Society on the Edge: Social Science and Public Policy in the Postwar United States
本书考察了二战后美国社会科学家如何研究、辩论和推广关于社会问题的新思考方式，并分析了这些研究如何影响公共政策，适合对社会科学史、政策制定及美国战后社会感兴趣的学者。
When the core social science disciplines first took shape in the United States during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, one of the central challenges was to understand various ills produced by a modern industrializing, urbanizing, and increasingly technological society. Those problems included everything from political corruption and other threats to democracy to economic slumps, social ills associated with a wide variety of things including immigration, prostitution, sweat shops, and labor unrest, cultural (mal)adjustments, and individual neurosis. The study of such matters was destined to remain salient for scholars, indeed right up to the present day. Yet explicit discussion and debate about “social problems” per se developed unevenly across the disciplines. Interest in particular problems such as crime or discrimination or inequality waxed and waned as well. So, how exactly did sociologists, psychologists, anthropologists, economists, political scientists, and other students of the human sciences understand what a social problem is? How did they decide whether some set of objective conditions, subjective perceptions, or a combination of the two meant that something qualified not simply as a social phenomenon, social condition, or social force but also as a genuine social problem or social pathology? As scholars attended to such basic questions, others naturally arose. How should social problems be studied? What factors must be considered to account for the origins, characteristics, and evolution of any particular social problem? And what could scientists of society and human nature do—if anything—to help ameliorate the harms associated with these problems?With a primary focus on the period from World War II through the late twentieth century, Society on the Edge provides the first in-depth examination of how social scientists investigated, debated, and promoted new ways of thinking about a wide array of social problems. The study also provides a rich analysis of the prewar background along with postwar professional, intellectual, social, and public policy contexts that shaped social science studies and conditioned the ways in which that work became—or did not become—influential in the wider society.After a superb introductory chapter by the coeditors, Philippe Fontaine and Jefferson Pooley, the bulk of this book focuses on particular social ills that attracted scholarly and public interest. Individual chapters take up the following topics: the family (Savina Balasubramanian and Charles Camic), education (Andrew Jewett), poverty (Alice O'Connor), discrimination (Leah N. Gordon), the “black ghetto” (George C. Galster), crime (Jean-Baptiste Fleury), addiction (Nancy D. Campbell), mental illness (Andrew Scull), and war (Joy Rhode). One could hope for chapters dedicated to other subjects as well, such as sexuality, immigration, or indigeneity. Nevertheless, the selection of topics covered in the present volume is compelling. Furthermore, every essay is deeply researched and well written, and each makes valuable analytic contributions while also synthesizing significant bodies of existing scholarship. Virtually all of the chapters are written by well-known and accomplished scholars, many of whom have published one or more books on subjects closely related to their essays.Besides sharing a general concern with how social scientists engaged with social problems, the authors address three fundamental questions, making the findings of the volume as a whole much more than the sum of its chapters. The first question is, When did the particular social problem under consideration acquire broad public importance, and for whom in particular did it seem so important? In answering this question, the essays show us how crime, poverty, war, and so on were taken up within particular academic and intellectual contexts and virtually always in dialogue with shifting social concerns and public policy developments. Not surprisingly, we encounter examples where social science studies and advice “withered on the vine of official indifference” (21). But that is only part of the story, because social scientists often played significant roles in shaping the terms of public discussion and policymaking. They were, as the editors put it, “among the significant definers. They helped to designate the problems and—in complex interplay with other social and political currents—to give shape to policy responses” (21). The second question concerns how academic investigations of particular problems reflected and informed shifts in the social science division of labor. Explorations of this issue reveal which disciplines, interdisciplinary fields, and subfields were or were not able to establish their authority as leading sources of expertise about mental illness, poverty, and education, among others. Third, what sorts of explanations did their analytic frameworks provide? Of special interest here is whether researchers concentrated on individual and local conditions, on larger social trends and structural forces, or on some combination. Answers to this question illuminate key developments and controversies concerning the epistemology and methodology of social problem analysis, which, in turn, had far-reaching policy implications.Broadly speaking, this study reveals that within academia, both structural and individualist explanations continued to have their adherents; but at the intersection of social science and public policy, individualistic approaches gained notable ground during the second half of the twentieth century. This trend reflected the rising salience of psychological and economic approaches specifically, including work from the disciplines of psychology and economics proper, but also investigations informed by psychological and economic approaches elsewhere, such as in political science and sociology. As a result, during the last couple of decades of the twentieth century and continuing into the present one, social problems continued to receive widespread attention across the well-established social science disciplines as well as in cross-disciplinary or hybrid fields of operations research, systems analysis, demography, criminology, and peace studies; in other branches of the academy focused on education, medicine in the case of psychiatry, business, social work, law, and public policy; and also certain areas within the biological sciences such as ethology, sociobiology, and neuroscience. But in public discourse and policymaking, economics and psychology had the greatest influence. This finding resonates with a growing body of historical works—by Ellen Herman, Alice O'Connor, Angus Burgin, Daniel Rodgers, Elizabeth Popp Berman, and others—that document a declining focus on social explanations and social forces combined with a diminished confidence in government interventions that target social structures; a strong shift toward individualistic thinking and the psychologization of social ills; the ascendancy of neoliberal modes of analysis and policymaking alongside attacks on the Keynesian welfare state; and economic imperialism buoyed by economization, wherein public discourse focused increasingly on economic matters and public policies prioritized the goal of strengthening the economy.This collection provides insightful discussion of many other themes of considerable historical interest as well. Readers will learn a lot about how the study of social disorders was often yoked to events and issues on the world stage, including the US-Soviet rivalry during the Cold War, development in the so-called Third World, efforts to contain the spread of communism and socialism, and the goal of strengthening the US economy and leadership of the capitalist system. The long 1960s also looms large. Amid the rise of social movements, antiwar protests, the Great Society, and the War on Poverty, engagement with social problems took on renewed urgency across the social and behavioral sciences, accompanied and in subsequent decades followed by leftist critiques and a powerful right-wing backlash, which would inform the rise of the Christian Right, the Reagan presidency, and the war on welfare. All the while, a shifting array of patrons (i.e., large private foundations, think tanks, policy institutes, and the civilian and military wings of the federal government) were heavily involved in promoting policy-relevant scholarship on the major social concerns of the day.Society on the Edge will be of considerable value to a wide range of scholars. These include social scientists whose own research, teaching, and other professional activities can benefit from a deeper understanding of the longer history and recent past of social problem analysis. For intellectual historians, historians of public policy, historians of war, the family, the black ghetto, or any of the other topics covered, and certainly for historians of the social, behavioral, psychological, and human sciences, this volume should be essential.