September 15, 2016

Dear colleagues,

I’m really looking forward to our conversation next month! What I’ve given you here, under the collective title “The Specter of Social Engineering: Scientism and Its Critics in the Long 1950s,” is a series of chunks, separated by ellipses, from a book-in-progress that is tentatively titled Containing Science: The Challenge of Science in Postwar America. (“Postwar” is now too narrow and will need to be rethought.) I’ve included pieces of the Introduction and Chapters 2-4. The book will continue with three more chapters that bring the narrative up to the present. Chapter 5 will look at the impact of “anti-scientism” on the New Left and its offshoots from the 1960s to the 1990s. Chapter 6 will explore anti-scientism among conservatives over roughly the same period. Finally, Chapter 7 will look at the fate of such challenges to scientism in our current era, which features both technological enthusiasm and religious conservatism.

With the book as a whole, I seek not only to explain important features of American political discourse but also to illustrate the importance of intellectual history to political history and vice versa. As part of this endeavor, I have laid out the similarities between “anti-scientism” and the familiar category of anti-communism. Is this a useful and convincing parallel to draw? Or do you think the phenomena differ sufficiently that equating them is misleading? Beyond that, can you think of a term less awkward than “anti-scientism”?

Meanwhile, I plan to add more material from popular culture and national political debates to these chapters before submitting the manuscript. I need to grapple with science fiction somehow, and there are many other cultural phenomena that may deserve attention as well. I also want to look more systematically at Congressional debates, as well as newspapers and journals of opinion, including the letters columns. How should I work in these sources? How much material should I add, and which existing material should I cut or compress? I’d be very glad for suggestions on these matters or any other thoughts for improvement that you might have.

Thanks in advance for your help!

Best, Andy Jewett

Introduction Science as a Moral Threat

“Democracy,” remarked the Christian theologian Stanley Hauerwas some years ago, “is a form of theocracy in which the new priests, that is, social scientists, rule in the name of ‘the people.’” To many readers, this sentiment will sound profoundly strange. What do sociologists and anthropologists, toiling away in university departments, have to do with the elected officials, bureaucrats, lobbyists, and donors who make up the face of American politics? But to other readers, versed in certain modes of cultural criticism, Hauerwas’ meaning is quite clear. From their standpoint, his assertion neatly captures the modern world’s characteristic malady: the fact that science’s cultural influence has eradicated all moral content from public life.1 In one form or another, this claim has reverberated through American public culture for nearly a century. Flip through the archives of American magazines from the twentieth century, or listen in on past scholarly conversations, and you will begin to notice it, again and again—seldom the dominant note, but often vigorously sounded. In these arguments, metaphors of pollution and contagion abound: Science seeps, creeps, infects. Some critics traced the cultural sickness to broad philosophical tendencies or “isms”: materialism, naturalism, positivism, secularism, atheism. Others found the source of the malady in the social sciences. Those fields had been “secreting … something akin to a poison” into modern societies, wrote the historian Jacques Barzun in 1966, turning the physical scientist’s mechanistic outlook into the “image of our inner life.” A decade earlier, another critic argued that postwar American life took its shape from “the seeping into the minds of non-academic men of the conviction that human and social life is subject to the same necessities as is the subject-matter of the physical sciences, and subject also to the same controls.”2 Such images of science as a potent threat to morality derive their power from a key assumption—namely, that science assumes a position of neutrality, or even active hostility, toward human purposes and values. In this definition, thinking scientifically about any subject matter means adopting an objective, value-neutral orientation that eliminates all moral considerations from the inquiry at hand. But Hauerwas is not simply saying that science is value-free. His assertion implies a series of further claims, which add up to a position I call “anti-scientism.”3

1 Stanley Hauerwas, Dispatches from the Front: Protestant Engagements With the Secular (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), 214, note 8. 2 Jacques Barzun, “Science as a Social Institution,” Proceedings of the Academy of Political Science 28, no. 2 (April 1966): 11, 13; Alexander Miller, review of Joseph Wood Krutch, The Measure of Man, Christian Scholar 38, no. 1 (March 1955), 69. 3 Anti-scientism is an unlovely term, and it has the serious disadvantage of not offering a parallel to “anticommunist”; “anti-scientist” simply does not work. But I have not found a more precise label for the cluster of arguments I describe. The superficially similar term “anti-science” imports far too much polemical content into the terminological framework and reifies a single definition of science: e.g., Gerald Holton, Science and Anti-Science (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993). Richard Hofstadter’s “anti-intellectualism” remains tied to a very specific intellectual formation: the beliefs and practices of elite university scholars circa 1963. Science figured heavily in this formation, but Hofstadter did not single out science or relate criticism of the postwar intelligentsia’s values—his own values—to other species of anti- scientism: Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (New York: Knopf, 1963).

Jewett (Draft: Please do not cite or circulate!) 1 The reasoning associated with anti-scientism goes like this: Value-neutral science is the proper means for examining the non-human, and thus non-moral, dynamics of the natural world. But the application of this value-neutral approach beyond its legitimate domain, to aspects of the human world, eliminates the moral meanings necessary for proper behavior. Indeed, anti-scientism holds that science’s morality-destroying outlook has spread through much or all of American public life, squeezing out other interpretive frameworks and creating a moral vacuum in the culture at large. Modern citizens, in this view, do not simply flout moral strictures. Rather, they disavow the moral dimensions of the human world altogether, because they adopt the value-neutral mindset of the scientist. It is society, not individuals, that lacks a moral compass. And this moral deficit, say critics, has produced major social problems that citizens will not solve until they address the underlying cultural root. They must throw off the moral nihilism of a scientific outlook and reorient their thinking around a more traditional source of insight—many critics point to religion, while most others favor the humanities—that once offered the requisite moral guidance and could do so again. Anti-scientism suggests that citizens need not, and should not, eliminate genuine science; they must have physics, chemistry, and biology for guidance. But they can save the human world only by containing science—by confining it once again to its proper domain, the study of the natural world. Only if modern citizens manage to contain science in this way will they learn once again how to behave morally, as their forebears did.4 The term anti-scientism builds on scientism, a pejorative label that critics have long applied to the view that scientific methods or interpretations are relevant in domains beyond the study of physical nature. The stance or sensibility that I call anti-scientism builds on scientism as a mode of criticism: it contends that some individual or group, or modern society in general, thinks that science applies where it does not. But anti- scientism also holds that the cultural influence of scientism has produced a wide-ranging set of social problems, or even a general crisis of society or civilization—dubbed simply the “modern crisis” by many critics since the 1930s. Like anticommunism, then, anti- scientism is a social and political argument, not just an intellectual one. Anticommunists did not simply disagree with communism or find it mistaken; they also saw it as an active threat to their societies. Similarly, anti-scientism identifies scientism as a clear and present danger that must be rolled back, not just a harmless mental error by a few, or even many, individuals. It comprises the full series of assertions outlined above: Science is rigorously value-neutral, even amoral. A scientific outlook dominates some or all of the public culture. When that culture does not provide firm moral guidance, our habits and institutions go awry. Ergo, our social and political problems stem from science—or rather, scientism and the faulty applications of scientific thinking it has fostered. Put most simply, anti-scientism is the tendency to see scientism as a cause of concrete ills in the world. Critics in this vein make claims about not only what science is but also what it does, or has done, to society.5

4 Hauerwas adds two additional claims to the basic framework of anti-scientism: the idea that science is a full-blown religion and the claim that society operates through a top-down system of political control. The first of these has been more common than the second among anti-scientism’s adherents. 5 Many critics, especially since the 1960s, have argued merely that rolling back scientism would be necessary to solve society’s problems, but many others have implied that such a move would be sufficient. On the concept of scientism, see especially Tom Sorell, Scientism: Philosophy and the Infatuation with Science (New York: Routledge, 1991); Mikael Stenmark, Scientism: Science, Ethics, and Religion

Jewett (Draft: Please do not cite or circulate!) 2 …

Containing Science explores the cultural meanings associated with anti-scientism across nearly a century, right up to the present day. As a significant force in American public life, anti-scientism dates back to the 1920s. Important antecedents can be found before World War I, but only after the war did substantial groups of critics conclude that scientism had significantly reshaped American public culture and institutions, causing a range of social ills. A host of phenomena struck the various critics as evidence of scientism’s sway: the new consumer culture, the moral and aesthetic rebellions against Victorian norms, changes in American education, and the popular vogue of psychology and other social sciences. Although some critics of scientism viewed industrial technology as the main avenue through which science had impacted modern culture, others discerned more direct lines of cultural transmission from the natural sciences into the culture at large—above all, through the field of psychology.

…

Such charges of scientism spread even more widely after World War II. The early Cold War period, from the late 1940s to the early 1960s, was both the golden age of American science—in terms of funding and prestige—and the heyday of anti-scientism. Those two phenomena were closely intertwined. The postwar United States witnessed a society-wide reckoning with the place of science in public life, as well as major changes in how participants thought about that question. All manner of postwar commentators argued that science had become a dominant power and set the tone for modern culture. Many now said that Americans lived at the height, or even the tail end, of an “age of science.” Anti-scientism hardly gained universal assent after World War II, but it was well represented, firmly mainstream, and often resolutely centrist in its political orientation. A long list of notables embraced it: the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, the political conservative Russell Kirk, and the literary critic Joseph Wood Krutch, to name just a few. Some postwar commentators deemed scientific, or scientistic, not only practices and institutions grounded in technology but also those that operated in a “depersonalized” manner, guided by impersonal rules or calculations rather than individual personalities, moral obligations, or subjective judgments. Thus, many saw scientism behind the centralizing, bureaucratic states of the mid-twentieth century, as well as the atomic bomb and the new medium of television. The growing military-industrial complex reinforced this perception that the governing system took its cues from science. So too did the new visibility of the social sciences, which found major new areas of application after World War II and claimed large swaths of interpretive terrain for themselves. Finally, the growing religious diversity of the United States made critics less likely to claim that mainline Protestantism set the tone for American public culture and more likely to look to the scientific disciplines and research universities for the roots of contemporary cultural developments.

(Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2001); and Joseph Margolis, The Unraveling of Scientism: American Philosophy at the End of the Twentieth Century (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003).

Jewett (Draft: Please do not cite or circulate!) 3 Many different groups of critics targeted scientism in the early Cold War years, each offering their own sets of moral guidelines as the needed alternative. These included numerous varieties of religious commentators, several groups of political conservatives, academic humanists, natural scientists distrustful of the social sciences, and dissidents within the social sciences. Such figures shared few, if any, substantive commitments. By the end of the 1950s, however, many of them had adopted both a label for the target of their ire—“scientism,” which came into general use at that time—and an age-old but newly attractive term for scientism’s opposite, namely “humanism.” This linguistic convergence inspired attempts by a number of postwar thinkers to mobilize diverse critics around their shared commitment to humanism over scientism. The conservative writer Russell Kirk, for example, worked with his publisher Henry Regnery to build a network of academic and non-academic thinkers that might oust the empiricist, quantitative “behavioral scientists” from the disciplines, or at least create a flourishing, humanistic alternative within the social sciences. Meanwhile, the philosopher Ruth Nanda Anshen, who oversaw seven book series featuring humanists of various persuasions, sought in the late 1950s to bring together critics of scientism at an Institute for the Study of Man. But these and similar initiatives foundered on the sharp political and theological divisions between scientism’s critics. Nonetheless, by the end of the 1960s anti-scientism had left a deep mark on American politics. On the political right, anti-scientism had circulated widely since the mid-1950s. Postwar figures such as Kirk and William F. Buckley, Jr. revitalized and modernized American conservatism, making it an alliance of religious believers against secularity as well as an alliance of individualists against collectivism. In the 1960s, anti- scientism gained similar traction on the resurgent left. New groups of radicals ditched orthodox Marxism, with its scientific pretensions, for self-consciously humanistic alternatives. In subsequent decades, members of the academic left often argued that scientism served as the official ideology of capitalist modernity, sweeping away economic and political challenges by eliminating the very possibility of morally grounded criticism. Meanwhile, many conservative theorists and activists decried the rationalistic utopianism of planners and bureaucrats in terms strikingly similar to those of their left-wing counterparts. From the 1970s forward, the growing religious right targeted scientism from a different direction, claiming that the secularization of American politics and the reappearance of Darwinian evolution in biology classes represented the official establishment of a false, naturalistic religion. Of these groups, however, only the radicals challenged the widespread techno- utopianism that accompanied the rise of the Internet, the dot-com boom, and the associated revolution in communication that took off in the 1990s. Even then, most left critics continued to focus primarily on what they considered scientism’s deeper, more fundamental expressions, such as technocratic political ideals or the modern conception of the autonomous self. Indeed, many on the left had come to equate science more closely with capitalism, bureaucracy, and liberal individualism than with technology. Meanwhile, religious conservatives had surprisingly little to say about the new marriage of technology and capitalism, even as they targeted climate science and a militant “New Atheism.” Free-market conservatives predictably lauded the high-tech economy while dismissing taxes, regulation, and other federal initiatives as warmed-over state socialism.

...

