Early Cold War Research and the Enduring Relevance Question: Area Studies, Behavioralism, and the SSRC

In the early days of the Cold War, tensions between disciplinary professionalization and broader policy relevance were manifest in related efforts by two scholars associated with the Social Science Research Council (SSRC): Talcott Parsons and Gabriel Almond. In my bookThe Cult of the Irrelevant: The Waning Influence of Social Science on National Security,1新泽西州普林斯顿：普林斯顿大学出版社，2019年More Info →I explore how they embraced the Behavioral Revolution sweeping the social sciences as a way to both transform them into more “scientific” disciplines and also make them more useful to policymakers. Ironically, however, their efforts undermined area studies and turned some social sciences, in particular political science, into disciplines with little policy application. Parsons’s and Almond’s achievements and their failures in this effort combined to tell a cautionary tale about social science’s ability to answer its relevance question: Can it be both a rigorous and directly policy-relevant scholarly enterprise?

The Behavioral Revolution within academia

No scholar more assiduously tried to modernize postwar social science than Parsons. The Harvard sociologist was among the legions of social scientists who rallied to the colors during the Second World War, an experience that convinced him that social science had been an important, if underappreciated, weapon in the arsenal of democracy. Moreover, the development of the atomic bomb instilled in him a sense of urgency about clarifying the role that social sciences could play in guiding postwar policy.2Uta Gerhardt,Talcott Parsons: An Intellectual Biography(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 150–51.Parsons’s massive 1948 report to the SSRC,社会科学：基本国家资源, sounded the charge in his major battle to define social science’s new role.

In it, Parsons outlined a detailed campaign plan for making the social sciences more scientific while ensuring they would continue to aid policymakers as they waged the Cold War. He sought to distance social science from the humanities, which were “orientated much more to appreciation than to analysis, prediction, and control.” The hallmark of science, and its unifying element, in his view, was theory: “The critical basis of the organization and generalization of knowledge lies in ‘conceptual schemes’ or ‘theory.’ It may therefore be said that the most important single index of the scientific status of a body of knowledge lies in the degree of technicality and scope of empirical applicability of the generalized conceptual schemes, of ‘theory’ in the field.”

Theory was inextricably linked, in Parsons’s mind, with basic, rather than applied, research. Indeed, Parsons recognized a fundamental tension between science and policy: “The kind of simplification which is essential, especially in the early stages of a scientific development, seems unrealistic and useless to practical men. It does not promise help in their immediate problems.” Moreover, he opposed social scientists doing policy-relevant work because it would raise unrealistic expectations and divert the best minds into policy analysis. Additionally, he viewed policy-focused research as more likely to be pressured or influenced by outside forces, whereas “basic” social science work would remain intellectually pure.

而不是一个特别sophisticated social scientist himself, Parsons was nevertheless adamant that the only hope for the future of social science was for it to be dominated by “key” men committed to the scientific enterprise. As he boasted, “those who still argue whether the scientific study of social life is possible are far behind the times. It is here, and that fact ends the argument.”3Talcott Parsons, “Social Science: A Basic National Resource” inThe Nationalization of the Social Sciences, ed. Samuel Z. Klausner and Victor M. Lidz (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986), 42–3, 45, 46, 47, 51, 53, 78, 104, 105, and 107.Indeed, he feared the forces for the status quo within the social sciences were so powerful that he was willing to see the rest of the field remain ineligible for support from the new National Science Foundation if he could not guarantee that it would go exclusively to social “scientists.” A revised, coauthored, draft of Parsons’s report was to have been published as a monograph under the SSRC’s imprint, but multiple revisions were rejected because the Council’s reviewers remained unpersuaded by Parsons’s conflation of the natural and the social science approaches and his unbounded confidence that basic research would eventually produce practical results.4Gerhardt,Talcott Parsons, 163–64.Still, Parsons’ personal failure with the SSRC should not mask the larger success he and like-minded colleagues enjoyed in remaking social science in his preferred image through the Behavioral Revolution.

