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THE COLD WAR AS INTELLECTUAL FORCE FIELD

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 October 2014

NILS GILMAN
NILS GILMAN*
Affiliation:
Associate Chancellor, University of California, Berkeley E-mail: [email protected]
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Extract

One of the most vibrant subfields of American intellectual history over the last fifteen years has been the history of the social sciences during the late twentieth century, a period when the size and quality of American social-scientific output grew explosively. Given that the major historiographic push to historicize this period of social science began in the 1990s, in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the declaration by some Americans of Cold War victory, it was perhaps inevitable that the geopolitics of the Cold War emerged as a major tool for accounting for what was distinct about the social science and broader culture of the postwar period. After all, wasn't it obvious that what made the 1990s different from the decades that came before it was the fact that the Cold War was over? And wasn't it further obvious that the bipolar geopolitics and nuclear night terrors of the Cold War had deformed everything they touched, not least the work of American social scientists? One marker of this obviousness was the transformation of the term “Cold War” from a noun describing (perhaps already too vaguely) a particular sort of geopolitical struggle into an adjective that could explain all sorts of extra-geopolitical activity. By the turn of the century this adjectivalization of the Cold War had become something of a historiographic cliché, a blunt (if not lazy) way to historicize our immediate forebears. When John Lewis Gaddis chose to title his “rethink” of Cold War history Now We Know, he didn't even need to add Better.

Type
Essays
Information
Modern Intellectual History , Volume 13 , Issue 2 , August 2016 , pp. 507 - 523
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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References

1 Although the term “Cold War” was used as an adjective in the early 1950s, it did not become common academic usage until the 1990s. Some early titles include Lowen, Rebecca S., Creating the Cold War University: The Transformation of Stanford (Berkeley, 1997)Google Scholar; and Price, David H., “Cold War Anthropology: Collaborators and Victims of the National Security State,” Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, 4/3–4 (1998), 389–430CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Also notable in the linguistic shift was Hanna Holborn Gray's review of Andre Schiffrin's The Cold War and the University (1997) in Foreign Affairs, which performed the precise linguistic shift in its title: “Cold war Universities: Tools of Power or Oases of Freedom?”

2 Engerman, David C., “Social Science in the Cold War,” Isis, 101/2 (2010), 393–400CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

3 Isaac, Joel and Bell, Duncan, eds., Uncertain Empire: American History and the Idea of the Cold War (New York, 2012)Google Scholar; and Solovey, Mark and Cravens, Hamilton, eds., Cold War Social Science: Knowledge Production, Liberal Democracy, and Human Nature (New York, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 This is all the more remarkable given many of the contributors are drawing their chapters from larger monographic projects, including Crowther-Heyck, Hunter, Herbert A. Simon: The Bounds of Reason in Modern America (Baltimore, 2005)Google Scholar; Brick, Howard, Transcending Capitalism: Visions of a New Society in Modern American Thought (Ithaca, NY, 2006)Google Scholar; Engerman, David, Know Your Enemy: The Rise and Fall of America's Soviet Experts (Oxford, 2009)Google Scholar; Isaac, Joel, Working Knowledge: Making the Human Sciences from Parsons to Kuhn (Cambridge, MA, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rohde, Joy, Armed with Expertise: The Militarization of American Social Research during the Cold War (Ithaca, NY, 2013)Google Scholar; Solovey, Mark, Shaky Foundations: The Politics–Patronage–Social Science Nexus in Cold War America (New Brunswick, NJ, 2013)Google Scholar; and Cohen-Cole, Jamie, The Open Mind: Cold War Politics and the Sciences of Human Nature (Chicago, 2014)Google Scholar.

5 Anders Stephanson, “Fourteen Notes on the Very Concept of the Cold War,” H-Diplo (May 1996), 1–21.

6 Notably in Gaddis, John Lewis, The Cold War: A New History (New York, 2006)Google Scholar—a book Tony Judt waspishly characterized as reading “like the ventriloquized autobiography of an Olympic champion.”

7 Westad, Odd Arne, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (Cambridge, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 Booker, M. Keith, The Post-utopian Imagination: American Culture in the Long 1950s (Westport, CT, 2002)Google Scholar.