Jewett (Draft: Please do not cite or circulate!) 4 Chapter 2 The Specter of Social Engineering

“During the past thirty years,” declared the Columbia University historian Jacques Barzun in 1964, “the articulate have unceasingly cried out against the tyranny of scientific thought, the oppression of machinery, the hegemony of things, the dehumanization brought about by the sway of number and quantity.” Indeed, Barzun continued, the most modern of the nations had cheered the loudest for “the wounded poets, the philosophers of myth, the devotees of agrarianism, the novelists of the life of instinct, and the painters and dramatists who scorn civilization—to say nothing of the day-to-day critics of mass culture.” Modernity’s champions had fought back, according to Barzun, and with some success. But the tide ran against them: “The handiwork of science in the modern world is a topic of everyday reference, and among those who lead opinion the reference is generally adverse.”6 Barzun’s assessment hardly fits the usual scholarly images of the mid-twentieth- century United States. Once viewed as a conservative age, the “long 1950s,” running from roughly 1947 to 1963, now appears in many histories as a time when partial retrenchment in national politics barely masked the accelerated march of technical rationality through American life. The prevailing narratives portray a naïve and almost universal trust in science in the postwar United States. They cite lavish research funding, the ascension of psychology and psychiatry, the high status of physics, the multiplication of consumer technologies, and the influence of technocratic political ideals. In the usual rendering, science went virtually unchallenged in the postwar United States and technocrats ruled the roost in both public and private sectors, despite Eisenhower’s genial centrism and sharper challenges from McCarthyism and the nascent New Right. The long 1950s, in this telling, represented the halcyon days of the “New Deal order.”7 While there is much truth in this account, anti-scientism also flourished in the same years. This chapter and the next two explore the crucial postwar period, which served as the crucible for many conceptions of science, religion, and modernity that remain widely current in the United States. All manner of postwar critics painted the picture of a deeply entrenched, thoroughly scientific culture, one relentlessly driven by technical imperatives to trample on human values at every turn. The power-hungry social engineer and the mindless technocrat became stock figures in American cultural criticism, shaping many citizens’ perceptions of their political world. Although such political effects are difficult to assess, the fact that even many staunch Democrats thought the cultural dominance of science had put the modern world on a fast train to hell surely influenced the fortunes of New Deal liberalism. Indeed, as this chapter shows, critical portraits of a scientific culture circulated freely between groups with very different political and religious views. Conservatives could easily pick up arguments from the likes of Barzun. So, too, could religious leaders who agreed with him on little else. For all of these figures, scientism explained key features of the modern world.

6 Jacques Barzun, Science: The Glorious Entertainment (New York: Harper & Row, 1964). 7 Ironically, Barzun’s book and many others like it helped to create this familiar portrait of American “high modernity” (and thus helped to obscure from historians’ sight the postwar efflorescence of anti-scientism) by asserting the reign of science, even as they deplored it.

Jewett (Draft: Please do not cite or circulate!) 5 Underneath the critics’ shared concerns about scientism, however, they disagreed in subtle but important ways on the precise nature of the threat posed by science. Indeed, various groups defined “science” itself in terms that reflected their own aims and interests, and they offered competing proposals for its cultural containment. At the confluence of these many programs, concerns about science’s effects became a staple of American cultural criticism. In the wake of the bomb, all kinds of commentators offered cultural lag arguments, claiming that technical knowledge had outrun moral knowledge and self-understanding in America. Many added that scientism was reversing the course of moral development, rather than advancing it or allowing it to proceed unhindered. Some claimed that science’s cultural influence had reduced moderns to the moral level of barbarians—and given them world-destroying weapons with which to fight.

Triggers

What is science doing to us? How is it changing the conditions of our shared existence? These questions have pressed on Westerners—and increasingly others as well—since the eighteenth century. But they have rarely pressed more insistently than they did in the post-World War II United States. The period from the late 1940s to the early 1960s brought profound uncertainties and fears. In the minds of many Americans, bombers patrolled the skies, communists lurked under the bed, and the nuclear family could hardly restrain the seething anxieties of suburban life. Waves of cultural panic arose: red scares, lavender scares, fears of juvenile delinquency, and the like. But underneath it all, many critics discerned an even deeper threat: an unprecedented, epochal shift in the locus of cultural authority. Alarming metaphors proliferated: science was a genie escaped from a bottle, a car steering itself, a servant or slave turned on its master. Science, relentlessly expanding its reach, had become a profound moral danger rather than a reliable force for good. It had escaped its proper domain—the value-neutral analysis of physical nature—and invaded the realms of human meaning and value. Far more than in earlier decades, postwar concerns about scientism focused explicitly on the methods and legitimacy of the social sciences. Conservative Protestants still inveighed against evolution, but their engagements with more mainstream thinkers were relatively infrequent by the 1950s. The remaining postwar disputants accommodated the findings of modern biology with little comment. Meanwhile, American philosophers largely withdrew from the main arena of public disputation as well, occupying themselves with technical questions and employing a highly specialized form of discourse, even in the burgeoning field of value theory. Following John Dewey’s death in 1952, American public life no longer featured an organized and often militant cadre of philosophical naturalists. The social sciences, too, adopted a detached, value- neutral stance as leading practitioners recast their fields in the mold of “behavioral sciences.” Rather than focusing on the status of biology or the overt ethical claims of social scientists and philosophers, then, postwar debates centered largely on social scientists’ substantive claims, implicit moral assumptions, and steadily growing areas of jurisdiction. Although postwar conflicts over scientism were, in this regard, simpler in structure than earlier rounds of disputation, they remained extremely bitter and became much more widespread. Conservative Protestants were largely alone in challenging

Jewett (Draft: Please do not cite or circulate!) 6 scientific conceptions of natural history, but all kinds of groups pushed back against what they saw as attempts to apply the mechanistic approach of the physical sciences to the domains of human meaning. New terms of opprobrium arose: “scientism” itself, by the end of the 1950s, but also, and more importantly, “social engineering.”8 In its guise as social engineering, scientism appeared to critics as no mere error or a diffuse cultural climate but rather a devastating social force in the everyday world. Social engineering meant that the advocates of scientism held substantial power and pursued far-reaching goals. It entailed the external manipulation of human beings, not just attempts to sway them through intellectual means, via writing and teaching. Several kinds of evidence in the postwar era fueled the widespread charge that science’s detached, depersonalized, and implicitly manipulative perspective had invaded the precincts of modern culture and transformed itself into social engineering. Put together, these developments appeared to many critics as the early phases of a comprehensive project of social engineering and convinced many that science itself had relativistic and authoritarian tendencies. To their eyes, science was the amoral ideology of power-hungry experts. The new awareness, and fear, of communism gave charges of social engineering a powerful boost. Although some deplored the Soviets’ abridgement of civil liberties, and others their destruction of free enterprise, the official atheism of the Marxist regime loomed large in American understandings of communism as a global phenomenon. And what was this atheism, many critics reasoned, if not an improper extension of the natural sciences’ materialism into philosophy and politics? Stalin’s worldview, wrote the anticommunist and political conservative Whittaker Chambers in his 1952 bestseller Witness, did not stem from Marx’s writings, but rather the physicist’s injunction: “All of the progress of mankind to date results from the making of careful measurements.” Chambers, who defined democracy as “a political reading of the Bible,” held that Stalin’s regime represented the endpoint of any genuinely secular philosophy. To the extent that science had spun off such philosophies at home, it threatened democracy and human freedom.9 A range of specific developments abroad reinforced many Americans’ belief that naturalistic philosophies inevitably led to totalitarianism. Anticommunists made much of the poor treatment of church leaders in Eastern Europe and elsewhere. In the West, too, strong communist parties in Europe seemed of a piece with the official secularism of the United Nations. Various religious leaders lobbied to include theistic language in the International Declaration of Human Rights and were dismayed when that campaign failed. The 1946 selection of the British biologist Julian Huxley as the head of the U.N.’s Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) reinforced suspicions of the body’s intentions. Huxley, the grandson of Darwin’s famed associate T. H. Huxley, was an outspoken scientific humanist who had laid out his controversial views in books such as What Dare I Think? and If I Were Dictator.

8 As mentioned in the introduction, the philosopher Max Otto complained about the ubiquity of the epithet “scientism” by 1943: “Scientific Humanism,” Antioch Review 3, no. 4 (December 1943), 534. And there were users well before then, such as Charles Gray Shaw, a Protestant philosopher at NYU: e.g., Shaw, The Ego and Its Place in the World (New York: Macmillan, 1913), 34, 39; Shaw, The Ground and Goal of Human Life (New York: New York University Press, 1919), esp. 62-83. But the term’s real takeoff occurred among some specialists in the 1940s and wider audiences in the 1950s. 9 Whittaker Chambers, Witness (New York: Random House, 1952), 9-10, 16-17.

Jewett (Draft: Please do not cite or circulate!) 7 At home, too, many critics saw secularism on the march in the postwar United States, despite the remarkable revival of religious faith and language in the nation’s public life. Central here was the Everson case of 1947, in which the Supreme Court enshrined Thomas Jefferson’s metaphor of a “wall of separation” between church and state. The actual outcomes of Everson and its successors, McCollum (1948) and Zorach (1952) were rather mixed, and in the latter case the Court famously declared, “We are a religious people whose institutions presuppose a Supreme Being.” But Everson and McCollum enshrined a strict separationist reading of the First Amendment that fueled intense anxieties about secularization among many religious leaders, politicians, and citizens. The wave of public activism among American natural scientists in the wake of Hiroshima and Nagasaki might have calmed suspicions that science exerted a harmful moral influence, but in some ways it further heightened that belief. Thanks to archives, memoirs, and historians, we can now peer inside the world of elite scientists’ responses to the bomb. But at the time, all the public could see was a series of public statements and proposals, in forums such as journal articles, reports, and letter columns. (Likewise, few Americans knew much at the time about the inner workings of the military-industrial complex or the behavioral sciences.) And what those public writings by activist scientists revealed could seem quite alarming: proposals to share power and knowledge with the enemy; a thin, consequentialist moral language; and eventually a public struggle between Edward Teller, who demanded more and larger bombs, and the aloof, patrician, cryptic, and allegedly communistic J. Robert Oppenheimer.10 When natural scientists spelled out their personal views at greater length, they could again sound rather frightening to those who worried about science’s cultural and moral impact. For example, the famed biologist George Gaylord Simpson declared in his widely read 1949 book The Meaning of Evolution that citizens should confine themselves to those religions and philosophies compatible with science’s discovery that there were no “absolute ethical criteria of right and wrong.” Simpson managed to pull a sturdy framework of human rights and democratic socialism out of the moral indeterminacy of the universe, and he couched all of his arguments in expansive, humanistic terms. Yet he also called for systematic deference to experts and rejected the attribution of authority to anything other than the scientists’ empirical evidence. More hopeful, if less plausible, was the Yale biologist Edmund Sinnott’s insistence that Christian ethics and Western political values grew directly out of human protoplasm. But Sinnott certainly alienated many readers when he stated that Western civilization represented “the faith of religious

10 Some of the most helpful recent excursions into the world of postwar behavioral science and the military- industrial complex include Joel Isaac, Working Knowledge: Making the Human Sciences from Parsons to Kuhn (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012); Joy Rohde, Armed With Expertise: The Militarization of American Social Research During the Cold War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013); Paul Erickson et al., How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind: The Strange Career of Cold War Rationality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013); Mark Solovey, Shaky Foundations: The Politics-Patronage-Social Science Nexus in Cold War America (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2013); Sarah Bridger, Scientists at War: The Ethics of Cold War Weapons Research (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015); Rebecca Lemov, Database of Dreams: The Lost Quest to Catalog Humanity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015); and the essays in Solovey and Hamilton Cravens, eds., Cold War Social Science: Knowledge Production, Liberal Democracy, and Human Nature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). An important overview is Ron Robin, The Making of the Cold War Enemy: Culture and Politics in the Military-Intellectual Complex (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).

Jewett (Draft: Please do not cite or circulate!) 8 liberalism,” a view he defined in opposition to both biblical literalism and Catholic theology. Meanwhile, the era’s many champions of individual freedom could hardly have been reassured by the anthropologist Ashley Montagu’s claim that infant dependency offered a model for adult belonging.11 And all the while, the natural and social sciences became ever more deeply embedded in the burgeoning military-industrial complex, as well as a booming consumer economy. Scientists appeared everywhere in advertisements, hawking toothpaste and other products, while psychologists helped companies tailor those pitches for maximum efficiency. Indeed, through its remarkable technological proficiency, science seemed the source of the unprecedented human condition of abundance—and the myriad social and cultural problems it quickly generated. And some of the same researchers whose work had generated the new consumer gadgets were also building weapons of unfathomable power in secret laboratories, far away from the public eye. Meanwhile, leading natural and social scientists repeatedly insisted that they were morally and politically neutral, bearing no responsibility for the uses of their work. In sum, there was something for everyone to fear in postwar American science. But it was specific developments associated with the social sciences that most often turned diffuse, if intense, concerns about scientism into much more concrete charges of social engineering by manipulative, amoral experts. These developments seemed to reveal the endpoint of modern society’s scientific drift, and also to indicate the major fronts on which to fight it. Even if there were no coordinated program of manipulation by social engineers, these phenomena suggested the terrifying potential outcomes of a spreading framework of cultural determinism and moral relativism. American “behavioral scientists,” it seemed to many postwar critics, had picked up the naïve relativism of the natural scientists, honed it to a point, and used it to manipulate their fellow citizens. Above all, it was B. F. Skinner’s 1948 novel Walden Two that appeared to reveal the deepest meaning of modern science, opening a window onto the secret hopes and dreams of the multiplying legions of behavioral scientists. Skinner, who was already notorious to American readers for keeping his infant daughter in a glass-sided box, denied the existence of free will as well as the soul. He portrayed a world in which experts conditioned children—taken from their parents at birth and raised collectively— to follow the community’s egalitarian rules, therefore obviating the need for democratic procedures. … If Skinner’s book offered the whitewashed version of postwar social engineering projects, the British novelist Aldous Huxley’s dystopian Brave New World struck many readers as a better description of the world that Skinner and his ilk would create. Originally published in 1932, the novel enjoyed considerable postwar success and appeared in several new editions starting in 1946. … The growing visibility of psychology and psychiatry in the postwar United States fed into this fear of a stultifying, unfree future grounded in the social applications of science. …

11 George Gaylord Simpson, The Meaning of Evolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1949), 345, 315; Edmund W. Sinnott, “The Biological Basis of Democracy,” Yale Review 35 (1945), 62-63; Sinnott, Two Roads to Truth: A Basis for Unity Under the Great Tradition (New York: Viking, 1953), 224-27; Ashley Montagu, On Being Human (New York: H. Schuman, 1950), 30.

