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 book The Cult of the Irrelevant: The Waning Influence of Social Science on National Security,1Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019More 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

“Parsons’s massive 1948 report to the SSRC, Social Science: A Basic National Resource, sounded the charge in his major battle to define social science’s new role.”

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, Social Science: A Basic National Resource, 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.

While not a particularly methodologically 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” in The 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

“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.”

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 The Dimensions of Diplomacy, 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,” Isis 101, 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, “Social Science and Social Policy,” Philosophy of Science 16, no. 3 (July 1949): 230; and Gene M. Lyons, The Uneasy Partnership: Social Science and the Federal Government in the Twentieth Century (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1969), 112.
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 Studies 5, 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.”11Parsons, “Social Science: A Basic National Resource,” 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

At least initially, proponents of the new approach believed a more rigorous comparative politics would prove relevant to Cold War policy. One of the leaders in this effort was Gabriel Almond.12→Robert Adcock, “Interpreting Behavioralism” in Modern 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” in The 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, “Anthropology, Political Behavior, and International Relations,” World Politics 2, no. 2 (January 1950): 281. He was particularly critical of political science, dismissing it as a “stagnant pool.”15Almond, “Introduction,” 13. Reflecting the new policy-science mindset that assumed that more rigorously derived knowledge constituted a sounder basis for policymaking, Almond was convinced comparative politics had to leave the area studies approach behind and become more scientific.

“The CCP helped to foster behavioral approaches as the dominant mode in comparative politics, marginalizing area studies and other nonbehavioral approaches.”

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 and Richard Cox, “Seminar Report,” American Political Science Review 47, 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 Scientist 33, 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 Science 442, no. 1 (March 1979): 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 Politics 3, 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 Politics 1, 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” in Chinese Thought and Institutions, John K. Fairbank, ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago 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, Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 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 History 28, 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 History 24, 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,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 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 History 15, 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” in Staging Growth: Modernization, Development, and the Global Cold War, David C. Engerman, ed. (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003), 57.

Second, as modernization theory developed within political science and the other social sciences, it did so in a way that made it less applicable to concrete policy situations. In fact, the Behavioral Revolution’s promise to reconcile theory and method with practical concerns was never realized. One survey of almost a thousand articles in leading political science journals from 1959 to 1969 found that only one touched on Vietnam and overall only 6 percent engaged in “policy analysis.”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 his April 2008 speech to 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 (New York, The Social Science Research Council, August 30, 2009), 1. But by that point area studies had long ago fallen “out of fashion” among most social scientists,35→Richard K. Betts, “Fixing Intelligence,” Foreign Affairs 81, 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 Politics 40, no. 2 (January 1988): 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).

References:

1
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019More Info →
2
Uta Gerhardt, Talcott Parsons: An Intellectual Biography (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 150–51.
3
Talcott Parsons, “Social Science: A Basic National Resource” in The 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.
4
Gerhardt, Talcott Parsons, 163–64.
5
McGeorge Bundy, “The Battlefields of Power and the Searchlights of the Academy,” in The Dimensions of Diplomacy, ed. E. A. J. Johnson (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1964), 2–3.
6
David C. Engerman, “Social Science in the Cold War,” Isis 101, no. 2 (June 2010): 396.
7
Gene M. Lyons and Louis Morton, Schools for Strategy: Education and Research in National Security Affairs (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1965), 63.
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, “Social Science and Social Policy,” Philosophy of Science 16, no. 3 (July 1949): 230; and Gene M. Lyons, The Uneasy Partnership: Social Science and the Federal Government in the Twentieth Century (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1969), 112.
9
James G. Hershberg, James B. Conant: Harvard to Hiroshima and the Making of the Nuclear Age (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1993), 711.
10
David C. Engerman, “Rethinking Cold War Universities: Some Recent Histories,” Journal of Cold War Studies 5, no. 3 (Summer 2003): 83.
11
Parsons, “Social Science: A Basic National Resource,” 74.
12
→Robert Adcock, “Interpreting Behavioralism” in Modern 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.
13
Gabriel A. Almond, “Introduction: A Functional Approach to Comparative Politics” in The Politics of the Developing Areas, Gabriel A. Almond and James S. Coleman, ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1960), 10.
14
Gabriel A. Almond, “Anthropology, Political Behavior, and International Relations,” World Politics 2, no. 2 (January 1950): 281.
15
Almond, “Introduction,” 13.
16
Nils Gilman, Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 118–19.
17
→Roy Macridis and Richard Cox, “Seminar Report,” American Political Science Review 47, no. 3 (September 1953): 642–43.
→Also see on this committee, Adcock, “Interpreting Behavioralism,” 200.
18
→Quoted in Gilman, Mandarins of the Future, 123.
→Also see 128–29.
19
Linking disciplinarity to the decline of area studies is Richard D. Lambert, “Blurring the Disciplinary Boundaries: Area Studies in the United States,” American Behavioral Scientist 33, no. 6 (July 1990): 725.
20
Lucian W. Pye, “Political Modernization: Gaps Between Theory and Reality,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 442, no. 1 (March 1979): 32.
21
Samuel P. Huntington, “The Change to Change: Modernization, Development, and Politics,” Comparative Politics 3, no. 3 (April 1971): 311.
22
Dankwart Rustow, “Modernization and Comparative Politics,” Comparative Politics 1, no. 1 (1968): 43.
23
John K. Fairbank, “Introduction: Problems of Method and Content” in Chinese Thought and Institutions, John K. Fairbank, ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957), 1.
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, Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 29, no. 1 (January–March 1997): 27–28.
25
Robert 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.
26
David C. Engerman, Know Your Enemy: The Rise and Fall of America’s Soviet Experts (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 14.
27
→Huntington, “The Change to Change,” 307.
→Also see Leonard Binder, “The Natural History of Development Theory,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 28, no. 1 (January 1986): 3.
28
Nick Cullather, “Development? Its History,” Diplomatic History 24, no. 4 (Fall 2000): 645 (emphasis in original).
30
Dean C. Tripps, “Modernization Theory and the Comparative Study of Societies: A Critical Perspectives,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 15, no 2 (March 1973): 219.
31
→Gilman, Mandarins of the Future, 103.
→Also Nils Gilman, “Modernization Theory, the Highest Stage of American Intellectual History” in Staging Growth: Modernization, Development, and the Global Cold War, David C. Engerman, ed. (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003), 57.
32
David M. Ricci, The Tragedy of Political Science: Politics, Scholarship, and Democracy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984), 197.
33
Binder, “The Natural History of Development Theory,” 5.
34
Also see Catherine Lutz, “The Perils of Pentagon Funding for Anthropology and the Other Social Sciences,” The Minerva Controversy (New York, The Social Science Research Council, August 30, 2009), 1.
35
→Richard K. Betts, “Fixing Intelligence,” Foreign Affairs 81, 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 Politics 40, no. 2 (January 1988): 169–93.