Rebels within the ranks
Subtitle: psychologists' critique of scientific authority and democratic realities in New Deal America
By: Katherine Pandora.
Series: Cambridge studies in the history of psychology
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 1997
Place of publication: Cambridge; New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 260
Subjects: Psychology -- United States -- History -- 20th century.
Description: During the 1930s, psychologists Gordon Allport, Gardner Murphy, and Lois Barclay Murphy emerged from the fields of social and personality psychology to challenge the neobehavioralist status quo in American social science. Willing to experiment with the idea of "science" itself, these "rebels within the ranks" contested ascendent conventions that cast the study of human life in the image of classical physics. Drawing on the intellectual, social, and political legacies of William James' radically empiricist philosophy and radical Social Gospel theology, these three psychologists developed critiques of scientific authority and democratic reality as they worked at the crossroads of the social and the personal in New Deal America. Appropriating models from natural history, they argued for the significance of individuality, contextuality, and diversity as scientific concepts as they explored what they envisioned as the nature of democracy, and the democracy of nature.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 183-251) and index.