Jewett (Draft: Please do not cite or circulate!) 9 Other concrete developments likewise suggested that Skinner and his scientific allies were gaining power and building a Huxley-like world. For example, the extensive development of polling and advertising techniques after World War II heightened fears of a loss of individual freedom. … Some of the postwar changes that alarmed critics of scientism the most concerned educational practices. In the schools and universities, too, quantitative and statistical methods of decision-making spread rapidly in the postwar years. … The vogue of testing merged, in the minds of many critics, with a thoroughgoing emphasis in the American school system on adjusting children to prevailing social values. Letters and articles from the postwar period are full of gripes about the “professional educationists” and their conformist, leveling ways. Particularly distressing to many was the “life adjustment” curriculum, a descendant of progressive education that abandoned the critical edge of early theorists such as John Dewey. As its name suggests, the life adjustment curriculum sought to teach practical skills and align students with the social group, as workers and as citizens. … Beyond the schools, Benjamin Spock’s bestselling childrearing manual and the popular writings of the anthropologist Margaret Mead portended for many a world that eliminated the richness, depth, and complexity of the adult experience, reducing everything to the child’s level of instant gratification. … Many commentators connected the rise of “permissive parenting” to what they saw as similar shifts in the treatment of lawbreakers, arguing that scientific thinking had fueled massive increases in adult and juvenile crime. In these areas, critics contended, a scientific mindset erred twice over: first, by eliminating genuinely moral judgments, and second, by deeming individuals innately good and blaming any deviation on their social environments. … Alfred Kinsey’s controversial reports on male and female sexual behavior, published in 1948 and 1953, reinforced the widespread fear that scientific thinking advanced a “statistical” or “descriptive” morality. … A number of widely read books by sociological interpreters on the dangers of conformity in the postwar United States tended to reinforce the fear that scientism threatened humanity, even though their authors also injected social-scientific concepts into the public conversation. For example, David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd was the most commercially successful work of American social science ever published, with sales of more than 1.4 million copies as of 1995. Riesman described a cultural landscape in which Americans increasingly abandoned their inner moral commitments and adjusted themselves to the prevailing standards of the group. The Lonely Crowd gained some credibility from its Riesman’s social-scientific credentials, but it resonated primarily because it reinforced the widespread, pre-existing suspicion of a cultural tendency—the loss of a stable moral framework—that many critics traced directly to scientism. Indeed, commentators often contended that the world would be safe if most social scientists were like Riesman rather than Skinner. In this manner, Riesman became an exception that proved the rule.12

12 David Riesman et al., The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950); Herbert J. Gans, “Best-Sellers by Sociologists: An Exploratory Study,” Contemporary Sociology 26, no. 2 (March 1997), 134. Despite the era’s image as a golden age of public sociology, science writers in 1954 considered the social sciences the least interesting of the sciences to the public: Lewenstein, “‘Public Understanding of Science’ in America,” 224. On Riesman, see Daniel

Jewett (Draft: Please do not cite or circulate!) 10 Similarly, works by William Whyte and Vance Packard introduced the public to sociological modes of analysis while stoking fears about the cultural effects of social science. Whyte’s biting critique of The Organization Man (1956) traced the society-wide replacement of the Protestant Ethic by the “Social Ethic,” the “secular faith” of the well- adjusted cog in a bureaucratic machine. Only a minority of social scientists fancied themselves “social engineers” and avatars of managerial order, he wrote; the rest found these outliers embarrassing. Nevertheless, this minority group had helped to make scientism, with its promise of “an exact science of man,” into a central pillar of the new administrative outlook. “At the present writing,” Whyte declared, “there is not one section of American life that has not drunk deeply of the promise of scientism.” Citing critical analyses of scientism by the conservatives Friedrich von Hayek and Eric Voegelin, Whyte contended that the social sciences could only be “social studies”; their subject matters lacked the “objectiveness” of physical phenomena.13 The following year, Packard’s The Hidden Persuaders detailed the enthusiastic collaboration of many social scientists (the “depth boys,” he called them, citing their reliance of depth psychology) in developing manipulative advertising and PR techniques. He identified the more extreme examples as moves towards “the chilling world of George Orwell and his Big Brother,” based on the assumption that “man exists to be manipulated.” Indeed, the book’s jacket described it boldly as the reader’s “guide to the Age of Manipulation.” Like Whyte, to be sure, Packard concluded on a hopeful note, writing, “we cannot be too seriously manipulated if we know what is going on.” (Whyte famously ended his book by teaching employees how to cheat on the personality tests used to screen them for group-mindedness.) Yet readers could draw darker conclusions from these bestselling books by Whyte and Packard. Like The Lonely Crowd, these books resonated partly because they targeted alarming cultural trends frequently associated with scientism, and not just because they were written in a social-scientific vein.14 Critics of scientism could also find much cause for alarm if they read more deeply in the disciplines or looked at curricular debates in the universities. Numerous scholarly liberals agreed with Edmund Sinnott that American or Western values ruled out a wide range of political ideologies and religious positions. The widely used portrait of an American liberal consensus located political radicals and conservatives outside the

Horowitz, Consuming Pleasures: Intellectuals and Popular Culture in the Postwar World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), esp. 121-136; and Daniel Geary, “Children of the Lonely Crowd: David Riesman, the Young Radicals, and the Splitting of Liberalism in the 1960s,” Modern Intellectual History 10, no. 3 (November 2013): 603-633. 13 William H. Whyte Jr., The Organization Man (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1956), 6-7, 30, 35, 26. Whyte also lambasted the life adjustment curriculum, calling for “a rigorously fundamental schooling” rooted in the humanities. (447) On Whyte’s critique of mainstream sociology, see David Paul Haney, The Americanization of Social Science: Intellectuals and Public Responsibility in the Postwar United States (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008), 175-177. 14 Vance Packard, The Hidden Persuaders (New York: David McKay, 1957), 5, 255, 265; quoted in Daniel Horowitz, Vance Packard and American Social Criticism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 160. “The organization man is not in the grip of vast social forces about which it is impossible for him to do anything,” Whyte concluded his book. “[T]he options are there, and with wisdom and foresight he can turn the future away from the dehumanized collective that so haunts our thoughts.” (447-448) As Whyte put it elsewhere in the book, “a status quo cannot long endure without an ideology to sustain it.” (249) David Paul Haney notes the capacity of Packard’s books to undermine sociological authority in The Americanization of Social Science: Intellectuals and Public Responsibility in the Postwar United States (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008), 205-207.

Jewett (Draft: Please do not cite or circulate!) 11 national project altogether, portraying them as fundamentally un-American. And as Sinnott shows, the liberal consensus project often had theological dimensions as well. American professors spoke casually about “education in liberalism” and the need to remake students’ basic cultural values in their classes, even though they increasingly disavowed any aim to do so with their research. When the “Jacob Report” of 1957 argued that colleges and universities were not actually making students more liberal, numerous respondents deemed that conclusion simply wrong; American higher education had a clear “liberalizing impact.” A survey instrument often used to measure college students’ “mental and emotional maturity” docked respondents for favoring censorship, criticizing Europeans or modern literature, distrusting liberals or American political leaders, or seeking to limit science’s reach. Most postwar American higher educators contrasted liberalism not only to radicalism and conservatism but also to a belief in absolute truths, especially moral and religious truths. To them, liberalism was as much a spiritual orientation as a political one.15

…

The practical aims of many postwar American scholars also offered scientism’s critics cause for alarm. Many readers saw more than a hint of Walden Two or Brave New World in political scientists’ assertion that democracy entailed the provision of security and comfort by experts, not opportunities to participate in the direction of public affairs. American behavioral scientists developed (and later applied overseas) linear narratives of “modernization” that identified technological progress, factory production, mass media, standardized education, bureaucratic welfare states, and elite-driven political systems as necessary and perhaps sufficient conditions for human freedom. Equating the latter with meritocracy, these behavioral scientists defined freedom in economic rather than political terms, as unimpaired access to the vocational slot best suited to one’s innate abilities. This model, added the philosopher Harry A. Overstreet, also guaranteed maximum emotional maturity to all, because psychologists had demonstrated that “a man is at his best when he is doing his best at what he can do best.” The modernization narratives of postwar behavioral scientists, like the interwar cultural lag stories of Ogburn and Beard, stripped the contingency from modern-mind narratives by contending that industrial societies either moved inexorably toward a secular, bureaucratized, standardized future or ripped apart at the seams. Such visions of modernity left no room for moral guidance, as traditionally understood.16

15 Harvard University Committee on the Objectives of a General Education in a Free Society, General Education in a Free Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1945), 57; Philip E. Jacob, Changing Values in College: An Exploratory Study of the Impact of College Teaching (New York: Harper, 1957); Alex S. Edelstein, “Since Bennington: Evidence of Change in Student Political Behavior,” Public Opinion Quarterly 26 (1962), 573; Vera M. Moss, “Evaluating ‘Values,’” Journal of Higher Education 31 (1960), 155. On this controversy, see Andrew Jewett, “Naturalizing Liberalism in the 1950s,” in Professors and Their Politics, eds. Neil Gross and Solon J. Simmons (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014): 191-216. 16 Nils Gilman, Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003); David C. Engerman et al., eds., Staging Growth: Modernization, Development, and the Global Cold War (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003); Harry A. Overstreet, The Mature Mind (New York: Norton, 1949), 34.

Jewett (Draft: Please do not cite or circulate!) 12 Detonations

Such developments accelerated the growth, dating back to the 1920s and 1930s, in the number of American commentators who believed that science threatened society not only by producing such rapid material progress that society’s moral resources could not keep pace but also by seeping into the cultural domain and directly undermining morality itself. Science, in this view, generated not just technological innovations but also equally thoroughgoing, and highly dangerous, innovations in social, political, and moral thought. All manner of mid-twentieth-century critics contended that scientists had illegitimately pushed their mechanistic view of reality into the domain of the human, with disastrous effects. Indeed, these figures claimed that reality itself was changing to fit the narrow, reductive interpretation of the scientists, technocrats, and planners: People were behaving more and more like machines themselves, and treating others as if they were machines, under the prevailing, mechanistic understanding of human affairs. The genuinely human dimensions of behavior were disappearing, as individuals lost the capacity to see and to name such essential elements of life as personal temperaments, creative thought, artistic inspiration, spirituality, and above all moral freedom. In short, science was remaking society in its own image by conceptually eliminating everything that failed to follow measurable, law-like regularities. What had once been a productive interpretive lens had become the cause of endless nightmares, when it was applied beyond its restricted domain and the human world itself was cut to fit science’s narrow scope. As a result, populist criticism of concentrated power shifted away from big business toward experts in the postwar years, even though most Americans continued to support the basic outlines of the New Deal state. Indeed, the former socialist Reinhold Niebuhr contended in 1952 that businessmen were far better than scientific experts; they knew when to set aside their self-serving ideologies and hammer out practical compromises, whereas the experts insisted on remaking the world in their own image— and increasingly possessed the power to do so. Niebuhr held that the United States would veer onto the totalitarian path the minute it granted substantive power to its naïve, freedom-denying experts. He wrote, “the man who knows himself to be absolutely right through the benefit of science is as cruel as those who achieved this fanaticism by religious revelation.”17 Most other critics of scientism believed that American experts already wielded inordinate cultural influence, if not formal power. And many of them contended that ideas controlled the shape of society anyway. The Jewish writer Will Herberg declared that “political events and historical developments are the outcropping of final existential realities.” Scientific experts proved especially dangerous, according to Herberg and many other postwar critics, because they traded in ideas. More specifically, they traded in deracinated, instrumental ideas, and either overtly or surreptitiously advanced the deeper, underlying philosophy of deracination itself—the intrinsically amoral standpoint of modern science. Postwar critics increasingly identified science with what scholars today call “instrumental rationality”: a purely means-oriented approach that focuses solely on achieving most efficiently a pre-determined goal that is provided from the outside by some other source. Instrumental rationality eschews all thought of the ends themselves; it

17 Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1952); Niebuhr, “A Faith to Live By: I. The Dilemma of Modern Man,” Nation 164, no. 8 (February 22, 1947), 208.

