Olivier Zunz, Why the American Century?. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.
by Dennis Bryson
Olivier Zunz, a historian now teaching at the University of Virginia in the United States, has written a book that should be of great interest to historians of the American social sciences-and, I would hope, of the social sciences more generally-during the twentieth century. In his Why the American Century?, Zunz argues that social scientific knowledge has played a major role in enhancing the power of the United States during the "American Century" (to use publisher Henry Luce's term). More particularly, Zunz examines in some detail the American "institutional matrix of knowledge" and its role in furthering the American Century. Zunz's book is a valuable and provocative, if not always convincing, contribution to understanding the role of the social sciences in the United States in the twentieth century.If the narrative that Zunz formulates at times seems to be a kind of success story for the United States, it is by no means an uncritical one. Zunz's intention is not simply to offer a triumphalist account of American success and hegemony; dissenting voices, such as that of Theodore Adorno, Frankfurt theorist and critic of American consumer society, are given a hearing in the book. Indeed, Zunz is primarily concerned not so much with the actual record of the performance of the U.S. economy and political system or whether or not the U.S. has lived up to its professed ideals, but with debates among the "liberal elites" over such issues as the management of society by means of "social intelligence," the role of the middle class, consumerism and social class, prosperity and democracy, pluralism and multiculturalism, and the exporting of American principles and economic practices to other nations. One might say, loosely following the French social theorist Cornelius Castoriadis, that a central theme in Zunz's book is the idea of the "American Century" considered as a "social imaginary" operating, especially among the elites, in the U.S. during the twentieth century. That is, the idea of the American Century constitutes an ensemble of images and symbols, ideas, "ideologies," and narratives, and most significantly for our purposes, forms of knowledge by means of which Americans have represented and instituted their sense of national identity and destiny during the twentieth century. According to Zunz, the social sciences have played a key role in the elaboration of the American social imaginary during this period.
Most useful for historians of the social sciences is Zunz's examination of the "institutional matrix of inquiry" as it emerged in the U.S. from about 1870 to the early twentieth century. Within the institutional matrix-which consisted of capitalist corporations, universities, philanthropic foundations, government agencies, and, eventually, the military-the production of knowledge was organised and its application and dissemination promoted by means of flexible institutional structures and the fluid circulation of personnel between these structures. Thus, knowledge and expertise moved easily from one institutional setting to another, and, as a result, such knowledge and expertise came to be effectively utilised for promoting technological and economic development, social engineering and management, and mass consumption within the U.S. Originally, such fields as chemical and electrical engineering and biological research applied to agriculture were key foci of the institutional matrix. Latter, they were supplemented by the efforts of psychologists to test and classify personnel for the corporations and the military, the anticipation of a consumer based economy in the writings of economists such as Simon Patten and John Bates Clark, and the sponsorship by the foundations of social survey and other social science projects in the first decades of the twentieth century.
Zunz assigns a key role to the foundations in elaborating the social sciences in the U.S. Thus, foundations such as the Russell Sage Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation, and the Rockefeller philanthropies played a major role in promoting knowledge oriented toward surveying, understanding, and managing the social. Especially significant were the Rockefeller philanthropies, which attempted to further the utilisation of social science as "social intelligence" in order to organise and reconstruct social life. For example, under Beardsley Ruml, the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial (LSRM) funded numerous university-affiliated social scientists and their projects. Thus, the LSRM sponsored the establishment of the Social Science Research Council, the community studies projects directed by Chicago social scientists Charles Merriam, Robert Parks, and Ernest Burgess, a study of migration conducted by Robert Yerkes under the auspices of the National Research Council, an institute for social research at the University of North Carolina under the direction of Howard Odum, and numerous other projects.
