| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Americanization of Social Science: Intellectuals and Public Responsibility in the Postwar United States. By David Paul Haney. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008. xii, 283 pp. $39.95, ISBN 978-1-59213-713-8.)
David Paul Haney's engaging, well-written study traces the historical roots of the gap between academic sociology and the lay public. From 1945 to the early 1960s, sociologists at Columbia University and Harvard University argued that sociology was a true science because it was incremental, possessed paradigmatic unity, and was necessarily insulated from popular pressures. Although echoing the scientism of the interwar years, they aimed this argument at foundations, educational institutions, and the lay public rather than at fellow sociologists. Growing acceptance of theories of anomie and mass society provided further reason to distance sociology from a public now viewed as incapable of reason. Key figures in this enterprise included Talcott Parsons, Robert Merton, Paul Lazarsfeld, and Samuel Stouffer.	1
Although no theory seriously challenged the Parsons-Merton paradigm during the 1950s, critics were not wanting, chief among them Pitirim Sorokin and C. Wright Mills. Challenge of another sort surfaced in the publication of sociological best sellers, which professional sociologists typically dismissed, by writers such as David Riesman, William Whyte, and Vance Packard. As attacks on mainstream academic sociology increased, its detractors charged, ironically, that the quest for scientific integrity fostered trivial pursuits while contributing to a troubling social engineering.	. . .

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