Area studies in national security policy

The most dramatic example of how the professionalization of social science disciplines inadvertently paved the road to their irrelevance in the policy space was the displacement of area studies by modernization theory and political development in political science. Area studies—the systematic investigation of the particularities of various regions through deep knowledge of their histories, languages, and cultures—was among the most useful of social science approaches during the Second World War. The primary locus for the area studies approach in the US government had been the Research and Analysis (R&A) Branch of the wartime Office of Strategic Services (OSS), which Harvard dean and Kennedy national security advisor McGeorge Bundy referred to as the “first great center of area studies in the United States.”5McGeorge Bundy, “The Battlefields of Power and the Searchlights of the Academy,” in外交的维度, ed. E. A. J. Johnson (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1964), 2–3.After the war, the US government sought to institutionalize the R&A Branch’s approach, which favored regional over general disciplinary expertise in government and academia.6David C. Engerman，“Social Science in the Cold War,”Isis101, no. 2 (June 2010): 396.Area studies thus emerged as a pillar for the Cold War bridge between the Ivory Tower and the Beltway.7Gene M. Lyons and Louis Morton,Schools for Strategy: Education and Research in National Security Affairs(New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1965), 63.

The legacies of that wartime mobilization of the professoriate would linger for a time after the Second World War. Given the extensive service of area studies scholars with the wartime intelligence community, there was initial postwar optimism about continuing cooperation between the academy and the government, particularly upon their return to the groves of academe where they established major “area studies” research centers on many campuses around the country.8→Robin W. Winks,Cloak and Gown: Scholars in the Secret War, 1939–1961, 2nd ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), 114–15 and 384.
→Also, see Bundy, “The Battlefields of Power and the Searchlights of the Academy,” 2–3; Edward Shils, “社会科学与社会政策,”Philosophy of Science16, no. 3 (July 1949): 230; and Gene M. Lyons,The Uneasy Partnership: Social Science and the Federal Government in the Twentieth Century（纽约：拉塞尔·西奇基金会，1969年），第112页。The National Defense Education Act (NDEA) of 1958 injected substantial funds to bolster expertise in this field early in the Cold War,9James G. Hershberg,James B. Conant: Harvard to Hiroshima and the Making of the Nuclear Age(Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1993), 711.while the Title VI program underwrote regional centers at many universities.10David C. Engerman，“Rethinking Cold War Universities: Some Recent Histories,”Journal of Cold War Studies5, no. 3 (Summer 2003): 83.Ironically, these efforts to increase the number of academic area experts by seeding them throughout regular social science departments inadvertently undermined their unique approach by forcing them to comport with disciplinary criteria of scholarly excellence.

This effort to maintain the wartime spirit of cooperation between academe and the policy community would have at best mixed results. Until the Behavioral Revolution swept political science, area studies had been its dominant approach to comparative politics. While acknowledging its wartime contributions, Parsons dismissed area studies on the grounds that they belonged “predominantly in the field of fact-finding research.”11帕森斯,“社会科学:一个基本的国家资源e,” 74.Postbehavioral comparative politics sought to generate general theories of political and economic behavior in the developing world that could be derived deductively and tested formally or statistically, while the area studies approach focused on describing and understanding the unique dynamics of particular regions or countries.

Separating area studies from political science

至少最初，新方法的支持者认为，更严格的比较政治将证明与冷战政策有关。这项努力的领导者之一是加布里埃尔·杏仁。12→Robert Adcock, “Interpreting Behavioralism” inModern Political Science: Anglo-American Exchanges Since 1880, Robert Adcock, Mark Bevir, and Shannon Stimson, ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 200.
→Also, see Ido Oren,Our Enemies and Us: America’s Rivalries and the Making of Political Science(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003) 148.Trained originally as a specialist in US politics at the University of Chicago, he eventually marched with the vanguard of the Behavioral Revolution in comparative politics. Like his mentors Charles Merriam and Harold Lasswell, Almond was bullish about the development of “policy science.” As he explained elsewhere, “practical policy motives have forced the modern political scientist to concern himself with the whole range of political systems which exist in the modern world—from African kingdoms and tribal organizations to traditional oligarchies such as Saudi Arabia, and transitional, modernizing systems such as Burma and India.”13Gabriel A. Almond, “Introduction: A Functional Approach to Comparative Politics” inThe Politics of the Developing Areas, Gabriel A. Almond and James S. Coleman, ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1960), 10.Indeed, a central element of his critique of anthropology and other cultural approaches like area studies was their lack of policy relevance.14Gabriel A. Almond, “人类学、政治行为和国际化的l Relations,”World Politics2, no. 2 (January 1950): 281.他特别批评政治学，将其视为“停滞池”。15Almond, “Introduction,” 13.反映了新的政策科学思维方式，认为更严格的知识构成了政策制定的强大基础，杏仁被说服了比较政治必须抛弃该地区研究的方法，并变得更加科学。

