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Cold War: Impact on Social and Behavioral Sciences
Cold War: Impact on Social and Behavioral Sciences Hamilton Cravens, University of Minnesota, Minnesota, MN, USA Ó 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Abstract The Cold War encouraged the development of engineering and behaviorally controlling assumptions, concepts, and methods in the social sciences, especially in the United States and the nations in its orbit. Globalization and the multiple perspectives it revealed ultimately overrode Cold War notions and nostrums.
Cold War’s Impact
Impact of the Cold War in the Americas
What was the Cold War’s impact on the social and behavioral sciences? Many historians argue that the Cold War began in 1947 and ended in 1991. It was the bipolar competition between the United States and the Soviet Union, together with each nation’s allies, between each alliance, and for the allegiances of the remaining ‘neutral’ nations. (Gaddis (1972), especially pp. 283–362, the standard conservative view; for provocative and contrary views of the Cold War’s duration and characteristics, see several of the essays in Joel Issac and Duncan Bell (2012), especially pp. 19–50, 91–141, et passim. It could be argued that the Cold War’s impact on the social sciences lasted much longer than the Cold War itself.) In the late 1940s and early 1950s the United States cemented Western Europe in its orbit, together with several Asian states, including Japan, South Korea, and South Viet Nam. The Soviet government kept almost all of the Red Army’s wartime gains in Eastern Europe, although in time it permitted West Berlin to remain free and Austria to be neutralized. Each superpower attempted to impose or insinuate its preferred social, political, and economic systems on each of its subordinate or allied states. Those associated with the United States formed democratic, market capitalist societies, with social welfare systems, while in the Russian bloc, Soviet forms of government, enterprise, science, education, culture, and social welfare were imposed from Moscow. In assessing the impact of the Cold War on the social and behavioral sciences, we must realize that there were important differences between the impact of the Cold War in the Western world, and in the Communist nations, chiefly the Soviet Union, its Eastern European satraps, and the Peoples’ Republic of China. National intellectual and political differences made for different results. And there were differences in the ‘underdeveloped world,’ as in Latin America, and in the areas emancipated by post-World War II decolonization, as in parts of Asia, notably India, and the Middle East. The picture is very complex. Not all nations experienced the development of the social sciences at the same time in history. Most social sciences existed before the Cold War began. The Cold War had an enormous influence in reshaping and expanding the social sciences’ character: their approaches, research agendas, funding possibilities, and all manner of other uses for public and private enterprises. It also sparked critical, even opposite, reactions, such as democratic Marxist movements in the West and its allies, and dissent in the Communist world.
In the United States, the federal government underwrote much behavioral science research in economics, political science, area studies, psychology and sociology and related endeavors through various agencies and departments of defense, intelligence, science, and medicine. The number of dollars available for social and behavioral science research and practice from private philanthropy was perhaps one-tenth of that available from federal sources in a typical year during the Cold War. Within the U.S. social sciences, there was the emergence of the behavioral sciences, clearly a Cold War product, from its Second World War origins as a kind of engineering social science to devise methods and approaches to win the global conflict. The behavioral scientist, as distinct from the social scientist, sought to create rigorous methods, often informed by high mathematics, for understanding and predicting the behavior of individuals, of groups, of institutions, and of entire nations; the social scientist, traditionally, sought to gather information and to explain what happened or what would happen. Social scientists had used descriptive statistics since the mid-nineteenth century. Behavioral scientists went further and deployed sophisticated probability techniques and applied methods from inferential statistics. In the 1950s and 1960s, to take one example, political scientists experienced a ‘behavioral revolution.’ They imitated natural scientists in the sense that they employed formal classifications, correlations, appeals to synchronic systems and structures, as well as the formal location and purpose of units within larger political systems. They moved away from prior developmental historicism and toward a neopositivist empiricism. They often used one or another modernization scheme when talking about comparisons between the developed and the underdeveloped worlds – between political cultures in the industrialized West and the preindustrial ‘third world.’ Implicit was often the shopworn assumption of the general superiority of the West over the preindustrial regions. Thus were absolutist patriotism and scientific positivism parallel underlying assumptions of American social and behavioral science. The domestic and international tensions of the Cold War simply magnified these attitudes. In the 1950s, American fears of potential Soviet nuclear parity – later proven to be false – drove Americans, whether social scientists or not, to intensify their opposition to Soviet aggression on all fronts, real and perceived. Although the Cold War introduced new issues and inspired new techniques, such as futures studies or game theoretical
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International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2nd edition, Volume 4
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-08-097086-8.03199-8
Cold War: Impact on Social and Behavioral Sciences
