It is now near conventional wisdom that the nineteenth century witnessed a fundamental shift in the conceptual foundations of international law, and this change was intertwined with a coordinate shift in the geography of Western international legal institutions beyond Europe. At the same time, these shifts are commonly described as also involving a general process of secularization which decentered religiously inspired notions of natural law for positivist legal science which helped facilitate the progressive inclusion of non-Christian nations in the Middle East and Asia. As generally follows grand narratives of break and rupture, more granular histories have produced nuanced and ambivalent explorations of the myriad ways in which social change unfolds in muddier path-dependent genealogies.

Chapter 4, on poverty, describes the broad arc of twentieth-century poverty knowledge in terms of “disembedding.” Progressive era social research had cast poverty as a structural problem, one that would require structural solutions. When journalists and politicians thrust poverty back onto the social scientific agenda in the 1960s, the issue was framed-by economists and other social scientists-in narrow and absolute terms, to the explicit exclusion of inequality. Economists in the postwar policy firmament were decisive and notably aloof, but the behavioral science-orientation of their non-economist colleagues contributed to the War on Poverty's circumscribed ambitions too. By the time the political currents shifted in the 1970s, the stage was set for a further disembedding-a re-pauperization of the poverty problem that culminated in Bill Clinton's mid-1990s welfare rollback. The chapter foregrounds the often-determinate role played by politics and-in the case of the neoconservative think tank-mezzo-level policy discourse. But social scientists were not impotent bystanders in the disembedding process. They had, in the War on Poverty years, laid the groundwork for the dodging of inequality questions-and, ironically, for the personal-responsibility moralism that, in the Clinton era, marked a full retreat from liberal social provision.

Chapter 9 traces the relatively light pre-World War II engagement with mental health issues, with the partial exception of sociology. The postwar expansion of federal research funding, paired with explosive treatment demand for returning veterans, transformed psychology, swelling its ranks with clinicians. Federal largesse underwrote a surprisingly diverse range of projects, with psychologists, psychiatrists, and, to a lesser degree, sociologists as the main beneficiaries. As psychology swelled under its postwar “scientist-practitioner” settlement, sociology remained comparatively small and, by the 1960s, increasingly critical of psychiatry and the country's mental health institutions. Meanwhile, psychiatry had rapidly shed its psychoanalytic character by the 1980s, a response to dried-up funding and the psychopharmacological revolution. The chapter addresses the relative neglect of mental health by economists, up through the 1990s-even as the discipline marched its toolkit through many other social problem domains. The explanation for the anomaly is that mental health, in all its stigmatized irrationality, was a step too far for a discipline committed to the everyday fact, and scholarly application, of reason. With its tight discipline and established policy sway, economists had “no need to chase after scraps from the table served up by NIMH.”

Chapter 7 describes how interwar sociologists, together with social psychologists and legal scholars, swapped out environmental explanations for the biological accounts. In the early postwar decades, the overall explanatory frame remained environmental, though low-income and subcultural factors had, by the 1950s, largely supplanted immigration and urbanization. New philanthropic attention to delinquency helped guide the federal government's adoption of community action programs under the Democratic administrations of the 1960s, with heavy involvement from social scientists. Johnson's twinned Wars on Poverty and Crime were, at least initially, predicated on the postwar consensus that the root causes of crime were social. An uptick in crime and the urban riots put Johnson and the Great Society's social policies on the defensive-as Republicans refined a racialized backlash politics of “law and order.” By the late 1960s a handful of social scientists had launched high-profile attacks on the prevailing criminological mainstream, coinciding with a federally sanctioned turn toward “crime control” and standalone programs in “criminal justice.” Though still prominent, sociologists shared jurisdiction with other social scientists, including a growing and influential contingent of economists. By the 1980s, crime had been sheared off from other social issues, with the field now centered on crime's efficient management.

Chapter 5 recounts how social scientists, during and after the war, tended to treat discrimination as a system-one with interlocking legal, political, and economic dimensions. By the 1950s systemic frameworks had receded in favor of more individualistic explanations for the “race problem.” The study of discrimination remained strikingly cross-disciplinary, but the lens of prejudice-individual attitudes in the aggregate-was newly prominent, supported by philanthropy and Cold War discretion. Gary Becker brought microeconomics to discrimination in this period, too, in an approach that, like the psychology of prejudice, stressed the causal priority of dispositions. The announcement of formal equality in the civil rights legislation of the mid-1960s complicated the study of race for the balance of the century. Systemic accounts were partially revived, and evidence for persisting racial inequality was widely documented. But causal factors proved harder to identify. In the wake of de jure segregation, even radical critics of “institutional racism” and “internal colonialism” conceded that discrimination's effects were easier to describe than its causal dynamics. Quantitative sociologists and economists deployed a cascade of measures that demonstrated disparate outcomes, though again without clear explanatory accounts rooted in discrimination.

