In the past ten years or so, there has been an increasing interest in the history of the social sciences since 1945. Researchers from various backgrounds have explored a number of areas that disciplinary historians had either neglected or considered through a narrower perspective. As a result, greater attention has been paid to the post-war conviction that trespassing the traditional boundaries of research fields was a prerequisite for dealing with the most pressing problems. As readers of this journal are well aware, there is widespread belief among economists that their subject estranged itself from other social sciences in the second half of the past century and that there was, therefore, little room for joint thinking and sharing of research experience by economists and other social scientists. There exist, however, a number of significant examples that prove that interactions between economists and other social scientists were far from negligible, and it may be presumed, therefore, that a better knowledge of cross-disciplinary research ventures involving economists after the Second World War would help historians of economics give a richer account of the developments affecting the subject throughout the period.

Cold War Social Science does not really exploit that vein. It does, however, include a handful of contributions that deal with post-war economics from the general perspective of the history of the social sciences. As such, it can provide historians of economics with new perspectives and questions. The book may also interest historians of economics because it deals with the ways other social scientists engage with issues that likewise concerned economists, and, therefore, allows for valuable points of comparison between various disciplinary approaches. Finally, the book sheds light on a number of contexts that are relevant to study the work, commitments, and ambitions of the post-war American social scientists. Here, historians of economics may ask themselves whether such contexts are relevant to their own work.

With such a title, it may be expected that the editors considered the Cold War as their study’s main context. Following the entry of the United States into the Second World War, the image of a bipolarized world gained in importance and later served as a convenient shorthand description of the complexities inherited from the pre-war era, to the point that the Cold War often stood as a sui generis entity, the independence of which was justified by its considerable practical effects. A number of scholars have insisted that the idea of a Cold War social science, though helpful in many respects, should be handled with care. In his introductory chapter, Solovey himself aptly points out that one may think of other relevant contexts. So readers may bear in mind that Cold War social science, as Solovey and, to a lesser extent, Cravens see it, is not just social science in the Cold War as a time period, since some of the scientific ambitions that developed after the Second World War had already characterized the pre-war era, or social science as produced by the national security concerns of the post-war era, since the latter have sometimes influenced research in an expected or peripheral way as much as they have been variably shaped by social scientific research. In this respect, David Engerman’s essay on the Harvard’s Refugee Interview Project in the volume, in pointing to the subtleties of the relations between the military and academe, testifies to the necessity of adopting a more balanced view of “Cold War Social Science,” one that “reveals the ‘academicization’ of military life as much as it does the ‘militarization’ of academic life” (p. 31). In any event, it is worth remembering that for many who actively participated in the building of post-war social science, the image of the USA and the USSR as former allies carried some weight as well: it encouraged a belief that miscommunication and misunderstanding, not just conflict of interests, accounted for international tensions.

The complexities of the above relations are equally perceptible in Joy Rohde’s contribution on how the antiwar movement expanded the military–academic–industrial complex. In following the vicissitudes of the Special Operations Research Office (SORO), from its creation in 1956 through the discontinuation of its partnership with the American University after years of social agitation, in 1969, Rohde shows that the fluctuating boundary between academe and the Pentagon was but an imperfect indication of the involvement of social scientists in Cold War politics. Meant to provide applicable knowledge on the changing Third World, SORO is a good illustration that, as much as the university could survive without the support of the military, it was not the only source of expertise the army could mobilize in its quest to win the hearts and minds of the Third World.

Part of the reason why the military could tap other resources is that, after the Second World War, social science expanded even more beyond the university as a result of the urge of formerly involved parties to capitalize on the scientific expertise inherited from the war experience. As many social scientists participated in the war effort in various capacities and institutions, so social scientific knowledge took on wider currency and diverse guises in post-war American society. Just as the social sciences opened up to the demands for greater stability in a volatile environment, their knowledge, because of its diversity, often reinforced existing anxieties and gave rise to new social demands. When Cravens, in the volume, insists on the conservative turn of the American social sciences after the Second World War, so as to recall that many leading scholars participated in the intellectual campaign against Communism, it should not be understood necessarily that they endorsed conservative ideology, but rather that greater sensitivity to the demands of the Cold War society made them most likely to address the threats of Communism in relation to social order. That was done repeatedly in the conventional social sciences and also in less-established fields such as future studies in which concern for the future of humanity could hardly escape the anxieties of the times (see Kaya Tolon’s essay in the volume). Whether the conservative turn of the social sciences affected them all in the same degree, regardless of the places where they were practiced, is a vexing issue, but the significance of social stability for most scholars at the time indicates greater willingness to maintain the American way of life than to change it.

