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

From World War II to the early 1970s, social science research expanded in dramatic and unprecedented fashion in the United States, which became the world's acknowledged leader in the field. This volume examines how, why, and with what consequences this rapid and yet contested expansion depended on the entanglement of the social sciences with the Cold War. Utilizing the controversial but useful concept of "Cold War Social Science," the contributions gathered here reveal how scholars from established disciplines and new interdisciplinary fields of study made important contributions to long-standing debates about knowledge production, liberal democracy, and human nature in an era of diplomatic tension and ideological conflict.

Mark Solovey is an assistant professor in the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology at the University of Toronto, and for 2011-2012 a Charles Warren Fellow at Harvard University. His research focuses on the political, institutional, and intellectual history of the social sciences in the United States since WWII. He has several articles in scholarly journals, including Annals of Science, History of Political Economy, Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, Radical History Review, and Social Studies of Science. He is the author of the tentatively titled Shaky Foundations: The Politics-Patronage-Social Science Nexus in Cold War America (forthcoming).



Hamilton Cravens isa professor emeritus of history at Iowa State University, writes about science in American culture and the tensions between expertise and democracy. He has authored or edited a dozen books, including The Triumph of Evolution (1978, 1988), Before Head Start (1993, 2003), The Social Sciences Go To Washington (2005), Race and Science: Scientific Challenges to Racism in America (2010), as well as about sixty articles and chapters in books. He is wrapping up a new book, Imagining The Good Society: The Social Sciences in the American Past and Present (forthcoming, 2012).

Foreword: Positioning Social Science in Cold War America—Theodore M. Porter * Cold War Social Science: Spectre, Reality, or Useful Concept?—Mark Solovey * PART I: Knowledge Production * The Rise and Fall of Wartime Social Science: Harvard’s Refugee Interview Project, 1950-54—David C. Engerman * Futures Studies: A New Social Science Rooted in Cold War Strategic Thinking— Kaya Tolon * ‘It was All Connected’: Computers and Linguistics in Early Cold War America—Janet Martin-Nielsen * Epistemic Design: Theory and Data in Harvard’s Department of Social Relations—Joel Isaac * PART II: Liberal Democracy * Producing Reason—Hunter Heyck * Column Right, March! Nationalism, Scientific Positivism, and the Conservative Turn of the American Social Sciences in the Cold War Era—Hamilton Cravens * From Expert Democracy to Beltway Banditry: How the Anti-War Movement Expanded the Military-Academic-Industrial Complex—Joy Rohde * Neo-Evolutionist Anthropology, the Cold War, and the Beginnings of the World Turn in U.S. Scholarship—Howard Brick * PART III: Human Nature * Maintaining Humans—Edward Jones-Imhotep * Psychology, Psychologists, and the Creativity Movement: The Lives of Method Inside and Outside the Cold War—Michael Bycroft * An Anthropologist on TV: Ashley Montagu and the Biological Basis of Human Nature, 1945-1960—Nadine Weidman * Cold War Emotions: The War over Human Nature—Marga Vicedo