Jewett (Draft: Please do not cite or circulate!) 13 speaks of what is, not what ought to be. It is thus the consummate expression of pure servitude, taking all of its meaningful cues from without. But modern society, according to many critics, had put the servants in charge. It had abdicated its responsibility to direct these morally blind experts, and had even granted them special forms of authority that made their wares all the more enticing—and perilous—to the masses.18 This view of science as an expression of instrumental rationality generated new arguments about why scientism was so threatening. Critics had long argued that science- based worldviews fostered moral relativism. But new understandings of moral relativism and its costs emerged over time. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, critics held that scientific philosophies turned citizens away from God’s moral law, leading them to engage in acts of crime and depravity. By the 1930s, the struggle over democracy’s cultural foundations had generated a new kind of critique, holding that the moral relativism of scientific worldviews made it impossible for citizens to retain their allegiance to democracy. The charge that scientism eroded the cultural foundations of democracy spread widely in the late 1930s and remained common in the late 1940s and 1950s. But a third mode of criticism emerged alongside older forms in the postwar years. This analysis centered on the domain of everyday meanings, of individual and collective psychology. Scientism, in the new rendering, eliminated all considerations of meaning whatsoever, producing a total normative vacuum that destroyed the possibility of an autonomous, integrated self or a fulfilling life. The nightmare scenario here was neither that individuals would neglect their families and pick each other’s pockets nor that they would acquiesce to dictators. The new dystopian vision was more like Max Weber’s “iron cage”: a world where faceless bureaucracies ruled and everyday life lacked meaning, where individuals had lost the capacity to conceive of purposes beyond the structures enmeshing them. It was a world of total depersonalization and alienation—not civil disorder but rather an excess of order, an inability to imagine alternatives to the present that rendered disobedience literally unthinkable. It featured a decentralized, despatialized form of oppression—not an all-powerful state crushing dissent but rather social engineers subtly manipulating individuals from the moment of their birth to fuse their beliefs and values with the imperatives of the social order. In short, it was not Orwell’s 1984 but rather Walden Two gone bad, turned into Brave New World. Of course, postwar critics of scientism worried plenty about totalitarian states. But the vision of a disenchanted, depersonalized world of alienation and conformity gave American conceptions of science and culture—and of totalitarianism itself—a new tone in the 1950s and early 1960s. Postwar challenges to scientism thus ran along two lines that critics weighed and mixed differently. Virtually every postwar critic of scientism targeted Skinner, and education was also a nearly universal concern. But commentators made various other selections from the postwar smorgasbord of scientism. One strand of criticism, rooted in the older connection between scientism and totalitarianism, centered on the incapacity of

18 Will Herberg, Judaism and Modern Man: An Interpretation of Jewish Religion (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1951), 11. Ironically, these critics followed Max Weber, the great theorist of instrumental rationality, more closely than did postwar behavioral scientists. The latter embraced Weber’s epistemology and his account of societal rationalization but not his dark rendering of that story. One commentator has connected Huxley’s Brave New World to Weber’s rationalization narrative: Robert S. Baker, Brave New World: History, Science, and Dystopia (Boston: Twayne, 1990), 68-69.

Jewett (Draft: Please do not cite or circulate!) 14 a naturalistic philosophy to ground democracy and combat communism. Here, the problem infused all of American public culture, or public philosophy. The schools sometimes came in for particular blame, but in general this side of the critique gestured rather vaguely toward “modern thought” as a whole. Indeed, postwar critics broadened their scope considerably. All manner of them now followed Catholics in tracing scientism—in this case, the basic error of rooting a comprehensive philosophy in science’s findings rather than recognizing their limited, instrumental character—back to the Enlightenment or even farther, perhaps to the writings of Newton, Descartes, or Bacon. The other strand of postwar anti-scientism targeted a phenomenon that was much more specific and operated on a shorter time frame. This was the nexus of social science—in its guise as social determinism—and particular social institutions, especially education, sexual behavior, and often criminal justice. Here, critics targeted specific scholars, politicians, and administrators for peddling a purely descriptive morality that defined anything people did frequently as normal, or even good, rather than judging that behavior according to settled moral standards. In short, postwar critics of scientism focused in different proportions on its political effects and its social effects. Among the general public, admiration for scientists’ technical achievements mixed with deep unease about the moral implications of their work. Polling data reveal little on this question; surveyors asked very few questions about science in the first place, and most of the phenomena that drew widespread disapproval did not fall under the prevailing definition of science itself. But other kinds of evidence are suggestive. For example, when the anthropologists Margaret Mead and Rhoda Metraux examined views of scientists among high school students and listed composites of the positive and negative descriptions, they presented one kind of negative image that had no positive counterpart: “He may not believe in God or may lose his religion. His belief that man is descended from animals is disgusting.” Meanwhile, college instructors and educated readers created a steady demand for new editions of Frankenstein and Faust, the classic Romantic critiques of technology and reason run amok. Similar themes echoed in many works of science fiction, a genre that flourished after World War II.19 In journalism and politics, anticommunist and anti-liberal sentiments inspired many blasts against scientism. Hearings before Congressional committees investigating the liberal bias of the leading American foundations gave critics of scientism such as Albert H. Hobbs invaluable opportunities to make their case. Hobbs, who had implored Kinsey to exert moral judgment, was a conservative sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania who clashed repeatedly with his departmental colleagues. His major books, The Claims of Sociology (1951) and Social Problems and Scientism (1953), portrayed American sociology as a hodgepodge of tendentious, biased claims that eviscerated traditional morality. Hobbs’ second book found major practical repercussions from scientism, illustrating his contention that “academic intellectuals, as well as demagogues, can influence society—that the mild-mannered man with the briefcase and bifocals constitutes a threat to democracy as well as the bullyboys in breeches.” Moley and other conservative writers, including George E. Sokolsky of the New York Herald Tribune and the editor and staff of the Indianapolis Star, took up Hobbs’ cause in his fight against the New Deal. These journalists argued that Hobbs’ situation at Penn—he remained at the

19 Margaret Mead and Rhoda Metraux, “Image of the Scientist among High-School Students,” Science 126 (August 30, 1957), 387 (italics removed).

Jewett (Draft: Please do not cite or circulate!) 15 assistant professor level for more than ten years, despite his publications—illustrated the hypocrisies of academic liberalism. Soon thereafter, through Moley’s intervention, Hobbs found himself testifying to Congress about his career struggles as part of a high-profile investigation to root out liberal bias in the major foundations—Carnegie, Rockefeller, and above all Ford—that bankrolled the social sciences. The committee, under Tennessee Representative B. Carroll Reece, eventually judged the foundations subversive, leading them to substantially alter their funding priorities. Ford not only shifted its grants away from basic theoretical work in the social sciences toward less contentious applied research but also began funding organizations such as the Foundation for Religious Action in the Social and Civil Order (FRASCO), the meetings of which featured President Eisenhower, Will Herberg, and others expounding on the theological roots of democracy—and, often, the totalitarian tendencies of scientism.20

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Moving beyond the ranks of religious leaders, figures on the political right also decried scientism’s influence on modern culture. They typically aligned themselves with traditional religious perspectives as they did so. Melding homegrown critiques of the secular state with nineteenth-century liberal tenets, economists’ new arguments against planning, and strains of European antimodernism, a growing number of critics in the 1950s attacked social science in the name of a corporate, organic vision of society. Many of these critics adopted the label “conservative,” hitherto anathema in American politics. Looking back, historians have tended to highlight two features of the postwar “New Right”: its dislike of the regulatory state built by Roosevelt and its fierce opposition to communism. Yet postwar conservatives also had much to say about cultural and intellectual matters. They routinely combined their economic and political arguments with claims about science, religion, and the humanities. Members of the New Right, which represented the confluence of many existing and emerging streams of conservatism, insisted that social scientists and government planners wrongly projected a materialistic outlook from the physical sciences onto the world of human affairs, threatening to destroy the social order altogether.21 Indeed, many conservative activists and writers defined their views in direct opposition to the ideological proclivities of American social scientists. The pages of postwar conservative journals and books are littered with attacks on the social sciences. Even libertarians, who stressed the absolute sanctity of property rights and freedom of contract rather than the authority of divine laws or the accumulated wisdom of mankind,

20 Albert H. Hobbs to Henry Regnery, August 31, 1949, Henry Regnery Papers, Hoover Institution Archives, box 30, folder 14; E. Merrill Root, Collectivism on the Campus: The Battle for the Mind in American Colleges (New York: Devin-Adair, 1955), 322-335; Raymond Moley, “Scientism,” Newsweek, June 28, 1954, p. 88; Solovey, Shaky Foundations, 122-127, 140-145; Charles W. Lowry to Monroe Bush, September 26, 1956 and Lowry to William Y. Elliott, May 3, 1957, William Y. Elliott Papers, Hoover Institution Archives, box 6, folder “FRASCO (Committee on Communist Education in Schools).” On FRASCO, see William Inboden III, Religion and American Foreign Policy, 1945-1960: The Soul of Containment (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008) and K. Healan Gaston, “The Cold War Romance of Religious Authenticity: Will Herberg, William F. Buckley Jr., and the Rise of the New Right,” Journal of American History 99 (March 2013): 1133-1158. 21 A helpful overview of the postwar movement is Patrick Allitt, The Conservatives: Ideas and Personalities Throughout American History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 158-190.

Jewett (Draft: Please do not cite or circulate!) 16 often portrayed social science as the domain in which, and through which, liberal dominance had produced its most destructive effects. Reasoning from the assumption that “ideas rule the world,” as the National Review never tired of repeating, conservatives held that real power in America rested in the hands of those controlling the means of cultural reproduction, namely professors and journalists. Even more galling to many conservatives than the imposition of liberal policies by the state was the way that liberal academics projected their values onto the very fabric of reality and defined conservatism as a mental pathology rather than a legitimate political option. The tendency of postwar social scientists to describe welfare-state liberalism as an objective and empirically grounded outlook, not just one ideology among many, fueled enormous resentment on the right. All manner of postwar conservatives held that the dogmatic philosophy of modern liberalism found its most enthusiastic and effective champions in the social sciences. In this manner, anti-scientism, aimed especially at the social sciences, became central to the self-definition of the 1950s New Right. As we will see in Chapter 4, some conservatives even worked to reshape the social science disciplines along friendlier lines.22

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22 William F. Buckley, Jr., “Publisher’s Statement,” National Review 1 (November 19, 1955), 5; Theodor W. Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel J. Levinson, and R. Nevitt Sanford, The Authoritarian Personality (New York: Harper, 1950); Daniel Bell, ed., The New American Right (New York: Criterion, 1955); Andrew Jewett, “Naturalizing Liberalism in the 1950s,” in Neil Gross and Solon J. Simmons, eds., Professors and Their Politics (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014): 191-216; Jamie Cohen-Cole, The Open Mind: Cold War Politics and the Sciences of Human Nature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014).

Jewett (Draft: Please do not cite or circulate!) 17 Chapter 3 The Humanistic Offensive

“Science is wonderful but sometimes I wish it would stay in the laboratory where it belongs instead of coming out to bother me.” So began an unpublished 1950s essay by Joseph Wood Krutch, whose 1929 book The Modern Temper had stoically embraced a world indifferent to human meanings. Krutch had traveled a long way since the 1920s. He now believed that physical scientists had thoroughly disproven his earlier, mechanistic conception of reality. Indeed, he argued that such a view persisted only in the social sciences. Yet Krutch feared that the social sciences were inexorably remaking the entire culture in their image. It was too late to rein in the physical scientists and their deadly devices, he wrote, but the social scientists bringing up the rear of the scientific train might be another story. Perhaps, Krutch proposed, “we can stop them before they go much further.”23 Many aspects of Krutch’s analysis echoed the theistic and conservative critiques described in the previous chapter. Indeed, a variety of religious believers and conservative readers responded favorably to his works. But in fact, Krutch represented a rather different phenomenon: a growing rebellion within the “modern mind” ranks themselves. Back in the interwar period, the campaign for mental modernization, with its twin attacks on laissez-faire politics and religious orthodoxy, had enlisted scholars from a wide ranges of disciplines: the social sciences, philosophy, biology, and even some precincts of literary study. It had also dominated the pages of progressive and radical journals such as the Nation, the New Republic, and Partisan Review. By the 1940s, however, an exodus had begun. Across the disciplines, individual thinkers and even whole subfields had begun to turn against the modern mind approach, deeming it an excrescence of scientism that was creating a moral vacuum in society. Many political thinkers did the same. By the early 1950s, these high-profile apostates routinely took to disciplinary journals and political magazines to denounce the moral nihilism of twentieth- century progressive thought. This chapter shows that important groups of social scientists, along with some natural scientists and political radicals, joined a host of humanistic scholars, religious leaders, and conservatives in the postwar chorus against mechanistic thinking and social engineering. These figures challenged what they saw as endemic scientism in the nation’s universities and political journals and sought to put the distinctively human element back into the modern picture of the world. No account of reality could be complete—or safe— they argued, that did not include human subjectivity, moral norms, and other non- observable but indispensable features. Like their counterparts outside the universities, these academic critics hoped to protect a series of crucial interpretative domains—human self-understanding, moral prescriptions, ideas about the proper shape of social and cultural institutions—against the intrusions of scientism. They, too, contended that the search for a science of society had eroded cultural norms and moral constraints. Some

23 Joseph Wood Krutch, unpublished essay (“Science is wonderful…”), Krutch Papers, Library of Congress, box 15, folder “Untitled, Unpublished.” For Krutch’s new approach, see The Measure of Man: On Freedom, Human Values, Survival, and the Modern Temper (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1954).

Jewett (Draft: Please do not cite or circulate!) 18 spoke of values in a more individualized, subjective sense, but universal moral laws or principles found plenty of adherents in the American universities as well. In a few academic circles, a new version of anti-scientism began to emerge that prefigured important elements of the 1960s New Left. The Columbia sociologist C. Wright Mills, the widely read psychologist Erich Fromm, and the “renegade Marxist” Dwight Macdonald all argued that the technocratic instantiations of science and liberalism reflected, rather than caused, a relentless bureaucratizing and rationalizing tendency in Western society. It was certainly important to throw off scientism and technocratic liberalism, they argued, but that intellectual work would simply kick off the long climb out of the pit of dehumanization. In this view, scientism performed crucial ideological functions but was not in itself the ultimate cause of the modern crisis; that lay in deeper economic and social tendencies. Themes from Max Weber, in his darker moods, and the early (“humanistic”) Karl Marx began to circulate in postwar American culture, alongside the echoes of Martin Heidegger in the thought of many German émigrés. American scholars of many different persuasions agreed that the modern era had witnessed the rationalization of society as well as knowledge, and perhaps even the instrumentalization of the world itself. Across the disciplines in the postwar years, it became a matter of simple common sense for many scholars that the Western world was experiencing an epochal “modern crisis” and that scientism lay at its root.

