‘You never need an analyst with Bobby around’: The mid-20th-century human sciences in Sondheim and Furth's musical Company

This article offers a case study in how historians of science can use musical theater productions to understand the cultural reception of scientific ideas. In 1970, Stephen Sondheim and George Furth's musical Company opened on Broadway. The show engaged with and reflected contemporary theories and ideas from the human sciences; Company's portrayal of its 35-year-old bachelor protagonist, his married friends, and his girlfriends reflected present-day theories from psychoanalysis, sexology, and sociology. In 2018, when director Marianne Elliott revived the show with a female protagonist, Company once again amplified contemporary dilemmas around human sciences expertise—this time, the biological fertility clock. Through Company, Sondheim and Furth—and later Elliott—constructed arguments about modern society that paralleled those put forth by contemporary human scientists, including psychoanalytic models of the mind, the lonely crowd phenomenon, and shifting conceptions of masculinity and femininity. Because of their wide popularity and potential for readaptation, musicals such as Company offer a promising source base for analyzing the relationship between contemporary society and scientific expertise in specific historical contexts.

Whatever Happened to the Social in American Social Thought? Part Two

The liberal social thought of the long 1950s is best seen as an attempt to combat the threat that the United States, as a modern mass society, could succumb to totalitarianism. Widely discussed texts like Escape from Freedom, The Vital Center, The Lonely Crowd, and The Origins of Totalitarianism announced the threat. Academic and theoretical studies worked to provide social supports for now weakened individuals or to find behavioral evidence that Americans still functioned as liberal democrats, but they did so by subordinating individual autonomy and mutual social responsibility to social systems, the market, and elites. Although social liberalism revived during the 1960s, the Great Society fused social liberalism to the Cold War state; the movements for civil rights and social inclusion, fueled by the desire for authenticity, veered into individualistic, identitarian channels; and radical calls for participatory democracy magnified both desires for authenticity and fears of American totalitarianism. Until the end of the century the totalitarian frame of liberal social thought continued to encourage visions of the future as a monolithic totality, to steer liberal social thinkers into individualistic channels, to hobble mutualistic conceptions of the social, and to weaken the ability of social liberals to respond to the conservative backlash that grew through the century and beyond.

Social Impact: Social Good, Social Neutrality, Social Bad, and Social Disaster: When Is Doing What You Have A “Right” To Do He “Right” Thing To Do?

Social good has been defined as “services or products that promote human well-being on a large scale.” While there seems to be agreement about the definitional “space” of social good, concepts of social action, social justice, and social impact require further attention.Producing social good does not require injustice: improvements can be made even when there is no injustice. Social good might be considered the first step in a triad containing social better (ment) and social best (good, better, best), with impactful results produced by social actors.There may be large cultural “umbrellas,” widely held value bundles, which define whole societies at points in time and over time. We discuss two: “the lonely crowd,” and “party ID.”We use a portfolio analysis to look at the elements of social good and social bad: social very good, social good, social neutrality, social bad, and social disaster, and then consider three examples of positive social impacts, and five examples of negative social impacts.We suggest a guide to social action to help us make better decisions aimed toward the A or B outcomes (Social Very Good and Social Good), using three steps: awareness of hidden bias, regular decision refurbishment, and using decision rules.The goal of this paper is to share ideas to help avoid social bad, and to help achieve social good. Ideally, social good considerations will become a regular part of the decision-making process.

The Age of “Amok”

The proliferation of mass-shootings in the United States since the 1960s has produced a character profile of largely unremarkable, middleclass male culprits who transform particular places of civil peace – schools, universities, shopping malls – into landscapes of war. On the one hand, the lack of clear motives has led mystified psychiatric experts to draw correlations between such events and “running amok” – the phenomenon of sudden outbursts of homicidal violence observed since early modernity in Southeast Asia. On the other hand, the details of how such acts are carried out as well as the notes of some perpetrators suggest that mass-shootings could also be understood as “interpretations” of American postwar society: from the “lonely crowd” of suburbia via “Reaganomics” to the present politics of fear and resentment to a society of preemptive control.

Crossing the Muddy Field of Witness, Calling the Lonely Crowd: A Walk to Meet a Sound

The artist Elizabeth McTernan and the mathematician Luke Wolcott collaborated on A Tree Calls, in which Wolcott chopped down a tree in the United States and McTernan simultaneously led a group in Copenhagen to walk toward the arrival of the sound of the tree falling. How does the sound of this tree falling, and the story of its journey and reception, help us walk into a framed void, alone together? In its faint vibration, how can we hear both the idea’s persistent unity and the silent physical arrival of absence?

The Predicament of National Character

“National character” has a curious history in the twentieth century. Margaret Mead wrote the first anthropological account of the United States in 1942, but the history of national character as a concept runs through social psychology and anthropology between the wars, the cultivation of “morale” during the Second World War, and the deployment of social science in postwar American military occupations. That history is the subject of this chapter: what “American character” revealed and obscured, both nationally and internationally. Mead was the Henry Luce of anthropology: her life and writings offer a miniature of the science of characterology in the American Century. The chapter begins as an institutional and intellectual history, but concludes with new readings of three postwar texts. Characterology was indeed a science, of a kind, but it was also an art. Ruth Benedict’s The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, a remote ethnography of Japan, is a parable of American power and its limits. Mead’s New Lives for Old, recounting her return to New Guinea in 1953, becomes a sermon about a Polynesian city upon a hill. David Riesman’s classic of sociology, The Lonely Crowd, closes one frontier of national character but opens another. To consider national character as narrative and ideology illuminates American character’s imprint on the world.