The Human Sciences in Cold War America

Abstract

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.

Developing selves: photography, Cold War science and ‘backwards’ people in the Peruvian Andes, 1951–1966

“…[7] Critical assessments of 'Cold War Social Science' include Isaac (2007) and Engerman (2010). For a forceful repudiation of research on anthropology's Cold War entanglements, see, e.g., Mandler (2009)…”

Mnemonic Multiples: The Case of the Columbia Panel Studies

“…Prominent sociologists, psychologists, and political scientists were drawn together by foundation and military funders, but also by personal ties, Cold War commitments and a shared enthusiasm for team‐based, quantitative research (see Crowther‐Heyck, , pp. 422–426; Isaac, , pp. 734–739).…”

The Reconstitution of Political Theory: David Easton, Behavioralism, and the Long Road to System

“…There is no doubt that the political atmosphere of the Cold War had an impact on the social sciences. Behavioralism was related to the general character of American academia during this period, and the movement was significantly supported by government funding for what was deemed to be truly scientific research and by involvement with institutions such as Social Science Research Council, the Ford Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation, which encouraged the application of scientific methodologies (see e.g., Ball, ; Farr, ; Hauptmann, ; Adcock, ; Isaac, ). But the images of both science and democracy that were prominently associated with behavioralism were rooted in a fundamental transformation in the discipline that had taken place a half‐century earlier (Gunnell, , ).…”