The internal opposition

The emergence of a vigorous internal critique of scientific scholarship on the intellectual terrain once dominated by “modern mind” theories suggests that the ideal of strict value-neutrality hardly dominated the postwar academy. Historians often suggest that a once-vigorous conception of morally engaged scholarship largely vanished from the American social sciences in the 1920s or 1930s and was only partially recovered in the 1960s. In fact, however, that vision never disappeared in the first place. The World War II era saw plenty of changes in the American disciplines, but these changes are not best characterized as an eclipse of moral engagement. Rather, two overlapping shifts took place. First, a narrower definition of the term “science” won out over its competitors. As a result, all forms of morally engaged scholarship and citizenship now stood beyond the boundaries of science proper. The status of many forms of qualitative research remained unclear as well. It was no longer obvious, for example, that cultural anthropologists could lay claim to the mantle of science—and as we will see, many no longer sought it. Second, most social scientists and philosophers disavowed, at least publicly, a goal they had once openly endorsed: namely, that of systematically altering American culture. In short, social scientists and philosophers increasingly rejected the ideal, or at least the language, of mental modernization.24

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24 For a recent and very different interpretation of many of the figures treated in this section, see George M. Marsden, The Twilight of the American Enlightenment: The 1950s and the Crisis of Liberal Belief (New York: Basic Books, 2014).

Jewett (Draft: Please do not cite or circulate!) 19 In this context, the behavioristic psychologist B. F. Skinner and his Walden Two gave offense in three ways. First, Skinner carried forward the view of many interwar thinkers that values grew out of everyday experience. This approach seemed to devalue religion and the humanities as independent sources of wisdom. Second, he likewise carried forward the ambition to reconstruct American culture in keeping with science’s teachings. Third, he framed that project of cultural reconstruction in the radically deterministic idiom of the interwar theorists John B. Watson and Harry Elmer Barnes. Skinner would later call a book Beyond Freedom and Dignity, a title that neatly captured his assault on the Western moral heritage that so many postwar scholars sought to defend. By challenging core Western ideals, Skinner drew much new opprobrium to the idea of cultural change unmoored from religious or humanistic guidance. His writings confirmed the suspicion of many readers that the project of mental modernization entailed a mechanistic, deterministic view of the human person and a manipulative, anti-democratic social vision. If this was a scientific ethics, then most Americans would look elsewhere for guidance. Given the widespread association of science with a loss of individual freedom—to say nothing of nuclear destruction—critical scholars in the social sciences found themselves caught between a rock and a hard place. They called for sustained, empirical inquiry, but they wanted nothing to do with technocratic nightmares such as Walden Two—let alone Aldous Huxley’s “brave new world.” In this context, many scholars grew uncomfortable with the very term “science.” C. Wright Mills, whose work would profoundly influence the New Left generation, reluctantly retained the term for readability’s sake but declared his preference, given the recent bureaucratization of science itself, for the broader phase “social studies.” A few years later, that same term became the title of a Harvard undergraduate program created by dissenters from the “behavioral science” model. Even as behavioral scientists rushed to associate themselves with science, then, a surprising number of postwar scholars kept their distance. Many of these dissenters believed that scientism had badly weakened or even eliminated modern citizens’ capacity for moral reasoning. Not all of these critics claimed that there were moral absolutes; some argued that values were as personal as tastes. But all insisted that moral commitments were substantive and important—and that scientific perspectives ruled them out of court.25 Chroniclers of the American social sciences sometimes date the recovery of a morally engaged social science to Mills’ vituperative attack on behavioralism in The Sociological Imagination (1959). In fact, plenty of social scientists in the 1950s issued moral judgments and often wrote for broad audiences. For example, David Riesman welcomed Mills’ book, having eschewed the behavioralist model in The Lonely Crowd and other works of the 1950s. Also at Harvard, the sociologist Barrington Moore, Jr., lamented social scientists’ search for strict causal laws and the concomitant decline of historical sensibilities in the twentieth century. Moore co-founded the Social Studies program, which centered on works of classical theory, in protest against the behavioralist approach of Talcott Parsons and his allies. And Nathan Glazer, one of Riesman’s collaborators on The Lonely Crowd, consistently held that sociologists should give the

25 C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959), 18.

Jewett (Draft: Please do not cite or circulate!) 20 public critical insights on social values and practices, not just add statistical bricks to a scientific edifice.26 In the years leading up to Mills’ seminal 1959 work, a number of other scholars wrote books that debunked the scientistic pretensions of modern social inquiry. Humanists penned the most widely read analyses, foremost among them Joseph Wood Krutch’s The Measure of Man (1954) and Jacques Barzun’s The House of Intellect (1959). But dissidents within the social sciences offered sustained critiques as well. One was Albert H. Hobbs, the conservative sociologist who drew Raymond Moley’s attention and testified before Congress in 1954. A few years earlier, Hobbs’ The Claims of Sociology (1951) had reported on a close examination of introductory textbooks in the field. Hobbs, a vigorous critic of American policies on welfare, crime, and the family, saw moral discipline rather than government as the solution to all social ills. He found the textbooks riddled with logical errors, methodological inconsistencies, and meaningless definitions, as well as liberal ideology dressed up as fact. Hobbs extended his criticism to the field as a whole in Social Problems and Scientism (1953), arguing against the kind of strict value-neutrality that postwar behavioralists claimed to achieve.27 Pitirim A. Sorokin also espoused a kind of conservatism, although he combined his religious faith, traditional social values, and staunch anti-communism—earned through battles with the Bolsheviks during his youth in Russia—with an equally vigorous dislike of materialistic self-seeking and ruthless competition. He had fought value-neutral approaches since the 1930s, giving him plenty of time to collect the litany of outrages that became Fads and Foibles in Modern Sociology and Related Sciences (1956). Like Hobbs, Sorokin left his claims about scientism’s destructive social effects largely implicit and spent most of his time on methodological criticism. But his final chapter, “In the Blind Alley of Hearsay Stuff and Negativism,” contained a few of the blasts for which he had become famous. Sorokin had argued since the late 1930s that all civilizations cycled between three holistic states that he called “ideational” (interpreting the spiritual or transcendent as the really real), “sensate” (focusing on the material dimensions of reality), and “integral” (holding the material and ideal in balance). He identified centralized state power as a symptom of the transition from one cultural period to

26 David Riesman et al., The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950); Riesman, Individualism Reconsidered and Other Essays (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1954); Barrington Moore, Jr., Political Power and Social Theory (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958); Nathan Glazer, “The American Soldier as Science: Can Sociology Fulfill Its Ambitions?” Commentary (November 1949): 488. Daniel Geary notes that Mills included this “third camp” of sociologists in an article prefiguring The Sociological Imagination but excised them from the book’s portrait of the profession: Radical Ambition: C. Wright Mills, the Left, and American Social Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 173. For the responses of Riesman and Moore to Mills’ book, see especially David Paul Haney, The Americanization of Social Science: Intellectuals and Public Responsibility in the Postwar United States (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008), 147-149, 150- 151, 156-157. 27 A few years later, Hobbs attacked the physicist Philipp Frank for articulating the value-neutralist philosophy of science associated with logical positivism. Hobbs favored the more spiritually inclined approaches of Eddington, Whitehead, and Einstein. “Science for Scientists Too?” National Review 1 (February 15, 1956), 29. Many of Hobbs’ admirers welcomed Mills’ book: Haney, The Americanization of Social Science, 167-169. A more popular, satirical treatment, Anthony Standen’s Science is a Sacred Cow (New York: Dutton, 1950) also appeared during these years; and cf. George Guion Williams, Some of My Best Friends Are Professors; a Critical Commentary on Higher Education (New York: Abelard-Schuman, 1958).

Jewett (Draft: Please do not cite or circulate!) 21 another—in this case, the disintegration of a sensate period that had defined the West since around 1500. And he scored social scientists for adopting the “negativistic” and deterministic tenor of such a mentality, rather than pointing the way beyond to an integral state of culture. “The destructive science of the dying Sensate culture,” Sorokin wrote, had “infected the minds of our intellectual, governmental, business and other leaders, as well as the minds of the masses of the led, with various negativistic notions, nihilistic dogmas, cynical beliefs, and debunking ideologies.” By so doing, scientism had powerfully augmented the characteristic products of cultural breakdown, including “terrible wars, revolutions, and anarchy; the utter atomization of all religious, moral, aesthetic, political, and other values”; and “tornadoes of destruction, bestiality, and inhumanity.”28 Mills was not only a precursor to the likes of the critical sociologist Alvin Gouldner and Port Huron Statement author Tom Hayden but also a successor to the motley company of Hobbs, Sorokin, Krutch, and Barzun. To be sure, he worked independently of their influence, and all of these authors stood well to the right of Mills. Barzun, the most progressive of the four, was more neoconservative than liberal and attacked everything from progressive education to fluoridation. Krutch welcomed aspects of the New Deal but worried about the effects of welfare provisions and decried the loss of individual moral responsibility and cultivated tastes in postwar America. Hobbs and Sorokin, as we have seen, espoused Christian approaches to social science and deplored the state growth of the twentieth century. Yet Mills shared with these figures an intense dislike of a particular style of investigation, centered on highly specialized research projects aimed at achieving empirical certainty about one small element of society as it stood. All five of these critics believed that the social scientist should instead sensitize the public to broad, structural changes in twentieth-century societies that threatened individual freedom and moral judgment alike.29 Mills, however, came at the problem of scientism’s cultural influence from a new angle and took the fight to the heart of the social sciences, working as he did alongside Robert K. Merton, Paul Lazarsfeld, and other architects of postwar behavioralism at Columbia. His detailed studies of class and power in modern American gave his methodological criticism far more credibility among social scientists than did Hobbs’ cranky moralizing or Sorokin’s calls for Christian love and “creative altruism” in the face of a social apocalypse. But Mills had a nightmare vision of his own, and one that a growing number of Americans shared by the late 1950s: the fearful prospect that Herbert Marcuse termed a “totally administered society.” Mills sounded many of the same notes as Marcuse and other Frankfurt School theorists, without the Continental terminology, mythological discursions, anti-populist aesthetics, and bleak pessimism that made a work like Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s The Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947) such a difficult nettle to grasp. Like the Frankfurt theorists, Mills drew out the more radical

28 Pitirim A. Sorokin, Fads and Foibles in Modern Sociology and Related Sciences (Chicago: Regnery, 1956), 304, 301. For a more direct statement of Sorokin’s social criticism from this period, see The Reconstruction of Humanity (Boston: Beacon Press, 1948). Haney analyzes Sorokin’s critique in The Americanization of Social Science, 124-137. Barry V. Johnston’s Pitirim A. Sorokin: An Intellectual Biography (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995) offers a helpful account of his career. 29 Indeed, one reviewer of Barzun’s book argued that The Sociological Imagination represented a case study of one aspect of the broader phenomenon Barzun identified: Charles Rolo, “Reader’s Choice: The Decay of Intellect,” Atlantic 203, no. 6 (June 1959): 82.

Jewett (Draft: Please do not cite or circulate!) 22 implications of Max Weber’s postulation that modern societies underwent sweeping, inexorable processes of rationalization that threatened to leave them all means and no ends.30 Although Mills’ book is deemed a classic critique of scientism, then, he actually backed away from the strong claims about scientism’s cultural impact that were common in that era. Mills identified scientism (“abstracted empiricism”) and the grand, abstruse theorizing of a Talcott Parsons as equally effective means by which social scientists fit themselves into “[r]ationally organized social arrangements” and avoided the true historical task of reason: creating “a society in which all men would become men of substantive reason, whose independent reasoning would have structural consequences for their societies … and thus for their own life fates.” In short, Mills wanted social scientists to help replace the “Cheerful Robot” of modern, rationalized societies with “The Renaissance Man”: “the self-educating, self-cultivating man and woman; in short, the free and rational individual.” To do so, he said, they would simply need to join the wider cultural trend, which was already pushing beyond modern forms toward a “post-modern” outlook. That view would center on the sociological imagination of Mills’ title: a mode of rationality that grasped large-scale changes in social structure and connected personal experiences to these broader forces.31 The psychoanalytic thinker Erich Fromm offered a slightly different but equally terrifying vision of an administered society, rooted theoretically in the early Marx rather than Weber. Although Fromm had broken with Horkheimer and Adorno in the 1930s, he had been an important figure in the early days of the Frankfurt School and shared other members’ distaste for positivistic scholarship and technocratic politics. Unlike theirs, however, his books were highly readable and sold in the millions from the late 1940s through the 1960s. In The Sane Society (1955), Fromm offered the ubiquitous postwar assertion that “we are more in need of a human renaissance than we are in need of airplanes and televisions.” But he traced the crisis back to modern capitalism, which had now begun to exert its routinizing and depersonalizing force through science and technology as well as the logic of the market. “Man has been thrown out from any definite place whence he can overlook and manage his life and the life of society,” Fromm wrote. “He is driven faster and faster by the forces which originally were created for him,” through the mode of capitalist alienation that Fromm called “abstractification” and saw behind modern science as well as political economy. The result was a total loss of autonomy, of even minimal control over one’s fate, in “a system which has no purpose and goal transcending it, and which makes man its appendix.”32

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30 Geary, in Radical Ambition, has shown that it took considerable work for Mills to cultivate the image of the critical outsider, given his deep connections to the social-scientific mainstream. 31 Mills, The Sociological Imagination, 61, 169, 173-175, 187, 166; Geary, Radical Ambition, 143-178; Haney, The Americanization of Social Science, 137-171. 32 Erich Fromm, The Sane Society (New York: Rinehart, 1955), 282, 120, 87; Lawrence J. Friedman, with Anke M. Schreiber, The Lives of Erich Fromm: Love’s Prophet (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), esp. 185-190.

