Cold War Social Science: Knowledge Production, Liberal Democracy, and Human Nature

From World War II to the early 1970s, social science research expanded in dramatic and unprecedented fashion in the United States. This volume examines how, why, and with what consequences this rapid and yet contested expansion depended on the entanglement of the social sciences with the Cold War.

MARK SOLOVEY is an assistant professor in the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology at the University of Toronto, and for 2011-2012 a Charles Warren Fellow at Harvard University. His research focuses on the political, institutional, and intellectual history of the social sciences in the United States since WWII. He has several articles in scholarly journals, including Annals of Science, History of Political Economy, Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, Radical History Review, and Social Studies of Science. He is the author of the tentatively titled Shaky Foundations: The Politics-Patronage-Social Science Nexus in Cold War America(forthcoming).
HAMILTON CRAVENS is a professor emeritus of history at Iowa State University, writes about science in American culture and the tensions between expertise and democracy. He has authored or edited a dozen books, including The Triumph of Evolution(1978, 1988), BeforeHead Start(1993, 2003), The Social Sciences Go To Washington(2005), Race and Science: Scientific Challenges to Racism in America(2010), as well as about sixty articles and chapters in books. He is wrapping up a new book, Imagining The Good Society: The Social Sciences in the American Past and Present(forthcoming, 2012).