Almond’s institutional springboard for remaking the subfield was the SSRC’s Committee on Comparative Politics (CCP). The CCP helped to foster behavioral approaches as the dominant mode in comparative politics, marginalizing area studies and other nonbehavioral approaches. In the summer of 1952, the SSRC sponsored the Interuniversity Research Seminar on Comparative Politics at Northwestern University. Its participants advocated a “problem orientation” and were committed to policy relevance.16Nils Gilman,Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America(Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 118–19.But they also agreed that the “area studies” approach had institutionalized a comparative politics that was parochial, descriptive, and atheoretical.17→Roy Macridis和Richard Cox，“Seminar Report,”American Political Science Review47, no. 3 (September 1953): 642–43.
→Also see on this committee, Adcock, “Interpreting Behavioralism,” 200.Still, some among them, such as their host Roy Macridis, quietly fretted that “’twenty years from now the Rockefeller [Foundation] and Carnegie [Corporation] may have to spend millions to liberate us from the conceptual straight-jacket that the [behavioralists] are wrapping around us.’”18→Quoted in Gilman,Mandarins of the Future, 123.
→Also see 128–29.

These second thoughts among comparative behavioralist fellow travelers quickly gave way to graver doubts.19Linking disciplinarity to the decline of area studies is Richard D. Lambert, “Blurring the Disciplinary Boundaries: Area Studies in the United States,”American Behavioral Scientist33, no. 6 (July 1990): 725.MIT’s Lucian Pye complained that the Behavioral Revolution had reduced comparative politics to the globalization of the US politics approach to the study of political behavior.20Lucian W. Pye, “Political Modernization: Gaps Between Theory and Reality,”Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science442，不。1（1979年3月）：32。Harvard’s Samuel P. Huntington lamented that the comparative element was being lost entirely as history and culture gave way to systems theory and quantification.21Samuel P. Huntington, “The Change to Change: Modernization, Development, and Politics,”Comparative Politics3, no. 3 (April 1971): 311.Dankwart Rustow agreed, complaining that Almond’s approach “sent Western students of politics off to study the non-West, but regrettably…sent them off with a conceptual baggage far more distinctly Western than he realized.”22Dankwart Rustow, “Modernization and Comparative Politics,”Comparative Politics1, no. 1 (1968): 43.And China specialist John K. Fairbank deplored the “remarkable parochialism on the part of Western political science [which], I suggest, has resulted from a mistaken doctrine of scientific universalism which forbids ‘regional’ specialization.”23John K. Fairbank, “Introduction: Problems of Method and Content” inChinese Thought and Institutions约翰·k·费尔班克。(芝加哥:Ch大学icago Press, 1957), 1.Looking back on this period, a number of later scholars agreed that this marginalization of area studies had ultimately undermined both scholarship and policy.24→D. Michael Shafer,Deadly Paradigms: The Failure of U.S. Counterinsurgency Policy(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 69.
→Ron Robin,The Making of the Cold War Enemy: Culture and Politics in the Military Industrial Complex(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 5.
→James K. Boyce, “Area Studies and the National Security State” in “Asia, Asian Studies, and the National Security State: A Symposium,” ed. Mark Selden, special issue,有关亚洲学者的公告29, no. 1 (January–March 1997): 27–28.

In an effort to become “science,” political science, among other social science disciplines, pushed its subfield of comparative politics away from the area studies approach and toward more universally oriented modes of inquiry as political development and modernization theory. This, in turn, would make them far less useful to policymakers than their area studies predecessors.25Robert A. Packenham,Liberal America and the Third World: Political Development Ideas in Foreign Aid and Social Science(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973), 246–47.The most successful postwar area studies programs focused on the United States’ primary Cold War adversaries, particularly the Soviet Union. Indeed, Soviet studies would become the model for all subsequent area studies programs in important respects.26David C. Engerman，Know Your Enemy: The Rise and Fall of America’s Soviet Experts(New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 14.But as the Behavioral Revolution came to dominate political science, it tipped the balance in favor of technique and general models over substance. To be sure, this inclination toward a “science” of development was not initially divorced from concern with concrete policy. But as it was captured by the Behavioral Revolution in the field of US politics and then transplanted into comparative politics, “theory becomes an end in itself.”27→Huntington, “The Change to Change,” 307.
→Also see Leonard Binder, “The Natural History of Development Theory,”Comparative Studies in Society and History28, no. 1 (January 1986): 3.

