SHAKY FOUNDATIONS: THE POLITICS-PATRONAGE-SOCIAL SCIENCE NEXUS IN COLD WAR AMERICA

SOLOVEY, MARK

ISBN 10: 0813554659 / ISBN 13: 9780813554655

Published by Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, NJ, 2013

About this Item

pp: 253. A volume in the 'Studies in Modern Science, Technology, and the Environment' series. Bound in pictorial laminated boards issued without a dust jacket. The author studied three important parts of the American social structure; the military, the Ford Foundation, and the National Science Foundation to show how the patronage system created new opportunities to work on scientific identity, public policy, and scientific research. A near fine copy with lightly bumped corners. The text is complete and free of any markings.

Seller Inventory # 008404

Bibliographic Details

• Title: SHAKY FOUNDATIONS: THE POLITICS-PATRONAGE-SOCIAL SCIENCE NEXUS IN COLD WAR AMERICA
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, NJ
• Publication Date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0813554659
• ISBN 13: 9780813554655
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Condition: Near Fine
• Dust Jacket Condition: No Jacket
• Weight: 0.55 kilograms
• Seller catalogs:
  • THE AMERICAS
  • SOCIAL STUDIES
  • SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

About this title

Synopsis

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.

About the Author

MARK SOLOVEY is an assistant professor at the University of Toronto’s Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology. He is the coeditor of Cold War Social Science: Knowledge Production, Liberal Democracy, and Human Nature.