Information for Authors

Chapter 1. Introduction

Philippe Fontaine (École normale supérieure de Paris–Saclay) and Jefferson Pooley (University of Pennsylvania)

Chapter 2. Inventing “Social Thought”

Stephen Turner (University of South Florida)

The Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago was an astonishing success in many dimensions; a failure in others. It has nevertheless survived for eighty years as a unique academic program, an achievement. Its founding and continuation depended on special circumstances and the specific and unusual characteristics of the people appointed to it and supporting it, as well as on its unusual appointment structure. Even to briefly identify and describe the achievements of its members and graduates would require a book length text. But it is possible to explain its origins, the various conflicts within the university and in relation to the larger intellectual world that both made the Committee possible, and which limited its significance as a model beyond the University of Chicago, and limited the prospects of its graduates. My title is ironic: the Committee was never about, or limited to, “social thought.” Its ambitions, and those of its members, were much larger, and its scope was always much broader. These ambitions, and their complex origins, will be my concern here. Inevitably it will involve personalities and their intellectual trajectories. Four personalities were key at the start: John and Elinor Nef, Frank Knight, and Robert Redfield. But others were crucial as well, notably Robert Maynard Hutchins, and during the early years of the Committee and for long after David Grene and Edward Shils.

Chapter 3. Interdisciplinary Openness or Scholarly Refugium? The First Three Decades of the Chicago Committee on International Relations

Lucian Ashworth (Memorial University of Newfoundland)

The story of the Committee on International Relations (CIR)—and more generally of international relations at Chicago—is also a story of personalities. Founded in 1928 by Charles Merriam and Quincy Wright, after a successful 1926 conference, it was Wright who framed CIR’s interdisciplinary approach. It was this interdisciplinary core that would be the basis of Morgenthau’s construction of a scholarly refugium, intent on preserving the emerging discipline – and both Wright and Morgenthau saw it as an emerging separate scholarly field – from the perceived scientism of Political Science. Morgenthau’s criticism of political science would bring him into conflict with Merriam. While Morgenthau’s approach at CIR would frame how IR was taught, Nicolas Guilhot has argued that the project of preserving the emerging field of IR from the social scientific theories of Political Science would ultimately fail.

Chapter 4. An Integrative Center or Sprawling Marginalities? The History of the Committee on Human Development between the 1940s and 1960s

Liping Wang and Zhengtao Zheng (Peking University)

The Committee on Human Development (CHD) was one of the oldest interdisciplinary committees founded after the completion of the social science building in 1929. Like the Institute of Human Relations (IHR) at Yale and later the Department of Social Relations (DSR) at Harvard, it was created to pursue interdisciplinary research that was particularly strong in the intersected fields of natural and social sciences. It gained abundant funds from the foundations and its research—driven by a strong belief in scientism—served both academic and public interests. It can be viewed as part of a broad behavioral science turn that encapsulated most social sciences. Unlike the other two institutions, CHD did not build on any explicit theory attempt, as people in other institutions did with Freud’s psychoanalysis or Parson’s theory of action. From its inception to the 1960s, CHD conducted a great amount of empirical research, focused on the problems of socialization emerging in different stages of human life. Development underlined its theoretical concern, if there was one, which can be traced back to John Dewey and the pragmatist view—life was open to change and sensitive to the interaction with the environment. CHD carried the mission of integrating the biological, psychological and sociological investigations of human growth not in abstract flux of time, but in concrete social settings, which led to the central place of fieldwork in its research design. As it says, “human development is a behavioral science devoted to understanding the ways in which normal people grow, change, and age over the life span. Human development studies behavior in contemporary real-life situations.”

Chapter 5. Field Definition, Multidisciplinarity and Generalizability in the University of Chicago’s Committee on Education, Training, and Research in Race Relations, 1947–1956

Leah Gordon (Brandeis University)

This chapter examines the development and dissolution of the University of Chicago’s Committee on Education, Training, and Research in Race Relations (CETRRR, 1947–1956). Established by sociologist Louis Wirth, with Carnegie and Rockefeller funding, CETRRR provided an institutional hub in a national movement to define race relations as a rigorous but also practically useful social scientific field. It situates CETRRR’s rise and fall in key mid-century intellectual and political developments: the foundation fueled rise of interest in social relations approaches and the behavioral sciences; new social scientific patronage systems that envisioned basic and applied research as mutually reinforcing; McCarthyist pressures constraining academic production on race and class; the acceleration of the Civil Rights Movement and backlash to it; and the wartime growth of a white-led race relations movement focused on reducing racial tensions and prejudice. The chapter emphasizes how surprising it is that CETRRR dissolved, largely because faculty could not agree on a shared mission, at precisely the moment when civil rights activists might have relied on its efforts. Tensions related to CETRRR’s central goals—around what multidisciplinary collaboration required and around linking social scientific rigor with practical utility—help to explain the Committee’s brief tenure and limited long term impact.

Chapter 6. Walking the Tightrope: The Committee on the Behavioral Sciences and Academic Cultures at the University of Chicago, 1949–1955

Philippe Fontaine (École normale supérieure)

Involving prominent figures such as psychologist James G. Miller and neurophysiologist Ralph W. Gerard, the Chicago Committee on the Behavioral Sciences embodied the common belief among behavioral scientists that a cross-disciplinary approach using natural science methods was key to understanding major issues facing mid-century American society. This interdivisional committee fell under the jurisdiction of both the natural and social sciences. As such, its flagship project, an institute of mental sciences, had to endure the attacks both of natural scientists who thought it inadequately scientific and of social scientists who regard its efforts as too narrow in scope and too biological in orientation. Though it failed in its main objective to create an institute, the committee was a formidable instrument of intellectual stimulation and socialization for its members. It provided them with an opportunity to familiarize themselves with each other’s scientific backgrounds, practices and jargons, realize the significance of academic cultural differences and learn ways to accommodate them.

