Cold War Social Science

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 – anthropology, development studies, economics, education, political science, psychology, science studies, and sociology – 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 – and thus how we should study – Cold War social science itself. 

“Cold War Social Science: Transnational Entanglements marks the latest fruits of Mark Solovey’s decades-long entrepreneurial effort to map the contours of ‘Cold War Social Science.’ … Solovey has gathered a wide ranging group of scholars interested in exploring one or another aspect of ‘Cold War social science’ in transnational perspective. … Each of the essays offers excellent empirical material and a serious effort to contend with the two analytic themes adverted by the book’s title: transnational and Cold War.” (David C. Engerman, Minerva, Vol. 62 (3), 2024)

“For Cold War Social Science: Transnational Entanglements has true merit. … this collection of disciplinary (self-)reflections should be required reading for social scientists themselves. For many of the aspects examined here—from data science, algorithmic thinking, and area studies, to the scientific objectivity posture and funding structures—are with us today. In short, this book deserves a wide readership.” (Clara Oberle, H-Soz-Kult, hsozkult.de, July 7, 2023)

“Cold 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. … the collection makes an important contribution to what has been called the ‘transnational turn’ in the history of the social sciences … .” (Cyril Jung, Metascience, August 4, 2022)

“The 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.” (John Krige, Annals of Science, Vol. 79 (3), 2022)

“The book's authors describe how imported knowledge was routinely reshaped for local purposes—and 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 field‐wide effort, one that has gained momentum over the last 15 years, to complicate (and pluralize) the idea of Cold War social science. … Cold War Social Science is an impressive, tightly edited collection, a model for tethering spread‐out case studies to a unifying theme.” (Jefferson Pooley, Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, October 12, 2021)

“As 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. … 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.” (Philippe Fontaine, Serendipities, Vol. 6 (2), 2021)

“This edited book demonstrates how social sciences were entangled with the global Cold War, by introducing cases from across the world and covering a wide range of inquiries, topics, and disciplines within social sciences, from the usual suspects of anthropology and development theories to more surprising associations such as the Science Citation Index and leisure studies. The volume will be highly useful for a broad range of scholars engaging critically with the interplay between Cold War politics and transnational scientific exchange. Cold War Social Science: Transnational Entanglements is a highly recommended edited volume for both postgraduate students interested in transnational science and historians of science, technology, medicine, and environment who engage with the entanglements of science and politics across national borders.” (Aya Homei, author of “Science for Governing Japan’s Population”)

Mark Solovey is Associate Professor in the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology at the University of Toronto, Canada.

Christian Dayé is a sociologist at the Science, Technology and Society (STS) Unit of Graz University of Technology, Austria.