Harvard's Quixotic Pursuit of a New Science: The Rise and Fall of the Department of Social Relations

In Harvard's Quixotic Pursuit of a New Science, Patrick L. Schmidt tells the little-known story of how some of the most renowned social scientists of the twentieth century struggled to elevate their emerging disciplines of cultural anthropology, sociology, and social and clinical psychology. Scorned and marginalized in their respective departments in the 1930s for pursuing the controversial theories of Freud and Jung, they persuaded Harvard to establish a new department, promising to create an interdisciplinary science that would surpass in importance Harvard's "big three" disciplines of economics, government, and history. Although the Department of Social Relations failed to achieve this audacious goal, it nonetheless attracted an outstanding faculty, produced important scholarly work, and trained many notable graduates. At times, it was a wild ride. Some faculty became notorious for their questionable research: Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert (reborn as Ram Dass) gave the psychedelic drug psilocybin to students, while Henry Murray traumatized undergraduate Theodore Kaczynski (later the Unabomber) in a three-year-long experiment. Central to the story is the obsessive quest of legendary sociologist Talcott Parsons for a single theory unifying the social sciences- the white whale to his Captain Ahab. All in all, Schmidt's lively narrative is an instructive tale of academic infighting, hubris, and scandal.

About the Author :
Patrick L. Schmidt is an attorney in Washington, D.C. He received a BA, magna cum laude, from Harvard College, a JD from Georgetown University, and an MIPP from the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. He first examined the history of the Department of Social Relations in his undergraduate honors thesis at Harvard.

Review :
An undergraduate thesis, now amplified by correspondence, historical research, and secondary sources, charts the rise and fall of the Department of Social Relations, the revolutionary attempt to create a new interdisciplinary social science. Towering scholars like Talcott Parsons and David Riesman loom large, as do the intellectual stakes--and the personal and institutional factors that brought the department down. -- "Harvard Magazine " Maya Angelou once said, "you can't really know where you're going until you know where you've been." If she was right, then everyone with a stake in the social sciences today should read and reflect upon Harvard's Quixotic Pursuit of a New Science, a new work by Patrick L. Schmidt that traces the rise and fall of Harvard University's Department of Social Relations, a department whose founders strove to unite sociology, anthropology, and psychology into a single discipline dedicated to the understanding of human behavior... Certainly, like other aspects of culture, that which we gloss as "knowledge" continues to change in response to the needs of those who pursue it as well as to events in the world around them. Scholars who dream of affecting the course of that change must learn from the experience of those who have gone before them. And we must hope that thoughtful scholars like Patrick Schmidt stand ready to chronicle and analyze their efforts as compellingly as he has done for the work of the Levellers here. -- "History of Anthropology Review" Present on the scene shortly after the demise of Harvard's Department of Social Relations in the 1970s, Patrick Schmidt got the inside view of that remarkable three-decade effort to re-boot American social thought for the postwar world. The nervy founders of "Social Relations" imagined that their multidimensional new science could eclipse the hegemony of Economics and explain the workings of welfare-state modernity. Whether deemed noble or delusionary, Social Relations represented one of the great episodes of "institution-building" (as Talcott Parsons put it) in the history of mid-20th century US social science. Schmidt's long-awaited book gives us, with insight and verve, the essential narrative of that ambition and its unraveling. --Howard Brick, Louis Evans Professor of History, University of Michigan This is a story of massive personalities as much as it is intellectual hubris, with luminaries such as Talcott Parsons, Clyde Kluckhohn, and Gordon Allport feeling stifled in their original departmental homes and united by a desire to study "man as he functions in society".... Schmidt does not shy away from controversial elements in this intriguing history, and the department had several, especially in the 1960s: from the Students for a Democratic Society launching two classes in the department that covered radical problems with minimal grading, to Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert feeding undergraduates psychedelics as a research project, contentions were the norm... In the midst of all this drama, Schmidt includes photos of key figures, helping to humanize the story. Initially intended as an undergraduate honors thesis, Schmidt's work maintains something of an academic tone, but that's balanced out by academic drama. It is deeply researched, drawing from conversations with people who were active members of the department when it was formed, and Schmidt offers an extensive index plus annotations and a bibliography. This text is a rich resource for future study in the history of related disciplines, and anyone interested in academic history will appreciate this dive into how Harvard scholars attempted, and ultimately failed, to unite disparate disciplines for intellectual and personal reasons. The fascinating history of Harvard's attempts to unify a Department of Social Relations. -- "Publishers Weekly: Booklife" Harvard's Department of Social Relations made history in the 1950s and 1960s as the most ambitious program in social science in the United States. Dedicated to a synthesis of sociology, anthropology, psychology, and other disciplines, the scope of its ambitions were matched only by the scope of its failures. Patrick Schmidt's new volume Harvard's Quixotic Pursuit of a New Science: The Rise and Fall of the Department of Social Relations (Rowman and Littlefield, 2022) documents the history of SocRel, as it was called, in intimate detail. It paints a colourful and carefully researched picture of the personalities and events that are central to the department's story, ranging from the austere theoretician Talcott Parsons to the hallucinogen-ingesting Ram Dass. -- "New Books Network" Schmidt's book is not only an instructive story of intellectual hubris and academic scandal. It also offers insight into ongoing debates over education, knowledge, power and progress.... In the case of Harvard's Quixotic Pursuit of a New Science, the unorthodox approach has borne fruit. Through meticulous research and compelling writing, Schmidt has taken a set of dry, inaccessible institutional records and turned them into a gripping intellectual drama. Best of all, he's managed to do so without sensationalizing his subject or shying away from semantics. A must-read for anyone interested in how educational systems are developed and their effect on the way we view the world. -- "New Humanist" Who knew that interdisciplinary academic politics could be so compelling? In this brisk, amusing and intellectually important book, Patrick Schmidt explores the grand ambitions and severe disappointments of one now-disbanded postwar innovation at Harvard. The Department of Social Relations intersected with everything from Timothy Leary's notorious psychedelic drug experiments, to the Unabomber's involvement with an abusive psychology test, to the training and careers of some of the top professors of the 20th Century, including David Riesman, Erik Erikson, Clifford Geertz, Talcott Parsons, David McClelland, Robert Bellah, and Howard Gardner. --Jonathan Alter, Author of "His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, a Life" An absorbing account of the rise and fall of a notoriously provocative academic division... It gives readers an engaging glimpse into transformations within post-World War II higher education. -- "Kirkus Reviews" In the popular Netflix documentary series How to Change Your Mind, host Michael Pollan briefly touches on the academic ecosystem in which psychedelic drugs were studied after LSD was synthesized in Switzerland. A much, much closer look at this ecosystem can be found in... Harvard's Quixotic Pursuit of a New Science[.] -- "High Times" Schmidt's lively narrative is an instructive tale of academic infighting, hubris, and scandal. -- "Across the Margin: The Podcast" The story of a controversial academic department at an elite university might seem cut off from broader societal concerns, but Patrick Schmidt's excellent book reveals precisely the opposite: how the history of Harvard's Department of Social Relations offers a broad and deep vision of mid-20th century debates over education and knowledge, identity and community, power and progress. A must read for anyone interested in how educational and social systems make and remake our understandings of the world and ourselves. --Benjamin Railton, Director of American Studies, Fitchburg State University