Session Abstract

A well-worn narrative about the American social sciences and social thought in the twentieth century holds that biologically grounded perspectives, strong in the late nineteenth century, gave way in the 1920s to cultural explanations of human behavior, which remained dominant until the resurgence of biological reasoning in the 1970s. Another account posits the replacement of economic approaches by sociological ones in the early twentieth century, followed by a re-emergence of economic thinking in recent decades. Yet the post-World War II period, which these narratives portray as the heyday of presumably relativistic cultural and sociological accounts of human affairs, also saw American social scientists embrace universalism: the view that, deep down, all human beings are essentially alike. How can we make sense of these apparently contradictory stories? Can we square the divergent portraits of postwar American thought as both relativistic and universalistic? Or are such terms inadequate as analytical tools for assessing the scholarly and popular discourses of the era?

The papers comprising this panel will focus on the period from the 1950s to the 1970s—the second of the turning points in the going narratives. They will slice into the fertile borderlands between the natural and social sciences from a number of different angles, taking human nature as their major theme and rationality as a strong minor note. Andrew Jewett will set the stage by surveying a series of argumentative strategies by which 1950s liberals in the disciplines rooted their political values in human nature, either directly or by way of social structures said to comport uniquely well with the needs of the human person. Jamie Cohen-Cole will then explore shifting assessments of the rationality of human actors in the emerging cognitive sciences in the late 1960s. Finally, Erika Milam will examine how scholarly and popular discourses on human nature in the 1960s prefigured the broader shift toward biologically grounded modes of social thought in the decade that followed.

Taken together, these papers will open a window onto a complex, ever-changing array of arguments about the relationship between biology, culture, social institutions, and human difference at a crucial moment in American political development. Challenging clear-cut narratives about the eclipse of biology, the dominance of sociology, or an age of universalism, they reveal a crosscutting series of pressures—social, cultural, political, even economic—that led postwar thinkers and ordinary citizens alike to craft new understandings of the relationship between human nature and its sociocultural contexts.