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THE HUMAN SCIENCES IN COLD WAR AMERICA

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 August 2007

JOEL ISAAC
JOEL ISAAC*
Affiliation:
Queen Mary, University of London
*
Queen Mary, University of LondonE1 4NS[email protected]
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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.

Type
Historiographical Reviews
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 50 , Issue 3 , September 2007 , pp. 725 - 746
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2007

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References

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63 Other sources on area studies during the Cold War are Immanuel Wallerstein, ‘The unintended consequences of Cold War area studies’, in Chomsky et al., The Cold War and the university, pp. 195–231; Bruce Cumings, ‘Boundary displacement: area studies and international studies during and after the Cold War’, in Simpson, ed., Universities and empire, pp. 159–88.

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85 See Paul Ricoeur, Time and narrative, i, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer (Chicago, 1984), part ii.

86 Gilman, Mandarin of the future, pp. 25–30.

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92 There was a brief Parsons revival in the years following his death in 1979, spearheaded by Jeffrey Alexander and a group of German social theorists including Jürgen Habermas and Niklas Luhmann. See Jeffrey C. Alexander, The modern reconstruction of classical thought, iv: Talcott Parsons (Berkeley, CA, 1983); idem, ‘The Parsons revival in German sociology’, Sociological Theory, 2 (1984), pp. 394–412CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Jürgen Habermas, The theory of communicative action, ii: The critique of functionalist reason, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 199–299.

93 Talcott Parsons, The structure of social action (New York, 1937).

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95 Ringing rejections of Parsonian sociology can be found in C. Wright Mills, The sociological imagination (New York, 1959), pp. 25–49; Alvin W. Gouldner, The coming crisis of Western sociology (London, 1971); Robin Blackburn, ed., Ideology in social science: readings in critical social theory (London, 1972), pp. 32–60.

96 Howard Brick, Transcending capitalism: visions of a new society in modern American thought (Ithaca, NY, 2006); idem, ‘The reformist dimension of Talcott Parsons's early social theory’, in Thomas L. Haskell and Richard F. Teichgraeber III, eds., The culture of the market: historical essays (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 357–96; idem, ‘Talcott Parsons's “shift away from economics”’, Journal of American History, 87 (2000), pp. 490–514Google Scholar.

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