Shelling from the ivory tower

This article is a historical examination of several watershed episodes in the militarization of US social science. It off ers an assessment of the actual “science” underpinning such initiatives as Project Camelot, and traces how American anthropology in its reaction to Project Camelot and Cold War studies moved from certain kinds of scientific/knowledge production toward others. By critiquing the intellectual foundations of Project Camelot alongside other examples of action-oriented social science, this article examines the connections between functionalism and the conceptual bias toward social order. What linked development, militarism, and imperialism was a more often than not oversimplified view of human behavior. In order to comprehend how models of development and modernization continue to shape American hegemony, this article scrutinizes a particular history of “military modernity.”

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

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.