Reviews in American History

For those concerned with the history of the construction of knowledge in the human sciences in the United States, these two books will be essential reading. While Hunter Heyck deals with the emergence of “high modern social science” and its transformation into “late modern social science” during the post-World War II period and after, Harvey J. Graff examines interdisciplinary endeavors in the social sciences, the life sciences, and related fields during the twentieth century. The books intersect in significant ways; both are concerned with interdisciplinary initiatives and with high modern social sciences such as cognitive science and social relations. Most importantly, both shed considerable light on the construction of the human sciences during the twentieth (and early twenty-first) century and, in doing so, make major contributions to illuminating the intellectual terrain that we now inhabit.

As indicated above, Hunter Heyck’s Age of System will be essential reading for those interested in the history of the human sciences in the late twentieth century. Part of a group of historians concerned with the history of the social sciences in the U.S. during the postwar era—Mark Solovey, Joel Isaac, David Engerman, Sonja Amadae, Nadine Weidman, Marga Vicedo, and Jeff Pooley come to mind as other members of this group—Heyck has previously distinguished himself as the author of an intellectual biography of Herbert Simon, a pioneer social scientist and administrator during the postwar years. In Age of System, Heyck provides us with an insightful and erudite historical account of what he terms “high modern social science,” examining its emergence in light of the wider intellectual, social, technological, and organizational trends from the 1950s to the early 1970s. Given its ambitious scope, his book can, [End Page 498] with some justification, be seen as a sequel to Dorothy Ross’ treatment of the emergence and consolidation of modern social science in her The Origins of American Social Science (1991); Heyck describes his book as a “prequel” to Daniel Rodgers’ examination of late modern social science (and other intellectual trends) in Age of Fracture (2011).

Heyck sees high modern social science as an “instantiation” of the “bureaucratic worldview.” The bureaucratic worldview envisioned societies, organisms, human-constructed cybernetic devices, and even aspects of the world of inanimate matter and energy as complex, hierarchical systems, which—at least in the case of organisms and of human beings and the organizations and systems created by them—were characterized by purposeful, adaptive behavior. The human sciences based on the bureaucratic worldview attempted to formulate models of these complex, hierarchical systems and utilized formal languages and sets of symbols, especially mathematics, in order to do so.

Associated with the bureaucratic worldview underpinning the postwar human sciences were the following features: a “behavioral-functional” approach to the properties of systems geared toward coordinating and maintaining equilibrium within these systems; an orientation toward instrumental reason; a concept of “universal man”; an emphasis on communication and information; an “analytic realism” that embraced “the use of mental constructs to describe systems of often intangible but very functional relationships” (p. 11); and a “weak holism” stressing the manner in which the higher levels of organizations coordinated and unified their components. The bureaucratic worldview came to pervade the human sciences during the postwar era—as the cognitive approach triumphed in psychology, “macroeconomics” in economics, the “behavioral revolution” in political science, and structural-functional approaches in the disciplines of sociology and anthropology. Practitioners of the new social (and cybernetic) sciences included such important figures as Talcott Parsons, Clyde Kluckhohn, George Miller, Jerome Bruner, Paul Samuelson, A. F. C. Wallace, David Easton, Herbert Simon, Walt W. Rostow, and Norbert Wiener.

In Age of System, Heyck situates the emergence of high modern social science within wider historical currents and contexts, including those relevant to the history of technology. The bureaucratic worldview that inspired...