Gray Matters: Social Scientists, Military Patronage, and Democracy in the Cold War

2009 ◽  
Vol 96 (1) ◽  
pp. 99 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joy Rohde
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Gray Matters

Igor Zevelev, Russia and Its New Diasporas. Washington: United States Institute of Peace Press, 2001, xi., 219 pp.

2003 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 233-234
Author(s):  
Justin L. Miller
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
World Politics ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Regional Stability ◽  
The Past ◽  
State Actors ◽  
The Cold War

One of the burgeoning areas of political study over the past ten years has concentrated on the role of non-state actors in world politics. In the wake of the Soviet collapse and the end of the Cold War rivalry, some social scientists began to construct paradigms and theories centered on identity and to concentrate their research on ethnodemographic challenges posed by migration and porous borders in the post-Soviet states, including how various groups facilitated secessionist movements and insurgencies, undermining regional stability and efforts at democratization in the process.

COSMOPOLITANISM AND THE USES OF TRADITION: ROBERT REDFIELD AND ALTERNATIVE VISIONS OF MODERNIZATION DURING THE COLD WAR

2012 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 565-595 ◽  
Author(s):  
NICOLE SACKLEY
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Modernization Theory ◽  
Talcott Parsons ◽  
World War ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Alternative Vision ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The University

The history of the rise and fall of “modernization theory” after World War II has been told as a story of Talcott Parsons, Walt Rostow, and other US social scientists who built a general theory in US universities and sought to influence US foreign policy. However, in the 1950s anthropologist Robert Redfield and his Comparative Civilizations project at the University of Chicago produced an alternative vision of modernization—one that emphasized intellectual conversation across borders, the interrelation of theory and fieldwork, and dialectical relations of tradition and modernity. In tracing the Redfield project and its legacies, this essay aims to broaden intellectual historians’ sense of the complexity, variation, and transnational currents within postwar American discourse about modernity and tradition.

scholarly journals Social Sciences in Hungary During the Cold War and After

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (1-2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Viktor Karády
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Book Market ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
The West ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Thaw Period

Based on various types of recently explored empirical evidence, this study attempts to account for the complex and ever-changing relationship the social sciences in Hungary have entertained with their foreign counterparts, both institutionally and through their intellectual references since their birth in the early 20th century. Historically, up until Communist times, Hungary was a German intellectual colony of sorts while remaining receptive mostly to French and other influences as well. This changed fundamentally after 1948 with the process of Sovietization. This implied the outright institutional suppression of several social disciplines (sociology, demography, political science, and psychoanalysis) and the forceful intellectual realignment of others along Marxist lines. Contacts with the West were also suspended and the exclusive orientation to Soviet social science enforced through­out the long 1950s. A thaw period after this attempt at Russian cultural colonization followed the years after the 1956 anti-Bolshevik uprising. From 1963 on, the Hungarian social sciences saw the reestablishment and state-supported promotion of disciplines that were suppressed earlier, the softening of the ascendancy of official Marxism, and the opening of channels of exchange with the West. In spite of the continuation of political censorship, ideological surveillance, and occasional expulsion of politically dissident scholars until 1989, Hungarian social scientists could benefit more often and intensively from Western sponsorship (such as study grants from the Ford foundation) and collaborations. After the fall of Communism, the expansion and reorientation of the social sciences to the West, dominated by Anglo-Saxon contacts, are demonstrated by various indices, such as data on the book market of the social sciences and books purchased by libraries, translated, or cited in major reviews.

scholarly journals The great Project Camelot: Implications and repercussions of a controversy in social sciences

Sociologija ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 60 (2) ◽  
pp. 458-480
Author(s):  
Marko Bala
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Social Research ◽  
The United States ◽  
Industrial Complex ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Social Scientific ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The Military ◽  
Project Camelot

The paper examines the relationship between social sciences and the military-industrial complex in the United States of America during the Cold War era. Based on the review of the most representative texts on this problematique, the author?s main goal is to prove the plausibility of critical view according to which the social sciences have been instrumentalized during the Cold War by centers of power such as CIA and the Pentagon in order to accomplish certain strategic goals. The main focus of our interest is Project Camelot, an ambitous research program which was canceled in the midst of the international scandal which erupted as a consequence of the exposure of the project?s political nature. The first part of the paper describes the Camelot controversy and the reaction of social scientists, as well as the debate on ethical, epistemological, political and practical implications of social scientific research, which was triggered by the affair. The second part of the paper describes research projects whose characterics are similar to those of Project Camelot, and the author hypostasizes that the controversial project cannot be viewed as an isolated case, but rather as a paradigmatic example of the Cold War social science. The text pays special attention to the question of sponsorship/sources of funding of social research, an issue whose scale and importance is especially highlighted in the third section of the paper. The concluding part points on the problem of militarization and instrumentalisation of social sciences fifty years after Project Camelot, while the emphasis is put on the necessity of maintaining the memory on the worst cases of the abuse of behavioral expertise.

