A hubristic windmill off Harvard Yard: Historically situating the Department of Social Relations

Abstract

This essay reviews Patrick L. Schmidt’s book chronicling the rise and fall of Harvard’s Department of Social Relations (Harvard’s Quixotic Pursuit of a New Science) and contrasts Schmidt’s history with work of other scholars focusing on the impacts of the Cold War on Harvard’s social sciences during this period. While Schmidt provides important new historical details about the Department of Social Relations, with significant new information on some of Harvard’s internal politics, this review considers some of the department’s failures in relation to the chilling effects of McCarthyism and some department members covert arrangements with intelligence agencies, and limits to free inquiry during the early Cold War.

Keywords:

• Harvard University
• Department of Social Relations
• History of anthropology
• Cold War
• Talcott Parsons

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 See works such as, Nielsen (1991), “The Political Orientation of Talcott Parsons: The Second World War and Its Aftermath.” Owens (2010), “Producing Parsons’s Reputation,” and Staubmann’s (2021), “C. Wright Mills’ The Sociological Imagination and the Construction of Talcott Parsons as a Conservative Grand Theorist.”

Additional information

Notes on contributors

David H. Price

DAVID H. PRICE is professor of anthropology at Saint Martin’s University. He is the author of many book, includingCold War Anthropology(2016, Duke University Press), and the forthcomingCold War Deceptions: The Asia Foundation and the CIA(University of Washington Press).