Stabilizing American Society: Kenneth Boulding and the Integration of the Social Sciences, 1943–1980

2010 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 221-265 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philippe Fontaine
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
World War ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
Main Determinant ◽  
Disciplinary Boundaries ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Scientific ◽  
American Society ◽  
The Right

ArgumentFor more than thirty years after World War II, the unconventional economist Kenneth E. Boulding (1910–1993) was a fervent advocate of the integration of the social sciences. Building on common general principles from various fields, notably economics, political science, and sociology, Boulding claimed that an integrated social science in which mental images were recognized as the main determinant of human behavior would allow for a better understanding of society. Boulding's approach culminated in the social triangle, a view of society as comprised of three main social organizers – exchange, threat, and love – combined in varying proportions. According to this view, the problems of American society were caused by an unbalanced combination of these three organizers. The goal of integrated social scientific knowledge was therefore to help policy makers achieve the “right” proportions of exchange, threat, and love that would lead to social stabilization. Though he was hopeful that cross-disciplinary exchanges would overcome the shortcomings of too narrow specialization, Boulding found that rather than being the locus of a peaceful and mutually beneficial exchange, disciplinary boundaries were often the occasion of conflict and miscommunication.

Do We Need a Postmodern Anthropology for Mission in a Postcolonial World?

2011 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 151-169 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael A. Rynkiewich
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Cultural Anthropology ◽  
The United States ◽  
Symbiotic Relationship ◽  
World War ◽  
Fields Of Study ◽  
The Social ◽  
Cross Fertilization

Abstract There was a time when mission studies benefitted from a symbiotic relationship with the social sciences. However, it appears that relationship has stagnated and now is waning. The argument is made here, in the case of cultural anthropology both in Europe and the United States, that a once mutually beneficial though sometimes strained relationship has suffered a parting of the ways in recent decades. First, the article reviews the relationships between missionaries and anthropologists before World War II when it was possible to be a ‘missionary anthropologist’ with a foot in both disciplines. In that period, the conversation went two ways with missionary anthropologists making important contributions to anthropology. Then, the article reviews some aspects of the development of the two disciplines after World War II when increasing professionalism in both disciplines and a postmodern turn in anthropology took the disciplines in different directions. Finally, the article asks whether or not the conversation, and thus the cross-fertilization, can be restarted, especially since the youngest generation of anthropologists has recognized the reality of local Christianities in their fields of study.

Anglicans and Episcopalians in America

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joan R. Gundersen
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
World War ◽  
Good Works ◽  
The Social ◽  
New Nation ◽  
And Gender ◽  
American Society ◽  
The Many

Episcopalians have built, reimagined, and rebuilt their church at least three different times over the course of 400 years in America. From scattered colonial beginnings, where laity both took major roles in running Church of England parishes and practiced a faith that was focused on worship, pastoral care, and good works, Anglicans created a church that blended hierarchy, democracy, and autonomy. It took time after the disruptions of the American Revolution for Episcopalians to find their place among the many competing denominations of the new nation. In the process women found new roles for themselves. Episcopalians continued to have a large impact on American society even as other denominations outpaced them in membership. As individuals they shaped American culture and became prominent advocates for the social gospel. Distracted at times as they tried to balance catholic and Protestant in their thought and worship, they built a church that included both religious orders and revival gatherings. Although perceived as a church of the elite, its members included African Americans, Asians, Native Americans, and union members. Episcopalians struggled with issues of race, class, and gender throughout their history. After World War II, their understandings of the teachings of Jesus pulled a majority of Episcopalians toward more liberal social positions and created a traditionalist revolt eventually resulting in a schism that required new rebuilding efforts in parts of America.

Comments

1975 ◽  
Vol 11 ◽  
pp. 55-56
Author(s):  
Karl R. Stadler
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Jewish History ◽  
World War ◽  
Anti Semitism ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Historical Role ◽  
Made In

In recent years there has been a deplorable lack of interest in Austria in the historical role of the Jews in Central Europe. Given the general trends towards internationalization of the social sciences and the interdisciplinary method of analysis, this neglect is most distressing. Presumably this lack of scholarly interest is related to the fact that since World War II the Central European Jews no longer constitute a distinct ethnic and religious group. Apart from studies made in university institutes for Jewish studies and in occasional publications which have mainly treated various aspects of “the holocaust,” most studies have approached Jewish history only collaterally by focusing on anti-Semitism.

From Politik als Beruf to Politics as a Vocation

2007 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 42-70 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jens Borchert
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Present Article ◽  
Empirical Research ◽  
Political Sociology ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
World War ◽  
Classical Text ◽  
Modern Politics ◽  
The Social

Max Weber's 1919 lecture Politik als Beruf is still considered a classical text in the social sciences. The reception of the text in the Anglo-Saxon world has been profoundly shaped by the translation provided by Hans H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, first appearing in 1946. Their Politics as a Vocation is more than a vivid transposition of Weber's rather peculiar German rhetoric—it is rendered in a way that suggests a certain interpretation and makes others highly improbable. The present article traces the reception of Weber's text back to certain decisions made by the translators after World War II. It argues that the translation emphasized philosophical and ethical parts of the text at the expense of others that were more geared toward a political sociology of modern politics. Moreover, the adoption of Weber's approach in empirical research was hindered if not foreclosed by a distorted presentation of his key typologies and some central concepts.