Jewett (Draft: Please do not cite or circulate!) 23 Chapter 4 Political Discord

When the Free Speech Movement took shape in Berkeley during the fall of 1964, a surprising cast of characters stood alongside the civil rights activists and other young radicals calling for open political expression on campus. Although conservative groups formally disavowed direct action and upheld campus regulations, the “United Front” challenging the Berkeley administration included members of the California College Republicans, Cal Students for Goldwater, the Young Republicans, Young Americans for Freedom, and the University Society of Individualists. These conservatives, too, deplored the university’s restrictions on political speech and sought to foster a more inclusive political dialogue on the Berkeley campus.33 As the Berkeley episode suggests, by the early 1960s the centrist liberalism that dominated postwar American public debate faced opposition on a variety of fronts. It was not just the temporarily marginalized and soon resurgent American left that targeted postwar tendencies, but also the growing New Right, along with an array of groups that stood between the left and right on the traditional political spectrum but challenged technocratic and scientistic tendencies in modern thought. Reinhold Niebuhr, for example, fit neatly into the postwar liberal establishment on many counts: he opposed communism, favored a mixed economy and a moderate welfare state, and eschewed all talk of moral absolutes. Yet Niebuhr also, as we have seen, deplored what he regarded as deeply scientistic impulses in postwar governance and political ideology. Krutch and Barzun likewise spoke against postwar liberalism from within. Neither could be called radical or conservative, but they blasted the political and especially intellectual establishments of their time. They shared with many on the political left and right a deep concern about the influence of scientism in American culture. In the 1950s and early 1960s, a series of emerging institutional niches gave critics of scientism the opportunity to articulate their perspectives and hammer out the points on which they overlapped and differed. Some of these critics believed they were building the intellectual and institutional basis for a full-blown movement against scientism. In their view, social scientists and their allies had used the universities as a base from which to project their inhuman ideals into the larger society over the past several decades. The critics would now need to do the same, creating an infrastructure to nurture the intellectual kernel of a new culture that would take seriously the distinctively human qualities in the world. Against a mainstream discourse that, in their view, took scientism for granted and drew its manipulative conclusions, these critics of scientism sought to create spaces for connecting and organizing an oppositional group: one that took moral freedom for granted and sought to hash out its meanings and applications. In short, they hoped to create something akin to Krutch’s “Moral Discourse,” though in a more philosophical and political-theoretical vein than a literary one. Yet it proved much easier for the divergent groups of critics to publish broadsides against scientism than to find common ground—above all, common political ground. A few postwar endeavors managed to incorporate figures from across the political

33 Eugene Bardach et al., “The Berkeley Free Speech Controversy (Preliminary Report, December 13, 1964),” available at http://www.fsm-a.org/stacks/GradStudentReport.html#IIA3b.

Jewett (Draft: Please do not cite or circulate!) 24 spectrum, but most institutional initiatives spanned only part of that spectrum. Some stretched from the right to the center-left, leaving out left-liberals and radicals of an anti- scientistic bent. Others stretched from the left to the center-right, missing a variety of conservatives farther to the right. Smaller clusters of critics also coalesced around particular understandings of why scientism fell short and how it could be redressed. The activities of a pair of figures, the conservative writer Russell Kirk and the New York- based editor Ruth Nanda Anshen, illustrate this clustering effect. Kirk and Anshen’s efforts highlight both the power and variety of anti-scientism in the postwar United States and the difficulties facing those who hoped to organize this energy and channel it against technocratic liberalism. Kirk helped to strengthen the humanistic content of American conservatism as the 1960s opened, and Anshen’s book series publicized a brand of humanism that mobilized natural science against scientism. Moreover, these figures influenced a new generation of thinkers and activists that emerged in the mid-1960s. Institutionally, however, the pair’s ambitious goals of turning the American universities against technocracy came to naught. It proved easy enough to publish individual expressions of anti-scientism in the postwar United States, but very difficult to channel these various expressions in a single direction.

Institutional resources

Critics of scientism from many political and religious backgrounds occupied a network of loosely linked institutional nodes in the postwar United States. Pockets of opposition to scientism appeared at many schools, including the University of Chicago, the New School for Social Research, Brandeis University, Kenyon College, Long Island University, the University of California at Riverside, and progressive colleges such as Bard and Bennington. Not coincidentally, the renascent field of political theory flourished in these locales. That field housed many émigré critics of technocratic liberalism and sustained a dialogue that included voices from the left and the right as well as heterodox liberals. Critiques of scientism also appeared in journals such as Commentary, Partisan Review, America, The Christian Scholar, The American Scholar, The Kenyon Review, Modern Age, and The Review of Politics. The Hazen Foundation, the Myrin Institute at Adelphi College, and other institutions offered resources as well. All of these initiatives fueled hopes that an organized opposition to scientism and technocracy had begun to take shape.

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Myrin was not the only postwar business leader that aimed to foster philosophical and religious opposition to technocratic liberalism. Many executives from the high-tech industries of the time associated science with individual ingenuity, free enterprise, and nature appreciation, rather than economic planning or “high modernist” projects such as the Tennessee Valley Authority and other massive government ventures. For example, W. C. Mullendore of the Southern California Edison utility discerned a “psychic epidemic” in postwar America, rooted in a materialistic mindset that needed to be dispelled through the moral traditionalism and individualism of Richard Weaver and Russell Kirk. Mullendore argued that business leaders should attack “the domination of

Jewett (Draft: Please do not cite or circulate!) 25 American philosophy by the radical liberals” rather than occupying themselves with the kinds of scientific and technological pursuits that encouraged the public to adopt the materialistic mindset of the anti-corporate left. Similar discontents, though not always framed in politically conservative terms, inspired the Aspen Institute in Colorado, where a group of business leaders drawn to Mortimer Adler’s version of the Great Books built a center for the commingling of philosophers, artists, and other cultural leaders.34 Attacks on scientism by the ferociously anti-industry, anti-development Krutch also drew attention from business leaders as well. Krutch, as we have seen, was a worthy, if slightly less misanthropic, predecessor to his admirer Edward Abbey, who was then crafting his anti-industrial position. But in 1957, the Corning Glass Works invited Krutch to a conference exploring how corporations could best support cultural development. The National Foremen’s Institute also sought a regular column from him for their newsletter aimed at executives. Other business leaders likewise appreciated Krutch’s moral individualism as well as his nature writings. In Arizona, Krutch spoke to a Phoenix meeting of insurance executives in 1958 and addressed the Tucson Chamber of Commerce in 1966. By the late 1960s, when his articles carried titles such as “Man the Enemy,” Krutch received frequent accolades from the likes of a General Motors engineer, Humble Oil’s former chief geologist, and a North Carolina fertilizer manufacturer. Kenneth Bechtel, a director of the Bechtel Corporation and president of the Industrial Indemnity Company (IIC), was a close personal friend and frequent travel companion of Krutch’s, as well as an important corporate contact. From 1958 forward, Krutch repeatedly addressed IIC employees on philosophical topics such as “Biology and Humanism” and “Modern Literature and the Image of Man” as well as the merits of the desert. (Barzun, a harder sell to the business community, nevertheless spoke to the ICC as well, along with as the Connecticut General Life Insurance Company, while writing Science: The Glorious Entertainment in the early 1960s.) More conservative business leaders also singled out Krutch as a leading critic of the push by Phi Beta Kappa and other organizations to create a federally funded “National Humanities Foundation.”35

34 W. C. Mullendore to Henry Regnery, n.d., Henry Regnery Papers, Hoover Institution Archives, box 82, folder 1; James Sloan Allen, The Romance of Commerce and Culture: Capitalism, Modernism, and the Chicago-Aspen Crusade for Cultural Reform (Boulder, University Press of Colorado, 2002). 35 Richard H. Andrews to Joseph Wood Krutch, September 18, 1957, Joseph Wood Krutch Papers, Library of Congress, box 3, folder “A”; Bruno R. Neumann to Krutch, ibid., box 5, folder “N-O”; untitled speech (“Fourteen years ago…”), 1958, ibid., box 9, folder “Speeches, 1953-1958”; “Agenda, Chamber of Commerce Forum Meeting, February 23, 1966,” ibid., box 9, folder “Speeches, 1966-1970”; “Man the Enemy” (reprint from the American Scholar), ibid., box 7, folder “W”; Peter Kyropoulos to Krutch, February 4, 1965, ibid., box 4, folder “K”; Wallace E. Pratt to Krutch, May 7, 1967, ibid., box 5, folder “P- Q”; Paul J. Barringer, Jr. to Krutch, June 2, 1970, ibid., box 7, folder “A-E”; “Biology and Humanism” reprint for Industrial Indemnity Company, n.d., ibid., folder “Speeches, 1958-1962”; “Biology and Humanism” draft, n.d., ibid., box 15, folder “Untitled, Unpublished”; “Modern Literature and the Image of Man,” reprint for IIC, n.d., ibid., box 9, folder “Speeches, 1953-1958”; W. A. Haluk to Krutch, February 3, 1958, ibid., box 4, folder “H”; “Joseph Wood Krutch, San Francisco, 1958,” reprint for IIC, ibid., box 9, folder “Speeches, 1953-1958”; MacGregor Folsom to Krutch, July 8, 1968, ibid., box 4, folder “F”; “Merely a Humanist–Discussion,” reprint for IIC, 1968, ibid., box 9, folder “Speeches, 1966-1970”; Krutch to Marcelle Krutch, September 3, 1958, ibid., box 3, folder “wife + mother”; Kenneth Bechtel to Krutch, November 18, 1960, ibid., box 3, folder “B”; “April Conception Bay Trip,” March 25, 1963, ibid.; Mark Van Doren to Joseph and Marcelle Krutch, June 2, 1959, ibid., box 6, folder “Van Doren family, 1958- 1959”; Jacques Barzun, Science: The Glorious Entertainment (New York: Harper & Row, 1964), ix; Carl Henry to Krutch, April 3, 1965, Krutch Papers, box 4, folder “H”; unpublished fragment (“Every now and

Jewett (Draft: Please do not cite or circulate!) 26 Another kind of venture similarly brought philosophically inclined business leaders into dialogue with scholars alarmed by prevailing cultural and political tendencies. The Aspen Institute was only one of the many educational programs for corporate executives in the postwar years. Without great fanfare, and sometimes with a conscious commitment to flying under the public’s radar, a number of universities established programs of humanistic education for business leaders. In 1953, for example, the University of Pennsylvania philosopher Elizabeth Flower asked her NYU colleague Sidney Hook—known for his fierce anticommunism and his defense of individual agency in the 1943 book The Hero in History—to contribute a lecture to “a year’s intensive program for a small group of the junior executives of the A. T. & T.” The aim, said Flower, was to “educate and humanize these potential men of industry.” The following year, Hook joined the sociologist Marvin Bressler and others in a repeat performance of this “experimental program in adult humanistic education for executives of various Bell Telephone Companies.” Program head W. Rex Crawford cautioned Hook, “If you don’t mind, don’t do anything about publicity for the course.” The history of these corporate programs remains largely unexcavated, and not all of the participants challenged scientism—Bressler, for example, advocated the behavioral science approach—but these programs clearly constituted another site wherein critics of postwar thought and culture, drawn from various points on the political spectrum, could meet and exchange views, while mingling with prominent figures from the business world. Here, as elsewhere, institutional sites, often financed with corporate money, provided a potential base of organization for critics of scientism.36

Conservatism as containment

Educational ventures for corporate executives were not the only forum in which critics of scientism (and others, such as Hook) collaborated in ways that undercut the usual understanding of politics as a left-right affair, defined primarily by competing views on economic regulation, taxes, and the size of the state. In many instances, as in the institutional niches discussed above, those who worried about the cultural influence of science met and found points of commonality across political lines, as well as religious ones. A pair of conservatives, the writer Russell Kirk and the publisher Henry Regnery, undertook a particularly sustained campaign to build such bridges and thereby to create a kind of organized humanist opposition. Indeed, Kirk held out hope that traditionalist conservatives and their anti-scientistic allies might be able to change the direction of the American university system entirely, by seeding the social sciences with more conservative voices. The efforts of Kirk and Regnery to bring about this ideological sea change in the social sciences, and the frustrations they faced as they sought to do so, reveal a great deal about the diversity of the adherents to anti-scientism. Ultimately, the

then…”), ibid., box 15, folder “Untitled, unpublished.” Barzun appeared at Aspen as well: Barzun to Champ Ward, May 9, 1962, Jacques Barzun Papers, Rare Books and Manuscripts Library, Columbia University, box 51, folder 71. 36 Elizabeth Flower to Sidney Hook, July 9, 1953, W. Rex Crawford to Sidney Hook, September 29, 1954, and W. Rex Crawford to Sidney Hook, November 1, 1954, in Sidney Hook Papers, Hoover Institution Archives, box 23, folder 47.

