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ARBEL-DISSERTATION-2016.Pdf (2.314Mb) The American Soldier in Jerusalem: How Social Science and Social Scientists Travel The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation Arbel, Tal. 2016. The American Soldier in Jerusalem: How Social Science and Social Scientists Travel. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University, Graduate School of Arts & Sciences. Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:33493383 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA ‘The American Soldier’ in Jerusalem: How Social Science and Social Scientists Travel A dissertation presented by Tal Arbel to The Department of the History of Science In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the subject of History of Science Harvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts April 2016 © 2016 Tal Arbel All rights reserved. Dissertation Advisor: Professor Anne Harrington Tal Arbel The American Soldier in Jerusalem: How Social Science and Social Scientists Travel Abstract The dissertation asks how social science and its tools—especially those associated with the precise measurement of attitudes, motivations and preferences—became a pervasive way of knowing about and ordering the world, as well as the ultimate marker of political modernity, in the second half of the twentieth century. I explore this question by examining in detail the trials and tribulations that accompanied the indigenization of scientific polling in 1950s Israel, focusing on the story of Jewish-American sociologist and statistician Louis Guttman and the early history of the Israel Institute of Applied Social Research, the survey research organization he established and ran for forty years. Along with a wave of scientist-explorers who traveled to the postcolonial areas in the early Cold War, Guttman set out to the Middle East, leaving a secure academic position and settling in Jerusalem on the eve of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. The inventor of cumulative scaling (known today as “Guttman scaling”)—a method of measurement first developed and used in The American Soldier, the classic World War II study of soldiering—Guttman sought to test in Israel the applicability of cutting-edge socio-psychological research techniques to the problems of a new state. With these objectives in mind, he established a small volunteer-based research unit within the Haganah, the largest among the paramilitary Zionist organizations in British Palestine, which then became part of the nascent Israeli Army. By the late 1950s, the military unit had evolved into a successful national research organization—the first of its kind outside the United States— iii that employed over two dozen workers and carried out studies on all aspects of social life for government offices, the military, and clients in the private sector. Joining others who have rejected Basalla’s diffusion model, my dissertation shows there was nothing inevitable about the spread of these statistical methods and tools. Rather, they traveled and took root through an active, engaged, and directed process, which required the entrepreneurial initiative and cultural labor of individuals, and depended in turn on the institutional experience and habits of mind they brought with them, their embodied skills, relationships and personal virtues. More concretely, I argue that the eventual institutionalization of this scientific practice and its attendant rationality in Israel was due primarily to Guttman’s ability to recreate the conditions of knowing by rendering social science expertise intelligible in the vernacular, and to make an “ecological niche” for scientific claims and methods to feel at home away from home. Yet, while Guttman was successful in recreating some of the conditions of social scientific knowing, conducting large-scale survey research in a “hostile,” or error generating environment – whether shortage of trained workers, resistant subjects and dismissive decision- makers, competing epistemic values, or the strains of war and state building – often engendered local adaptations. Highlighting the “iterability” of science in translation, I also show that behavioral concepts and claims embedded in the ‘deliverables’ produced by Guttman were often reframed, modified, and infused with local modes of reasoning and understanding as they were vernacularized. The dissertation thus serves to illuminates both the processes that governed the transnational circulation of scientific ideas and tools in the postwar period and the central role this knowledge migration played in shaping the history of the modern social sciences. