Mark Solovey

My research examines the development of the social, psychological, and behavioral sciences in various contexts, i.e., intellectual, biographical, disciplinary, political, and institutional.  Most of my work concentrates on the period since World War Two, especially the Cold War era. I am particularly interested in the following issues: scientific boundary work for the social, psychological, and behavioral sciences; controversy over their intellectual foundations, normative implications, and scientific identities; the evolution and impact of private and public patronage for research in these fields; debates about their social relevance and public policy uses.

My book Social Science for What? Public Funding for the “Other Sciences” at the U.S. National Science Foundation (MIT Press, July 2020) examines the contested position of the social sciences at this major U.S. science agency.  The NSF’s 1950 enabling legislation made no mention of the social sciences, although it included a vague reference to “other sciences.” Nevertheless, as I show in this book, the NSF soon became a major—albeit controversial—source of public funding for them.  My analysis underscores the long-term impact of early developments, when the NSF embraced a “scientistic” strategy, wherein the natural sciences represented the gold standard, and created a social science program limited to “hard-core” studies. Along the way, I show how the agency’s efforts to support scholarship, advanced training, and educational programs were shaped by landmark scientific and political developments, including McCarthyism, Sputnik, reform liberalism during the 1960s, and a newly energized conservative movement during the 1970s and 1980s. Finally, I assess the NSF’s relevance in our “post-truth” era, question the legacy of its scientistic strategy, and call for a separate social science agency—a National Social Science Foundation. This study of the battles over public funding is crucial for understanding the recent history of the social sciences as well as ongoing debates over their scientific status and social value.

My book Shaky Foundations: The Politics-Patronage-Social Science Nexus in Cold War America provides the first extensive examination of a new patronage system for the social sciences that emerged in the early Cold War years and that took more definite shape during the 1950s and early 1960s, a period of enormous expansion in American social science. By focusing on the military, the Ford Foundation, and the National Science Foundation, I show how this patronage system presented social scientists and other interested parties, including natural scientists and politicians, with new opportunities to work out the scientific identity, social implications, and public policy uses of academic social research. I also examine significant criticisms of the new patronage system, which contributed to widespread efforts to rethink and reshape the politics-patronage-social science nexus starting in the mid-1960s.  Based on extensive archival research, Shaky Foundations addresses fundamental questions about the intellectual foundations of the social sciences, their relationships with the natural sciences and the humanities, and the political and ideological import of academic social inquiry.

I am also co-editor of the book Cold War Social Science: Knowledge Production, Liberal Democracy and Human Nature.  From World War II to the early 1970s, social science research expanded in dramatic and unprecedented fashion in the United States, which became the world’s acknowledged leader in the field. This book examines how, why, and with what consequences this rapid and yet contested expansion depended on the entanglement of the social sciences with the Cold War. Utilizing the controversial but useful concept of “Cold War Social Science,” the contributions gathered here reveal how scholars from established disciplines and new interdisciplinary fields of study made important contributions to long-standing debates about knowledge production, liberal democracy, and human nature in an era of diplomatic tension and ideological conflict.