Jewett (Draft: Please do not cite or circulate!) 27 divergent political and religious commitments of scientism’s critics proved impossible to overcome when the chips were down.37 When Russell Kirk spoke about higher education at the Myrin Institute in December 1956, he championed Irving Babbitt’s 1908 study Literature and the American College and called for a “return to a concise curriculum emphasizing classical literature, languages, moral philosophy, history, the pure sciences, logic, rhetoric, and religious knowledge. Kirk’s omission of the social sciences is ironic, given that he energetically advocated a conservative turn in those fields and would harbor that dream through the turmoil of the 1960s. Kirk’s ecumenically sourced assault on what he notoriously called “defecated rationality” reached its highest pitch in a 1961 New York Times piece that prompted a vigorous rebuttal from the Columbia sociologist Robert K. Merton. Enlisting Barzun, Sorokin, and Mills in the cause, Kirk called human beings “the least controllable, verifiable, law-abiding and predictable of subjects.” He advocated a turn from the quixotic ideal of a social science to the pursuit of a normative “social art,” as undertaken by “poets, theologians, political theorists, moralists, jurists and men of imagination generally.”38 Historians have been slow to recognize that American conservatives worked ardently to win over existing cultural institutions in the 1950s and early 1960s, as well as to gain political power. Even the smallest cultural battleground carried considerable weight in the eyes of conservatives, as evidenced by their attacks on what they considered the liberal bias of the reference work Twentieth Century Authors. But above all other cultural institutions stood the universities, with their massive resources and unique brand of intellectual authority. These institutions offered an unmatched platform from which to offer moral, social, and political judgments—and a platform that conservative thinkers believed had been consciously and systematically denied to them. In seeking to turn the ship of academia to the right, conservatives made the postwar university into a key site for early attempts to craft a right-wing intellectual infrastructure. Conservatives mobilized an array of cultural, institutional, and financial resources as they sought to amplify their voices in the academic conversation. As Chapter Six will show, these developments of the 1950s offer an instructive comparison with the tactics adopted

37 Historians of the social sciences have shown that vocal public criticism by conservative Congressional leaders shaped the institutionalization and funding of those disciplines in the late 1940s and 1950s: e.g., Mark Solovey, Shaky Foundations: The Politics-Patronage-Social Science Nexus in Cold War America (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2013); David Paul Haney, The Americanization of Social Science: Intellectuals and Public Responsibility in the Postwar United States (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008); Andrew Jewett, Science, Democracy, and the American University: From the Civil War to the Cold War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012). Yet conservatives tend to appear in such accounts as rather wooden figures who operate from a base outside the social sciences—usually in government—and seek to shackle or even silence those disciplines. Neither historians of conservatism nor chroniclers of the social sciences have presented a full picture of how conservatives engaged with the social sciences in the 1950s. 38 Russell Kirk, “The American College: A Proposal for Reform,” Proceedings of the Myrin Institute (Spring 1957), 14, 19; Kirk, “Prospects for a Conservative Bent in the Human Sciences,” Social Research 35, no. 4 (Winter 1968), 580-581; Kirk, “Is Social Science Scientific?” New York Times (June 25, 1961), 16, 18. On the 1961 piece and Robert K. Merton’s response, see David Paul Haney, The Americanization of Social Science: Intellectuals and Public Responsibility in the Postwar United States (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008), 208-221. Haney discusses Kirk and other conservatives’ appreciation of Mills on 167-169. Kirk’s “defecated rationality” came from a talk given before the Foundation for Religious Action in the Social and Civil Order, discussed in Chapter 2.

Jewett (Draft: Please do not cite or circulate!) 28 by leading conservatives in the 1970s, when figures such as Lewis Powell attacked the universities from the outside and created alternative, non-academic sites of knowledge production, especially think tanks.39 Conservatives’ postwar campaign to redirect the American universities, though modest in its results, reflected one of the deepest commitments of the 1950s New Right: the shaping power of ideas in history. Viewing politics as largely a reflection of the intellectual culture, conservatives traced the evils of the New Deal state, at least in part, to changes in the content and institutionalization of the social and natural sciences— changes that appeared to overlap in alarming ways with totalitarianism abroad. There were important connections between the simultaneous rise of the New Right and the behavioral science model in the 1950s that tell us a great deal about the importance of anti-scientism to American conservatism since World War II. The struggle to create a solid base in the social sciences was a cause, as well as a result, of conservatives’ belief that they needed to fight a war of ideas rather than simply a political battle.

…

Traditionalists such as Kirk were particularly likely to seek intellectual change in the universities, working from either without or within. To traditionalists, the truly important questions did not concern how big the state should be or how it should act in the international arena. Rather, they involved moral truth: Who spoke for it? How could it be known? Did science rule it out? What social structures did it imply? Believing that human action ultimately flowed from such foundational commitments, traditionalists defined themselves in opposition to Enlightenment-inspired modes of liberalism rather than liberal policies per se. Their conservatism centered on the need to recognize foundational moral laws, not a call for absolute economic liberty. Like many liberals, in fact, traditionalists sharply criticized the moral and cultural effects of modern capitalist enterprise. But they traced those effects to modern liberalism’s attack on moral and cultural standards rather than the operations of private property or free markets. Thus, traditionalists organized around the axis of philosophical opposition to scientism and related forms of state action—a deadly threat to individual liberty, in their view, because it undermined the moral foundations of society and opened the door to totalitarian rule— as much as they did around the axis of individual liberty itself. In the words of Hobbs, these figures embraced a “philosophical conservatism, not merely economic.” Conservatism figured in their writings as a comprehensive moral and intellectual critique of modern thoughtways, not just an attack on Keynesian economic policies.40 This fundamentally moral definition of conservatism facilitated alliances across many lines of difference. Among traditionalists themselves, the shared commitment to

39 Edward Case, “Big Brotherly Reference Book,” National Review 1 (April 25, 1956), 20-21.One phase of this campaign has been studied in some detail, namely the activities of conservative thinkers such as Hayek in economics departments. But the economics story has not been situated in its wider academic and cultural contexts. For another dimension of conservatives’ postwar cultural campaign, see Alan Filreis, Counter- Revolution of the Word: The Conservative Attack on Modern Poetry, 1945-1960 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008). Kevin Mattson briefly mentions additional dimensions of the conservative analysis in Rebels All! A Short History of the Conservative Mind in Postwar America (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2008), 121-122. 40 Albert H. Hobbs to Raymond Moley, January 25, 1954, Moley Papers, box 23, folder 51.

Jewett (Draft: Please do not cite or circulate!) 29 moral authority bridged disagreements on matters as substantial as whether American political culture was fundamentally liberal or conservative. The same orientation also led many traditionalists to seek allies among liberal critics of scientism—and to accuse some of their fellow conservatives of promoting an ethically dubious form of economic determinism. In particular, they viewed the “hopeless doctrinaire” Ludwig von Mises and other economic libertarians as dangerous radicals who shared with Marxists and welfare- state liberals a destructive focus on the material rather than moral side of human affairs. Traditionalists were quick to see economic determinism in the writings of conservatives whose social prescriptions moved in the realm of policy and who focused on limiting the scope of the state rather than rehabilitating the intellectual and cultural foundations of the West. Conversely, they often recognized allies in figures of other political stripes who shared their critique of scientism and commitment to moral foundations.41 The vigorous circulation of religious and humanistic critiques of scientism in postwar public culture presented these thinkers with a number of possible alliances. At that time, the meaning of the term “conservative” remained up for grabs. It was not inevitable that activists and scholars would line up according to the standard left-right spectrum, with those on the right ignoring their many other differences and defining themselves in terms of their shared commitment to economic liberty. For traditionalists, especially, another option appeared as well: a philosophically grounded alliance with religious and humanistic thinkers who rejected the prevailing social-scientific views of society and the human person. Although traditionalists felt some affinity for most other defenders of economic individualism, their intense focus on philosophical foundations also drew them toward liberals and even radicals who challenged the deterministic and relativistic tendencies of the social sciences. Unlike many other conservatives, then, figures such as Kirk and Regnery actively sought out anti-scientistic liberals such as Robert Hutchins, the former University of Chicago president who had famously challenged Dewey’s educational philosophy in the name of foundational moral principles in the 1930s, and the Harvard sociologist Pitirim Sorokin, a vociferous critic of value-neutral approaches in the social sciences. Regnery, especially, felt these figures might be convinced to give the New Right a fair hearing rather than rule it out of court, and perhaps even come around to its core truths. These traditionalists feared that journalists and politicians could not win the cultural battle alone; the struggle between the champions of order and the avatars of relativism and collectivism also needed to be fought on the terrain of the disciplines. They would need allies in order to take back the social sciences and universities, steering them toward conservative principles and the underlying tradition of moral law. These overtures by Kirk and Regnery met with varying degrees of success. Before Hutchins left Chicago in 1951, he looked with favor on attempts to increase the intellectual diversity and philosophically self-reflective character of the faculty. He supported the effort to hire Hayek, as well as related endeavors to turn the Committee on Social Thought into a clearinghouse for the full range of contemporary ideological positions. The Committee’s Nef, who saw his program as “one of the last strongholds for cultivation of the personal individual talent in a world which tends to divide everything into categories,” proved a crucial academic interlocutor for Regnery. Hutchins, who had connections to Regnery’s father and believed strongly in the importance of foundational

41 Russell Kirk to Henry Regnery, December 2, 1954, Regnery Papers, box 39, folder 9.

Jewett (Draft: Please do not cite or circulate!) 30 philosophical principles, remained a key target of Regnery’s attention after he left Chicago. In 1954, Hutchins’ ascension to the chairmanship of the fledgling Fund for the Republic—soon to become a thorn in the side of conservatives dismayed at the liberal bent of the foundations—had Kirk and Regnery salivating at the prospect of a Hutchins- led organization with $15 million and “no idea of what they want to do.”42 In the case of Sorokin, meanwhile, Regnery published the sociologist’s Fads and Foibles in Modern Sociology and Related Sciences (1956), which briefly—until the publication of C. Wright Mills’ The Sociological Imagination in 1959—succeeded Hobbs’ study as the most visible and sustained academic critique of putatively value- neutral social science. Sorokin expressed his appreciation of Hobbs for having “the courage to express his conclusions, regardless as to whether they agree or disagree with the prevalent opinion at a given moment within academic circles.” His own Fads and Foibles appealed not only to sociological leftists but also to corporations like General Electric, which ordered a copy. Meanwhile, funding for its publication came from the Lilly Endowment. It says much about Regnery’s understanding of conservatism that he was eager to publish a book which offered detailed methodological criticism of a specific body of academic work, offering nary a word of protest against the New Deal, anti-anti- communism, or other typical targets of right-wing ire.43 Kirk himself hoped to remake the disciplines from within, despite his famous disdain for postwar academia. Ironically, Kirk’s belief that genuine universities stood above the political fray—unlike the patently ideological foundations—and thus carried the authority of truth rather than mere partisan rhetoric led this famously sour apostate from academia to repeatedly seek a path back into it, though on rather extravagant terms. Kirk had left academia, apparently for good, in 1953. Profoundly anti-populist, Kirk hoped to bring the message of conservatism to a saving remnant of right-thinking Americans, who could then lead the degenerate masses. Few places could have suited his temperament less well than the egalitarian Michigan State College (later University), where football and vocational skills were the order of the day. Hired in 1946 to teach the history of civilization, Kirk grew disillusioned with the academic boosterism and “growthmanship” of the post-GI Bill era. He resigned seven years later, “in protest against a deliberate lowering of standards, calculated to attract more students and pay for more dormitories,” and retreated to an inherited home in upstate Mecosta, where he sought to revitalize the great tradition of humane letters that had flourished in an age

42 John U. Nef, “Monthly Meeting of Instructional Staff Held October 9 [1951],” Friedrich A. von Hayek Papers, Hoover Institution Archives, box 63, folder 10; Robert M. Hutchins to Henry Regnery, January 27, 1954, Regnery Papers, box 33, folder 1; Russell Kirk to Regnery, January 25, 1954, ibid., box 39, folder 9. 43 Pitirim A. Sorokin to Henry Regnery, April 2, 1956, Regnery Papers, box 70, folder 9; Regnery to Russell Kirk, July 31, 1953, ibid., box 39, folder 9; Regnery to Sorokin, n.d., attached to Sorokin to Regnery, May 3, 1957, ibid., box 70, folder 9; Pitirim A. Sorokin to Henry Regnery, April 9, 1956, ibid. Regnery also sought to build bridges to the humanistic left by finding readers for Kirk’s books beyond the usual circle of conservatives. In this, he had some success. Among the admirers of The Conservative Mind, according to Kirk, was the leftist Princeton historian Eric Goldman, who was “giving copies of it to friends in Vienna.” Kirk to Regnery, September 4, 1954, Regnery papers, box 39, folder 9. Regnery later sent Kirk’s Academic Freedom to Sidney Hook, writing, “I think you would be more in agreement with him than not.” Regnery had long sought to cultivate Hook, whose pragmatically tinged Marxism gave way after World War II to an equally pugnacious anticommunism. Regnery to Hook, February 7, 1955, ibid., box 30, folder 27.

