The Genealogy of A Positivist Haunting: Comparing Prewar and Postwar U.S. Sociology
The Genealogy of A Positivist Haunting: Comparing Prewar and Postwar U.S. Sociology
The Genealogy of A Positivist Haunting: Comparing Prewar and Postwar U.S. Sociology
George Steinmetz
This essay asks two related questions about the discipline of soci-
ology in the United States during the middle decades of the twentieth cen-
tury. The first of these questions is historical and comparative, and relates
to the dominant epistemological 1 orientation in U.S. sociology in the two
decades after World War II. What accounts for the postwar narrowing of
sociology’s epistemological and methodological diversity, or more precisely,
for the shift from a relative balance between nonpositivist and positivist ori-
entations in the interwar period to a clear positivist dominance of the disci-
pline? A second and related problem is a counterfactual one and concerns
U.S. sociology’s substantive geographic focus, its emphasis on the United
States to the relative exclusion of the rest of the world. Why did U.S. soci-
I would like to thank Hyun Ok Park, Harry Harootunian, and Craig Calhoun for comments
on an earlier version of this paper.
1. I will use the adjective epistemological in this essay as shorthand to encompass onto-
logical and methodological issues as well, except when specified; see my ‘‘American Soci-
ology’s Epistemological Unconscious and the Transition to Post-Fordism: The Case of His-
torical Sociology,’’ in Remaking Modernity, ed. Julia Adams, Elisabeth Clemens, and Ann
Orloff (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004), 109–57.
ologists remain focused on their own country, or treat the rest of the world
in ways that disavowed or obliterated its difference from the United States?
Why did they persist in this provincialism during a period in which the geo-
graphic reach of U.S. global empire was expanding exponentially?
In approaching the history of a discipline such as sociology, it is best
to examine both the ‘‘internal or autonomous forces that shape the devel-
opment of scientific inquiry on the one hand and those that arise exter-
nally in the cultural or social milieus of that scientific enterprise on the
other.’’ 2 More specifically, I will theorize sociology here ‘‘internally’’ in terms
of its fieldlike qualities (or lack thereof) in Pierre Bourdieu’s sense, asking
about the emergence of recognized or agreed-upon definitions of unequally
distributed social-scientific capital. But such a field-level analysis cannot
explain why one particular definition of scientific distinction—in this case, the
methodological-positivist definition—was able to ascend to paramountcy
only after World War II. By the same token, Bruno Latour’s approach can tell
us what sorts of strategies scientists are likely to use in seeking scientific
capital, but it cannot explain why the same techniques fail in one historical
period and succeed in another. The external determinant that is emphasized
in most of the literature on the sociology of the social sciences is money. The
story of the rise of scientism and ‘‘big social science’’ has often emphasized
the influx of federal funding after 1945.3
While this was certainly part of the conjunctural mix that helped the
methodological positivists achieve preeminence, it was not enough. The
explosion of funding for social science framed as a natural science was itself
part of a broader societal-level formation that arose after the war: Fordism.
Analyzing the relations between social science and Fordism is a corrective
to the rigid distinction between ‘‘internalist’’ and ‘‘externalist’’ approaches
in science studies, insofar as the internal workings of social science were
directly linked to some of the more encompassing patterns of social life.
Yet even this is too one-sidedly economistic. An additional process
that prepared the ground for positivism’s sweeping victory inside soci-
ology after 1945 has to do with the spontaneous social epistemologies that
2. Neil Smelser, ‘‘External Influences on Sociology,’’ in Sociology and Its Publics, ed.
Terence C. Halliday and Morris Janowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 43.
3. See especially Stephen Park and Jonathan H. Turner, The Impossible Science: An Insti-
tutional Analysis of American Sociology (Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage, 1990). For a parallel
analysis of anthropology in this period, see David H. Price, ‘‘Subtle Means and Enticing
Carrots: The Impact of Funding on American Cold War Anthropology,’’ Critique of Anthro-
pology 23, no. 4 (2003): 373–401.
