------ EH.NET BOOK REVIEW ------
Title: The History of the Social Sciences since 1945

Published by EH.NET (November 2010)

Roger Backhouse and Philippe Fontaine, editors, /The History of the Social
Sciences since 1945/. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. x + 256 pp.
$26 (paperback), ISBN: 978-0-521-71776-2.

Reviewed for EH.Net by Philip Mirowski, Department of Economics and Policy
Studies, University of Notre Dame.

This is a collection admirable in its motives but frustrating in its
execution. Everyone will have their own objections to what they believe is
left out in such a short book, so I will strive to avoid the obvious, and
instead ask: is this an attempt to mobilize contributions toward a history of
something that lacks a coherent center, and therefore any plausible narrative
line? That is, does it resemble one of those penny dreadful non-histories of
entities like “salt” or “dirt” or the “wisdom of crowds,” where
the primary protagonist lacks solidity and identity through time?
Universities, it is true, often sport divisions or colleges of “social
science,” but they also all have Departments of Maintenance Services, and
yet no one feels the need for “The History of Maintenance.”

There have been one or two forays into a generic history of the social
sciences, but to take one example, in the case of Dorothy Ross, it ended up
being a history of something else altogether: “American exceptionalism”
or the “American character.” The editors here don’t fall into that
trap, but deputize various social scientists to individually survey
psychology, economics, political science, sociology, social anthropology and
human geography. One might have ended up with a portmanteau jumble of
disjointed internalist impressions of the just-so stories the grizzled elders
tell the children around their disciplinary campfires, like the late
lamented/ Cambridge History/ (2003), but the editors have struggled to avoid
that as well. To forestall that, they presented each contributor with a
unique set of questions they would like to have considered (pp. 5-6) in the
interest of lending the volume a modicum of coherence: issues like the impact
of World War II, the hegemonic influence of the U.S. on the field,
relationships to the natural sciences and the other social sciences,
demographics and professionalization, the possible conditioning of the Cold
War, the place of neoliberalism and dissent.  Inevitably, the majority (and
even one of the editors in his own contribution) proceeded to ignore most of
that, and forge ahead with the conventional local folklore of their assigned
discipline in splendid intellectual isolation. You can lead a source to
water, but you can’t make him think.

This brings us to consider a more disturbing possibility, namely, that bona
fide social scientists might make for lousy historians, perhaps because they
had been weaned off history in their very gestation. Adam Kuper, in his
chapter on social anthropology, actually observes that the story of
professionalization in the Anglo social sciences over the course of the
twentieth century was pretty uniformly the transition from
historical/evolutionary themes and approaches to what might charitably be
construed as short-term policy concerns largely devoid of context, which
includes the other social sciences. Adcock and Bevir prettify the trend in
politics by dubbing it a “shift from developmental historicism to modernist
empiricism.” [Think “the culture of poverty,” “the paradox of
voting,” or “the optimal rule for monetary policy.”]  They neglect to
point out that the scientism (which the editors gloss as “the endorsement
of theory”) that became so pronounced in the 1940s-1970s across the board
was simply another manifestation of the same trend. In other words,
professionalization went hand-in-hand with becoming “useful” to the state
or corporate paymasters; the last thing they wanted was history, except
possibly hagiography. The awkward inability demonstrated herein to organize
many chapters around some coherent narrative line may simply be symptomatic
of a learned incapacity born of decades of professionalization. It is a shame
this serial awkwardness did not itself become an occasion for theoretical
reflection. But heritage isn’t destiny: this volume presents us with the
irony that the editors start out declaring economists have no interest in
their history, and yet, here it is two economists who have exerted themselves
so mightily against the grain to commit real history between consenting
adults.

In many ways, the most unusual and interesting contribution to this volume is
the last chapter, co-authored by the editors, and bearing the imprint of
Fontaine’s wide-ranging intellect and linguistic facility. Although it
starts off promising a synthesis of the preceding hidebound disciplinary
accounts, it rapidly turns into a survey of the numerous attempts to found
dedicated interdisciplinary institutes in the postwar era: Yale Institute of
Human Relations, Michigan’s Survey Research Center, Harvard’s Department
of Social Relations, Carnegie’s GSIA, MIT’s Research Center for Group
Dynamics, RAND and Michigan’s Mental Health Research Institute. This is an
extremely fascinating approach, since these entities mostly escape the optic
of disciplinary history; yet their efflorescence within a limited postwar
timeframe and their relative failure speaks volumes about the quest to
produce a unified “history of social science.” Fontaine’s signature
claim (p. 209) is that the discipline of psychology was almost always located
at the center of such innovations; but I have my doubts. First, there is the
observation of Mitchell Ash in this volume that “psychologist” did not
constitute a stable identity in postwar America; it might just have been the
kneejerk methodological individualism of the American Century, rather than
psychology per se, that provides the actual common denominator. Second, I
would suggest we look to the intentions of the founders of these units; for
instance, the Ford Foundation played a dominant role in the founding of RAND
and Carnegie GSIA, as well as the Stanford Center for Behavioral Sciences,
under the rubric of pushing its agenda for “behavioral science.” But
third, and most importantly, the history of these units reveals much about
the inhospitable postwar climate for the prewar commonplace that presumed
unity of the social sciences was their natural telos.

The historical generalization overlooked by the editors is that
“interdisciplinary” social science units shoehorned into postwar
university structures almost uniformly failed, whereas those founded as
freestanding think tanks, from RAND to American Enterprise Institute to Cato
and the Manhattan Institute, all persevered and succeeded. This is true even
for the odd case of Carnegie GSIA, which became the model for other business
schools across the nation, but only upon dispensing with the original
interdisciplinary structures initially promoted by Herbert Simon (himself
then exiled to a Department of Psychology). The lesson may be that the
postwar American research university could not sustain true
interdisciplinarity in social science inquiry, but that military and
corporate sponsors of the think tanks could manage it, but only by yoking it
to a format that enforced unquestioned responsiveness to the whims of the
funders.

This brings us to a final thought: maybe a “history of the social
sciences” is a quixotic quest because it presumes there is some unique
ontological thing called “society” to which all the diverse sciences
devote their individual inquiries. While this may have been an opinion widely
shared during the first half of the twentieth century, it is one that quickly
lost its rationale as we approached the twenty-first century. Here I believe
the contributors all underestimate the importance of the rise of
neoliberalism as a major conditioning factor in the history. If indeed,
people come to really believe that, “there is no such thing as society,”
to quote the Iron Lady, then it follows directly that there is also no such
thing as a coherent “history of the social sciences.” They no longer
qualify as the subject of a sustained narrative any more than does the
history of things colored brown, or the history of rectangular objects that
rattle when the wind blows.

Philip Mirowski is the author of /Machine Dreams/ (2002), /ScienceMart: The
Privatization of American Science /(2011), and /Never Let a Dire Crisis Go to
Waste/ (forthcoming) and the editor (with Dieter Plehwe) of /The Road from
Mont Pèlerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective/ (2009).

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Geographic Location: General, International, or Comparative
Subject: History of Economic Thought; Methodology
Time: 20th Century: WWII and post-WWII