The Experts' War on Poverty

Author(s):  
Romain D. Huret

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.

2018 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 457-488
Author(s):  
Monica Eppinger

Abstract Major twentieth-century social theories like socialism and liberalism depended on property as an explanatory principle, prefiguring a geopolitical rivalry grounded in differing property regimes. This article examines the Cold War as an under-analyzed context for the idea of “the tragedy of the commons.” In Soviet practice, collectivization was meant to provide the material basis for cultivating particular forms of sociability and an antidote to the ills of private property. Outsiders came to conceptualize it as tragic in both economic and political dimensions. Understanding the commons as a site of tragedy informed Western “answers” to the “problem” of Soviet collective ownership when the Cold War ended. Privatization became a mechanism for defusing old tragedies, central to a post-Cold War project of advancing “market democracy.” Meanwhile, the notion of an “illiberal commons” stands ready for redeployment in future situations conceived as tragically problematic.


2020 ◽  
pp. 165-188
Author(s):  
Sebastián Hurtado-Torres

This chapter describes the efforts by the United States and Eduardo Frei to prevent Salvador Allende from attaining the presidency. The Nixon administration, after choosing not to involve itself in the 1970 presidential race to the extent the Johnson administration had in the 1964 election, reacted with great alacrity to Allende's victory in the popular election. Richard Nixon himself instructed CIA director Richard Helms to conduct covert operations in Chile, behind Ambassador Korry's back. In addition, Chilean politicians, particularly Christian Democrats of the Frei line, tried or at least explored ways of averting an Allende victory and sought for that purpose the support of the U.S. embassy in Santiago. Though many of the documents that tell this part of the story have been available to researchers since at least the early 2000s, only one scholarly work has treated these attempts by Chilean politicians, especially Eduardo Frei, in depth. The tendency of scholars of U.S. foreign relations during the Cold War to assume rather uncritically that the only decisions that mattered were taken in Washington has narrowed the perspectives from which the history of Cold War Chilean politics has been studied and interpreted.


2003 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 233-234
Author(s):  
Justin L. Miller

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.


2016 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-23
Author(s):  
Olexii Zhyvora

Abstract The topic of propaganda, which was thought to be a part of the Cold War past, was recently revived by modern and rather successful application in Georgian, Syrian and Ukrainian conflicts. In this regard Korean Peninsula is a perfect example of prolonged use of mutual practice of indoctrination to study its origins. This article discuses the evolution of propaganda use by both Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and Republic of Korea (1945-1960) in cultural, economic and political dimensions. Qualitative text analysis and case study in conjunction with theoretical framework of A. E. Cassirer, S. Langer, E. Barneys and W. Lippmann are used to establish techniques used, and to explain its overall success.


2012 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 565-595 ◽  
Author(s):  
NICOLE SACKLEY

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.


Author(s):  
Viktor Karády

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.


Sociologija ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 60 (2) ◽  
pp. 458-480
Author(s):  
Marko Bala

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.


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