To trace the “origins” of American social science to 1929 is in some ways an arbitrary exercise, for its history is a continuing development before and after that date. But 1929 takes us far enough into that history to recognize both the continuing characteristics of American social science and its distinctive twentieth-century features.

My intention has been to historicize American social science, to show that its effort to naturalize the historical world is itself a historical project. To say this is to deny its positivist self-description as objective science. Like John Dewey, I use this historical strategy with “malice prepense,” but I am aware that positivists are well armed to slough it off. In science, they say, there is no connection between the context of discovery and the context of verification. Even if that were true, and I do not believe it is, it assumes for the social sciences precisely what is in question; namely, the likeness of its practice to the natural sciences.

What my history shows is that American social science has consistently constructed models of the world that embody the values and follow the logic of the national ideology of American exceptionalism. The exceptionalist vision has continually responded to the changes of history itself, and it has been open to a considerable variety of disciplinary interests, political purposes, and personal experiences. But the exceptionalist stance has withal produced remarkable continuities within and across these disciplines.