In January 2006, we initiated a seminar series, held at the Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science (CPNSS), at the London School of Economics and Political Science, on the history of postwar social science. This was an experiment to create an audience for reflection on the history of the social sciences in general. To start the series, we decided to have papers on the six core social sciences, providing general perspectives against which further work could be placed. In subsequent years, after obtaining the support of the Leverhulme Trust, we explored interdisciplinary figures in social science and a series of social problems.

These papers made us realize the importance of this interdisciplinary approach to the history of the social sciences. There is already work on this, but only as part of histories that have a much longer time frame: historical research on the postwar social sciences remains overwhelmingly discipline based. So we approached Cambridge University Press with a proposal for a short volume based on chapters by four of the participants in the seminar and outsiders. This book is the result.

We do not claim to offer a comprehensive or unified history of the social sciences since the Second World War. Contributors were provided with a common list of themes and were asked to address the ones they considered relevant to the discipline they were discussing, but no attempt has been made to homogenise the chapters, which reflect the different disciplinary backgrounds and concerns of their authors, as well as the peculiarities of the social sciences under consideration.

Introduction

Psychology occupies a peculiar place among the sciences, suspended between methodological orientations derived from the physical and biological sciences, and a subject matter extending into the social and human sciences. A field with such a vast domain might well be called protean, or at the least a transdiscipline. The struggle to create a science encompassing both subjectivity – conscious or unconscious mental processes and motives – as well as observable behavior, and the interrelated effort to develop professional practices utilizing that science's results, provide interesting examples for the extension and also the limits of such scientific ideals as objectivity, measurability, repeatability, and cumulative knowledge acquisition. In addition, psychologists' struggles to live by such methodological ideals while competing with others to fulfill multiple public demands for their services illuminates both the formative impact of science on modern life, and the effects of technocratic hopes on science.

There has been a broad shift in the historiography of psychology over the past twenty years from the achievements of important figures and the history of psychological systems and theories, to the social and cultural relationships of psychological thought and practice. [For comprehensive overviews, see Smith (1998) and Danziger (1990, 1997).] In the process, the interrelationships of psychological research and societal practices with one another, and with prevailing cultural values and institutions in different times and places, have become clearer. Elsewhere I have tried to bring out certain common threads in this varied narrative.

Historical Background

Work in the history of sociology has concentrated on the thoughts and biographies of great men, commonly theorists; this is in curious contrast to sociology's defining concern with social structure and typical social patterns. A common version, a sequence of theories from the mainstream of Western sociology, creates a coherent account by leaving out other societies and most empirical work and the societal differences it deals with. This chapter attempts to tell a story more concerned with empirical work and disciplinary institutions than great theorists, not entirely centred on Europe and the anglophone world, and treating as problematic the extent to which there has been one sociology with a shared history. First, the prewar background, and some of the postwar changes and demographic flows that affected later developments are outlined. Then data are presented on various aspects of sociological activity since then. In conclusion, the threads are drawn together to sketch the pattern of historical change.

To the extent that sociology was institutionalized under that name in universities before World War II, its significant presence was in France, Germany, and the United States. There was, however, a less-known presence in Japan, Latin America, and Poland, for instance, in addition to the smaller contributions of Italy and Britain, and several countries had sociological journals. But sociology did not always have a clear identity distinct from that of other social science.

Origins, Context, Institutions

A history of twentieth century anthropology is impossible. The configuration of the discipline is completely different in the United States and in Britain and France, its main European centres. In North America, anthropology remained, at least until the 1950s, an uneasy coalition of ethnology, archaeology, linguistics, and biological anthropology. ‘Cultural anthropology’ emerged as a virtually independent discipline in the 1930s, but its overlap with European ‘social anthropology’ was never complete. While social anthropology in Britain and France – and increasingly in other European centres – identified itself as a social science, ‘cultural anthropology’ found itself more at home in the humanities. I shall confine myself here to social anthropology, which is essentially a European social science, although with a significant presence in Brazil, India, Japan, Australia, and South Africa, and I shall concentrate on the development of the field in Britain, its major centre, while indicating some parallel developments in France and, more recently, in other European countries. My focus will be less on the internal intellectual history of the discipline than on its institutional contexts, which I believe were decisive for the trajectory taken by the field.

