Shaky Foundations The Politics-Patronage-Social Science Nexus in Cold War America

• Main Author: Solovey, Mark
• Format: eBook Book
• Language: English
• Published: United States Rutgers University Press 2013
• Edition: 1
• Series: Studies in Modern Science, Technology, and the Environment
• Subjects: 1945-1989; 20th Century; Cold War; Cold War > Social aspects; Endowment of research; Endowment of research > Political aspects > United States > History > 20th century; History; History of Science & Technology; Political aspects; Pure sciences; SCIENCE; SCIENCE / General; Social aspects; Social sciences; Social sciences > Research > United States > History > 20th century; United States; World politics; World politics > 1945-1989; United States
• ISBN: 0813554667; 9780813554662; 9780813554655; 0813554659; 0813571286; 9780813571287
• DOI: 10.36019/9780813554662

Numerous popular and scholarly accounts have exposed the deep impact of patrons on the production of scientific knowledge and its applications.Shaky Foundationsprovides 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 Foundationsaddresses 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.