9 Westad, Odd Arne, “Beginnings of the End: How the Cold War Crumbled,” in Pons, Silvio and Romero, Federico, eds., Reinterpreting the End of the Cold War: Issues, Interpretations, Periodizations (New York: Routledge, 2005), 68–81Google Scholar.

10 The most explicit supporter here of Westad's periodization is Philip Mirowski, who contributed essays to both volumes, and who, like many economics-centric historians, is suspicious of the tendency to make the Cold War the dominant motif of the postwar period. Mirowski argues that the central dividing line in postwar history was the replacement around 1980 of the Fordist social state by a globalizing neoliberal model of capital accumulation—which had a direct impact on the social sciences in that it led the Cold War-motivated state funding of the social science to be replaced “by the neoliberal system of patronage that fundamentally challenged many of the epistemological and political principles of Cold War-era science” (UE 10). This seems dubious: even if we agree that the best way to periodize the intellectual history of the social sciences is by following the money, funding models were already shifting by the late 1960s. On funding models see Solovey, Shaky Foundations, and Parmar, Inderjeet, Foundations of the American Century: The Ford, Carnegie, and Rockefeller Foundations in the Rise of American Power (New York, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 Mastny, Vojtech, “The 1963 Nuclear Test Ban Treaty: A Missed Opportunity for Détente?” Journal of Cold War Studies, 10/1 (2008), 3–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 Westad, Odd Arne, ed., Brothers in Arms: The Rise and Fall of the Sino-Soviet Alliance, 1945–1963 (Stanford, 1998)Google Scholar; Hughes, R. Gerald, Britain, Germany and the Cold War: The Search for a European Détente 1949–1967 (Oxford, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For the periodization of détente see Bracke, Maude, Which Socialism, Whose Détente? West European Communism and the Czechoslovak Crisis of 1968 (Budapest, 2007), chap. 1Google Scholar; and Hanhimaki, Jussi M., The Rise and Fall of Détente: American Foreign Policy and the Transformation of the Cold War (Washington, DC, 2013)Google Scholar.

13 Suri, Jeremi, Power and Protest: Global Revolution and the Rise of Détente (Cambridge, MA, 2005)Google Scholar; Loth, Wilfried and Soutou, George, eds., The Making of Détente: Eastern Europe and Western Europe in the Cold War, 1965–75 (New York, 2007)Google Scholar.

14 On the interwar mystic roots of corporate scenario planning see Kleiner, Art, Age of Heretics: A History of the Radical Thinkers Who Reinvented Corporate Management (San Francisco, 2008)Google Scholar.

15 Varum, Celeste Amorim and Melo, Carla, “Directions in Scenario Planning Literature: A Review of the Past Decades,” Futures, 42/4 (2010), 355–69CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, “Global Scenarios: Their Current State and Future” (2011) – a paper (perhaps tellingly?) prepared for the US Naval Postgraduate School.

16 Although Hunter Heyck's essay in CWSS explains how certain postwar social scientists (especially economists), led by Herbert Simon, came to adopt a view of humans as reduced to their function as “choosers,” one thing that's missing from these volumes is a serious account of what was arguably the single most important process in postwar social science, namely the ascension to hegemony of economics. The final triumph of neoclassical economics over institutional economics took place during this period, in ways that Mirowski and Amadae have shown were closely linked (in the first order) to the Cold War: Amadae, S. M., Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy (Chicago, 2003)Google Scholar; and Mirowski, Philip, Machine Dreams: Economics Becomes a Cyborg Science (Cambridge, 2002)Google Scholar.

17 Most notably with the period-defining essay “The Responsibility of Intellectuals,” New York Review of Books, 23 Feb. 1967; as well as “Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship,” originally delivered as a lecture in 1968 and then published in American Power and the New Mandarins (New York: Pantheon Books, 1969), 23–158.

18 On the Cold War and Montagu see also Sperling, Susan, “Ashley's Ghost: McCarthyism, Science, and Human Nature,” in Wax, Dustin, ed., Anthropology at the Dawn of the Cold War: The Influence of Foundations, McCarthyism and the CIA (Ann Arbor, 2008), 17–36Google Scholar.

19 Engerman, David, “Social Science in the Cold War,” Isis, 101/2 (2010), 393–400CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.