Llanes Escoda, Josefa

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yolanda Ealdama
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Social Worker ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
Prisoners Of War ◽  
Decent Work ◽  
World War ◽  
Welfare Programs ◽  
Social Welfare System ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Right

Josefa Llanes Escoda (1898–1945) was one of the early social workers in the Philippines. As a social worker she moved from the residual approach and initiated sustainable welfare programs. She was also an advocate for decent work for women. She was able to merge her role as a social worker and as a suffragist by mobilizing members of the National Federation of Women’s Club (NFWC) of the Philippines to educate women on the importance of the right to vote. During World War II, when the social welfare system was in disarray, she mobilized members of the NFWC to feed prisoners of war and other displaced persons. In her own way, she was a freedom fighter.

CONSIDERING CAPITALISM IN AMERICAN SOCIAL THOUGHT

2008 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 179-194
Author(s):  
MARK PITTENGER
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
New Left ◽  
The United States ◽  
Cultural Issues ◽  
World War ◽  
Contemporary Culture ◽  
Political Pluralism ◽  
American Capitalism ◽  
American Society ◽  
The Right

Triumphant capitalism seems nowadays to be a fact of nature, requiring no name and admitting, as Margaret Thatcher famously put it, of “no alternative.” Neither American Capitalism nor Transcending Capitalism shrinks from “naming the system,” as perplexed New Leftists once struggled to do when trying to articulate their own alternative. But having named it, neither book takes as its primary task to define or fully describe that economic and sociocultural system. Rather, both are concerned principally with how twentieth-century American intellectuals, broadly construed, oriented and addressed themselves to the idea of capitalism in light of their respective historical moments’ shifting economic and social realities. Some reformist thinkers came to deny the efficacy of “capitalism” for describing a political–economic order which they believed to be rapidly passing away; their rivals to the right, meanwhile, mounted a reinvigorated defense of the term and its classical implications. While Daniel Bell announced in his 1960 essay on “The End of Ideology in the West” that post-World War II intellectuals had achieved a “rough consensus” on the desirability of the welfare state and political pluralism, the essays in American Capitalism suggest a more complicated picture. The “age of consensus,” that favorite punching bag of recent historians of the United States, takes a few more ritual knocks in the Lichtenstein volume. But the book's essays, in conjunction with Howard Brick's monograph, do establish that the lively discourse on the future of American society which proceeded in the aftermath of World War II was also part of a continuous debate that ran across most of the century's course. Bell suggested one theme of that debate when he argued that Western intellectuals must turn their attention away from political economy in order to address “the stultifying aspects of contemporary culture,” which could not be adequately framed in traditional right-versus-left terms. If Bell's generation, along with the younger New Left thinkers who were soon to appear, found the contradictions of capitalism to be decreasingly pressing, they would find sufficient challenge when they engaged instead with the knotty social and cultural issues of modern America.

scholarly journals Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead as a Novel of Manners

2018 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 828-838
Author(s):  
Muhammad Khallaf
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Norman Mailer ◽  
World War ◽  
The Social ◽  
Descriptive Approach ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Novel Of Manners ◽  
American Society

Norman Mailer (1923-2007) is one the most important figures among the American Writers, an extremely influenced personality in the post-world war II American Literature. He is best known for his first war novel The Naked and the Dead (1948), which is a commentary on the American society. Hence, the present study is an attempt to investigate and reflect the social ills and fragmentation, misery and the overwhelming social and political restraints that formed the American atmosphere at that time. Mailer is interested in what happens in the contemporary American society. His aim is to depict the national rituals of American life. The researcher in this study seeks to identify the literary aspects reflected and drawn in The Naked and the Dead that make us categorize it as a novel of manners for it is satiric and realistic in depiction, in which Mailer unprecedentedly characterizes the social mores, evils and customs that are characteristic of a particular class of people in a specific historical context. The descriptive approach along with detailed analysis is utilized in conducting the present study. The conclusion sums up the most important findings of the study.

Social Science’s Cold War

2019 ◽  
pp. 65-90
Author(s):  
Michael C. Desch
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Natural Sciences ◽  
World War ◽  
Security Environment ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Social ◽  
The One

This chapter details how with the end of the Second World War, social science disciplines were pulled in two diametrically opposed directions. The general intellectual climate of the post-World War II/early Cold War era was one of great optimism about professionalizing and modernizing the social sciences on the model of the natural sciences. This impulse especially affected political science. However, the inherent tensions between “rigor” and “relevance” reasserted themselves once again, and it became clear that a peacetime choice between them might have to be made. On the one hand, the experience of the war, and the growing realization that the country faced a protracted period of rivalry with the Soviet Union, encouraged the disciplines to try to remain relevant to policy. On the other hand, the mixed security environment and desire to remake the social sciences in the image of the natural sciences eventually pushed them away from it.

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