Steinmetz / Prewar and Postwar U.S. Sociology 111
4. This resonance between positivism and environing patterns of social regulation has
come partly out of joint under present-day post-Fordism, a problem I address in ‘‘Scientific
Authority and the Transition to Post-Fordism: The Plausibility of Positivism in U.S. Soci-
ology Since 1945,’’ in The Politics of Method in the Human Sciences: Positivism and Its
Epistemological Others, ed. George Steinmetz (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press,
2005).
5. Alternative terms that attempt to capture a similar cluster of disciplinary characteristics
include instrumental positivism and objectivism.
6. For a comparative account of the versions of positivism that have prevailed in the vari-
ous U.S. social science disciplines, see my introduction to The Politics of Method in the
Human Sciences. See also the recent work of Immanuel Wallerstein, which has stimulated
some social scientists to rethink their ‘‘nineteenth-century’’ assumptions.
112 boundary 2 / Summer 2005
7. Contrast, for example, Talcott Parsons, The Structure of Social Action, vol. 2 (1937; repr.,
New York: Free Press, 1949), 774, and the writings of George Lundberg, including ‘‘The
Natural Science Trend in Sociology,’’ American Journal of Sociology 61, no. 3 (November
1955): 191–202.
8. See Robert C. Bannister, Sociology and Scientism (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1987); Christopher Bryant, Positivism in Social Theory and Research (New
York: Macmillan, 1985); and Dorothy Ross, The Origins of American Social Science (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
9. Turner stresses that Giddings trained numerous students who then went on to occupy
leading roles in sociology departments around the country; see ‘‘The Origins of ‘Main-
stream Sociology’ and Other Issues in the History of American Sociology,’’ Social Episte-
mology 8, no. 1 (January–March 1994): 41–67. The other leading early sociology depart-
ment, at the University of Chicago, was founded by Albion Small, who had been exposed
to the ‘‘humanistic’’ side of the nineteenth-century ‘‘methods struggle’’ in Germany but later
Steinmetz / Prewar and Postwar U.S. Sociology 113
endorsed the idea that sociology should pattern itself on the natural sci-
ences. In his presidential address to the American Sociological Society in
1926, for example, John L. Gillin declared that ‘‘the application of the scien-
tific method and the increased emphasis upon objective data have been act-
ing as selective agents in consigning these enemies of sociology’’—social
theorists and social activists—‘‘to a deserved innocuous desuetude.’’ 10 Vien-
nese logical positivism began making inroads into the sociological scene,
even if the philosophers’ more explicit appeals to social scientists came after
World War II (culminating in Ernest Nagel’s widely read The Structure of
Science: Problems in the Logic of Scientific Explanation [1961]).11 Sociology
textbooks from this era also typically recommended emulating the natural
sciences.12
A closer examination suggests, however, that positivism was far from
hegemonic in U.S. sociology before 1945. The discipline was particularly
riven during the ideologically turbulent 1930s, which saw discussions of the
putative links between positivism and fascism and of the need to recon-
nect sociology with the humanities and social activism.13 In addition to the
wrenching social disruptions and vibrant political movements outside the
academy and the new ideas brought by exiles from Europe, the discipline
was also diversified somewhat in terms of its personnel, which became less
rural and Protestant (even though it remained overwhelmingly white and
14. Norbert Wiley, ‘‘The Rise and Fall of Dominating Theories in American Sociology,’’ in
Contemporary Issues in Theory and Research, ed. William E. Snizek, Ellsworth R. Fuhr-
man, and Michael K. Miller (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1979), 47–83; and Patricia
Madoo Lengermann, ‘‘The Founding of the American Sociological Review : The Anatomy
of a Rebellion,’’ American Sociological Review 44, no. 2 (April 1979): 185–98.
15. Edward Shils, ‘‘The Calling of Sociology,’’ in Theories of Society: Foundations of Mod-
ern Sociological Theory, ed. Talcott Parsons et al. (New York: Free Press, 1961), 1405,
1410.
16. Pierre Bourdieu, ‘‘The Specificity of the Scientific Field,’’ in French Sociology: Rupture
and Renewal Since 1968, ed. Charles C. Lemert (New York: Columbia University Press,
1981), 257–92.
