies that underpinned analyses of the Cold War were bound up with particular sets of political loyalties and affinities, making for contentious and sometimes rancorous debates (Paterson 1971, Schrecker 1998, Haynes 2000). Once the Cold War had been consolidated as an historical category of over-riding and over-arching significance, it became a point of reference for shifts in thought and ideas—particularly in the realm of culture and the arts (Saunders 1999, Berghahn 2001). Apart from a few recent texts (e.g., Robin 2009, Solovey and Cravens 2012), the role played by the social sciences in this global confrontation has received only cursory examination. To be sure, over the years a number of works have appeared that address particular aspects of social-scientific activity during the Cold War (e.g., Simpson 1994, Glander 2000, Parry-Giles 2002, Gilman 2003, Wax 2008). But the various partial analyses have never added up to form a whole. And more general overviews of how the social sciences developed in the post-World War II period largely fail to take into account how they were shaped by escalating tensions between the U.S.S.R and the United States (e.g., Lyons 1969). This oversight has been unfortunate. While the post-war period spawned a number of fields in the human sciences including strategic studies, Sovietology, game theory, and modernization theory, the practical assumptions that gave rise to these approaches have largely escaped close scrutiny. While current assumptions about how and why social sciences should be funded were largely forged in the Cold War crucible, broader accounts of how the current pattern of patronage developed have been notably lacking. The publication of these two insightful and thoroughly researched volumes goes a long way to help fill this void. Mark Solovey’s focus, in Shaky Foundations, is on funding patterns for the social sciences during the two decades after World War II. Following the money, he delves into how socialscientific research was supported by both private and government agencies, including philanthropy and the military. To this end, The Contours of America’s Cold War, by Matthew Farish. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. 351pp. $25.00 paper. ISBN: 9780816648 436.

Cold War Social Science: Knowledge Production, Liberal Democracy, and Human Nature

Cold War Social Science: Knowledge Production, Liberal Democracy, and Human Nature

Cold War Social Science: Knowledge Production, Liberal Democracy, and Human Nature

Cold War Social Science: Knowledge Production, Liberal Democracy, and Human Nature