Shaky Foundations - (Studies in Modern Science, Technology, and the Environment) by Mark Solovey (Paperback)

About the Book

Shaky Foundations provides the first extensive examination of a new patronage system for the social sciences that emerged in the early Cold War years and took more definite shape during the 1950s and early 1960s. Focusing on the defense department, the Ford Foundation, and the National Science Foundation, Mark Solovey explores the struggles of these various funders to define what counted as legitimate social science and how their policies and programs helped to shape the goals, subject matter, methodologies, and social implications of academic social research in the nuclear age.

Book Synopsis

Numerous popular and scholarly accounts have exposed the deep impact of patrons on the production of scientific knowledge and its applications. Shaky Foundations provides the first extensive examination of a new patronage system for the social sciences that emerged in the early Cold War years and took more definite shape during the 1950s and early 1960s, a period of enormous expansion in American social science.

By focusing on the military, the Ford Foundation, and the National Science Foundation, Mark Solovey shows how this patronage system presented social scientists and other interested parties, including natural scientists and politicians, with new opportunities to work out the scientific identity, social implications, and public policy uses of academic social research. Solovey also examines significant criticisms of the new patronage system, which contributed to widespread efforts to rethink and reshape the politics-patronage-social science nexus starting in the mid-1960s.

Based on extensive archival research, Shaky Foundations addresses fundamental questions about the intellectual foundations of the social sciences, their relationships with the natural sciences and the humanities, and the political and ideological import of academic social inquiry.

Review Quotes

"Shaky Foundations offer[s] intersting insights into scholarship in Cold War North America."-- "British Journal of the History of Science"

"Shaky Foundations is a well-researched account of the rise of a new patronage system for the social sciences in the early Cold War-era United States. Solovey leaves readers with a sharpened understanding of the travails of social science research during the first two decades of the Cold War."
-- "Journal of American History"

"A crucial resource for the growing community of historians interested in the history of the social sciences, as well as for historians of education and intellectual historians of the Cold War."-- "The Historian"

"Solovey makes a valuable contribution to the growing literature on the development of social sciences in the U.S. during the 20th century. A major achievement is the author's presentation of this often complicated and complex story in a clearly written and well-documented manner. Highly recommended."-- "Choice"

"Solovey's book [presents] a complex and heterogeneous picture of the interest and the political positions surrounding the great advancement of the social sciences during the Postwar era."
-- "Sociologica"

"This is an important book. The brilliance of this book lies in pinpointing the origins of the terms that are still used in contemporary debates on the role of social science in the United States. This book is a critical tool in approaching the most essential question --what next for American social science?"-- "LSE Review of Books"

"We Are All Research Subjects Now: And Cold War-era safeguards won't protect us," by Sarah E. Igo-- "Journal of Higher Education"

"Shaky Foundations impressively pulls back the curtain on American social scientists and their complex relationships with funding agencies, offering crucial insights into the past--and the future--of social science."--David C. Engerman "author of Know Your Enemy: The Rise and Fall of America's Soviet Experts"

"Shaky Foundations offers an important new argument about how the American social sciences interacted with wider social and political forces during the Cold War era. Solovey has done very important work in establishing the bitterly contested character of postwar epistemological and institutional shifts."
-- "Isis"

"In this clearly written and thoroughly researched book, Mark Solovey takes a new approach to writing the history of the social sciences in America by 'following the money' and examining how patrons and their agendas shaped the development of the field."--Nadine Weidman "author of Constructing Scientific Psychology: Karl Lashley's Mind-Brain Debates"

"Solovey's social scientists are neither naïve researchers exploited by the military-industrial complex nor greedy masterminds eagerly anticipating their patrons' needs. Instead, he presents us with a series of encounters between program managers, disciplinary spokesmen, and political partisans, each of which demonstrates its participants' unexpectedly complex positions. In what feels like a prelude to contemporary partisan investigations of the social sciences, Shaky Foundations recounts numerous instances of McCarthy-era attacks on social scientists as leftist agitators."
-- "Science"

About the Author

MARK SOLOVEY is an assistant professor at the University of Toronto's Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology. He is the coeditor of Cold War Social Science: Knowledge Production, Liberal Democracy, and Human Nature.