nuclear war strategies, basic political attitudes and cleavages were not so much changed as intensified, especially a heightened patriotism and a worshipful faith in scientific and engineering rationality – scientific positivism, that is. Thus American sociology was divided into various camps. The structural–functional school of Harvard’s Department of Social Relations, led by sociologist Talcott Parsons, emphasized the adjustment of the individual to the larger social system, and Robert K. Merton, of Columbia, promoted a similar but more modest version adjustment according to theories of middle range application. These might well characterize the posture of the postwar liberal in American politics. More radical were sociologists who followed the social conflict ideas of Lewis Coser, who insisted that conflict among differing social interests, or groups, constituted the warp and woof of society. Even more radical were C. Wright Mills, of Columbia, and his hardy followers, who declared that the social system had been taken over by powerful oligarchies and elites and that the average ‘mass man’ had little agency in society. Alvin Gouldner insisted that mainstream sociology simply upheld the status quo. All were fierce critics of Cold War conservatism, as well as what they believed was social science that buttressed Cold War conservatism. Economists were similarly split into several camps. The macroeconomists who followed John Maynard Keynes had the experience of the 1940s to the 1970s to show that their aggregate demand economics did lift employment and produce prosperity; World War II and the Cold War sparked such great government spending which, together with certain tools, such as national income accounting and specific mathematical theorems, spelled unparalleled economic growth for the United States. Yet there was at least one other kind of economics, neoclassical microeconomics, or the study of the individual agent or firm in a market, which feted a philosophy of individualism, not the aggregate, whose proponents pushed it into the terrain of abstract mathematics, and rigorous axiomatic logic, thus laying claim to a higher level of scientific, positivistic economics. With the problems of ‘stagflation’ of the 1970s in the economy, the neoclassicists bested the Keynesians in their discipline and in the public arena. Hence partisans of conservative neoclassical economics won out in the 1980s and early 1990s, as the Reagan Administration scuttled détente with the Soviets and the Cold War heated up, as it had not since the later 1960s. There were also ‘heterodox economists’: they included libertarians, who wanted to wish government away; Marxist economists, who pined for social democracy; and ‘postKeynesian’ economists, who worked to convince others that Keynes’s doctrines had a rigorous mathematical, as well as a policy basis, and better for all than the dog-eat-dog ideology they accused the neoclassical economists of peddling. But this strange assortment of ‘heterodox economists’ could only agree among themselves that the neoclassical conservatives were wrong; by the 1990s they were split into warring groups themselves among post-Keynesians, libertarians, feminists, and Marxists – among others. Development of the neutral or ‘underdeveloped’ world was also a part of hemispheric social and behavioral science. The trailblazers were likely the anthropologists, who during the 1940s and 1950s, turned from the study of man’s origins with preliterate tribes to the study of contemporary peoples in exotic
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areas of strategic importance to the United States. The Cold War made such work even more crucial to American policymakers, who believed the nation was engaged in a twilight struggle, as President Kennedy put it, for the ‘underdeveloped’ world’s allegiance against the Communist menace. According to Walt W. Rostow, sometime economic historian and presidential adviser, all nations followed certain stages of economic growth to urbanization and industrialization; this became high policy with which to thwart Communism and to promote democratic capitalism around the globe. During the Cold War, the United States’ military, intelligence, and international development agencies funded numerous social science investigations in the ‘underdeveloped nations’ seeking, in the case of South Viet Nam, to support the Diem dictatorship, or in the case of Chile, to carry out through ‘Project Camelot,’ a study of how to design a general systems model to predict and control internal strife and promote counterinsurgency in peripheral countries. In any given time there were perhaps several dozen such covert social science operations functioning with governmental support. Some social science expertise was indigenous in Latin America. The nineteenth century independence movements fostered champions of liberal statism, Comtean positivism, and German historical or institutional economics. Between the Second World War and the 1970s, as Latin America entered the world economy, its economists, whether proficient academically or self-trained, wrote much about the economics of underdeveloped countries and regions – that is, their region. For example, the left-liberal Argentine economist Raúl Prebisch developed from the 1940s on a center–periphery theory of economic underdevelopment that was both theoretical and historical, that social scientists and governmental apparatchiks throughout Latin America took up. He also created a network of like-minded economists through the Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA), located in Santiago, Chile, and which nurtured a Latin American economics profession anxious to promote its region. Certain groups of United States economists, as the neoclassical economists at the University of Chicago, established rival groups of conservative economists, as at the Catholic University of Chile, who went on to advise the region’s rightist regimes, such as Pinochet’s in Chile. Here the regional stimulus was Fidel Castro’s Cuba, against which both the United States and the rightist regimes reacted, plotted, and schemed. The Cold War definitely spilled over into the Western Hemisphere. The social scientists, as retainers of various governments, smartly followed behind their patrons.
The Impact of the Cold War in Western Europe Before the Second World War, social science’s intellectual center was Europe. On the European continent, dictatorships arose in the interwar and war years from Iberia to the Urals, save for England, France, and a few neutrals, such as Switzerland and Sweden. Whether these dictatorships were Fascist, National Socialist, or Marxist-Leninist, their leaders destroyed or drove into exile most of their social sciences – and practitioners. Only those social sciences that pleased the dictators, such as eugenics in Nazi Germany, or eugenics and psychology in the Soviet Union, survived the war years. Thereafter consequently the United States became a world power in the social
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sciences, thanks in addition to its expansion and mobilization of social scientists. Europe’s distress was America’s advantage. In postwar Western Europe – the areas allied with the United States and liberated from Nazi or Fascist control – there was a rebuilding of society and economy, thanks in no small measure to the Marshall Plan. Everywhere the Americans there behaved much as they did at home, so that national autonomy and democracy emerged in Western Europe. There the masses demanded, and got, sometimes with the threat of Communist influence, a new deal of social welfare legislation which in turn necessitated the training and employment of social scientists to administer the new states’ social welfare, economies, political democracies, and defense forces, in the form of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), formed as a cordon sanitaire against the engorged postwar Soviet empire to the east. The Western European countries demanded NATO from the U.S. as the price of the founding of the West German Republic in 1949 and