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 1 Governing the World the American Way 7 Survey Modernity 12 Chapter Outline 17 CHAPTER 1: INTO THE WILD 22 Objectivism Unbound 23 Tricks of the Trade 32 Zionism and Scientism 36 A War of One’s Own 46 CHAPTER 2: WHAT THE (JEWISH) SOLDIER THINKS 53 Guard Duty 56 Morale under Siege 60 Observations in a Hostile Environment 67 ‘Not Volunteers and not Pioneers’ 73 The Perfect Scale 79 The Ontology of the Questionnaire 88 The Warrior’s Spirit and the Soldier’s Mood 100 Fear in Battle 105 Fear in Hebrew 115 CHAPTER 3: WHO IS A SOCIOLOGIST 124 A Job Interview Gone Wrong 125 The Last Prussian University 131 Against Utility 135 Knowing a World in Crisis 139 Looking for an Heir 144 Vienna in Jerusalem 147 The Americans Are Coming 150 The Jewish Man of Science 169 CHAPTER 4: THE MORAL ECONOMY OF SURVEY RESEARCH IN ISRAEL 178 ‘Statesmen’s Laboratory’ 181 Laboratory Life 188 ‘Guttman was the Institute’ 200 The Split Director 206 ‘They Practically had a Joint Career’ 214 CONCLUSION 222 BIBLIOGRAPHY 238 v Israel's rebirth as a nation after two thousand years is a freak phenomenon of history. But in all branches of science the observation of freak phenomena yields important clues to general laws. Dwarf stars and human giants, radioactivity and parthenogenesis, prophets, maniacs and saints are all freaks which carry the conditions of normality to the pointed and profiled extreme. So does this race of eternal victims with its flayed skin and exposed nerves, which demonstrates, with the horrible precision of an anatomic atlas, a condition of man otherwise mercifully hidden from us. Arthur Koestler, 1949 vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS It is a pleasure to thank those who have made this dissertation possible. Anne Harrington, my beloved advisor, has insightfully, and with great skill, helped transform an unwieldy and overly theoretical proposal into a narrative-driven, detail-rich, and surprisingly archive-heavy dissertation about actual people and their manifold lived experiences in science. I went through an equally dramatic metamorphosis in the process, and Anne has been there all along, guiding me time and again to safe harbor. Even more than the professional wisdom she imparted, Anne has taught me how to lead a sustainable life of the mind, practically and ethically. It is her unwavering support and rare sense of commitment that have seen me through to the end of this dissertation. I was very fortunate to have a wonderfully diverse dissertation committee, whose members have each inspired and sharpened my work in different ways. From Steven Shapin I learned that—its impersonal appearance notwithstanding—scientific knowledge making is a deeply personal, socially fraught, and culturally situated affair. His discerning reading and perceptive comments, as well as the model his own intellectual and authorial workmanship has offered, have shaped the dissertation in the most significant of ways. Rebecca Lemov’s imaginative engagement with psychological tests and protocols, experimental apparatuses, and strange recording machines inspired me to focus on the travel of tools and methods; while her ethnographic and literary sensibilities spurred me to draw out the obscure and accidental in the story. And the one-and-only Roger Owen showed me how to conduct analysis on a world- historical scale while staying specific with translocal entanglements and crosscutting itineraries, and how to make good scholarly use of my emotional and political leanings. Our many delightful conversations over the years have left an immeasurable mark on my thinking. vii Acknowledgement is also due to other faculty mentors who were instrumental in bringing the project to fruition. Marwa Elshakry, who welcomed me into her classroom and her home when I first arrived, and started me thinking about the global circulation of scientific ideas and the cultural politics of science-in-translation, thus planting the seed for this dissertation; Jamie Cohen-Cole, who during his two-year appointment as Lecturer at Harvard taught me much of what I now know about the politics of the American mind, about precision measurement, and about reflexivity and recursivity in science. He was a huge help on my prospectus, and has been both a most generous and smart interlocutor ever since. Richard Tuck and Andy Jewett have been both a pleasure to work with and teach for throughout my three-year stint with the Committee on Degrees in Social Studies, and actively supported my efforts to bring social theory and history of science together. I will be forever grateful to Janet Browne for the gentle and dryly-bemused way she has steered me out of frightening dead ends and for her faith in me. I’m especially grateful to Sam Schweber, a real mensch, who accompanied me for many years, selflessly attentive as only a man of his stature can be. I would be remiss if I did not thank the archivists who have helped me along the way. Hana Pinshow, Head of the Ben-Gurion Archives in Sde-Boker, got up very early on a Sunday morning and stayed especially late while I frantically took photos of the entirety of the Guttman Papers (all 31 boxes of them) after learning that the collection relocated to the Negev desert only a few days before I had to fly back to Boston.
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