Dueling Deweys: Moralism, Scientism, and American Social Science History

Following Dorothy Ross and Peter Novick, anyone writing about the history of the social sciences in the United States, or debates about objectivity within the social sciences and historical professions, risks being regarded as doing supplementary work. ¹ Maybe so. But John M. Jordan’s Machine-Age Ideology and Mark C. Smith’s Social Science in the Crucible are fine studies and deserve attention for the contributions they make to the intellectual and cultural history of social scientists’ uses of metaphor and debates over values and the uses of social knowledge.

These studies are both complementary and at odds, which makes reading them together quite interesting. Jordan and Smith provide useful guides to the institutional forces, intellectual developments, and ideological debates which shaped the American social sciences from the end of the nineteenth century through the end of the 1930s. Both convincingly illustrate how social scientists’ emulation of natural and applied science models led to the dominance of scientistic thinking and prescriptive metaphors which expressed the shared goals and common lexicon of the different social science disciplines. By extension, they show how the obsession with objectivity, rationality, and technique, combined with financial dependence on culturally and politically conservative institutional bases of support, made the social sciences agents of tepid reform, at best. As Smith shows in his fine first chapter, the emphasis on method and technique (as opposed to reform-driven research or more critical and speculative thinking about the social order) along with constant proclamations of objectivity and value-neutrality, made the social sciences appealing and safe for their benefactors, especially the big foundations, corporations, university presidents, and boards of regents. Smith uses this framework to set up the resulting intellectual and ideological tensions among the “objectivists” and the “purposivists” (his cumbersome phrase by which he denotes critics and reformers) within each of the social sciences. He develops the disciplinary histories and explores the debates by writing compelling intellectual biographies of leading interwar social scientists, including Wesley C. Mitchell, Charles Merriam, Robert Lynd, Charles Beard, and Harold D. Lasswell. Jordan relies on the same general intellectual and institutional framework, but his study is more a cultural history of the social engineering ideology which grew out of the applied sciences and permeated the social sciences and the larger culture in the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth century.

Together Smith and Jordan teach one a great deal about the powerful sway of the applied science model for the emerging social sciences. They provide ample illustrations through the individuals, episodes, and institutional entities central to the history of the social sciences, including the major foundations’ generous funding of small-scale, empirically oriented social science research; the ideological implications of economic dependence on those monies; the central roles played by Edwin Day, Beardsley Ruml, and Raymond Fosdick Jr. in the Rockefeller philanthropies; the post-World War I business and government demands for technical data, resulting in data-producing entities like the National Bureau of Economic Research under Edwin Day and Wesley Mitchell; the roles of Mitchell, Charles Merriam, and William Ogburn in the internecine struggles within the President’s Committee on Recent Social Trends; and, especially, the Social Science Research Council’s intellectual and ideological authority in increasingly professionalized but apolitical social sciences. While Jordan and Smith each cover this terrain (Smith with more attention to detail), their approaches are far different. Indeed, it is Smith’s intention to complicate the scientistic hegemony and social control imperatives which Jordan argues are inevitably a function of a scientific epistemology.

John Jordan’s handsomely produced study, Machine-Age Ideology, is more politically pointed than Smith’s. He asserts that anxieties about the cultural and political implications of technology have always influenced American social and political thought. He is mainly concerned about the implications...