Chapter 7. The University of Chicago Committee on Communication, 1942, 1948–1959: The Life and Death of an Interdisciplinary Field

Jefferson Pooley (University of Pennsylvania)

The chapter traces the halting start, revival, and ignominious shuttering of the Committee on Communication (1942, 1948–1959). Established in 1942, the Committee on Communications and Public Opinion was stillborn, dismantled later that year as its chief sponsor, library scientist Douglas Waples, joined the government’s propaganda bureaucracy. After the war, Bernard Berelson—Waples’s former student—lobbied for a revival. By 1948, he won approval for the Committee on Communication, which in most respects resembled its war-era predecessor. The main claim of this paper is that the Chicago Committee on Communication was an expression, in fractal form, of communication research in the middle-third of the twentieth century. The Committee registered the birth and death of an interdisciplinary formation—one that was unstable and tethered to war. In a meaningful sense, the Chicago committee system’s interstitial character was purpose-built for communication research. It is an ephemeral form, suited for circumstantial groupings that will, with time, whither away.

Chapter 8. A Chicago School of Modernization Theory: The Committee for the Comparative Study of New Nations, 1960–1975

Bijan Warner (Independent scholar) and Jefferson Pooley (University of Pennsylvania)

The Committee for the Comparative Study of New Nations (CCSNN) was a forum at the University of Chicago for interdisciplinary dialogue regarding a set of theoretical and empirical questions in the social sciences. This chapter presents a history of the CCSNN through portraits of its four founding members: Edward Shils, David Apter, Clifford Geertz, and Lloyd Fallers. By attending to their intellectual commitments and motivations, the resulting narrative allows us to see how the contexts of departments, disciplines, patronage, decolonization, and the Cold War were experienced at the CCSNN. The CCSNN warrants attention as a particular case in the history of the social sciences for its influence on over 80 affiliated scholars and graduate fellows and as a site to examine the interchange of ideas, thus complementing disciplinary histories. As a refuge from the myopia of professionalized academic disciplines, the constraints of area studies, and the top-down management of social science inquiry from patrons and university administrators, the CCSNN provided an environment for the efflorescence of ideas.

Chapter 9: Death by Committee: Dual Stratification and the End of Home Economics at Chicago

Jonny Bunning (Centre européen de sociologie et de science politique)

This chapter traces the history of home economics at the University of Chicago, arguing that it was formed and ultimately abolished because of its ties to a broader institutional pattern of gender stratification. This was intrarather than inter-institutional, in which a women’s department emerged in a formally coeducational institution. Within the university, this entailed lower prestige and power. Beyond the university, however, home economics at the University of Chicago positioned itself as a high-status enterprise supplying ideas and labor to other institutions. Once wider social conditions of gender stratification change, rationale for this arrangement weakens. The first to perceive this were undergraduates, who abandoned the program. Administrators then turned against it. For those invested in home economics, the abolition was fraught. Graduates of the program responded with a letter-writing campaign; those in the branch of home economics closest to the chemical and nutritional sciences experienced the abolition as a loss of status; those working in a more strictly economic vein, however, benefited from the possibility of full alliance with economics, itself newly prestigious. The paper may thus help explain why home economists like Margeret Reid never expressed hostility to neoclassical approaches to the household.

For the volume we will generally follow the current edition of the Chicago Manual of Style, and use Chicago’s footnotes-and-bibliography citation style. Note: This means that manuscripts should include both footnotes and bibliography entries. The following guidelines and examples apply for footnote references and bibliography entries.

Book

References to books should include author(s)’ names; complete title of the book in italics; place of publication and publisher’s name; year of publication; and page numbers cited (footnote only).

• Initial footnote example: Dorothy Ross, The Origins of American Social Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 200–211.
• Subsequent footnote example: Ross, Origins of American Social Science, 215.
• Bibliography example: Ross, Dorothy. The Origins of American Social Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Chapter from an edited book

References to book chapters should include author(s)’ names; title of the chapter, in quotes; complete title of the book, italicized; editor(s)’ names; page numbers of the chapter (bibliography only); place of publication and publisher’s name; year of publication; and page numbers cited (footnote only).

• Initial footnote example: Craufurd D. Goodwin, “The Patrons of Economics in a Time of Transformation,” in From Interwar Pluralism to Postwar Neoclassicism, ed. Mary S. Morgan and Malcolm Rutherford (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 78.
• Subsequent footnote example: Goodwin, “Patrons of Economics in a Time of Transformation,” 56.
• Bibliography example: Goodwin, Craufurd D. “The Patrons of Economics in a Time of Transformation.” In From Interwar Pluralism to Postwar Neoclassicism, edited by Mary S. Morgan and Malcolm Rutherford, 53–81. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998.

Journal article

References to articles in periodicals should include author(s)’ names; title of article, in quotes; title of periodical, italicized; year; volume number, italicized; number of issue; page numbers of article (bibliography only); DOI (if available, bibliography only); and page numbers cited (footnote only).

• Initial footnote example: 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 (2013): 624.
• Subsequent footnote example: Geary, “Children of The Lonely Crowd,” 631.
• Bibliography example: Geary, Daniel. “Children of The Lonely Crowd: David Riesman, the Young Radicals, and the Splitting of Liberalism in the 1960s.” Modern Intellectual History 10, no. 3 (2013): 603–33. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1479244313000231.