The colonial setting is crucial, though too often represented in polemical terms (as though social anthropologists in the first half of the twentieth century were either collaborators or true scientists).

Introduction

Although some aspects of the study of geography are common across a large number of countries, nevertheless a marked ‘geography of geographies’ has emerged since the Second World War. Until then, there was considerable common ground that geography was the study of areal differentiation or chorology; it described and provided accounts for inter-regional differences in environments, human activities, and the interactions between the two. The widely adopted foundations for such an approach were laid down by German and French geographers – with a major American defence of that approach published in 1939 (Hartshorne 1939; see also Entrikin and Brunn 1990; Hartshorne 1959).

Those foundations were rapidly eroded in the anglophone world during the immediate post-war decades. Human geography in the United Kingdom, the United States, and most of the former British Empire took a new set of paths and contacts with practices in other language realms declined, although Scandinavia and the Netherlands were exceptions – much of the research done there is published in English and contacts with English-speaking geographers were strengthened post-1950, with the anglophone ‘new geographies’ adapted to local circumstances (Öhman and Simonsen 2003). Some national traditions were sustained in other language realms, such as the dominance of the regional monograph in French practice (Clout 2009; see also Clout 2003), but many aspects of the ‘new paths’ taken within anglophone geography were later adopted there in some form, fostered by two-way contacts (not least attendance at the annual meetings of the Association of American Geographers, which took on a pronounced international complexion from the 1990s on).

The Second World War and Its Aftermath

It is hard to overestimate the significance of the Second World War for the social sciences as a whole, even though its importance varied from one social science to another. The war and its aftermath brought about profound changes in Western societies, creating new problems that provided opportunities for social scientists to demonstrate their expertise. In the postwar decades, notably the 1960s, as a result of their efforts to tackle urgent social problems, the traditional domains of the social sciences were redefined. Of course many of the conceptual frameworks or paradigms within which social scientists operated had roots that went much further back, but the changed context brought about profound transformations. The most obvious change concerned the political position of the United States in relation to Europe: to quote British historian Tony Judt (2007, p. 13), “Europe in the aftermath of the Second World War offered a prospect of utter misery and desolation. … Europeans felt hopeless, they were exhausted – and for good reason.” The physical destruction had been immense, the death toll, especially among civilians, vastly higher than that in the First World War, and at the end of the war tens of millions of people were displaced, in part as a result of “an unprecedented exercise in ethnic cleansing and population transfer” (p.24): Europe was in chaos and the split between East and West was accentuated.

Introduction

Many histories can be told of political science. Some start in classical Athens (Almond 1995); others start in the Scottish Enlightenment (Farr 1988). But if we are specifically interested in political science as one of the set of institutionally differentiated disciplines that together make up contemporary academic social science, it was born in America early in the twentieth century (Ross 1991, chaps. 3 and 8; Adcock 2003). The prominence of America then and now might suggest a narrative of Americanization. However, we will argue that this narrative needs tempering with recognition of the influence of Europe on America and the way different traditions modify ideas adopted from elsewhere. The history of political science is one of the contingent transnational exchanges in which ideas are appropriated, modified, and transformed.

The direction and extent of the transnational exchanges vary across different aspects of political science. If the Americanization narrative appears most plausible with regard to the institutions of political science as an autonomous discipline, it becomes harder to sustain once our focus shifts to intellectual history. When we look at the British case, for example, we will argue that new empirical topics in political science arose from exchanges in which British figures played as great an initiating role as Americans; that new quantitative techniques were indeed more commonly developed in America and then adopted in Britain, but they were modified in the process of adoption; and that the postwar history of American political science has been dominated by new theories – from the positivist theories of behavioralism to rational choice theory – that had little impact on British political science.