Two consequences emerged from this trend. First, the methodological core of modernization theory quickly became “modeling.”28Nick Cullather, “Development? Its History,”Diplomatic History24, no. 4 (Fall 2000): 645 (emphasis in original).Unfortunately, modernization theory’s predilection for models and methods over substance led it to mischaracterize the actual situation in some concrete cases.29Mark Berger, “Decolonization, Modernization, and Nation-Building: Political Development Theory and the Appeal of Communism in Southeast Asia, 1945–1975,”东南亚研究杂志34, no. 3 (2003): 423.As Dean Tripps explained, modernization theory’s scientific pretensions encouraged “the tendency to mistake concept for fact.”30Dean C. Tripps, “Modernization Theory and the Comparative Study of Societies: A Critical Perspectives,”Comparative Studies in Society and History15, no 2 (March 1973): 219.It assumed, for example, that all states were converging on one common economic (market) and political (democracy) system, and once they reached those points, many of the pathologies of underdeveloped countries would resolve themselves. This was not just a theoretical assumption, it would also underlay much of US Cold War strategy toward both the Second and Third Worlds.31→Gilman, Mandarins of the Future, 103.
→Also Nils Gilman, “Modernization Theory, the Highest Stage of American Intellectual History” inStaging Growth: Modernization, Development, and the Global Cold War, David C. Engerman, ed. (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003), 57.

其次，随着政治学和其他社会科学中的现代化理论的发展，它以使其不适用于具体政策情况的方式。实际上，从未实现过行为革命与实践关注的理论和方法调和理论的承诺。从1959年到1969年，一项对主要政治学期刊中的近一千篇文章进行的一项调查发现，只有一项涉及越南，总体上只有6％的人参与了“政策分析”。32David M. Ricci,The Tragedy of Political Science: Politics, Scholarship, and Democracy(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984), 197.A prominent comparative politics scholar attributed this retreat from relevance to disciplinary professionalization, as a result of which social scientists faced fewer internal incentives to do such work and more disincentives to engage in policy.33Binder, “The Natural History of Development Theory,” 5.

Conclusion

Echoes of these debates about relevance have continued to reverberate. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates’s post–Cold War Minerva Initiative testifies to continuing dissatisfaction among national security policymakers with purely in-house research and analysis but also the lack of useful scholarly research on some of the most pressing post–Cold War security issues. In hisApril 2008 speechto the American Association of Universities on the 50th anniversary of the National Defense Education Act (NDEA), he telegraphed that the social science expertise he sought seemed more akin to the area studies model.34Also see Catherine Lutz, “The Perils of Pentagon Funding for Anthropology and the Other Social Sciences,”The Minerva Controversy（纽约，社会科学研究委员会，2manbetx万博官网登录009年8月30日），第1期。But by that point area studies had long ago fallen “out of fashion” among most social scientists,35→Richard K. Betts, “Fixing Intelligence,”Foreign Affairs81, no. 1 (January/February 2002): 58–9.
→Also, see Joseph Lepgold and Miroslav Nincic,Beyond the Ivory Tower: International Relations Theory and the Issue of Policy Relevance(New York: Columbia University Press, 2001) 5.
→Vinay Sitapati, “Hegemony in the Politics Department,”The Daily Princetonian, April 5, 2011.
→Jack Snyder, “Science and Sovietology: Bridging the Methods Gap in Soviet Foreign Policy Studies,”World Politics40，不。2（1988年1月）：169–93。highlighting that the unintended consequence of Parsons’s and Almond’s embrace of the Behavioral Revolution was not to settle social science’s relevance question but rather to keep it open permanently.

Some portions of this essay draw upon Michael Desch,The Cult of the Irrelevant: The Waning Influence of Social Science on National Security(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019).