Social Science for What?: Philanthropy and the Social Question in a World Turned Rightside Up

CHAPTER 2. SOCIAL SCIENCE, THE SOCIAL QUESTION, AND THE VALUE NEUTRALITY DEBATE

48  CHAPTER 2  SOCIAL SCIENCE, THE SOCIAL QUESTION, AND THE VALUENEUTRALITY DEBATE When RSF reinvented itself as a social science foundation in the late 1940s, it did not simply break with an earlier vision of social scientific reform. Its trustees also embraced an alternative and, in its own way, equally value-laden vision of relevant social science that had been honed and institutionalized with increasing momentum since the 1920s—in research universities, in professional societies , in an expanding nonprofit research sector, and in a philanthropic politics of knowledge that, though by no means wholly absent from the early RSF, was most closely associated with the Carnegie Corporation and the Rockefeller Foundation’s Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial Fund.1 That vision, of a neutral, politically detached, and more academically grounded and “scientistic” social science, did not originate with the major foundations. It did, however, become the program of the two biggest and leading social science funders, and through them of an officially nonideological, incrementalist, and managerial reformism that ratified the basic outlines of the corporate-government -academic alliance envisioned in Herbert Hoover’s associative state.2 The foundations in turn played a central role in institutionalizing the idea of neutrality as the basis of social scienti fic relevance and expertise. They did so with massive infusions of support for such leading centers of academic social science as the University of Chicago and Columbia, and in newly established nonprofit organizations such as the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER, founded in 1920), the Social Science Research Council (SSRC, created in 1923), and the Brookings Institution (created out of the merger of nominally separate institutes of government and economics in 1927).3 With foundation money, close ties to business and government, and often overlapping networks of academics and boards of trustees, these organizations became the standard-bearers for what constituted neutral expertise in the independent —which is to say, nongovernmental and nonprofit—research sector. It was to these institutions that Herbert Hoover would turn throughout the 1920s as sources of knowledge on a wide range of economic and administrative issues, and, on the eve of a Great Depression that Hoover’s experts failed to forecast, for the latest in social scientific thinking about the major social developments that would challenge American society in the coming decade. The result, Recent Social Trends, was indeed a comprehensive and authoritative survey that synthesized a tremendous amount and range of social research. It also captured something significant in its deliberately neutered tone. By the time the massive study was published in 1934, the social question loomed larger than ever, but its essential character, as framed by the social scienti fic experts, had changed. The problems presented by recent social trends—admittedly massive problems involving governance, democracy, political economy, the family, the physical environment , and more—were best stated as problems of social (im)balance , (dis)equilibrium, and (mal)adjustment. In reporting them, the task of social science was strictly technical, requiring the authors to refrain from expressing opinions and instead to focus on providing officials with information for more efficient planning.4 At the time, though, and throughout the interwar years, this vision of value-neutral social science, albeit increasingly dominant and favored in official circles, was still very much in play.5 For one thing, neutrality became institutionalized as a sort of semiofficial knowledge standard within a much broader and highly politicized context of knowledge mobilization and proliferating expertise, in which activist organizations—partly in response to diminished opportunities for political mobilization by other means, but also in Value-Neutrality Debate 49 recognition of the growing political salience of organized knowledge —created or greatly expanded their research capacities.6 Although this broader institutionalization of knowledge occurred across the political spectrum, it was especially vigorous in leading labor and such prominent progressive reform organizations as the National Consumers’ League, the National Urban League, and the social insurance–oriented American Association for Labor Legislation . Along with the Russell Sage Foundation, this segment of the expanding nongovernmental research and advocacy sector maintained a robust tradition of reform-oriented social scientific research . Alternatives to neutrality could also be found in academe, notably in the heavily applied and policy-oriented brand of institutionalist economics practiced by John R. Commons and others at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and in the high-powered collection of radical and...