Description
Book SynopsisIn this, a unique history of the America's postwar intellectual, David Paul Haney outlines the developoment of sociology as a discipline and why, given its focus of study, it failed to develop into a force in the intellectual currents of the United States.
Arguing that sociologists attempted to develop both a science and an instrument for the spread of humanistic concern about socity, Haney shows how both attempts failed to connect sociology with larger questions of policy and social progress.
Trade Review"This is an important and timely work…. [W]hile it is excellent as an intellectual history of the sociological discipline from the late 1940s to the early 1960s, its importance in illuminating questions of the public role of intellectuals in a modern democratic society gives it a far wider significance…. This is a fluent, well-constructed, soundly researched and informative work that fills in an important but little-understood aspect of postwar American social, cultural and intellectual history."
—Metapsychology Online
Table of ContentsTable of Contents
Chapter 1 Introduction 1
Chapter 2 The Postwar Campaign for Scientific Legitimacy 29
Chapter 3 Quantitative Methods and the Institutionalization of Exclusivity 60
Chapter 4 Social Theory and the Romance of American Alienation 90
Chapter 5 Theories of Mass Society and the Advent of a New Elitism 115
Chapter 6 Fads, Foibles, and Autopsies: Unwelcome Publicity for Diffident 160
Sociologists
Chapter 7 Pseudoscience and Social Engineering: American Sociology's 225
Public Image in the Fifties
Chapter 8 The Perils of Popularity: Public Sociology and Its Antagonists 264
Conclusion The Legacy of the Scientific Consensus 301
Bibliography
