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Gray Matters: Social Scientists, Military Patronage, and Democracy in the Cold War
Joy Rohde
| A renowned physicist told U.S. defense secretary Robert McNamara in 1961 that "while World War I might have been considered the chemists' war, and World War II was considered the physicists' war, World War III ... might well have to be considered the social scientists' war." As new states emerged from the wreckage of European empires, Pentagon officials enlisted social scientists in the battle to contain the spread of Communism in the so-called emerging nations of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. This fusion of social science and statecraft reached its acme at the Special Operations Research Office (SORO), a multidisciplinary research institute created in 1956 by the U.S. Army and stationed on the campus of American University in Washington, D.C. At SORO, political scientists, social psychologists, anthropologists, and sociologists joined forces with military experts to unearth the political and social causes of Communist revolution, identify the laws governing social change, and clarify the scientific principles of psychological warfare. SORO researchers connected social knowledge and military affairs, creating a hybrid form of expertise intended to help the United States win the battle for hearts and minds.1 |
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In the 1950s and early 1960s, when the defeat of Communism seemed a matter of national survival, most social scientists accepted military-funded research as legitimate social science. But as opposition to the Vietnam War and to American militarism intensified in the late 1960s, a growing number of academic social scientists, public intellectuals, and policy makers condemned Pentagon-funded social scientists as technocratic social engineers and partisan ideologues. They accused researchers of sacrificing their intellectual integrity to a warmongering, imperialistic national security state. In 1969 American University's administration exiled SORO from its campus and severed the university's ties to the military.2 |
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SORO was one of several military-funded research institutes that were banished from academic life in the late 1960s and early 1970s. As historians have shown, by the end of the 1960s, military support was suspected of distorting the direction of scholarship and corrupting the unfettered pursuit of knowledge. Cold War social research seemed to erode what many Americans considered the proper boundaries between the ivory tower and the Pentagon.3 |
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But the problem of Cold War social science was more profound than the objectivity of sponsored research or the corruption of free inquiry. Like generations of politically active social scientists, the scholars who worked for the national security state sought to elevate politics to the level of science. Yet that aspiration has perpetually presented social scientists with vexing epistemological and ethical challenges. The application of social research to policy raised a pressing question: What was the proper role of the expert in a democracy? The basis of modern scientific authority lies in the ostensibly objective and disinterested character of its empirical claims. Scientific knowledge is politically powerful in part because it seems to exclude the arbitrary and subjective. Scientists seem to provide universally valid, impersonal, nonideological conclusions, transforming questions of power and politics into the subjects of rational, value-neutral inquiry. For this reason, scientific knowledge can be a powerful tool for decision making in democracies. But many Americans, scholars and citizens alike, long suspected that social research might not be disinterested. Indeed, American social science was cast in a crucible of social and political reform. From late nineteenth-century surveys of poverty to mid-twentieth-century investigations of the psychological damage caused by racism, social scientists marshaled facts to solve social problems. Applying social science to political questions not only threatened to bring scholarship into the subjective realms of moral argument and individual values. It raised fundamental questions about the accountability of experts to the public. Social scientists' mission presented them with a quandary: Could they provide knowledge and apply it to social and political problems without undermining democracy?4 |
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