Philippe Fontaine and Jefferson Pooley have edited a remarkably well-integrated and informative collection of essays on the intersection of the social sciences and public policy in the United States. Each chapter charts the history of a social problem about which social science disciplines claimed authoritative knowledge and sought to influence public policy: the family, education, poverty, discrimination, the Black ghetto, crime, addiction, mental illness, and war. For each problem the authors ask, Who gets to define the problem: the social scientists or political actors? Which social science disciplines are most important in defining problems and their solution? And third, is there a general shift over the second half of the twentieth century from contextual and structural explanations and interventions to more individualistic ones? The editors’ analytical introduction elaborates on these questions and draws together general conclusions from the nine chapters. The introduction, the common analytical agenda, and the depth of knowledge the authors bring to their subject areas make the volume more valuable than the usual multi-authored collection of essays.
A good deal of historical work already foreshadows the conclusions. Politics was clearly more powerful a determinant of how social problems were defined and addressed than the social sciences. Sociology, within whose precincts the genre of “social problems” developed, lost power over them during the second half of the century, while psychology and economics gained in authority. In accord with the rightward drift in politics, individualistic understandings of social problems gained power while the more contextual understandings provided by sociology and its ethnographic allies declined in importance. The volume confirms these answers but adds enough complexity and nuance to occupy the next generation of scholars.
All authors agree that the large shifts in political ideology and the major political events around them set the agenda for the social sciences—from the aftermath of World War II into the Cold War era, the Great Society sixties, and the rise of Nixon-Reagan-era conservatism. Political and ideological power over the social sciences was exercised mostly through government provision of research funding, less so by government employment, and indirectly through the ability of those in power to capture public attention.
Together these forces transformed problems and whole disciplines. As Savina Balasubramanian and Charles Camic show, World War II and then the Cold War focus on modernization in the post-colonial world made demography the highest status field in study of the family. Crime, according to Jean-Baptiste Fleury, was for postwar sociologists a social problem solvable by integration into the community; beginning in 1968, the conservative shift in politics turned it into a “standalone” problem, removed from its roots in community. With rapid federal funding of new university programs in “criminal justice,” it became a problem of crime control, punishment, and rational management (p. 259). Andrew Scull shows that lavish postwar funding by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) supported the rapid increase of clinical psychologists, reshaping the whole discipline of psychology around clinical rather than experimental practice. NIMH also supported socially oriented interventions in mental health that virtually ended with the election of Reagan in 1980. That same shift in politics and funding, according to Nancy D. Campbell, changed the perception of addiction from being a social problem into a neurological disease, sidelining the social sciences. And Joy Rohde argues that the Cold War focus on national security largely removed war from the category of a social problem altogether, making it instead a necessary feature of international relations and elite statecraft.
This is not to say that the social sciences were entirely the handmaiden of politics. Social scientists often had their own reasons for collaborating with political pressures. Clinical psychologists themselves led the disciplinary takeover; in other fields like criminology and the management of war, vocational opportunities or shared ideology smoothed the way. Shared ideology allowed some individual social scientists to exert significant influence on policy, notably Kenneth Clark on Brown v. Board of Education, Michael Harrington and Daniel Moynihan on the Great Society, and James Q. Wilson and Edward Banfield on Reagan-era policies.
Psychology and economics, the two disciplinary winners in this changing political climate, gained importance in part through the kinds of political expertise they offered. Balasubramanian and Camic show that while the Depression, world war, and postwar expansion made economic expertise increasingly important, sociologists were engaged with less central concerns. Psychology rose to government attention with wartime mental health problems and their aftermath. The scientism of the postwar decades was also a major factor: economics and psychology commanded the most advanced quantitative methods. Behavioralism, sociology’s contemporary formulation of a scientific program, could not match their methodological sophistication. Equally if not more important, economics and psychology rose in authority because their individualistic disciplinary orientations put them in accord with—and in the case of economics to some degree aided—the broad political shift to the right.
Economists recast social problems altogether into the market language of their discipline, particularly after 1980 when rational choice theories flourished, and the tools economists introduced, like modeling and cost-benefit analysis, increasingly influenced policy choices. Most authors, in accord with their historical perspective, regret the inability of economists’ theory and methods to take account of contextual factors. George C. Galster, an economist, alone applauds the sophistication of neoclassical economics and its effort to achieve greater contextual awareness in the study of the Black Ghetto.
In many problem areas, economists thus acted as, and were perceived as, imperialistic intruders. The exceptions in the volume only prove the rule. Andrew Jewett points out that economists were not much interested in encroaching on low-status fields like the study of education, and Campbell notes that they were interested only in elaborating their disciplinary paradigm, not in collaborating with other disciplines to address the problem at hand. The contrast here with psychologists, who more easily moved within and absorbed cognate disciplines, would be worth drawing out.
To their credit, the authors introduce substantial complexity into the volume’s major generalizations. Alice O’Connor’s chapter on the heyday of poverty studies in the 1960s sharpens the conclusion stated or implied in all the chapters. Poverty studies, she argues, “was about poor people and the identifiably demographic and behavioral attributes” that kept them poor. It would not be about the structural inequalities of class, race, gender, wealth, and power “that kept upwards of one-quarter of American households in extreme economic need” (p. 141). She attributes that failure to a general disembedding of poverty knowledge from its social context that occurred after World War II across the social sciences as growing professionalism and scientism led social scientists to narrow their field of vision and place foundational moral issues off limits. Sociology, with its individualizing behavioral science, was as much a participant in this project as economics. When Lyndon Johnson declared war on poverty, the demand to make policy politically effective narrowed the focus further, prioritizing short-term actions and reliable, measurable goals.
The turn to individualistic explanations thus first occurred in the 1950s and carried into the ’60s. That timing is echoed to some degree in most of the chapters and could be explored further. It highlights the importance of the rise of totalitarianism in shifting social scientists’ social orientation towards individualism. Totalitarianism put contextual and social-structural explanations and interventions on the defensive. Many postwar sociologists fed into such fears —and incidentally fueled their discipline’s decline—when they charted the troubling course of modernity into mass society and the possibility of totalitarianism arising in America. That modern society created rootless masses of enfeebled individuals strengthened the celebration of individual freedom that was exploited by the political right.
Leah Gordon’s chapter on discrimination complements O’Connor’s and the volume’s general conclusions. Gordon emphasizes that the drift toward individualizing knowledge was uneven. Once racial equality was declared in law, more socially grounded theories of discrimination and inequality coexisted with frequent disregard of context. Moreover, the line between individual and social explanations was often left unclear. This was particularly true as multicausal chains lengthened and neoclassical economists found systemic significance in their study of individual choices.
Gordon’s chapter also shows that the presence of race at the center of the problem of discrimination produced an important difference. Most authors record the triumph of conservative individualistic framings of their problem areas after 1970 or 1980. While small but articulate centers of systemic analysis had developed on the radical left, they had been quickly marginalized. In regard to discrimination and race problems more generally, however, radical scholarship struck roots in academia and developed sophisticated, morally grounded systemic analyses that have substantially impacted the social sciences and public discussion.
The editors suggest that social science readers need not become discouraged at the volume’s broad conclusions. They propose that the social sciences had their greatest effect on policy indirectly, through providing a “vocabulary of popular knowledge” (p. 49), or a “social imaginary” that set the “parameters of political possibility”(p. 51). It was the wide circulation of such individualizing knowledge and moral perspectives, they suggest, that made psychology and economics so important. It is also where this excellent volume invites supplementation.