its rearmament in 1955. Thus an American empire was created there, but by mutual consent and invitation, not terror, coercion, or imperial rule from Washington, as was the case in Soviet-controlled Eastern Europe. Hence the social sciences in Western Europe followed both national traditions and American influence, with the latter usually secondary. Thanks to the American influence, or lack thereof in other cases, the Cold War stimulated an intellectual renaissance. In Great Britain, for example, sociology came into its own, even appearing in Oxford and Cambridge by the 1960s; initially British sociology followed American patterns, but after 1970 other, more indigenous traditions, often ruggedly empiricist, reasserted themselves. The American influence could be felt mainly in institutional forms, as in disciplinary departments and formal associations. On the Continent, American and European traditions clashed and melded. Thanks to American influence in the United Nations Economic, Social, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), American forms of social science organization, as in disciplinary departments and associations transferred to the Continent, but theory was a different matter. In France, the Marxist influence on sociology was evident, as were the ideas of Michel Foucault and others. In West Germany, American intellectual traditions vied with indigenous ones, such as the returned social science exiles, such as the Frankfurt School, but also conflict theorists such as Ralf Dahrendorf. And there were democratic Marxist social scientists as well, thanks in some measure to the Social Democratic Party. Anthropology in America became focused on contemporary cultures, whereas anthropology in Europe tended to focus on the effects of colonization. American anthropology became useful to the nation’s cold war social sciences, whereas European anthropology was largely oriented away from the Cold War’s direct influences. Two disciplines in particular, psychology and economics, betrayed Cold War influences but also became international technical behavioral sciences. Psychology became increasingly Americanized. In West Germany, professors from the Nazi era retired only in the 1960s, when a younger generation emerged, insisting on American-style psychology, meaning datadriven research and statistical treatment of results. In Britain, psychology closely paralleled the American version. And by the
1970s, everywhere else in Western Europe, the Anglo-American synthesis of cognitive behaviorism dominated. Economics also mutated into an increasingly technical behavioral science, which split into conflicting macroeconomic and microeconomic branches, often with the former pushing a Keynesian or post-Keynesian agenda, and the latter an updated version of Austrian individualistic economics. The technical methods psychologists and economists used made their sciences international, but the methods themselves were largely American and Cold War-inspired in origin. If the technical innovations were largely a Cold War legacy, their cosmopolitanism betrayed both American and European elements. Thus the Europeans retained a sense of society as a collectivity, whereas the Americans’ underlying attitudes always retained some agency for individuals – and individualism.
The Impact of the Cold War in the Soviet World Josef Stalin suppressed most of the social sciences in the Soviet Union well before the Cold War. He would not tolerate sociology, law, political science, or economics, unless derived from his notions of Party orthodoxy. The construction of a Soviet centralized system of science permitted only one social science – psychology – some latitude, largely because Ivan Pavlov’s work had been reconciled with dialectical materialism, the Party’s official philosophy. Dialectical materialists sought to explain the world by insisting that all that exists is real; the real world exists as matter–energy; and this matter–energy develops in accordance with universal regularities or laws. They thus refuted idealism, especially the Western versions. Yet ironically dialectical materialism permitted Soviet scientists to engage in philosophical jargon – ‘newspeak’ – that in turn permitted considerable flexibility, as well as camouflage for scientific discourse safe from Party censors’ onslaughts. Thus Soviet psychologists rehabilitated consciousness and other mental constructs justifying attempts to create a new ‘Soviet personality,’ a Party priority, and Soviet cybernetics, again a patriotic necessity, developed from ‘newspeak’ discussions among those to compete with America in computers (Slava Gerovitch, 2002: Chapters 1–6). Cybernetics was indeed a Cold War interdisciplinary behavioral science. The Soviet imprint was manifest on the social sciences in its satellites in the Cold War era. The social sciences received less funding and more intellectual control than other sciences, thanks to the monopoly of the Communist Party in each country. The Russian occupiers made sure their hierarchical and centralized system of government institutes of science was created in each satellite. The Party governments in each country used the social sciences to enforce Party hegemony. Results differed from country to country. In East Germany, for example, until the 1960s, Party officials permitted Nazi-era psychologists to retain their chairs on the Leninist ground that bourgeois scientists could work for the Party; as this generation retired, indigenous devotees of Soviet psychology replaced them. Yet even these professors mixed Soviet-style cognitive research with American information-processing approaches as a new ‘Marxist’ approach congruent with the indispensable current ‘scientific–technical revolution.’ Poland’s
Cold War: Impact on Social and Behavioral Sciences
national consciousness was the strongest in Soviet Europe. Catholicism and repressed Polish national pride kept Polish intellectuals free in their private thoughts, at least; and whatever had the imprint of the Russian bear was distasteful to most Poles. Polish social science during the whole period was more up to date with Western social science than social science in other Soviet satellites. Psychology flourished in Poland as the study of national character, seen as a collective entity. Even before the Soviet collapse, Poland was an unreliable ally, as the emergence of the labor union Solidarity in the 1980s suggested. Often the social sciences were weak in some satellites, such as Bulgaria or Yugoslavia, and the imposition of Soviet orthodoxy came easily. Yet in all the satellite countries, the social scientists turned inward, toward studies of their own national character; commonly they paid mere lip service to Moscow. In this way they gained some distance, some breathing room, from Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy. Hence the Cold War had an enormous impact, institutionally and, to a lesser extent, intellectually, upon Central and Eastern Europe, especially with the establishment of Communist governance, something that the Soviets had known since Stalin consolidated his rule in the late 1920s in Russia.
