The fortunes of social science within the American National Science Foundation
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The fortunes of social science within the American National Science Foundation Mark Solovey: Social science for what? Battles over public funding for the “other sciences” at the National Science Foundation. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2020, 408 pp, $50 PB George Reisch1 Accepted: 29 October 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Mark Twain is believed to have said that while history does not repeat, it often rhymes. Mark Solovey endorses this idea in his latest book, Social Science for What?—an impressive account of the fortunes of social science within the American National Science Foundation (NSF). Buttressing and chronologically extending his treatment in his book Shaky Foundations (Solovey 2013), Solovey establishes the NSF’s importance as a funding agency for postwar social science and charts the recurring and rhyming challenges social scientists and their defenders faced within and around the foundation. The repeating themes are intellectual—concerning regnant doubts about the integrity, foundations, and practical utility of social science as it is perennially contrasted to natural science. They are also financial—concerning the small, sometimes miniscule, grants given to social scientific projects; and they are often political—given the United States’ propensity to reactionary anti-intellectualism. The social sciences, Solovey shows, have long been an easy target for politicians who portray research projects they do not like as ideological or subversive of the so-called American way of life. Even some NSF administrators in Solovey’s story fear the “political troublemaking capacity” of the social sciences (245). Stylistically and organizationally, this book falls prey to what I call academic “spoon feeding.” Evidently, the author (or their editor, to place the blame where it often belongs) believes that readers should first be told what the book will be about and how it will be established in each chapter; then told what the book is about and how it is established by the historiographic particulars in each chapter; and then be told again what the book was about and how it was established in chapter summaries and then, yet again, in the book’s conclusion. When history repeats, or seems to, it is interesting. When historians repeat themselves, it is something else. * George Reisch [email protected] 1
Chicago, IL, USA
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Metascience
That said, I found Social Science for What? engaging and informative. Despite the interruptions of chapter summaries and reviews, Solovey provides a convincing and sometimes vivid picture of NSF social-science funding in the last half of the twentieth century. On a basis that includes abundant archival evidence, he covers the debates surrounding the formation of the NSF in the wake of World War II; the relative golden age of social-science funding in the 1960s when national leaders hoped that social science might help to solve economic and social problems; the stormy 1970s when congressmen such as William Proxmire delighted in attacking supposedly wasteful,
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