What was Cold War social science? In the new volume, Cold War Social Science: Transnational Entanglements, coeditors Mark Solovey and Christian Dayé have assembled an insightful group—mostly of historians and sociologists housed in various programs related to science and technology studies in Canada, the United States, and Europe—to bring a new set of challenges to the confounding question. The volume builds on the work of its predecessor, Cold War Social Science: Knowledge Production, Liberal Democracy, and Human Nature, published in 2012 and also coedited by Solovey, by supplementing criticism of the monolithic category of “Cold War social science” with a new emphasis on the slippages and exchanges between nations that took place during the postwar era.
Solovey and Dayé list three goals for the project: first, to examine the factors and institutions that actively enabled transnational movements and exchanges in the social sciences during the Cold War; second, to understand how transnationalism shaped the development of social science work in various Cold War-inflected contexts; and third, to investigate how transnationalism in different Cold War settings inspired debate over fundamental questions concerning the nature and meaning of the social sciences.
The three goals are accompanied by three “axes of contention” concerning whether the social sciences should be used as tools for liberation or repression; whether they should be value-free and detached or value-laden and engaged; and whether they should operate polycentrically or emanate from centers to peripheries. The axes also provide historiographical framings, as questions such as those regarding the degree of polycentricity of the social sciences bear on the retelling of the history of the social sciences as much as they once did on their practice.
The contributions in the book are divided into four parts. The first part, “Exchanges across the Iron Curtain,” attempts to break down the binary, bipolar conception of the Cold War social sciences by demonstrating how some social scientific developments were born out of collaborations between social scientists in the United States and the Soviet Union, not only forged in silent opposition to a secretive enemy. In the first study, Ekaterina Babintseva breaks the surface of the permafrost that has hardened over narratives of irreconcilable differences between Cold War enemies with a study of a project spearheaded by the Soviet Council's Section on Psychology and Cybernetics during a moment of increased international exchange in the early 1960s. Inspired by the idea of “programmed instruction” drawn from American behavioral psychology, the project used the tools of the emerging field of cybernetics to develop pedagogical computers intended to deliver individualized instruction with small units of information and automated feedback. Babintseva reveals, perhaps unsurprisingly, that social scientists behind the Iron Curtain, like Americans, conceived of the operations of the human mind in the image of computational algorithms while also developing tools to further train algorithmic thinking and buttress against human fallibility. In the Soviet Union of the early 1960s, such attempts promised to purify the mind and society of the remnants of Stalinism.
In the next chapter, Elena Aronova provides an illustrative individual narrative to complement the connection traced by Babintseva. Aronova focuses her chapter on a Philadelphia entrepreneur named Eugene Garfield, remembered as the founding figure of “scientometrics,” the quantitative study of scientific citational practices, and reveals how his encounters with scientists within the Soviet Union, both as imagined antagonists and real collaborators, gave rise to the Science Citation Index. In the part's final chapter, Simon Ottersbach argues for considering Radio Free Europe as an unorthodox knowledge-producing institution. It is a welcome attempt to expand the bounds of the volume, even if his argument that RFE became a producer of “Cold War Knowledge” when it began producing social-scientific briefs risks reaffirming a narrow conception of knowledge production during the Cold War.
The second section, titled “Modernization Theory Meets Postcolonial Nation Building,” yields some of the volume's most novel insights. Even as scholars have expanded their studies of the Cold War to include the less-than-cold experience of the conflict in the decolonizing world and talk of the “Global Cold War” has become commonplace, the US-centric tendencies of such scholarship has often supported narratives of postcolonial developments defined in opposition to the hegemony of the United States. The contributors to the second section subvert such narratives, following individual social scientists, as the transnational vectors of their lives extended bidirectional lines of influence.
