Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-7cvxr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-22T17:37:19.144Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

SOCIAL SCIENCE IN BLACK AND WHITE: RETHINKING THE DISCIPLINES IN THE JIM CROW EMPIRE

Review products

Aldon D.Morris, The Scholar Denied: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Birth of Modern Sociology (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2015)
RobertVitalis, White World Order, Black Power Politics: The Birth of American International Relations (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 April 2017

SAM KLUG
SAM KLUG*
Affiliation:
Department of History, Harvard University E-mail: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

The rise of the social sciences in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America has been an especially fruitful topic for intellectual historians over the past four decades. An early, prominent explanation of the new levels of institutional power and intellectual authority achieved by the social sciences stressed the sense of interdependence created by the expansion of the market and the rise of new communications technologies. Others have emphasized intellectual struggles for authority among religious, popular, and scientific approaches to knowledge. Still others have laid the credit, or blame, for the ascension of the social sciences on liberal elites’ consolidation of their power after the collapse of monarchical authority and the successful repression of Marxist challenges. Two celebrated accounts have argued that ideological conditions, whether pervasive beliefs in American exceptionalism or visions of “scientific democracy,” shaped the development of the social sciences and their claims to intellectual authority. In the case of specific disciplines, like sociology and political science, the most supple histories have shown how broad changes in the structure of American capitalism created the conditions of possibility for new forms of knowledge about the social world, while more subtle intellectual shifts created openings for particular practices.

Type
Review Essays
Information
Modern Intellectual History , Volume 15 , Issue 3 , November 2018 , pp. 909 - 921
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Haskell, Thomas L., The Emergence of Professional Social Science: The American Social Science Association and the Nineteenth-Century Crisis of Authority (Urbana, 1977)Google Scholar.

2 For a brisk and fluid overview of several of these approaches see Ross, Dorothy, “Changing Contours of the Social Science Disciplines,” in Porter, Theodore M. and Ross, Dorothy, eds., The Cambridge History of Science, vol. 7, The Modern Social Sciences (Cambridge, 2003), 205–37Google Scholar.

3 Ross, Dorothy, The Origins of American Social Science (Cambridge, 1991)Google Scholar; Jewett, Andrew, Science, Democracy, and the American University: From the Civil War to the Cold War (Cambridge, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Morrison, Toni, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (New York, 1992)Google Scholar. Vitalis's argument runs along similar lines as those advanced by Ido Oren and John Hobson, but Vitalis delves deeper into foundation and individual archives, and unlike Oren and Hobson he examines African American intellectual production in detail. See Oren, Ido, Our Enemies and US: America's Rivalries and the Making of Political Science (Ithaca, 2002)Google Scholar; and Hobson, John M., The Eurocentric Conception of World Politics: Western International Theory, 1760–2010 (Cambridge, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Morris's lumping of Ward with his more thoroughly Spencerian rival William Graham Sumner is consistent with Daniel Breslau's depiction of Ward's position. See Breslau, Daniel, “The American Spencerians: Theorizing a New Science,” in Calhoun, Craig, ed., Sociology in America: A History (Chicago, 2007), 39–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Weber's embrace of Souls is explored in Scaff, Lawrence A., Max Weber in America (Princeton, 2011), 98–108Google Scholar.

7 This interpretation of Du Bois's racial thought is sharply contested, as Morris admits. Though there is not space to reconstruct the dispute here, Morris argues against scholars such as Kwame Anthony Appiah and Adolph Reed Jr, who contend that Du Bois retained a biological understanding of race as defined by “common blood,” or a Lamarckian theory of the inheritance of racial “traits.” See Appiah, Anthony, “The Uncompleted Argument: Du Bois and the Illusion of Race,” Critical Inquiry, 12/1 (1985), 21–37CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Reed, Adolph, “Du Bois's ‘Double Consciousness’: Race and Gender in Progressive Era American Thought,” Studies in American Political Development, 6/1 (1992), 93–139CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Morris, The Scholar Denied, 29–45.

8 Zimmerman, Andrew, “Decolonizing Weber,” Postcolonial Studies, 9/1 (2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 53–79, at 59.

9 Bois, W. E. B. Du, The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study (Philadelphia, 1996; first published 1899)Google Scholar, 15.

10 Ibid., 6.

11 Several other scholars have begun the work of uncovering this institutional and intellectual history. See Long, David and Schmidt, Brian C., eds., Imperialism and Internationalism in the Discipline of International Relations (Albany, 2005)Google Scholar; Bell, Duncan, “Writing the World: Disciplinary History and Beyond,” International Affairs, 85/1 (2009), 3–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Guilhot, Nicholas, ed., The Invention of International Relations Theory: Realism, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the 1954 Conference on Theory (New York, 2011)Google Scholar; and Isaac, Joel and Bell, Duncan, eds., Uncertain Empire: American History and the Idea of the Cold War (New York, 2012)Google Scholar.

12 Wilson, Woodrow, “The Reconstruction of the Southern States,” Atlantic Monthly, 87 (1901), 1–14Google Scholar; Manela, Erez, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (Oxford, 2007)Google Scholar.

13 The most comprehensive account of the political visions that both US and European actors invested in the Atlantic Charter is Borgwardt, Elizabeth, A New Deal for the World: America's Vision for Human Rights (Cambridge, MA, 2006)Google Scholar, though she devotes little attention to African Americans. For more on Logan's critique of trusteeship see Eschen, Penny M. Von, Race against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937–1957 (Ithaca, 1997)Google Scholar.

14 The historian who has done most to restore interest in Tate is Barbara Savage, who is currently writing her biography. For an early sample of this work see Savage, Barbara D., “Professor Merze Tate: Diplomatic Historian, Cosmopolitan Woman,” in Bay, Mia, Griffin, Farah J., Jones, Martha S., and Savage, Barbara D., eds., Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women (Chapel Hill, 2015), 252–70Google Scholar.

15 Nicholas Guilhot argues that some international-relations theorists’ silence on questions of decolonization stemmed from both the institutional bifurcation of “realist” thought from modernization theory and the critique of nationalism—including anticolonial nationalism—that was built into the conceptual architecture of international-relations theory. See Guilhot, Nicholas, “Imperial Realism: Post-war IR Theory and Decolonisation,” International History Review, 36/4 (2014), 678–720CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16 , Julian Go, “Sociology's Imperial Unconscious: The Emergence of Sociology in the Context of Empire,” in Steinmetz, George, ed., Sociology and Empire: The Imperial Entanglements of a Discipline (Durham, NC, 2013), 83–105CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17 Zimmerman, Andrew, Alabama in Africa: Booker T. Washington, the German Empire, and the Globalization of the New South (Princeton, 2010)Google Scholar; Frazier, E. Franklin, Race and Culture Contacts in the Modern World (Boston, 1965)Google Scholar.

18 Two examples of this language can be found in Cruse, Harold, “Revolutionary Nationalism and the Afro-American,” in Cruse, Rebellion or Revolution? (New York, 1968), 74–96Google Scholar; and Blauner, Robert, Racial Oppression in America (New York, 1972)Google Scholar. For a brief historical overview see Gutiérrez, Ramón A., “Internal Colonialism: An American Theory of Race,” Du Bois Review 1/2 (2004), 281–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar.