Review - The Americanization of Social Science
Intellectuals and Public Responsibility in the Postwar United States
by David Haney
Temple University Press, 2008
Review by Ralph Harrington, Ph.D.
Sep 16th 2008 (Volume 12, Issue 38)

This is an important and a timely work. The 'social science' part of the title is slightly misleading: this is essentially a history of sociology, but, while it is excellent as an intellectual history of the sociological discipline from the late 1940s to the early 1960s, its importance in illuminating questions of the public role of intellectuals in a modern democratic society gives it a far wider significance.

Sociology has always had an identity problem. How much more generalized could a topic of study be than 'society'? And how can sociologists study the very thing within which they are embedded? Haney's able and readable history addresses the ways in which American sociology engaged with (or failed to engage with) these problems during its postwar 'golden age'.

The overriding response of American sociologists to their discipline's crisis of identity was to assert, ever more fervently, that it was a fully-fledged science. The adoption of scientific methodology and language gave sociology a professional legitimacy, ensuring status, finance and influence for its institutions and practitioners. The price that sociology paid for this was a disconnection from the very thing it sought to study and understand: society.

A retreat into scientism saw sociology embracing a model of 'mass society' that was amenable to the functionalist and quantitatively-based methodologies that became the dominant paradigm. Haney examines the ways in which notions of 'mass society' served to differentiate American sociology through the 1950s from its European origins and produced an elitism of outlook that enabled sociologists to insulate themselves from dialogue with non-sociological professions and, indeed, to view ordinary members of society with attitudes bordering on contempt. The dominant sociological paradigms of the 1950s, some historians and sociologists have argued, emphasized the individual as against the mass, but Haney shows that the ways in which individuals were treated in sociological studies had the paradoxical effect of undermining their individuality. Sociological studies of professional groups, white-collar workforces, suburbs and members of the armed forces all subsumed individuals into larger groups through the imposition of sociological models that de-emphasized human agency in favour of a functionalist reading of society.

Thus, while for European sociologists 'neurosis' had been an individual pathology understood in Freudian terms as the product of an individual personal history, for American sociologists it was a cultural phenomenon located in the nature of modern mass society's interaction with the individual – an interaction which led to the destruction of that very quality of individuality. The consequences of this worldview for the practice of medicine are well known, with collective pathologization taking the place of an individualized diagnostic model, producing a loss of authority for both patient and medical practitioner and an increasing recourse to drug-based treatments for behavioral conditions.

In his often chilling chapter 5, Haney describes the ways in which sociologists felt able to write off the great mass of their fellow Americans as passive, conformist, and ready prey for authoritarian ideologies. Mass society, they believed, was intrinsically antidemocratic; meanwhile, their own scientific elitism and the contempt with which they viewed the society they studied placed their own profession in a highly ambiguous relationship with the supposed values of a liberal, democratic society.

This dominant approach produced a reaction from within sociology's own ranks, and Haney recounts the challenges posed by critics such as Pitirim Sorokin and C. Wright Mills who sought to re-engage sociology with society itself, dethroning the narrowly scientific paradigm upon which its elitist world-view was based. The rejection of the quantitative bias of contemporary sociology, with its obsession with surveys, and the claim that sociology should re-connect with the humanities rather than seek to insulate itself within a domain of pure science were highly controversial, but bore fruit in the more engaged, populist, flexible and eventually more influential sociology of the 1960s and 70s.

This is a fluent, well-constructed, soundly researched and informative work that fills in an important but little-understood aspect of postwar American social, cultural and intellectual history.

© 2008 Ralph Harrington

Ralph Harrington, Ph.D. is a historian who has researched, lectured and published on medical history and the history of trauma, among other topics. His web site is at http://www.greycat.org