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TANGLED LOOPS: THEORY, HISTORY, AND THE HUMAN SCIENCES IN MODERN AMERICA*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2009

JOEL ISAAC
JOEL ISAAC*
Affiliation:
Department of History, Queen Mary, University of London E-mail: [email protected]
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Extract

During the first two decades of the Cold War, a new kind of academic figure became prominent in American public life: the credentialed social scientist or expert in the sciences of administration who was also, to use the parlance of the time, a “man of affairs.” Some were academic high-fliers conscripted into government roles in which their intellectual and organizational talents could be exploited. McGeorge Bundy, Walt Rostow, and Robert McNamara are the archetypes of such persons. An overlapping group of scholars became policymakers and political advisers on issues ranging from social welfare provision to nation-building in emerging postcolonial states. Many of these men—and almost without exception they were men—were also consummate operators within the patronage system that grew up around American universities after World War II. Postwar leaders of the social and administrative sciences such as Talcott Parsons and Herbert Simon were skilled scientific brokers of just this sort: good “committee men,” grant-getters, proponents of interdisciplinary inquiry, and institution-builders. This hard-nosed, suit-wearing, business-like persona was connected to new, technologically refined forms of social science. No longer sage-like social philosophers or hardscrabble, number-crunching empiricists, academic human scientists portrayed themselves as possessors of tools and programs designed for precision social engineering. Antediluvian “social science” was eschewed in favour of mathematical, behavioural, and systems-based approaches to “human relations” such as operations research, behavioral science, game theory, systems theory, and cognitive science.

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Essays
Information
Modern Intellectual History , Volume 6 , Issue 2 , August 2009 , pp. 397 - 424
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2009

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67 Hacking, “Looping Effect,” 368–70. See also idem, “The Making and Molding of Child Abuse,” Critical Inquiry 17 (Winter 1991), 254–5.

68 Hacking, “Making up People,” 108.

69 This is not to mark a sharp conceptual or methodological distinction between the Geisteswissenschaften and the Naturwissenschaften. The looping effect is not an epistemological criterion. The most perfectly naturalistic social-scientific theory may loop into human self-understandings just as well as hermeneutic or interpretive concepts. Hence the historian can remain agnostic about the possibility of a natural science of human behavior. Even if one existed, it could still “contaminate” the descriptions of those with access to that knowledge. For further reflections on this topic see Hacking, “Looping Effects,” 364.

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79 MacKenzie and Millo, “Constructing a Market,” 108–9, 112–15.

80 Stephen A. Ross quoted in ibid., 109.

81 Ibid., 120–27. See also MacKenzie, “An Equation and Its Worlds.”

82 MacKenzie and Millo, “Constructing a Market,” 127–35.

83 MacKenzie, An Engine, Not a Camera, 19.

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87 Light, “Taking Games Seriously.”