The Impact of the Cold War in Asia Among Asiatic Communist states – chiefly the People’s Republic of China and the Democratic Republic of North Korea – the social sciences were completely under the thumb of their dictators and Party officials. Neither Mao Zedong nor Kim Il-sung would permit competition with their social doctrines. In the 1930s, however, Chinese social scientists had imported Western social science to facilitate the country’s modernization, especially in sociology and economics – precisely the fields that Mao would commandeer and submit to his ideas. Hence in the Cold War era, non-Communist social scientists retreated to Taiwan and Hong Kong. In Taiwan, those who retained an ideological affinity with the mainland were suppressed. In Hong Kong, thanks to British colonial traditions of political stability and academic freedom, Chinese social scientists developed their teaching and research often along the lines of American and British social sciences, where many had received their postgraduate training. In South Korea, at first the social sciences were a pale imitation of the American social sciences, especially sociological structural–functionalism and conservative microeconomics. Eventually, as South Korea’s political culture became increasingly democratic, so its social scientists began to study problems facing their nation, such as national division, the status of a postcolonial society in the world economy, and related issues. Two major Asian states, Japan and India, demonstrated much about the Cold War’s impact beyond the Americas and Europe. In the early postwar years Japan’s American occupiers democratized society, politics, and the economy, although Japanese cultural traditions of collectivity, obedience, and central authority remained below the surface. Social scientists then wished to eliminate Japan’s negative history and reputation, and adopted many American social science ideas and methods. Yet in the 1970s and beyond, Japanese Marxism, a product of the 1920s, was revived as a way to reassert Japan’s
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intellectual identity apart from Western influences. Japan was doubtless an American ally in world politics, as were the nations of Western Europe, which tilted the Cold War toward the United States. Yet there was a reassertion of Japanese cultural and intellectual identity and independence, married with Americanstyle disciplinary formation and institutionalization. With British rule in the eighteenth century came a rich and complex tradition of social research – for administrative and imperial purposes, to be sure – in India. After independence in 1947, Indian sociologists and anthropologists at first gravitated to American-style structural–functionalist analysis of modernization. They focused on rural communities undergoing social change. The village they assumed was a functional unit with different caste groups, factionalism, class antagonisms, patron– client relations, and the relation of the village to the outside world. The University of Chicago’s sociology programs heavily influenced these scholars. One could also see the influence of structuralism in studies of caste, kinship structure, ritual, and religious practices and beliefs. Yet there was also a growing interest in the use of Marxian methods of social and economic analysis. In economics, independence brought forth the problem of national economic development, and in the early postwar years there was much interest in government planning of the economy. Indian social scientists sought to conform to international standards of excellence, which meant they looked toward the United States, Western Europe, and Japan, not the Communist world, for their ideas. In part due to the British influence, Indian economists used statistical investigations of Indian economic life to help central planning. Economists such as Amartya Sen and others asked basic questions about equity and justice in Indian modernization. From the 1970s on, government planning fell into disfavor and economists began asking more specific questions about, for example, whether agriculture promoted or retarded development, about whether government promotion of industrialization was beneficial or harmful, the role of technology, and the impact of the world economy and of foreign investment on Indian economic growth. Indian political thinking was predominantly liberal, and this was reflected in its governmental structures and among its political scientists. Indian political scientist Rajni Kothari, for example, insisted in 1970 there was a dynamic core in the Congress Party’s dominance of national democratic politics. Using a structural–functional analysis, Kothari argued that the “Congress system” connected government and party at different levels, from the nation’s capital to the cities and the rural hinterlands. This accommodated dissent and helped stimulate needed correctives. Yet, perhaps inevitably, there was criticism from an indigenous Marxist social democratic left, not unlike developments in Western Europe and Japan, and leftliberal Marxian analysis informed dissent among Indian social scientists and politicians.
Conclusion What, then, was the impact of the Cold War on the social and behavioral sciences? It encouraged, from developments in the Second World War, a positivistic, manipulative, and engineering approach to human behavior in all its dimensions. While the Cold War was in its early, intense phases – until the
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resolution of the Berlin and Cuban missile crises of the early 1960s – the social and behavioral sciences closely mirrored the values and remedies of their sponsoring central governments. These political and intellectual straitjackets began to fray and dissolve outside the Communist world by the 1970s, thanks to liberal and radical dissent in the United States, in Western Europe, in Japan, and even in India, and if the Cold War idea of using social science for social engineering maintained its vitality, the Cold Warrior attitudes diminished considerably, and national differences and preferences asserted themselves. In the Communist world, it was only when the Soviet Union collapsed, and China came under Mao’s successors, MarxistLeninist rhetorically but nationalistic and capitalistic in fact, that matters changed. In Central and Eastern Europe, each former satellite retained, to some extent, Russian-style centralization of cultural life, but the expansion or reinvigoration of universities promoted Western-style standards of social science teaching and research, again, with each nation’s elite asserting its distinctive national cultural identity. In the People’s Republic, social science that supported the nation’s development, for example, sociology and demography emerged from the Party’s stranglehold. An indirect influence of the Cold War, and not just in the United States, was the rise of ideologically driven think tanks, such as the right-wing Heritage Foundation in the United States, which employed social scientists as spokespersons for their ideas to influence public opinion and governmental policy. As such the think tanks came to challenge the intellectual authority of the social and behavioral sciences in academic and even government academy circles. Here was Cold War social engineering, often financed by private interests, creating potentially powerful Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) that could direct or redirect public policy along risky, even dangerous pathways, with little, if any, influence from ordinary citizens. The United States likely had the most such think tanks. There was no small irony in this, for throughout the nineteenth century, and into the twentieth, American social science was often a folk movement, democratic to the core. In conclusion, the Cold War dominated certain aspects of the social and behavioral sciences around the globe for some years, but clearly after 1970 or so, and especially with the passing of Mao in China and much later, the collapse of the USSR, the Cold War was in the main a memory, and not always a pleasant one to those involved. Yet in the long perspective, the world’s peoples had become increasingly aware that they were living in a global civilization. The Cold War obscured and retarded that perception for several decades. But the fact of globalization trumped Cold War perspectives. Now the world appeared highly diverse, constituted of n-dimensions, proportions, and images.
