Social Science, Scientism, and American Democracy

The turbulent 1960s and ‘70s witnessed widespread challenges to the practice and social function of science. Historians, then and later, played an active role exposing ways in which—at government-funded think tanks and universities alike—nominally scientific problem-choices and results were often skewed to serve powerful interests over some broader measure of the public good.¹ The Vietnam War, especially, challenged deeply ingrained presumptions about objectivity and disinterest as the essence of the scientific enterprise. In the years that followed, some historians of science gradually shifted from exposing earlier contradictions to examining the ramifications of their discoveries, specifically their connections to the so-called rightward and postmodern turns that were drawing so much attention within the political and intellectual history subdisciplines.² Conflicts and nuances of the previous era were of less immediate concern.

Recently a number of historians, including historians of science, have refocused attention on contested aspects of science before the turmoil of the 1960s.³ Although the impression has hardly been reversed that the latter twentieth century witnessed an enormous culturally, economically, and politically consequential disillusionment with important aspects of modern science, it has become increasingly apparent that there is also room for a much better understanding of earlier disparate public and elite views about the research enterprise. What was science thought to be good for? What defined it? And what special status, if any, was to be granted to scientific knowledge-claims? As the focus, organization, and practice of science modernized in nineteenth–century America, and especially as the U.S. federal government expanded its use of and its support for science, there were multiple, competing answers to such questions. Although for some time those differences may have seemed less important than stark postmodern challenges to the very notion of scientific authority, it may well be that examining earlier differences more closely will provide a better understanding of how we have gotten to where we are, as well as the range of possibilities in front of us.

Andrew Jewett and Mark Solovey undertake just such an examination, setting new benchmarks for future study of the history of science, or at least the history of the social sciences, in America. Jewett asserts and then provides copious evidence for just how actively contested presumptions about science were in the United States for at least a century following the Civil War. Mark Solovey describes how, even at the height of the Cold War, the very prevalence of seeming consensus masked some very powerful opposing forces. Both authors use the term “scientism” to describe the claims that the social sciences were value-neutral and that their seemingly rigorous, systematic, and quantitative investigations implied objectivity and disinterestedness in the consideration of human behavior, economics, and political activity (Jewett, pp. 10n, 216–18; Solovey, p. 16). Mimicking the natural sciences (physics most specifically), scientism, in their analysis, highlights an assumed ability among social scientists to construct, based on empirical investigation, accurate predictions of individual, social group, and social system behavior—including the behavior of economic and political systems. At the same time, scientism (as defined) assumes a willingness to relegate the consequential issues of purpose, human values, power, and ethics variously to religion, humanists, politics, or even government officials.

As announced in the preface, Science, Democracy, and the American University, the more ambitious of the two books reviewed here, attempts “to explain what several generations of thinkers had in mind when they devoted their lives to the project of making America scientific” (p. vii). Jewett sees as both inaccurate and misleading a prominent tendency among contemporary intellectual historians to view “technocratic, managerial liberalism”—which features value-neutrality and the witting or unwitting furtherance of establishment interests—as a defining characteristic...