Shaky Foundations: The Politics-Patronage-Social Science Nexus in Cold War America

Studies in Modern Science, Technology, and the Environment

by Mark Solovey

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.

Genres: Politics, History, Science, Social Science

266 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2013

Reviews

[Yeast]

An introduction to the history of social sciences from the immediate postwar years to early 1960s, Shaky Foundations has demonstrated the tension between natural and social scientists, between conservative and liberal politicians and social scientists, and within the individual fields.

While the book is worth reading and contains some interesting information, I think the impact the development in mid to late 1960s has brought should be included in the analysis, and the struggle of individual scientists in the military-industrial-academic nexus can be better elaborated.