See also: Coser, Lewis A. (1913–2003); Dahrendorf, Ralf (1929–2009); Keynes, John Maynard (1883–1946); Marxist Approaches to Social Work; Mills, Charles Wright (1916–62).
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Abstract The Cold War encouraged the development of engineering and behaviorally controlling assumptions, concepts, and methods in the social sciences, especially in the United States and the nations in its orbit. Globalization and the multiple perspectives it revealed ultimately overrode Cold War notions and nostrums.
Cold War’s Impact
Impact of the Cold War in the Americas
What was the Cold War’s impact on the social and behavioral sciences? Many historians argue that the Cold War began in 1947 and ended in 1991. It was the bipolar competition between the United States and the Soviet Union, together with each nation’s allies, between each alliance, and for the allegiances of the remaining ‘neutral’ nations. (Gaddis (1972), especially pp. 283–362, the standard conservative view; for provocative and contrary views of the Cold War’s duration and characteristics, see several of the essays in Joel Issac and Duncan Bell (2012), especially pp. 19–50, 91–141, et passim. It could be argued that the Cold War’s impact on the social sciences lasted much longer than the Cold War itself.) In the late 1940s and early 1950s the United States cemented Western Europe in its orbit, together with several Asian states, including Japan, South Korea, and South Viet Nam. The Soviet government kept almost all of the Red Army’s wartime gains in Eastern Europe, although in time it permitted West Berlin to remain free and Austria to be neutralized. Each superpower attempted to impose or insinuate its preferred social, political, and economic systems on each of its subordinate or allied states. Those associated with the United States formed democratic, market capitalist societies, with social welfare systems, while in the Russian bloc, Soviet forms of government, enterprise, science, education, culture, and social welfare were imposed from Moscow. In assessing the impact of the Cold War on the social and behavioral sciences, we must realize that there were important differences between the impact of the Cold War in the Western world, and in the Communist nations, chiefly the Soviet Union, its Eastern European satraps, and the Peoples’ Republic of China. National intellectual and political differences made for different results. And there were differences in the ‘underdeveloped world,’ as in Latin America, and in the areas emancipated by post-World War II decolonization, as in parts of Asia, notably India, and the Middle East. The picture is very complex. Not all nations experienced the development of the social sciences at the same time in history. Most social sciences existed before the Cold War began. The Cold War had an enormous influence in reshaping and expanding the social sciences’ character: their approaches, research agendas, funding possibilities, and all manner of other uses for public and private enterprises. It also sparked critical, even opposite, reactions, such as democratic Marxist movements in the West and its allies, and dissent in the Communist world.
In the United States, the federal government underwrote much behavioral science research in economics, political science, area studies, psychology and sociology and related endeavors through various agencies and departments of defense, intelligence, science, and medicine. The number of dollars available for social and behavioral science research and practice from private philanthropy was perhaps one-tenth of that available from federal sources in a typical year during the Cold War. Within the U.S. social sciences, there was the emergence of the behavioral sciences, clearly a Cold War product, from its Second World War origins as a kind of engineering social science to devise methods and approaches to win the global conflict. The behavioral scientist, as distinct from the social scientist, sought to create rigorous methods, often informed by high mathematics, for understanding and predicting the behavior of individuals, of groups, of institutions, and of entire nations; the social scientist, traditionally, sought to gather information and to explain what happened or what would happen. Social scientists had used descriptive statistics since the mid-nineteenth century. Behavioral scientists went further and deployed sophisticated probability techniques and applied methods from inferential statistics. In the 1950s and 1960s, to take one example, political scientists experienced a ‘behavioral revolution.’ They imitated natural scientists in the sense that they employed formal classifications, correlations, appeals to synchronic systems and structures, as well as the formal location and purpose of units within larger political systems. They moved away from prior developmental historicism and toward a neopositivist empiricism. They often used one or another modernization scheme when talking about comparisons between the developed and the underdeveloped worlds – between political cultures in the industrialized West and the preindustrial ‘third world.’ Implicit was often the shopworn assumption of the general superiority of the West over the preindustrial regions. Thus were absolutist patriotism and scientific positivism parallel underlying assumptions of American social and behavioral science. The domestic and international tensions of the Cold War simply magnified these attitudes. In the 1950s, American fears of potential Soviet nuclear parity – later proven to be false – drove Americans, whether social scientists or not, to intensify their opposition to Soviet aggression on all fronts, real and perceived. Although the Cold War introduced new issues and inspired new techniques, such as futures studies or game theoretical
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nuclear war strategies, basic political attitudes and cleavages were not so much changed as intensified, especially a heightened patriotism and a worshipful faith in scientific and engineering rationality – scientific positivism, that is. Thus American sociology was divided into various camps. The structural–functional school of Harvard’s Department of Social Relations, led by sociologist Talcott Parsons, emphasized the adjustment of the individual to the larger social system, and Robert K. Merton, of Columbia, promoted a similar but more modest version adjustment according to theories of middle range application. These might well characterize the posture of the postwar liberal in American politics. More radical were sociologists who followed the social conflict ideas of Lewis Coser, who insisted that conflict among differing social interests, or groups, constituted the warp and woof of society. Even more radical were C. Wright Mills, of Columbia, and his hardy followers, who declared that the social system had been taken over by powerful oligarchies and elites and that the average ‘mass man’ had little agency in society. Alvin Gouldner insisted