Conclusions

2019 ◽  
pp. 169-178
Author(s):  
Sara Lorenzini
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Institutional Development ◽  
Negative Consequences ◽  
Global History ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
History Of Development ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
National Economies

This concluding chapter argues that, during the Cold War, countries in the Global South had played the superpowers off each other, achieving almost unchecked aid during decolonization—but this approach no longer worked. Economists and social scientists attacked the Cold War, claiming that the aid distributed then, while abundant, had been distorted by politics, with negative consequences for national economies. Cold War aid, they said, fostered inefficient distribution, thwarted institutional development in newly independent countries, propped up failed states, and nourished civil wars with weapons and ideology. The book reveals development's many expectations other than humanitarian motives: political loyalty, broader markets, and personal or group legitimacy. It also recounts a plural history, seeing the global history of development as made up of projects with worldwide aspirations but clearly framed for national purposes and within regional dimensions. The image of development as a single design, the concretization of a hegemonic view, a global faith, a center around which global polity is organized, is a simplified representation.

The New Welfare—Warfare State: Challenges to the Sociological Imagination

2011 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 132-149 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marinus Ossewaarde
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Sociological Imagination ◽  
Global Capitalism ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Social Imagination ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Foreign Policies ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Political Economic ◽  
Two Sides

C. Wright Mills introduced his concept of the sociological imagination during the Cold War to warn against what he perceived as increasing moral and political indifference and the incapacity of people to relate their own private worlds to world history. Hence, social scientists failed to see that the welfare and peace at home, to which they contributed, were supported by wars waged somewhere far away. The post-Cold War epoch is characterised by new unprecedented challenges raised by neo-liberalism, global capitalism, biotechnology, eugenics, racial hygiene and the biologisation of social policy. The new world is ruled by political, economic and technological forces that closely cooperate with each other and determine world and local histories. The changed social structures also imply that domestic and foreign policies undergo mutations. Yet, they remain the two sides of the same coin, which has now become the neo-liberal objective of unhindered global capitalism. The ‘new’ or ‘updated’ social imagination still strives to unmask hidden powers that justify their dominion.

scholarly journals The Remobilization of the Propaganda and Morale Network, 1947–1953

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jefferson Pooley
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
World War ◽  
Large Share ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Ww Ii ◽  
National Security State ◽  
Research Initiatives ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The U.S

In the aftermath of World War II, the U.S. social scientists serving in Washington and abroad returned—most of them—to their universities. A large share of those returnees had staffed the U.S. government's sprawling propaganda and morale bureaucracies. Shuffling between agencies, these scholars-on-loan forged informal ties and something like a network. Back on campus, they resumed teaching and research. A raft of published work based on wartime projects soon appeared, under a label—“communications research”—that had taken hold during the war. But few of the returning social scientists identified with the new field. Anthropologists returned to anthropology, sociologists to sociology, and so on. The thesis of this paper is that the Cold War brought them back together. The new national security state, in other words, recruited a remarkably similar cast of social scientists to run its propaganda research initiatives. Some of those projects were self-conscious revivals of World War II efforts, but even the fresh initiatives were staffed by veterans of the earlier campaigns. The mix of military, civilian, and foundation sponsors in the early Cold War, moreover, resembled the WW II configuration. The propaganda and morale network was, in effect, remobilized.

scholarly journals Contributions by Canadian Social Scientists to the Study of Soviet Ukraine During the Cold War

2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-52
Author(s):  
Bohdan Harasymiw
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Scholarly Work ◽  
Personal Interest ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Canadian Institute ◽  
Cold War Era ◽  
Cultural Order ◽  
Social Scientific ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Political Economic

This article surveys major publications concerning Ukraine by Canadian social scientists of the Cold War era. While the USSR existed, characterized by the uniformity of its political, economic, social, and cultural order, there was little incentive, apart from personal interest, for social scientists to specialize in their research on any of its component republics, including the Ukrainian SSR, and there was also no incentive to teach about them at universities. Hence there was a dearth of scholarly work on Soviet Ukraine from a social-scientific perspective. The exceptions, all but one of them émigrés—Jurij Borys, Bohdan Krawchenko, Bohdan R. Bociurkiw, Peter J. Potichnyj, Wsevolod Isajiw, and David Marples—were all the more notable. These authors, few as they were, laid the foundation for the study of post-1991 Ukraine, with major credit for disseminating their work going to the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies (CIUS) Press.

The Experts' War on Poverty

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Romain D. Huret
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
War On Poverty ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Richard Nixon ◽  
Family Assistance ◽  
Government Role ◽  
The Family ◽  
Institutional System ◽  
Political Dimensions ◽  
The Cold War

This book traces the efforts of a dedicated community of experts to create a policy bureaucracy that reigned until Richard Nixon implemented the Family Assistance Plan in 1969. Although they toiled in relative obscurity, this cadre of experts waged their own war on the American political establishment, creating policies that challenged the unscientific prejudices that ruled DC politics. The Experts’ War on Poverty highlights the metrics, research, and economic and social data that these social scientists employed in their day-to-day work. Huret argues that this internal “war” at a time of great disruption due to the Cold War undermined and fractured the institutional system officially intended ending poverty. What developed instead, he writes, was a group that was determined to fight poverty in ways that the federal government was unable to pursue by promoting radical policies and a more progressive government role and sweeping reforms. The Expert’s War on Poverty closely examines the intellectual, social, and political dimensions of this community of experts and social scientists and how they shaped American policy in the Cold War era.

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