Roger E. Backhouse and Philippe Fontaine declare two purposes in bringing together these essays. The first is to focus explicitly on the development of the social sciences in Europe and North America since 1945 on the premise that World War II marked profound changes in the social sciences. Secondly, the editors intend these essays on separate disciplines—psychology, economics, political science, sociology, anthropology, and human geography—to “pave the way toward an integrated history” of the social sciences, and in the last chapter they produce a stimulating “prolegomena” to such a history (p. 5). The disciplinary chapters are expertly done and informative, but only the Backhouse essay on economics attempts a comprehensive disciplinary history. The others limit their focus geographically or topically, giving substantial attention to British perspectives, and do not always cooperate in making the editor’s synthetic case. Readers of the Cambridge volume on the history of the modern social sciences in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Porter and Ross, eds., Reference Porter and Ross2003) will not be altogether surprised by these essays (two authors are the same), but the book as a whole brings the last sixty years into sharper relief and deepens analysis of important issues. Backhouse in particular sets a high standard in combining a practitioner’s acute understanding of his discipline with an historian’s understanding of the multiple contexts that shape it.

Backhouse’s essay on economics makes the strongest case for marking a new period in social science history at 1945 and provides the template for the synthetic essay on all the social sciences. The historical consequences of World War II, he argues, shifted the whole landscape of economics, making American practitioners and disciplinary institutions predominant. At the same time, economists’ wartime experience, development of new statistical and modeling techniques, and the influence of new standards of scientific rigor reconstituted economics as an engineering-oriented science. The editors construct a common history largely by suggesting that the major factors at work on economics were also—if differentially—at work on the other disciplines.

The factor most fully addressed by the separate essays is Americanization, and here the other essayists display a good deal of resistance. Backhouse himself prefers American “dominance” to the term “Americanization,” for he makes it largely a matter of size, noting that many of the ideas behind the new mathematical and engineering techniques originated in Europe. Mitchell G. Ash in psychology likewise emphasizes the explosive expansion of the American discipline since the war, concluding that psychology is now everywhere “deeply dependent … on American research styles and professional practices” (p. 30). Robert Adcock and Mark Bevir, however, taking political science in the United States and Britain as a case study, find a narrative of Americanization inadequate to the “contingent transnational exchanges both ways” (p. 71) and the highly selective British appropriation of theories and methods. Jennifer Platt echoes that judgment in regard to sociology and, as in political science, finds that American influence peaked before 1970, with greater European selectivity thereafter. Writing on human geography as an Anglo-American enterprise that became a social science only after the war, Ron Johnston also finds a mixed picture of commonalities and differences. Adam Kuper, focused only on British social anthropology, links that field to British institutional contexts from the 1920s through the 1960s—colonial rule in Africa and university location in a few high-status institutions; only after the collapse of the imperial project did the culturalist influence of American anthropology dominate.Footnote ¹ American dominance has thus been more potent in disciplines whose conceptual and methodological tools are abstract and mathematical but less powerful where the disciplinary apparatus is more deeply imbedded in political, social, and cultural contexts.

The editors’ other major factor in the transformation of the social sciences is the technical, engineering orientation that emerged from social scientists’ experience during the war and their desire for rigor in scientific method. Here again, economics and psychology most fully embrace the task of management of modern society, while social engineering and its methods grew in, but proved less constitutive of, the other social sciences. Only in economics did the preference for rigor succeed in establishing a firm orthodoxy around new mathematical and statistical tools, and around market theories built on the presumption of individual actors and rational behavior in accord with those tools.Footnote ² In contrast, Ash shows, rigor accentuated the distinction between “hard” and “soft” methods in psychology, sharply dividing specialized fields and then replicating the methodological split within them. Cross-cutting divisions between fields of specialization and method appear to have proliferated in sociology and political science as well. Adcock and Bevir’s excellent analysis shows that political science reconstituted a loose “mainstream” influenced by behavioralism but still grounded in the modernist empiricism that took shape in the 1920s, and that competing conceptions of theory and method survived in distinctive subfields.Footnote ³

Changing intellectual and political contexts added further sources of conflict. While positivist theory undergirded the desire for rigor in the post-war decades, the criticisms of positivism launched by humanistic approaches to the social world after 1970 legitimated hermeneutic methods and valorized culture. Economics was least affected by this epistemological shift. The largest effects were felt by anthropology, followed by sociology and human geography, as well as differentially by country.