that mainstream sociology simply upheld the status quo. All were fierce critics of Cold War conservatism, as well as what they believed was social science that buttressed Cold War conservatism. Economists were similarly split into several camps. The macroeconomists who followed John Maynard Keynes had the experience of the 1940s to the 1970s to show that their aggregate demand economics did lift employment and produce prosperity; World War II and the Cold War sparked such great government spending which, together with certain tools, such as national income accounting and specific mathematical theorems, spelled unparalleled economic growth for the United States. Yet there was at least one other kind of economics, neoclassical microeconomics, or the study of the individual agent or firm in a market, which feted a philosophy of individualism, not the aggregate, whose proponents pushed it into the terrain of abstract mathematics, and rigorous axiomatic logic, thus laying claim to a higher level of scientific, positivistic economics. With the problems of ‘stagflation’ of the 1970s in the economy, the neoclassicists bested the Keynesians in their discipline and in the public arena. Hence partisans of conservative neoclassical economics won out in the 1980s and early 1990s, as the Reagan Administration scuttled détente with the Soviets and the Cold War heated up, as it had not since the later 1960s. There were also ‘heterodox economists’: they included libertarians, who wanted to wish government away; Marxist economists, who pined for social democracy; and ‘postKeynesian’ economists, who worked to convince others that Keynes’s doctrines had a rigorous mathematical, as well as a policy basis, and better for all than the dog-eat-dog ideology they accused the neoclassical economists of peddling. But this strange assortment of ‘heterodox economists’ could only agree among themselves that the neoclassical conservatives were wrong; by the 1990s they were split into warring groups themselves among post-Keynesians, libertarians, feminists, and Marxists – among others. Development of the neutral or ‘underdeveloped’ world was also a part of hemispheric social and behavioral science. The trailblazers were likely the anthropologists, who during the 1940s and 1950s, turned from the study of man’s origins with preliterate tribes to the study of contemporary peoples in exotic
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areas of strategic importance to the United States. The Cold War made such work even more crucial to American policymakers, who believed the nation was engaged in a twilight struggle, as President Kennedy put it, for the ‘underdeveloped’ world’s allegiance against the Communist menace. According to Walt W. Rostow, sometime economic historian and presidential adviser, all nations followed certain stages of economic growth to urbanization and industrialization; this became high policy with which to thwart Communism and to promote democratic capitalism around the globe. During the Cold War, the United States’ military, intelligence, and international development agencies funded numerous social science investigations in the ‘underdeveloped nations’ seeking, in the case of South Viet Nam, to support the Diem dictatorship, or in the case of Chile, to carry out through ‘Project Camelot,’ a study of how to design a general systems model to predict and control internal strife and promote counterinsurgency in peripheral countries. In any given time there were perhaps several dozen such covert social science operations functioning with governmental support. Some social science expertise was indigenous in Latin America. The nineteenth century independence movements fostered champions of liberal statism, Comtean positivism, and German historical or institutional economics. Between the Second World War and the 1970s, as Latin America entered the world economy, its economists, whether proficient academically or self-trained, wrote much about the economics of underdeveloped countries and regions – that is, their region. For example, the left-liberal Argentine economist Raúl Prebisch developed from the 1940s on a center–periphery theory of economic underdevelopment that was both theoretical and historical, that social scientists and governmental apparatchiks throughout Latin America took up. He also created a network of like-minded economists through the Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA), located in Santiago, Chile, and which nurtured a Latin American economics profession anxious to promote its region. Certain groups of United States economists, as the neoclassical economists at the University of Chicago, established rival groups of conservative economists, as at the Catholic University of Chile, who went on to advise the region’s rightist regimes, such as Pinochet’s in Chile. Here the regional stimulus was Fidel Castro’s Cuba, against which both the United States and the rightist regimes reacted, plotted, and schemed. The Cold War definitely spilled over into the Western Hemisphere. The social scientists, as retainers of various governments, smartly followed behind their patrons.
The Impact of the Cold War in Western Europe Before the Second World War, social science’s intellectual center was Europe. On the European continent, dictatorships arose in the interwar and war years from Iberia to the Urals, save for England, France, and a few neutrals, such as Switzerland and Sweden. Whether these dictatorships were Fascist, National Socialist, or Marxist-Leninist, their leaders destroyed or drove into exile most of their social sciences – and practitioners. Only those social sciences that pleased the dictators, such as eugenics in Nazi Germany, or eugenics and psychology in the Soviet Union, survived the war years. Thereafter consequently the United States became a world power in the social
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sciences, thanks in addition to its expansion and mobilization of social scientists. Europe’s distress was America’s advantage. In postwar Western Europe – the areas allied with the United States and liberated from Nazi or Fascist control – there was a rebuilding of society and economy, thanks in no small measure to the Marshall Plan. Everywhere the Americans there behaved much as they did at home, so that national autonomy and democracy emerged in Western Europe. There the masses demanded, and got, sometimes with the threat of Communist influence, a new deal of social welfare legislation which in turn necessitated the training and employment of social scientists to administer the new states’ social welfare, economies, political democracies, and defense forces, in the form of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), formed as a cordon sanitaire against the engorged postwar Soviet empire to the east. The Western European countries demanded NATO from the U.S. as the price of the founding of the West German Republic in 1949 and its rearmament in 1955. Thus an American empire was created there, but by mutual consent