Zunz summarises the relationship between philanthropy and social science in the following words, which are worth quoting at length:
"By decade's end [the end of the 1920s], the social sciences had received an extraordinary boost from the funding coming from the new foundations. Taken together the foundations and research institutes primarily in New York but also in Washington had influence well beyond what they directly funded. They actually formed new cultural foci for processing ideas, projects, and money as well as bringing together investigators from different institutions. Their staff had a say in the conceptualisation and support of much of what counted in social science, both basic and applied, in universities, professional associations, and government agencies. And they increased their influence by moving among these different institutions". (p. 42)Ruml's career well illustrates how participants in the institutional matrix moved from one institutional setting to another. Trained as a psychologist by James Angell at the University of Chicago, Ruml worked on testing military personnel during the First World War. As director of the LSRM during the 1920s, he was the architect and administrator of the influential social science program of this foundation. After a stint as the dean of the social science division of the University of Chicago, Ruml left academia to become the treasurer of Macy's department store. Latter, in 1937, he was appointed director of the New York branch of the Federal Reserve Bank. As treasurer of Macy's and director of the New York Federal Reserve Bank, Ruml refined his vision of America as a consumer-oriented society "democratically" embracing all (or nearly all) segments of the American population; concomitantly, he espoused Keynesian economic policies. Zunz notes that Ruml played a key role in convincing President Franklin D. Roosevelt to deliberately adopt Keynesian policies in early 1938.
Zunz explores the manner in which social scientific knowledge came to be associated with dialogic modes of power (my phrase, not Zunz's). During the 1920s, advertisers and others had attempted to apply methods of habit formation and breaking derived from behaviourist psychology, but these methods were found to be too crude to accomplish what their champions (such as John B. Watson) had hoped. Instead, quantitative methodologies, including sophisticated sampling techniques, were applied to survey research-as questionnaires were developed and administered in order to identify and measure "public opinion." Advocates of the new methods, such as George Gallup, thought of survey questionnaires as being a "democratic" way for people to make their opinions known on an array of topics, from political and social issues to consumer preferences. Needless to say, the "empowerment" gained by the public was instrumentalized by managerial elites in order to advance their own goals-for example, integrating the population into consumer society.
New ways of conceptualising social class came to be associated with social science and its methods. Thus, social scientists such as sociologist F. Stuart Chapin and anthropologist W. Lloyd Warner focused on the manner in which class could be ascertained and measured by examining the patterns of consumption of various groups. For example, Warner saw class in terms of six different "status" levels-and he defined status largely in terms of patterns of consumption. Such methods for examining class enhanced the idea that class conflict could be avoided and democracy attained if only all (or most) American citizens could participate in consumer society.
As interesting as Zunz's book is, I do not find it totally convincing. For one thing, Zunz's assertion in the second chapter that "the spirit of Protestant reform" was "written into American social science" seems rather dubious to me. It is, of course, widely known that many American social scientists during the early twentieth century had been influenced by the Social Gospel movement and, indeed, in a number of cases, had been Protestant ministers before turning to social science. Nevertheless, by the 1920s, the enterprise of social science differed greatly from religious modes of thought and practice. And if it is possible, as Zunz suggests, to discern a "normative" orientation in the American social sciences in the early twentieth century, perhaps this is derived as much or more from the origins of the American institutional matrix of knowledge in fields such as engineering than from the domain of religion and morality. The search for social order, methods of ameliorating social conflict, and norms of social conduct-characteristic of American social science during the early twentieth century-is similar in significant respects to the "technical normalisation" fostered by the engineers. As Francois Ewald has suggested, technical normalisation involves a "communicative logic" entailing negotiation by various specialists and groups aimed at the formulation of common terms, concepts, and standards pertinent to production and consumption. No doubt, both social scientists and engineers conceived of their respective agendas as promoting the general "welfare" of society.
Another problem with Zunz's book is that he does not adequately deal with the manner in which "grass-roots" movements such as the CIO union movement of the 1930s and the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s had an impact on the projects, concepts, and knowledge formulated by managerial and social scientific elites. Thus, in order to comprehend new ways of thinking about class as well as such emergent concepts as "pluralism" and "multiculturalism," the complex and dynamic patterns of conflict and interaction involving all major social groups, not merely the elites, need to be examined. Of course, Zunz deliberately focuses on the elites in his book, but I fear that his narrative, in not dealing in more depth with the social movements active during the periods with which he is concerned, leaves too much out of the picture. To adequately understand the phenomena that Zunz deals with, we need more of a sense of the complex interplay between grass-roots movements and the elites.
In spite of the problems with Zunz's book, his notion of the institutional matrix of knowledge provides an excellent tool for understanding the way in which social science knowledge is constructed and the role it comes to play in organising and managing modern society. In addition to further exploring this topic in the U.S., it would be most instructive to examine how such institutional contexts have functioned in other societies.
Bibliography
Castoriadis, Cornelius. The Imaginary Institution of Society. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987. Ewald, Francois. "Norms, Discipline, and the Law." Representations 30 (Spring 1990): 138-161.