The Social Sciences as Social Technologies: How the National Security Crisis of 1941–91 Transformed the American Social Disciplines

Hamilton Cravens

The Social Sciences As Social Technologies: How the National Security Crisis of 1941-1991 Transformed the American Social Disciplines

The social and behavioral sciences have become heavily involved in the application of their expertise and ideas to the needs of society, especially in terms of federal government social and foreign policy, including, in recent decades, strategic choices. The New Deal, the Second World War, and the Cold War all offered new opportunities for the social scientific professoriate and their colleagues in public and private enterprise to push ahead with new and interesting work. Yet the truly transformative changes came mainly after Pearl Harbor and, most importantly,were ideological and intellectual in nature. Positivism came to the fore--the belief that science was united, absolute, and true, and that experts could use their special knowledge to solve problems and that nature was itself absolutely knowable and predictable.