and invitation, not terror, coercion, or imperial rule from Washington, as was the case in Soviet-controlled Eastern Europe. Hence the social sciences in Western Europe followed both national traditions and American influence, with the latter usually secondary. Thanks to the American influence, or lack thereof in other cases, the Cold War stimulated an intellectual renaissance. In Great Britain, for example, sociology came into its own, even appearing in Oxford and Cambridge by the 1960s; initially British sociology followed American patterns, but after 1970 other, more indigenous traditions, often ruggedly empiricist, reasserted themselves. The American influence could be felt mainly in institutional forms, as in disciplinary departments and formal associations. On the Continent, American and European traditions clashed and melded. Thanks to American influence in the United Nations Economic, Social, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), American forms of social science organization, as in disciplinary departments and associations transferred to the Continent, but theory was a different matter. In France, the Marxist influence on sociology was evident, as were the ideas of Michel Foucault and others. In West Germany, American intellectual traditions vied with indigenous ones, such as the returned social science exiles, such as the Frankfurt School, but also conflict theorists such as Ralf Dahrendorf. And there were democratic Marxist social scientists as well, thanks in some measure to the Social Democratic Party. Anthropology in America became focused on contemporary cultures, whereas anthropology in Europe tended to focus on the effects of colonization. American anthropology became useful to the nation’s cold war social sciences, whereas European anthropology was largely oriented away from the Cold War’s direct influences. Two disciplines in particular, psychology and economics, betrayed Cold War influences but also became international technical behavioral sciences. Psychology became increasingly Americanized. In West Germany, professors from the Nazi era retired only in the 1960s, when a younger generation emerged, insisting on American-style psychology, meaning datadriven research and statistical treatment of results. In Britain, psychology closely paralleled the American version. And by the
1970s, everywhere else in Western Europe, the Anglo-American synthesis of cognitive behaviorism dominated. Economics also mutated into an increasingly technical behavioral science, which split into conflicting macroeconomic and microeconomic branches, often with the former pushing a Keynesian or post-Keynesian agenda, and the latter an updated version of Austrian individualistic economics. The technical methods psychologists and economists used made their sciences international, but the methods themselves were largely American and Cold War-inspired in origin. If the technical innovations were largely a Cold War legacy, their cosmopolitanism betrayed both American and European elements. Thus the Europeans retained a sense of society as a collectivity, whereas the Americans’ underlying attitudes always retained some agency for individuals – and individualism.
The Impact of the Cold War in the Soviet World Josef Stalin suppressed most of the social sciences in the Soviet Union well before the Cold War. He would not tolerate sociology, law, political science, or economics, unless derived from his notions of Party orthodoxy. The construction of a Soviet centralized system of science permitted only one social science – psychology – some latitude, largely because Ivan Pavlov’s work had been reconciled with dialectical materialism, the Party’s official philosophy. Dialectical materialists sought to explain the world by insisting that all that exists is real; the real world exists as matter–energy; and this matter–energy develops in accordance with universal regularities or laws. They thus refuted idealism, especially the Western versions. Yet ironically dialectical materialism permitted Soviet scientists to engage in philosophical jargon – ‘newspeak’ – that in turn permitted considerable flexibility, as well as camouflage for scientific discourse safe from Party censors’ onslaughts. Thus Soviet psychologists rehabilitated consciousness and other mental constructs justifying attempts to create a new ‘Soviet personality,’ a Party priority, and Soviet cybernetics, again a patriotic necessity, developed from ‘newspeak’ discussions among those to compete with America in computers (Slava Gerovitch, 2002: Chapters 1–6). Cybernetics was indeed a Cold War interdisciplinary behavioral science. The Soviet imprint was manifest on the social sciences in its satellites in the Cold War era. The social sciences received less funding and more intellectual control than other sciences, thanks to the monopoly of the Communist Party in each country. The Russian occupiers made sure their hierarchical and centralized system of government institutes of science was created in each satellite. The Party governments in each country used the social sciences to enforce Party hegemony. Results differed from country to country. In East Germany, for example, until the 1960s, Party officials permitted Nazi-era psychologists to retain their chairs on the Leninist ground that bourgeois scientists could work for the Party; as this generation retired, indigenous devotees of Soviet psychology replaced them. Yet even these professors mixed Soviet-style cognitive research with American information-processing approaches as a new ‘Marxist’ approach congruent with the indispensable current ‘scientific–technical revolution.’ Poland’s
Cold War: Impact on Social and Behavioral Sciences
national consciousness was the strongest in Soviet Europe. Catholicism and repressed Polish national pride kept Polish intellectuals free in their private thoughts, at least; and whatever had the imprint of the Russian bear was distasteful to most Poles. Polish social science during the whole period was more up to date with Western social science than social science in other Soviet satellites. Psychology flourished in Poland as the study of national character, seen as a collective entity. Even before the Soviet collapse, Poland was an unreliable ally, as the emergence of the labor union Solidarity in the 1980s suggested. Often the social sciences were weak in some satellites, such as Bulgaria or Yugoslavia, and the imposition of Soviet orthodoxy came easily. Yet in all the satellite countries, the social scientists turned inward, toward studies of their own national character; commonly they paid mere lip service to Moscow. In this way they gained some distance, some breathing room, from Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy. Hence the Cold War had an enormous impact, institutionally and, to a lesser extent, intellectually, upon Central and Eastern Europe, especially with the establishment of Communist governance, something that the Soviets had known since Stalin consolidated his rule in the late 1920s in Russia.
