Shaky foundations
Subtitle: the politics-patronage-social science nexus in Cold War America
By: Mark Solovey
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Published: 2013
Place of publication: New Brunswick, N.J
Language: eng
Number of pages: 253
ISBN-13: 9780813554655; 9780813554662
Subjects: Endowment of research; World politics; Cold War; Social aspects; History; Social sciences; Research
Description: "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."--Publisher's website.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Introduction: social scientists and their patrons in a remarkable era; title: Social science on the endless (and end-less?) frontier: the postwar NSF debate; title: Defense and offense in the military science establishment: towards a technology of human behavior; title: Vision, analysis, or subversion?; title: The rocky story of the behavioral sciences at the Ford Foundation; title: Cultivating hard-core social research at the NSF: protective coloration and official Negroes.