The last fifteen years have witnessed an explosion of interest in the history of the Cold War. Historical attention has focused not only on the diplomatic and military aspects of the conflict, but also, increasingly, on its cultural, intellectual, and technological dimensions. One of the fruits of this widening of scope in Cold War studies is a burgeoning literature on the development of the post-Second World War American human sciences. Studies of the Cold War career of the human sciences, however, have often been inflected by moralistic, and sometimes tendentious, claims about the relationship between the state and the academy. This article seeks to explain the chief characteristics of the historiography of the human sciences in Cold War America by describing its formation in the interstices of three distinct lines of inquiry: the history of science, the cultural turn in Cold War studies, and the history of the birth of the human science professions in the United States. It argues that historians of the post-war American human sciences have absorbed some features of these literatures, whilst neglecting others that offer more nuanced perspectives on the relationship between scientific research and its patrons during the Cold War era. Moreover, it suggests that the best prospects for the future maturation of the field lie in the recovery of ‘middle-range contextualizations’ that link post-war trends in the human sciences to interwar and turn-of-the-century developments, thereby making the Cold War context less all-encompassing than it has sometimes appeared.

During the first two decades of the Cold War, a new kind of academic figure became prominent in American public life: the credentialed social scientist or expert in the sciences of administration who was also, to use the parlance of the time, a “man of affairs.” Some were academic high-fliers conscripted into government roles in which their intellectual and organizational talents could be exploited. McGeorge Bundy, Walt Rostow, and Robert McNamara are the archetypes of such persons. An overlapping group of scholars became policymakers and political advisers on issues ranging from social welfare provision to nation-building in emerging postcolonial states. Many of these men—and almost without exception they were men—were also consummate operators within the patronage system that grew up around American universities after World War II. Postwar leaders of the social and administrative sciences such as Talcott Parsons and Herbert Simon were skilled scientific brokers of just this sort: good “committee men,” grant-getters, proponents of interdisciplinary inquiry, and institution-builders. This hard-nosed, suit-wearing, business-like persona was connected to new, technologically refined forms of social science. No longer sage-like social philosophers or hardscrabble, number-crunching empiricists, academic human scientists portrayed themselves as possessors of tools and programs designed for precision social engineering. Antediluvian “social science” was eschewed in favour of mathematical, behavioural, and systems-based approaches to “human relations” such as operations research, behavioral science, game theory, systems theory, and cognitive science.

This essay explores a form of reflexivity peculiar to the postwar social sciences. The mobilization of science in the United States during World War II released across the social sciences a wave of new research tools: mathematical models and calculation techniques ranging from game theory to cybernetics. As this profusion of analytical technologies gathered pace in the early years of the Cold War, practitioners of economics and cognate disciplines began to register what I term tool shock. Foundational debates about the epistemological properties and scientific legitimacy of the new tools were conducted in various fields. Focusing on economics and sociology, and in particular on economic theory and social theory, I track these debates across the immediate postwar years. I show that the intensity and location of tool shock varied noticeably in these two disciplines. Such differences, I argue, can be explained by the extent to which the postwar techniques were built into the pedagogical and research practices of the two fields in question.

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Studies of the history of the human sciences during the Cold War era have proliferated over the past decade--in JHBS and elsewhere. This special issue focuses on the connections between the behavioral sciences and the culture and politics of the Cold War in the United States. In the recent literature, there is a tendency to identify the Cold War human sciences with two main paradigms: that of psychocultural analysis, on the one hand, and of the systems sciences, on the other. The essays in the special issue both extend understanding of each of these interpretive frameworks and help us to grasp their interconnection.