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The Americanization of Social Science
Intellectuals and Public Responsibility in the Postwar United States

David Haney (Author)

9781592137145

Paperback / softback, published 15 October 2008

296 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 2 cm, 0.36 kg

"This is an important and timely work…. [W]hile it is excellent as an intellectual history of the sociological discipline from the late 1940s to the early 1960s, its importance in illuminating questions of the public role of intellectuals in a modern democratic society gives it a far wider significance…. This is a fluent, well-constructed, soundly researched and informative work that fills in an important but little-understood aspect of postwar American social, cultural and intellectual history."
-Metapsychology Online

In this, a unique history of the America's postwar intellectual, David Paul Haney outlines the developoment of sociology as a discipline and why, given its focus of study, it failed to develop into a force in the intellectual currents of the United States.

Arguing that sociologists attempted to develop both a science and an instrument for the spread of humanistic concern about socity, Haney shows how both attempts failed to connect sociology with larger questions of policy and social progress. 

Table of Contents


Chapter 1    Introduction                                          1

Chapter 2    The Postwar  Campaign for Scientific Legitimacy              29

Chapter 3    Quantitative Methods and the Institutionalization of Exclusivity         60

Chapter 4    Social Theory and the Romance of American Alienation                   90                                                 
Chapter 5    Theories of Mass Society and the Advent of a New Elitism        115

Chapter 6    Fads, Foibles, and Autopsies: Unwelcome Publicity for Diffident    160
               Sociologists                                          
                                           
Chapter 7    Pseudoscience and Social Engineering: American Sociology's         225
   Public Image in the Fifties

Chapter 8    The Perils of Popularity: Public Sociology and Its Antagonists    264

Conclusion    The Legacy of the Scientific Consensus                301

Bibliography   

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