That is not to suggest that social change was of little interest to American social scientists; rather, with the domination of modernization theory in the post-war era, they paid more attention to the possibility that other societies could emulate the American model. A number of essays in the volume refer to the modernization narrative in a direct or indirect way. As several instructive books have already been published on the subject, including Michael Latham’s Modernization as Ideology (2000) and Nils Gilman’s Mandarins of the Future (2003), there is no need to go into details. Rather, it may be interesting to point to another turn—the world turn in US scholarship—as described by Howard Brick in his essay on neo-evolutionist anthropology. There, Brick recalls the fall into disgrace of modernization theory in the 1970s and points to a counter-narrative that considered patterns of change in the Third World through “ideas of sequential change in social structures and cultural forms over long stretches of human time” (p. 157). To some extent, in emphasizing the primacy of so-called “transnational” phenomena, Brick helps readers go beyond the “received notion of a monolithic Cold War culture of political consensus and academic complicity” (p. 166).

During the Cold War, many, including social scientists, viewed the closed and centrally planned Soviet society as the perfect foil for the open and self-reliant American society. Accordingly, American superiority was an issue of tremendous political importance, and uncertainty about it a constant source of anxiety. Several essays in the volume point to the anxieties of American society and their translations in post-war social science. Edward Jones-Imhotep, for instance, deals with anxieties over the trustworthiness of machines in relation to concerns over the reliability of humans. Considering engineering psychology’s preoccupation with maintenance, he reaches the conclusion that “making Cold-War technology trustworthy involved shaping historically specific classes of people as well as specific classes of things” (p. 176). The potential failings of people is likewise touched upon in the essay by Hunter Heyck, who describes how the post-war era brought about a new perspective on human behavior in which individuals appeared as “limited choosers.” As Heyck recalls, in the 1950s and 1960s, though many social scientists were aware of the imperfect rationality of human actors and its potential damages for democracy, they endorsed the decision-making framework and concentrated on delineating appropriate conditions for rational choice by limited agents. In his essay on the creativity movement, which he distinguishes from the other two creative enterprises in Cold War psychology—cognitive psychology and creative liberalism—Michael Bycroft shows how “researchers proclaimed creativity as one important solution to the problems of the age” (p. 203). Here again, researchers showed skepticism about the power of human intelligence to solve the problems of the age. They found human creativity more promising in that respect, and, accordingly, made every effort to define the conditions for its enhancement among individuals. Marga Vicedo’s essay points out that during the Second World War and its aftermath, social scientists acknowledged the importance of emotions in human behavior. Examining the science of mother love from the viewpoint of the stability of democratic societies, she shows that it relies on, as much as it supports, a vision of human nature in which human behavior was seen as the result of a biological evolutionary process. That science fueled debates about women’s social roles at a time when there were deep anxieties about the control of behavior and risks of social disintegration. The question of women’s social roles is also considered in Nadine Weidman’s essay on the anthropologist Ashley Montagu, who exemplifies the rise of newly biologized conceptions of human nature in the 1950s. Of particular interest is Montagu’s “claim that human nature was grounded in a biological drive toward cooperation” (p. 216), a claim that underwent a significant change when he posited that instead of a single, biologically based, human nature, there were “two… natures, differentiated by gender—one of which [women’s] was cooperative, and the other of which had to painstakingly learn to become so” (p. 224).

The last two essays above are clear evidence that though this book means to contribute to the history of Cold War social science, it does pay attention to its connections with the natural sciences, most notably biology. Other essays in the volume, however, point to other natural sciences, as does Janet Martin-Nielsen’s, which comes back to the establishment of linguistics as a distinct professional and academic discipline. There, she describes Noam Chomsky’s transformational grammar as representative of the discipline’s strong association with formal sciences, mathematics in particular, and its efforts to compare itself with the natural sciences. As is well known, a number of developments in the social sciences after the Second World War cannot be understood without considering the role of prominent natural scientists who hoped that social forces could be subjected to the same control as natural forces, and worked actively towards that goal or encouraged social scientists to do so. Though social scientists were often receptive to the successes of the natural sciences, it would be a mistake to reduce the nature of their endeavors to mere translations of existing models, theories, and concepts to their own fields of investigation. As Joel Isaac shows in his study of Harvard Department of Social Relations, where the influence of natural scientists was still perceptible in the late 1940s and 1950s, the main social sciences developed theoretical and conceptual commitments of their own after the Second World War. Though some of these commitments were inspired by the achievements of the natural sciences, as is clear in the case of the belief in a general theoretical framework, that is not to say that the theory-data relationship patiently constructed by social scientists had no logic of its own. It is fair to say that as much as the Second World War marked the consecration of a natural scientific and engineering culture, the Cold War era marked the affirmation of a social scientific culture. That this book helps us see more clearly its defining characteristics is already a significant achievement.