Cold War Social Science

This book explores how the social sciences became entangled with the global Cold War. While duly recognizing the realities of nation states, national power, and national aspirations, the studies gathered here open up new lines of transnational investigation. Considering developments in a wide array of fields – anthropology, development studies, economics, education, political science, psychology, science studies, and sociology – that involved the movement of people, projects, funding, and ideas across diverse national contexts, this volume pushes scholars to rethink certain fundamental points about how we should understand – and thus how we should study – Cold War social science itself.

How the NSF became an important yet controversial patron for the social sciences, influencing debates over their scientific status and social relevance. In the early Cold War years, the U.S. government established the National Science Foundation (NSF), a civilian agency that soon became widely known for its dedication to supporting first-rate science. The agency's 1950 enabling legislation made no mention of the social sciences, although it included a vague reference to "other sciences." Nevertheless, as Mark Solovey shows in this book, the NSF also soon became a major--albeit controversial--source of public funding for them.

Examines the politics of intellectual life during the Cold War, and the effects of U.S. intelligence and propaganda agencies on academic culture and intellectual life

Numerous popular and scholarly accounts have exposed the deep impact of patrons on the production of scientific knowledge and its applications. Shaky Foundations provides the first extensive examination of a new patronage system for the social sciences that emerged in the early Cold War years and took more definite shape during the 1950s and early 1960s, a period of enormous expansion in American social science. By focusing on the military, the Ford Foundation, and the National Science Foundation, Mark Solovey shows how this patronage system presented social scientists and other interested parties, including natural scientists and politicians, with new opportunities to work out the scientific identity, social implications, and public policy uses of academic social research. Solovey also examines significant criticisms of the new patronage system, which contributed to widespread efforts to rethink and reshape the politics-patronage-social science nexus starting in the mid-1960s. Based on extensive archival research, Shaky Foundations addresses fundamental questions about the intellectual foundations of the social sciences, their relationships with the natural sciences and the humanities, and the political and ideological import of academic social inquiry.

During the height of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Pentagon launched a controversial counterinsurgency program called the Human Terrain System. The program embedded social scientists within military units to provide commanders with information about the cultures and grievances of local populations. Yet the controversy it inspired was not new. Decades earlier, similar national security concerns brought the Department of Defense and American social scientists together in the search for intellectual weapons that could combat the spread of communism during the Cold War. In Armed with Expertise, Joy Rohde traces the optimistic rise, anguished fall, and surprising rebirth of Cold War–era military-sponsored social research. Seeking expert knowledge that would enable the United States to contain communism, the Pentagon turned to social scientists. Beginning in the 1950s, political scientists, social psychologists, and anthropologists optimistically applied their expertise to military problems, convinced that their work would enhance democracy around the world. As Rohde shows, by the late 1960s, a growing number of scholars and activists condemned Pentagon-funded social scientists as handmaidens of a technocratic warfare state and sought to eliminate military-sponsored research from American intellectual life. But the Pentagon’s social research projects had remarkable institutional momentum and intellectual flexibility. Instead of severing their ties to the military, the Pentagon’s experts relocated to a burgeoning network of private consulting agencies and for-profit research offices. Now shielded from public scrutiny, they continued to influence national security affairs. They also diversified their portfolios to include the study of domestic problems, including urban violence and racial conflict. In examining the controversies over Cold War social science, Rohde reveals the persistent militarization of American political and intellectual life, a phenomenon that continues to raise grave questions about the relationship between expert knowledge and American democracy.

This book explores how the social sciences became entangled with the global Cold War. While duly recognizing the realities of nation states, national power, and national aspirations, the studies gathered here open up new lines of transnational investigation. Considering developments in a wide array of fields – anthropology, development studies, economics, education, political science, psychology, science studies, and sociology – that involved the movement of people, projects, funding, and ideas across diverse national contexts, this volume pushes scholars to rethink certain fundamental points about how we should understand – and thus how we should study – Cold War social science itself.

This book explores how the social sciences became entangled with the global Cold War. While duly recognizing the realities of nation states, national power, and national aspirations, the studies gathered here open up new lines of transnational investigation. Considering developments in a wide array of fields - anthropology, development studies, economics, education, political science, psychology, science studies, and sociology - that involved the movement of people, projects, funding, and ideas across diverse national contexts, this volume pushes scholars to rethink certain fundamental points about how we should understand - and thus how we should study - Cold War social science itself. Mark Solovey is Associate Professor in the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology at the University of Toronto, Canada. Christian Dayé is a sociologist at the Science, Technology and Society (STS) Unit of Graz University of Technology, Austria.

From World War II to the early 1970s, social science research expanded in dramatic and unprecedented fashion in the United States. 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.

This interdisciplinary text takes into account the impact of the Cold War on various locales, groups, societies, organizations, and technology. Included in this work are chapters on education, political groups, cultural challenges and rivalries, nuclear technology and weaponry, the impact of nuclear exposure, and the new global order in a postnuclear age. Edited by an historian, each chapter is written from multiple disciplinary perspectives political science, history, social science, science, and medicine making this work exceptionally unique with broad sweeping conceptual frameworks, methods, and points of analysis, all the while focused upon a four decade era of fear. The work of Stivachtis and Manning offer an engaging look into the organization of the international community, world affairs, and intercultural challenges during the Cold War to understand the impact on global society through the lens of the English School of International Relations. Cimbalas chapter delves into the challenges to controlling and understanding nuclear warfare throughout the Cold War and how the knowledge of control or preventing catastrophic nuclear war in the historic period is significantly different from the current nuclear age, from the perspectives of what nations have weapons, of what magnitude, and the potential for warfare. The impact of nuclear exposure well after the Cold War is examined in Osonos work, which analyzes the physiological and neurological impact of nuclear waste on workers in China who unknowingly unearthed barrels of nuclear waste. Nekola offers readers a view into the role of the exiled Czech political parties that operated in outside of the regulations of the Iron Curtain, after the 1948 Communist Coup, maintaining party publications and organization throughout the 1950s. The work of BarNoi analyzes the relationship between the Israeli and Soviet governments as the nation of Israel was founded and ultimately placed in the political crosshairs of world leaders from 1945 to 1967. Palmadessas works on U.S. education k12 compulsory and higher education considers the ways in which education responded to the call for patriotic support of the U.S. in opposition to the communist regime in Russia and the understanding of the global role education was to play. The Cold War shook the world, its institutions, cultural groups, and scientific communities to their core. The Cold War: Global Impacts and Lessons Learned offers readers insight into the immediate challenges, the continued obstacles, and the knowledge gained from this tumultuous period riddled with fear that dominates the narrative of 20th century world history.

Annotation -- New Scientist.