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PART II UNDERSTANDING THE CHALLENGE FROM THE RIGHT To a degree that no doubt would have surprised them, the social scientists at the early Russell Sage Foundation and writing in the broader progressive tradition have a great deal to offer the project of social science and liberal philanthropy today. After all, though the progressives were not as unabashedly optimistic as they are sometimes made out to be, they were secure enough in their assumptions about social progress to imagine that a century later the need to study the labor question would have disappeared. Revisiting the dynamics the Pittsburgh surveyors and their contemporaries had called attention to in exploring the impact of sped-up production practices, the disappearance of job ladders, the gendered and racialized hierarchies in the workplace, the proliferation of home work and other informal modes of production, and, more generally, the gaps between low-wage earning and wealth owning America would also be unnecessary. Yet all of these issues have been subjects of recent RSF-funded research.1 Nor would Gunnar Myrdal have expected that his morally resonant title would continue to be invoked, not merely as a point of reference but as a description of the contemporary race issue.2 Nothing would be more surprising to the foundation’s founding generation, however, than to find its centenary counterparts grappling with the rise of an aggressively antistatist laissez-faire ideology , and with its unshakable hold on a now significantly reframed 71 social question. Ultimately, then, what gives Progressive-era social know-ledge its enduring—indeed, renewed—relevance is not continuity but change, embodied in the profound and ongoing transformations in political culture and public philosophy that have signi ficantly altered the politics of knowledge and philanthropy over the past several decades and their ideological orientation. It is thus that I turn in the next three chapters to understand the historical roots of this transformation, and its expression in the rise of the philanthropic right. 72 Social Science for What? ...

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