Shaky Foundations: The Politics-Patronage-Social Science Nexus in Cold War America(Studies in Modern Science, Technology, and the Environment)

About the Book

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.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments Introduction 1. Social Science on the Endless (and End-less?) Frontier 2. Defense and Offense in the Military Science Establishment 3. Vision, Analysis, or Subversion? 4. Cultivating Hard-Core Social Research at the NSF Conclusion Notes Index

About the Author :

MARK SOLOVEY is an assistant professor at the University of Toronto’s Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology. He is the coeditor of Cold War Social Science: Knowledge Production, Liberal Democracy, and Human Nature.

Review :
"Solovey’s social scientists are neither naÏve researchers exploited by the military-industrial complex nor greedy masterminds eagerly anticipating their patrons’ needs. Instead, he presents us with a series of encounters between program managers, disciplinary spokesmen, and political partisans, each of which demonstrates its participants’ unexpectedly complex positions. In what feels like a prelude to contemporary partisan investigations of the social sciences, Shaky Foundations recounts numerous instances of McCarthy-era attacks on social scientists as leftist agitators."
(Science) "Shaky Foundations offers an important new argument about how the American social sciences interacted with wider social and political forces during the Cold War era. Solovey has done very important work in establishing the bitterly contested character of postwar epistemological and institutional shifts."
(Isis) "This is an important book. The brilliance of this book lies in pinpointing the origins of the terms that are still used in contemporary debates on the role of social science in the United States. This book is a critical tool in approaching the most essential question -what next for American social science?" (LSE Review of Books) "Solovey makes a valuable contribution to the growing literature on the development of social sciences in the U.S. during the 20th century. A major achievement is the author's presentation of this often complicated and complex story in a clearly written and well-documented manner. Highly recommended." (Choice) "Shaky Foundations is a well-researched account of the rise of a new patronage system for the social sciences in the early Cold War-era United States. Solovey leaves readers with a sharpened understanding of the travails of social science research during the first two decades of the Cold War."
(Journal of American History) "Solovey's book [presents] a complex and heterogeneous picture of the interest and the political positions surrounding the great advancement of the social sciences during the Postwar era."
(Sociologica) "A crucial resource for the growing community of historians interested in the history of the social sciences, as well as for historians of education and intellectual historians of the Cold War." (The Historian) "Shaky Foundations offer[s] intersting insights into scholarship in Cold War North America." (British Journal of the History of Science) "Shaky Foundations impressively pulls back the curtain on American social scientists and their complex relationships with funding agencies, offering crucial insights into the past-and the future-of social science." - David C. Engerman (author of Know Your Enemy: The Rise and Fall of America's Soviet Experts) "In this clearly written and thoroughly researched book, Mark Solovey takes a new approach to writing the history of the social sciences in America by 'following the money' and examining how patrons and their agendas shaped the development of the field." - Nadine Weidman (author of Constructing Scientific Psychology: Karl Lashley's Mind-Brain Debates)