The Impact of the Cold War in Asia Among Asiatic Communist states – chiefly the People’s Republic of China and the Democratic Republic of North Korea – the social sciences were completely under the thumb of their dictators and Party officials. Neither Mao Zedong nor Kim Il-sung would permit competition with their social doctrines. In the 1930s, however, Chinese social scientists had imported Western social science to facilitate the country’s modernization, especially in sociology and economics – precisely the fields that Mao would commandeer and submit to his ideas. Hence in the Cold War era, non-Communist social scientists retreated to Taiwan and Hong Kong. In Taiwan, those who retained an ideological affinity with the mainland were suppressed. In Hong Kong, thanks to British colonial traditions of political stability and academic freedom, Chinese social scientists developed their teaching and research often along the lines of American and British social sciences, where many had received their postgraduate training. In South Korea, at first the social sciences were a pale imitation of the American social sciences, especially sociological structural–functionalism and conservative microeconomics. Eventually, as South Korea’s political culture became increasingly democratic, so its social scientists began to study problems facing their nation, such as national division, the status of a postcolonial society in the world economy, and related issues. Two major Asian states, Japan and India, demonstrated much about the Cold War’s impact beyond the Americas and Europe. In the early postwar years Japan’s American occupiers democratized society, politics, and the economy, although Japanese cultural traditions of collectivity, obedience, and central authority remained below the surface. Social scientists then wished to eliminate Japan’s negative history and reputation, and adopted many American social science ideas and methods. Yet in the 1970s and beyond, Japanese Marxism, a product of the 1920s, was revived as a way to reassert Japan’s
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intellectual identity apart from Western influences. Japan was doubtless an American ally in world politics, as were the nations of Western Europe, which tilted the Cold War toward the United States. Yet there was a reassertion of Japanese cultural and intellectual identity and independence, married with Americanstyle disciplinary formation and institutionalization. With British rule in the eighteenth century came a rich and complex tradition of social research – for administrative and imperial purposes, to be sure – in India. After independence in 1947, Indian sociologists and anthropologists at first gravitated to American-style structural–functionalist analysis of modernization. They focused on rural communities undergoing social change. The village they assumed was a functional unit with different caste groups, factionalism, class antagonisms, patron– client relations, and the relation of the village to the outside world. The University of Chicago’s sociology programs heavily influenced these scholars. One could also see the influence of structuralism in studies of caste, kinship structure, ritual, and religious practices and beliefs. Yet there was also a growing interest in the use of Marxian methods of social and economic analysis. In economics, independence brought forth the problem of national economic development, and in the early postwar years there was much interest in government planning of the economy. Indian social scientists sought to conform to international standards of excellence, which meant they looked toward the United States, Western Europe, and Japan, not the Communist world, for their ideas. In part due to the British influence, Indian economists used statistical investigations of Indian economic life to help central planning. Economists such as Amartya Sen and others asked basic questions about equity and justice in Indian modernization. From the 1970s on, government planning fell into disfavor and economists began asking more specific questions about, for example, whether agriculture promoted or retarded development, about whether government promotion of industrialization was beneficial or harmful, the role of technology, and the impact of the world economy and of foreign investment on Indian economic growth. Indian political thinking was predominantly liberal, and this was reflected in its governmental structures and among its political scientists. Indian political scientist Rajni Kothari, for example, insisted in 1970 there was a dynamic core in the Congress Party’s dominance of national democratic politics. Using a structural–functional analysis, Kothari argued that the “Congress system” connected government and party at different levels, from the nation’s capital to the cities and the rural hinterlands. This accommodated dissent and helped stimulate needed correctives. Yet, perhaps inevitably, there was criticism from an indigenous Marxist social democratic left, not unlike developments in Western Europe and Japan, and leftliberal Marxian analysis informed dissent among Indian social scientists and politicians.
Conclusion What, then, was the impact of the Cold War on the social and behavioral sciences? It encouraged, from developments in the Second World War, a positivistic, manipulative, and engineering approach to human behavior in all its dimensions. While the Cold War was in its early, intense phases – until the
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resolution of the Berlin and Cuban missile crises of the early 1960s – the social and behavioral sciences closely mirrored the values and remedies of their sponsoring central governments. These political and intellectual straitjackets began to fray and dissolve outside the Communist world by the 1970s, thanks to liberal and radical dissent in the United States, in Western Europe, in Japan, and even in India, and if the Cold War idea of using social science for social engineering maintained its vitality, the Cold Warrior attitudes diminished considerably, and national differences and preferences asserted themselves. In the Communist world, it was only when the Soviet Union collapsed, and China came under Mao’s successors, MarxistLeninist rhetorically but nationalistic and capitalistic in fact, that matters changed. In Central and Eastern Europe, each former satellite retained, to some extent, Russian-style centralization of cultural life, but the expansion or reinvigoration of universities promoted Western-style standards of social science teaching and research, again, with each nation’s elite asserting its distinctive national cultural identity. In the People’s Republic, social science that supported the nation’s development, for example, sociology and demography emerged from the Party’s stranglehold. An indirect influence of the Cold War, and not just in the United States, was the rise of ideologically driven think tanks, such as the right-wing Heritage Foundation in the United States, which employed social scientists as spokespersons for their ideas to influence public opinion and governmental policy. As such the think tanks came to challenge the intellectual authority of the social and behavioral sciences in academic and even government academy circles. Here was Cold War social engineering, often financed by private interests, creating potentially powerful Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) that could direct or redirect public policy along risky, even dangerous pathways, with little, if any, influence from ordinary citizens. The United States likely had the most such think tanks. There was no small irony in this, for throughout the nineteenth century, and into the twentieth, American social science was often a folk movement, democratic to the core. In conclusion, the Cold War dominated certain aspects of the social and behavioral sciences around the globe for some years, but clearly after 1970 or so, and especially with the passing of Mao in China and much later, the collapse of the USSR, the Cold War was in the main a memory, and not always a pleasant one to those involved. Yet in the long perspective, the world’s peoples had become increasingly aware that they were living in a global civilization. The Cold War obscured and retarded that perception for several decades. But the fact of globalization trumped Cold War perspectives. Now the world appeared highly diverse, constituted of n-dimensions, proportions, and images.
See also: Coser, Lewis A. (1913–2003); Dahrendorf, Ralf (1929–2009); Keynes, John Maynard (1883–1946); Marxist Approaches to Social Work; Mills, Charles Wright (1916–62).
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