Jewett (Draft: Please do not cite or circulate!) 31 before social-scientific empiricism. Among the results of his labors were a series of widely read books, starting with the path-breaking The Conservative Mind in 1953.44 Yet Kirk’s desire to turn the American universities toward the right cut against his loudly announced break with academia—a story that he continued to elaborate in his writings even as he considered a variety of academic posts behind the scenes. As early as 1953, Regnery informed Kirk that the Volker Fund would bankroll him, as it had Hayek and Mises, if he attached himself to an academic program such as Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought. At Chicago, Nef wanted to create for Kirk a position parallel to that of Hayek. In response, Kirk originally told Regnery that he hoped to stay out of academia for two years. He then suggested that he would join the Committee only if he could serve in absentia, as had the theologian Jacques Maritain and the poet-critic T. S. Eliot. Perhaps equally problematic, both Hayek and the conservative economist Frank Knight opposed Kirk’s appointment. But there were other options to be considered. In 1954, Kirk fielded offers from Queen’s University and the University of Detroit, and Regnery raised the prospect of Notre Dame in 1955.45 Despite Kirk’s high demands, his search for an academic post was closely tied to his vision for the journal that would become Modern Age. In Kirk’s mind and that of many of his supporters, an academic platform was integral to his plan for the new journal; only academic credibility would enable him to counter the depredations of scientism and liberalism. Kirk’s 1957 discussions with Ripon College were part of a complex, multiyear set of negotiations with multiple foundations and several academic institutions— including Kenyon, Wabash, and Long Island University in addition to Ripon and Chicago—during which Kirk sought to find his journal an academic home without committing himself to teaching. “Under no circumstances shall I become a real professor all over again,” he declared to Regnery, after turning down an Earhart Foundation grant that would have required him to teach at LIU in exchange for publishing Modern Age there. In the end, Kirk did land at LIU, which he had earlier reported was “talking about setting up a conservative department of political science” and had then hired Kenneth Colegrove to teach that subject. The Marquette Charitable Organization of Illinois provided the lion’s share of the funds for Kirk’s fledgling journal.46

44 Russell Kirk, Decadence and Renewal in the Higher Learning: An Episodic History of American University and College Since 1953 (South Bend, Ind.: Gateway, 1978), 3-13 (quote on 5); Kirk, Academic Freedom, 105; Kirk, The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Santayana (Chicago: Regnery, 1953). The Academic Freedom account does not identify Kirk as the protagonist but reflects his own experience. 45 Henry Regnery to Russell Kirk, October 8, 1953, Regnery to Kirk, October 12, 1953, Kirk to Regnery, October 27, 1953, Kirk to Henry, November 1, 1953, Kirk to Regnery, November 9, 1953, and Kirk to Regnery, March 18, 1956, Kirk to Henry Regnery, May 11, 1954, and Regnery to Kirk, December 15, 1955, in Regnery papers, box 39, folder 9. 46 Regnery to Kirk, October 12, 1953, Kirk to Regnery, July 31, 1956, and Kirk to Regnery, November 15, 1955, in Regnery papers, box 39, folder 9; Regnery to Russell Kirk, July 28, 1958, Regnery papers, box 40, folder 1. The Northwestern political scientist Kenneth W. Colegrove was another ardent advocate of remaking the social sciences. He urged Regnery to solicit and publish a series of social-scientific works that would counter the “anti-conservative” bias of those disciplines and the liberal political culture that they shaped. Colegrove identified a particular need for books on “The Do-Gooder in Politics,” “The Rich Liberal in Politics,” “the pathology of the Civil Service,” and, above all, the life of the Republican champion Robert A. Taft. Estimating that 90% of political scientists and more than 70% of journalists were “radical liberals,” Colegrove lamented that “the cults of economic determinism, cultural determinism, anti- traditionalism, behaviorism and, to some extent, Freudian analysis” dominated scholarly work on political matters. More than simply wrongheaded, he contended, such “slanted writings” were “intellectually

Jewett (Draft: Please do not cite or circulate!) 32 Kirk joined forces in these endeavors with his indefatigable publisher, Henry Regnery, whose boundless energy, optimism, and networking skills made up for his financial shortfalls. To be sure, Regnery moved in powerful circles. He attended at least one meeting of Hayek’s Mont Pelerin Society, and he joined Kirk, Buckley, Moley, and several others in a failed attempt to create a conservative counterpart to the liberal Americans for Democratic Action, with behind-the-scenes funding from General Motors. Most often, however, Regnery toiled in even less visible and more mundane ways, seeking the money that selling books by renegade consevatives did not provide. Regnery courted foundation officials and Texas oil barons alike in his attempt to drum up financial backing for the conservative intellectual revolution. Like any good publisher, he also sought out sources of mass sales for his books. Regnery joined hands with agencies as varied as the U.S. Information Agency and the Joanna Mills Company to promote Kirk’s The American Cause (1957) and other titles.47 Reflecting their constant shortfalls, the letter exchanges between Kirk and Regnery in the 1950s are filled with instances of cooperation and proposals for future cooperation with corporate allies, conservative foundations, and lobbying groups. In 1953, for example, Kirk was paid to consult for the National Tax Equality League, lunched with the president of United States Sanitary Supplies, and solicited funds from companies ranging from General Foods to Perfect Circle Piston Rings. Regnery reported proudly that Marshall Field, owner of the Chicago Sun, had read Kirk’s book The Conservative Mind, and the two men watched with great interest—if some suspicion of the project’s utopian ambitions—the creation of the Richardson Foundation by Robert R. (Randy) Richardson and his father, Vick Chemical Company president H. Smith Richardson. Indeed, when conservatives imagined new intellectual initiatives, they thought at the same time about potential funding sources: “people like Pierre Goodrich and E. F. Hutton, who might be persuaded to help underwrite this venture.” This money financed a wide variety of initiatives, large and small, as when Sunoco co-founder J. Howard Pew forwarded $1,500 to Regnery to facilitate the publication of Hobbs’ The Claims of Sociology.48 Kirk became particularly adept at moving between the journalistic and corporate worlds, not least through his attempts to secure financial and institutional support for his journal Modern Age. A February 1959 lunch at Chicago’s Union League Club found dishonest; many disregard scientific method while paying lip service to canons of scholarship.” Colegrove, “Fields Needing the Publication of Conservative Books; Proposals for Books in These Fields,” reprinted as part of Henry Regnery, “A Proposal to Establish a New Series of Books on Education; International Relations, Government, Economics and Society,” Regnery Papers, box 82, folder 1. 47 Regnery to Friedrich Hayek, March 26, 1984. Hayek Papers, box 24, folder 19; “Report of a Meeting Held December 5, 1953,” Regnery Papers, box 16, folder 5; Russell Kirk to Henry Regnery, February 17, 1954 and Regnery to various, October 23, 1953, ibid., box 39, folder 9; Regnery to Kirk, April 27, 1953 and Regnery to Kirk, May 26, 1953, ibid., box 39, folder 9; Kirk to Regnery, November 23, 1957, ibid., box 40, folder 1. 48 Russell Kirk to Henry Regnery, October 27, 1953 and Kirk to Regnery, November 9, 1953, Regnery Papers, box 39, folder 9; Kirk to Regnery, December 11, 1957, ibid., box 40, folder 1; Regnery to Kirk, July 31, 1953 and Regnery to Kirk, September 1, 1954, ibid., box 39, folder 9; Frank Barnett to Regnery, April 17, 1953, ibid., box 6, folder 2; Albert H. Hobbs to Regnery, January 15, 1951, ibid., box 30, folder 14. Regnery did not publish Hobbs’ book, but Pew and Hobbs may have made the same arrangement with its eventual publisher, Stackpole. On corporate support for the conservative movement in general, see especially Kim Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan (New York: Norton, 2009).

Jewett (Draft: Please do not cite or circulate!) 33 Kirk, Regnery, the literary scholar Richard M. Weaver, and the publisher David Collier— Hayek had been invited as well but could not attend—dining with executives from Great Lakes Solvents, the United Electric Coal Company, the First National Bank of Chicago, Nationwide Food Service, Kemper Insurance, and several other area businesses. A few months later, Kirk reported to Regnery that he had lined up $1,000 from the Richardson Foundation, was waiting to hear back from the Lilly Endowment and 3M, and was about to embark on a trip that would include visits to the General Foods Fund and the A. O. Smith Company of Milwaukee. Two years earlier, a local washing-machine manufacturer had ended up footing the bill for Kirk’s failed attempt to establish Modern Age and an accompanying institute at Ripon College in Wisconsin.49 As these initiatives show, Kirk and Regnery, like many other conservatives, worked at the intersection of two rather different intellectual coalitions: the emerging political right, which was defined by a set of prescriptions for social and economic policy, and a more vaguely defined cultural opposition, comprising those who favored humanistic and religious alternatives to scientism. Facing these options, conservatives took different paths. Buckley’s response to the liberal threat centered on political journalism, which he saw as a means of giving voice to the powerless conservative majority. Buckley helped to spearhead a political coalition encompassing almost all of those—he sought to exclude secularists such as Ayn Rand—who wanted to minimize the state’s role in economic affairs and fight communism around the globe. But Kirk and his allies often stressed axes of intellectual agreement instead and downplayed lines of political connection as they sought to build a movement against modern, social-scientific liberalism. They often christened political liberals such as Reinhold Niebuhr honorary conservatives for their attention to the importance of tradition, the social role of religious faith, the irremediable sinfulness of man, and other themes. Some even viewed critics within the social sciences—the less radical members of the internal opposition discussed in Chapter 3—as potential allies. Yet Kirk and Regnery continued to operate far outside the intellectual mainstream. Their search for allies proved arduous and only occasionally rewarding, as political differences between scientism’s critics fostered mutual suspicion.50

…

Setting aside local contingencies, the obstacles Kirk and Anshen encountered suggest that the institutional bridges across political and religious barriers they proposed could hold only so much weight. There remained crucial differences between the various critics of scientism, on matters of policy as well as more fundamental assumptions about society and the nature of the human person. On the one hand, traditionalist conservatives shared with humanistic liberals and radicals an emphasis on individual moral responsibility, a critique of materialistic interpretations of human behavior, a sense that the Western literary and spiritual traditions operated alongside political experience as potent sources of ethical guidance, and a belief that it was illegitimate to use scientific

49 “Luncheon for Russell Kirk,” February 19, 1959, Kirk to Regnery, May 7, 1959, and Kirk to Regnery, January 20, 1957, Regnery Papers, box 40, folder 1. 50 These figures also shared an intellectual hero in the anti-Enlightenment thinker Edmund Burke, whose writings were invoked by many postwar critics of rationalism and scientism.

Jewett (Draft: Please do not cite or circulate!) 34 techniques to manipulate individuals, no matter how socially advantageous the resulting behavior might be. Yet many humanistic thinkers on the left worried primarily that a society dominated by scientism stifled individual creativity and freedom of expression. They wanted more, rather than less, experimentation in those regards. By contrast, traditionalist conservatives identified moral relativism as the core problem with a scientifically guided society. They insisted that modern scientific techniques obscured the existence of a stable moral order behind the flux of experience. For traditionalists, individual liberty functioned as both the source of a morally grounded society—it allowed individuals to escape imposed orthodoxies and see the truth for what it was—and the fruit of such a society, insofar as freedom could have substance only when individuals disciplined themselves to avoid licentious behavior. These differences ultimately set limits on the degree to which traditionalists could find common ground with critics of scientism on the other side of the political aisle. A number of more conventionally political differences reared their heads as well. Among even the most centrist liberals, the circle of potential allies stopped well short of the rightward fringe of American conservatism. By contrast, figures such as Kirk and Regnery tended to accept as compatriots all who spoke of individual liberty and moral order, even if those individuals also harbored rather outrageous views on other questions. Regnery himself had a personal penchant for some highly unpopular positions. For example, he vigorously, if not always consistently, supported World War II revisionism—the view that the Western allies, led by Roosevelt, were the aggressors in a war that should not have happened. This claim, seemingly grounded in the assumption that none of Roosevelt’s decisions could have been right, drew Regnery closer to a few maverick social scientists, especially the historian Harry Elmer Barnes. But it placed a high wall between him and most other scholars, whom he occasionally judged on the basis of their past enthusiasm for American intervention rather than on their current views of economic regulation and other salient matters. Here, as in many other instances, stark political divides trumped the subtler philosophical threads between scientism’s ideologically heterogeneous postwar critics.51 These political differences would reassert themselves with a vengeance in the 1960s, a decade that saw sharper political struggles than any since the 1930s. On the left, many radical critics would pull together earlier strands of anti-scientism—radical, left- liberal, humanistic, theistic—into a potent assault on a technoscientific elite. Frustrated with the political shackles imposed during their education and radicalized by the civil rights and antiwar movements, many students and young scholars would renew the project begun by Niebuhr and other religious thinkers in the 1930s: namely, that of creating an alternative American left, based on a more organic, “authentic” form of progressive thought and purged of scientism, statism, and other incursions of bureaucratic rationality. On the right, meanwhile, a host of theorists, activists, and politicians would adopt a populist stance that pitted ordinary citizens and their moral traditions against the manipulative experts of the “new class” of managers, bureaucrats, and technicians. Even as humanistic challenges to scientism gained considerable force, deep political divides would emerge among those who favored a non-technocratic, morally committed form of politics.

51 Henry Regnery to Russell Kirk, February 21, 1958, Regnery Papers, box 40, folder 1.

Jewett (Draft: Please do not cite or circulate!) 35 Even as Kirk and Anshen fell short of their goals in the late 1950s, their networks of thinkers and publications bequeathed significant interpretive resources to the new generation that came of age in the 1960s. Critics of any political leaning who concluded from the events of the 1960s that the modern world needed a more humanistic or religiously authentic alternative to mainstream liberalism could find inspiration in the writings of postwar figures as disparate as Kirk, Sorokin, Hutchins, Anshen, Tillich, and Fromm. As we will see, many other authors of the late 1950s whose works have been identified as “seeds of the sixties” likewise believed that scientism was complicit in modern forms of oppression and sought alternative sources of moral guidance in religion or the humanities. Not just C. Wright Mills, but also Paul Goodman, Norman O. Brown, Lewis Mumford, Herbert Marcuse, and many other social critics of the late 1950s and early 1960s targeted scientism’s political effects and helped to give intellectual form to the New Left, as its leaders recoiled against the technocratic liberalism of the postwar establishment. Indeed, these anti-scientistic shocks would reverberate through the American left’s more scholarly incarnations for decades to come.52

52 The phrase comes from Andrew Jamison and Ron Eyerman, Seeds of the Sixties (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).

Jewett (Draft: Please do not cite or circulate!) 36