Overview
- Considers the impact of the Cold War's transnational dimensions on social science
- Gathers contributions exploring a wide range of fields, from anthropology to political science
- Broadens our understanding of Cold War social science beyond nation-centered approaches
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Table of contents (13 chapters)
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Exchanges Across the Iron Curtain
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Modernization Theory Meets Postcolonial Nation Building
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Creating Good Citizens
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Social Science Under Debate
Keywords
About this book
This book explores how the social sciences became entangled with the global Cold War. While duly recognizing the realities of nation states, national power, and national aspirations, the studies gathered here open up new lines of transnational investigation. Considering developments in a wide array of fields ā anthropology, development studies, economics, education, political science, psychology, science studies, and sociology ā that involved the movement of people, projects, funding, and ideas across diverse national contexts, this volume pushes scholars to rethink certain fundamental points about how we should understand ā and thus how we should study ā Cold War social science itself.
Reviews
āCold War Social Science: Transnational Entanglements offers a remarkably broad panorama of the transnational encounters, debates and exchanges between social scientists during the Cold War era. ā¦ the collection makes an important contribution to what has been called the ātransnational turnā in the history of the social sciences ā¦ .ā (Cyril Jung, Metascience, August 4, 2022)
āThe book makes good on its claim that, by taking a transnational approach, the image of the social scientist asdominated by capitalist or socialist ideology yields to a far richer picture that emphasizes the diversity of intellectual agendas, traditions and values that defined social scientific research and researchers during the Cold War.ā (John Krige, Annals of Science, Vol. 79 (3), 2022)
āThe book's authors describe how imported knowledge was routinely reshaped for local purposesāand how, in some cases, traffic in ideas and practices went the other way, from the periphery to the center. The result is an important contribution to a fieldāwide effort, one that has gained momentum over the last 15 years, to complicate (and pluralize) the idea of Cold War social science. ā¦ Cold War Social Science is an impressive, tightly edited collection, a model for tethering spreadāout case studies to a unifying theme.ā (Jefferson Pooley, Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, October 12, 2021)
āAs is well-known, in the past thirty years or so, the history of the social sciences since 1945 has often concentrated on the Anglo-American world, relegating the transnational dimension of social science in the Cold War to footnotes. ā¦ Studying this collection of essays, readers will reach the conclusion that other, decentered, histories of the social sciences can be written that challenge the one-way conception of international social scientific exchange and favor instead multivocal narratives.ā (Philippe Fontaine, Serendipities, Vol. 6 (2), 2021)
Editors and Affiliations
About the editors
Christian DayƩ is a sociologist at the Science, Technology and Society (STS) Unit of Graz University of Technology, Austria.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Cold War Social Science
Book Subtitle: Transnational Entanglements
Editors: Mark Solovey, Christian DayƩ
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70246-5
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: History, History (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-70245-8Published: 14 May 2021
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-70248-9Published: 14 May 2022
eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-70246-5Published: 13 May 2021
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XXVI, 400
Number of Illustrations: 9 b/w illustrations
Topics: History of Science, World History, Global and Transnational History, History, general