Chapter 10 describes the curious case of the social science of war, which shed its social problem framing in the early postwar era. From the interwar years through to the late 1940s, war was a public-facing problem whose solution-the eradication of armed conflict-seemed within reach for many social scientists and their internationalist allies. Quincy Wright's magisterial and multi-disciplinary 1942 A Study of War exemplified the social-scientific ambition to foster peace through an expert-guided world order. The Cold War, however, abruptly stalled war's brief career as a social problem. The Soviet threat, and the national security state erected in response, helped to reframe the social science of war in management terms. For the next two decades most social scientists of war-though split on methodology and approach-hitched their study to the Cold War struggle. By the late 1960s the Vietnam debacle had implicated Defense-sponsored work on counter-insurgency and psychological warfare, leading to a public backslash against military entanglements. Many social scientists abandoned the study of war in Vietnam's wake, ceding the domain to political science in general and international relations in particular. The result was a social science of war that remained, into the 1980s, centered on statecraft and security.

Chapter 6 addresses the “black ghetto”-the persistent concentration of African-American poverty in the country's inner cities. The interwar Chicago School's race-agnostic paradigm was challenged by a handful of high-profile sociologists and economists in the mid-1940s in works that, though they documented a discriminatory thicket, failed to win public or policy traction. Only with the televised urban riots of the mid- to late 1960s, in the midst of Johnson's Great Society, did the black ghetto attain full-fledged problem status. Social scientists registered the new stakes in a wave of studies that established the battle lines for decades. Works that stressed the spatially concentrated legacy of racial discrimination were pitted-in a highly charged political climate-against culture-of-poverty accounts. The research lines, in turn, informed competing remedies, notably geographic dispersal, community development, and-in a reflection of the country's rightward drift-outright disengagement. The broad if uneven patterns in the post-1960s scholarship are a de-emphasis of race, on the one hand, and the strengthening of individualistic frames, on the other. There is, moreover, a rough disciplinary divide: Sociologists, he shows, have tended to highlight spatial and social factors, with economists and political scientists favoring, for the most part, more individualist and class-based accounts.

Chapter 3 traces the peculiar-and sometimes hands-off-relationship of the mainline social sciences to education research over the course of the twentieth century. The existence of low-status education schools, operating as standalone units on the professional margins of the US university, colored the shape and volume of social scientific inquiry in shifting ways. Into the 1950s, education was typically positioned as a solution for other problems of society, rather than its own focal concern. With the Cold War and the federal government's new mandate to steward economic growth as backdrop, “fixing” the nation's schools took on special urgency, as exemplified in the early 1980s by a policy and political climate increasingly oriented to national competitiveness. Social scientists from the main disciplines move in and out of the education domain, sometimes yielding jurisdiction to “ed school” faculty whose radicalism has tended to marginalize their contributions since the 1960s. From the 1970s on, meanwhile, the policy prominence of economics has increased. The human capital framework, in particular, supplied an individualistic and vocational lens to assess the school system, one that sidelined the stratification and inequality concerns of other social scientists and ed school researchers.

Chapter 2 recounts how social scientists were already fretting about the family early in the century. The institution, according to sociologists through the late interwar period, was especially vulnerable to the disorganization wrought by modern social change. Concern for the family's fate took on a new, international cast in the early Cold War period, in conjunction with the rise of demography as a cross-disciplinary field. In the contest with the Soviets, the drive to modernize the “new states” had, as its demographic dimension, a concern for large family size. The claim that economic development, and insulation from socialism, hinged on fertility control was advanced by demographers, many but not all housed in sociology. By the mid-1960s, a domestic-facing research landscape was gathering momentum, supported by government and foundation interest in the family's role as transmitter of inequality. The domain of family demography, a resource-intensive specialty clustered in cross-disciplinary centers, spread throughout the remainder of the century—dwarfing other claimants, including Gary Becker's economics of the family.