Cold War Social Science

Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 2022

Sociologica, 2021

In this paper we start from Mark Solovey’s Social Science for What? to analyze the place and the role of the social sciences in the US National Science Foundation from the mid- 1940s to the end of the 1980s. The book highlights the tensions that built up around the epistemic status of the social sciences vis-à-vis the natural sciences and the reputational debates surrounding their role and fate during and after the postwar period. We mostly focus our attention on structures, actors and processes not addressed by Solovey: relationships, networks, and patterns of stratification within and across disciplines; the emergence of novel approaches outside the scientistic and positivistic framework sponsored by the NSF; alternative sources of funding, such as the National Endowment for the Humanities; and a set of broader, long-term processes in the macro-field of the social and behavioral sciences. We present some preliminary data suggesting that a wider, theoretically-oriented approach might be fruitful in casting a more complex and dynamic portrayal of the development of American social science.

Daedalus, 2004

History of Social Science, 2025

A new journal offers a chance to name its object of study. There are social scientists and social sciences, but is there such a thing as social science? History of Social Science may seem puzzling given cogent challenges to the history of science set in the singular. Surely complaints that the word science implies a unity that does not exist can be extended to the term social science as well. We concede this point but have something else in mind. By History of Social Science we mean to signal that it is worth considering as a collective various approaches to the study of society that took form in the late nineteenth century, even if they continue to be identified with separate social sciences. Until recently, most accounts have centered on the pasts of individual disciplines and their specific concerns. Relatively little attention has been paid to parallels, connections, and differences among these pasts. For many decades the "history of the social sciences" was a hollow label, an umbrella term for a bundle of otherwise isolated disciplinary histories.

Burdwan Journal of Sociology, 2020

The paper seeks to understand the nomenclature 'social sciences' as is commonly available to scholars and students of subjects like Sociology, Political Science, Social Anthropology and other sister disciplines including Economics. It begins by drawing upon the history of the development of the study of the social that is 'scientific' and therefore 'value neutral'. This is of course not entirely the case as is well established now in the modern social sciences. The very act of sifting evidence by canons set in the natural sciences has not only been critiqued but natural sciences themselves are critical about such claims. This paper draws attention to the controversies that surround our popular usage of the word 'science' and also seeks to understand the role of ideology in the art and craft of the social sciences. This paper argues that the exercise of weeding out ideology is by itself an ideological task and that matters are not as simple as such an argument makes it out to be. The paper draws heavily on the disciplines of Sociology and Social Anthropology and makes a case for inter-disciplinary approaches as well as the need to pay heed to 'lay' concerns.

2010

This compact volume covers the main developments in the social sciences since the Second World War. Chapters on economics, human geography, political science, psychology, social anthropology, and sociology will interest anyone wanting short, accessible histories of those disciplines, all written by experts in the relevant field; they will also make it easy for readers to make comparisons between disciplines. The final chapter proposes a blueprint for a history of the social sciences as a whole. Whereas most of the existing literature considers each of the social sciences separately from one another, this volume shows that they have much in common; for example, they have responded to common problems using overlapping methods, and cross-disciplinary activities have been widespread. The focus throughout the book is on societal pressures on knowledge production rather than just theoretical lineages.

2016

Social sciences are trying to impose themselves as established ones. For example, it’s used to be preupposed that there is an exemplary social science, like economics. But all the achievements and failures ascribed to social sciences are rooted in economics as well. In order to proceed with alternative and unconventional approaches to social processes it is desirable to start from historical background of social sciences. It may seem superficial but it is hard to escape the feeling of certain dissonance between presumably high weight and relatively young age of social sciences. This is a common feature of all political discourses in seeking to validate their dominance despite the limited period of their existence accordingly. It reveals a complexity within prevailing trichotomy of knowledge – humanities, natural sciences and social sciences. The overlapping history and methodology makes these lines of division quite blurred. Humanities and natural sciences have a longer history and ...

History of Political Economy, 2022

With the rise to authority of the social sciences after World War II, the division of knowledge between science and the humanities has gradually lost relevance and the differentiation of three, instead of two, cultures is now widely accepted. Needless to say, the increased significance of the social sciences in public life since 1945 has been achieved at the expense of the humanities, if only because the former often impinge on the turf of the latter. Likewise, the formidable reputation of the physical sciences in the wake of the war played no minor role in prompting social scientists to take them as a template for establishing their credentials as scientists. Caught between two lumbering elders, the social sciences have often met with the indifference of one, for failing to catch up, and the criticism of the other, for forgetting their origins. Because of conflicting attractions, disciplinary idiosyncrasies, and political temptations, the social sciences have suffered from an uncertain self-image. Mark Solovey's book title is reminiscent of Robert S. Lynd's Knowledge for What? (1939), which considered the place of social science in American culture at a time when the National Science Foundation (NSF) had yet to be created, and when private foundations still served as the main source of funding for social research. Like Lynd's book, Social Science for What? examines the central question of the social sciences' utility, but it does so in a different way. Once the NSF was established, indeed, public attention shifted: away from the critique of social science for its putative lack of serviceability and toward the evaluation of its scientific legitimacy as a precondition for its practical relevance. Starting with discussions predating the NSF's founding in 1950 and closing with the end of Ronald Reagan's second mandate, Solovey offers a lively, balanced, and powerful analysis of the changing status of the social sciences within

History of the Human Sciences, 2021