Politics—a major source of conflict that shaped all the social sciences—appears only sporadically in these essays. The editors alone try to consider its effects systematically. In economics, Backhouse treads carefully in showing links between economics and ideology: post-war/Cold War politics shaped the desire for scientific rigor in a number of ways and the conservative political climate after 1970, as well as economists’ esthetic preference for rigor, led to the rapid spread of the influential neoliberal market model; in turn, the economists’ market model legitimated neoliberal ideas in politics and society.Footnote ⁴ The editors suggest that the radical politics of the 1960s and beyond, including feminism, most influenced sociology and reinforced the proliferation of heterodox approaches in all the social sciences. Arguing that how a discipline manages dissent from mainstream understandings is an important determinant of the shape it will take, Backhouse shows that economics alone was able to marginalize the dissent flowing from these multiple sources.

Economics thus followed a strikingly different path of consolidation over the course of these decades, with neoliberal market theory only a variation of its dominant paradigm, while the other social science disciplines continued to fragment.Footnote ⁵ Ash describes psychology, the largest social science, as now hopelessly fragmented. The fragmentation of sociology is not only discussed by Platt but replicated in the form of her essay. Kuper declares at the outset that a comprehensive history of even twentieth-century anthropology is “impossible.”

Lest the narrative emerging from these essays be mainly a story of increasing separation between and fragmentation within the social sciences, the editors place a good deal of emphasis on cross-disciplinary efforts. The number of such efforts is impressive, particularly from 1945–65, fueled by the search for solutions to common social problems and the hope of “an integrated theory of the individual and social behavior” (p. 210). The editors call attention to the central presence of psychology in many of these efforts and the more imperial style of economists’ cross-disciplinary ventures. They conclude nonetheless that these efforts, while creating a subset of genuinely interdisciplinary practitioners, worked to define disciplinary borders as well as to build bridges, and represented less efforts at cooperation than competitive efforts of different disciplines to capture the social field.

Though still thinly and incompletely sketched, then, something like a picture of the contemporary social sciences emerges from these essays, replete with astute observations and suggestive insights, and calling for further historical study. A social science whose central purpose is the “management” of society is deeply imbedded in society’s ideals, languages, norms, and practices, as in its institutions and structures of power. That imbeddedness, together with contemporary perspectives in epistemology, raise an issue only intermittently broached in these essays: reflexivity, the recognition that social scientists operate not as observers of a reality outside them but as participants within it. The implications of that condition have only begun to penetrate the social sciences—from economists’ dawning recognition that market actors’ expectations can be shaped by economists’ own theories and prescriptions to anthropologists’ sometimes debilitating anxieties of interpretation, but reflexivity offers historians an especially rich field. If social scientists generally do not understand their own ideas and practices as shaping and being reshaped by the social world they study, that understanding comes easily to historians.

The editors’ emphasis on the mid-century transformation of the social sciences also needs to be weighed against longer views. As periodization changes, so too does significance. The longer term conceptual continuities highlighted by the essays on political science and anthropology as well as by the essays in Porter and Ross (Reference Porter and Ross2003) can be treated as precursors to post-World War II developments or as indicative of deeper characteristics and contexts. In economics, a long-term view would highlight the underlying bias of neoclassical economics towards laissez faire as well as the contingent conditions in the 1970s that, as Backhouse emphasizes, moved economics to a neoliberal market paradigm.Footnote ⁶ In sociology, the longer time frame would reveal not continuity, but the striking decomposition of the realm of the social since the 1970s. The nineteenth-century discovery of society and the importance of social theorists in defining modernity gave sociology jurisdiction over a thick understanding of social milieu and structural narratives that oriented modern society in time and place. As that social-historical understanding has eroded, so too has the coherence and confidence of the discipline.Footnote ⁷ Instead, the growth of economics and psychology, and the pervasiveness of their languages of the market and management of the self, reinforce the understanding of society as a realm of merely aggregated individual behaviors. The editors’ striking closing image of the social sciences as competing “to force their own conception of society on each other so as to emerge as the main providers of solutions to its problems” (p. 223) suggests the importance of attention to this ongoing history.