Sebastián Gil-Riaño argues that the UNESCO-funded vision of multicultural assimilation championed by anthropologist Charles Wagley was not only a product of a US-backed cosmopolitan vision that sought to unite the “so-called Free World,” but also drew heavily upon the idea of “Lusotropicalism,” a theory of cultural integration then popular among Brazilian nationalists and intellectuals. Christa Wirth tells the story of Felipe Landa Jocano, a Philippine anthropologist among a generation trained at the University of Chicago, whose career trajectory—adapting modernization theory to an anticolonial, nation-building project that did not accord with US Cold War interests but incidentally gave rise to a US-allied dictatorship—indicates some of the possible ironies of Cold War social science practice when traced across national boundaries. And Margarita Fajardo's contribution demonstrates that highlighting social scientific developments from the Global South is not an adequate balm for the maladies of US-centric bias if such developments are only seen as reactions to the aims of the United States. Fajardo traces a narrative of simultaneity, rather than of influence or opposition, where dependency theory—after the seeds of its development were planted by the UN-funded Comisión Económica Para América Latina y el Caribe, or CEPAL—emerged out of conversations within the Latin American left, not as an explicitly anti-Cold War social science.
The third and shortest part of the volume centers on a beloved theme of critical scholars of the Cold War social sciences: national projects aiming to create “good citizens,” during which the social sciences turned explicitly normative and political. A chapter from Vítězslav Sommer on social scientific attempts to study and prescribe leisure in Czechoslovakia from the 1950s to the 1980s hews closer to the Iron Curtain than the hemisphere-spanning contributions of the previous section, but retains the same focus on local social-scientific debates in nations other than the United States or the Soviet Union. Sommer analyzes these debates on their own terms, as unique contributions to discourse about fundamental social-scientific questions rather than as extraneous phenomena to be swept under the powerful explanatory umbrella of the “Cold War.” Zhipeng Gao's chapter, of particular interest to readers of this journal, is notable for breaking the temporal framework that often defines the “Cold War.” It traces the unique labor-centered path that Chinese education took in the late 1950s back to the way Chinese educational reformers adapted American educational philosophies in light of Marxist debates about determinism and the role of education in historical progress in the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s.
In chapters set closer to the traditional commanding heights of social scientific research, the contributors to the last section, “Social Science under Debate,” ask how the presence of transnationalism, both conceptually and practically, influenced debates about the fundamental nature and proper function of the social sciences. Per Wisselgren focuses on UNESCO's Department of Social Sciences during the 1950s, when Alva Myrdal, the Swedish sociologist and politician, helmed the organization and attempted to internationalize the social sciences through the exportation of an American model of value-neutral social sciences imbued with a new consideration of uneven power relations among nations. A chapter by Begüm Adalet focuses on the “fractured scholarly selves” of two Cold War social scientists, Dankwart Rustow and Frederick Frey, as they worked on questions of comparative politics and modernization theory in Turkey and became increasingly disillusioned with the value-neutrality and neat theoretical rigidity of American social science. In the final chapter, Markus Arnold retreads the classic debate about the relationship between planning, knowledge, and freedom that took place between Americans, such as C. Wright Mills, and Austrians, such as Friedrich Hayek. Arnold emphasizes social-science practitioners whose ideas were not simply “caused” by military funding structures, but who were actively reckoning with the problems of the role of the social sciences in Cold War culture—a worthwhile aim, even if other contributors successfully demonstrate that seemingly rigid Cold War institutions were also populated by fractured selves, tense debates, and individuals in transit, thinking reflexively while weaving in and out of nations and orthodoxies.
The studies in the volume are most revelatory and engaging when focused on the individual lives that composed, questioned, and worked between national ideological projects. At other times, the breadth of the volume threatens its structural stability. The contributions provide no coherent conclusion to central interpretive questions, such as the utility of the “Cold War” as a framework. Are its temporal bounds rigidly deceptive? Does it privilege bipolarity and obfuscate local narratives? Or is it an essential lens, properly wielded, through which to examine the debates about subjectivity, knowledge, and social change that raged across the world in the latter half of the twentieth century? The volume's keywords—“transnational” and “entanglements”—provide messy guidance for harmonization. But polyphony need not descend into Babel. The category of the Cold War social sciences is capacious enough to incorporate more voices, even as their voluminous questions strain its seams. For researchers interested in the history of the social sciences, Cold War history, intellectual history, or global postwar political history, as well as critical practitioners of social science, this volume and its concerns are an essential entanglement in which to become enmeshed.