Steinmetz / Prewar and Postwar U.S. Sociology 115
17. Friedrich A. von Hayek, ‘‘Scientism and the Study of Society (Part 1),’’ Economica 9,
no. 35 (August 1942): 268.
18. Richard Evans, ‘‘Sociological Journals and the ‘Decline’ of Chicago Sociology: 1929–
1945,’’ History of Sociology 6–7 (1986–87): 123; Bannister, Sociology and Scientism, 189,
218.
19. These departments were at Columbia University, the University of Chicago, the Uni-
versity of Wisconsin, the University of Michigan, Harvard University, the University of
North Carolina–Chapel Hill, and (before 1945) the University of Minnesota. I discuss these
departments and Berkeley’s new sociology department, which was created after World
War II, in ‘‘American Sociology.’’
116 boundary 2 / Summer 2005
20. Patricia Wilner, ‘‘The Main Drift of Sociology between 1936 and 1982,’’ History of Soci-
ology 5, no. 2 (Spring 1985): 16, table 10.
21. Parsons, The Structure of Social Action, 2:622, my emphasis. Despite his emphasis
on values or norms, Parsons also fell into an objectivist analysis of the subjective, reducing
it to the single category of the means-ends schema; see Charles Camic, ‘‘Structure After
50 Years: The Anatomy of a Charter,’’ American Journal of Sociology 95, no. 1 (July 1989):
esp. 64–69.
22. See Talcott Parsons, Robert F. Bales, and Edward A. Shils, Working Papers in the
Theory of Action (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1953); see also Jennifer Platt, A History of
Sociological Research Methods in America: 1920–1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 1996), 102.
Steinmetz / Prewar and Postwar U.S. Sociology 117
23. Gregory Zilboorg, ‘‘Sociology and the Psychoanalytic Method,’’ American Journal of
Sociology 45, no. 3 (November 1939): 341.
24. See Stephen Turner and Jonathan Turner, The Impossible Science: An Institutional
Analysis of American Sociology (Beverly Hills, Calif., and London: Sage, 1990), chap. 3,
on this influx. One autobiographical account of the transformation of a chemist at Eastman
Kodak into a sociologist who carried his self-described ‘‘positivist orientation . . . from the
physical sciences’’ into the new field is given by J. S. Coleman, ‘‘Columbia in the 1950s,’’
in Authors of Their Own Lives: Intellectual Autobiographies by Twenty American Sociolo-
gists, ed. Bennett M. Berger (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 75, 93.
25. Roscoe C. Hinkle and Gisela J. Hinkle, The Development of Modern Sociology, Its
Nature and Growth in the United States (New York: Random House, 1954).
118 boundary 2 / Summer 2005
31. According to the 1956 text, sociology’s aim was to ‘‘discover systematic . . . observ-
able relationships between . . . phenomena.’’ The discipline was ‘‘nonethical,’’ although its
findings could be used in ‘‘instrumental’’ ways. Ronald Freedman et al., Principles of Soci-
ology (NewYork: Holt, 1956), 5, 6, 12. Compare Charles Horton Cooley, Robert Cooley
Angell, and Lowell Juilliard Carr, Introductory Sociology (New York: Charles Scribner’s
Sons, 1933).
32. Kucklick, ‘‘A ‘Scientific Revolution,’’’ 16.
33. Quotes from Platt, A History of Sociological Research Methods in America, 202–3;
and William H. Baxter, ‘‘Where Does the ‘Comparative Method’ Come from?’’ in The Lin-
guist’s Linguist: A Collection of Papers in Honour of Alexis Manaster Ramer, ed. Fabrice
Cavoto, vol. 1 (Munich: LINCOM), 42–43.
34. James J. Chriss, ‘‘Testing Gouldner’s Coming Crisis Thesis: On the Waxing and
Waning of Intellectual Influence,’’ Current Perspectives in Social Theory 15, no. 3 (1995):
3–61; George C. Homans, ‘‘A Conceptual Scheme for the Study of Social Organization,’’
American Sociological Review 12, no. 1 (February 1947): 14.
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35. Henry Pratt Fairchild, Dictionary of Sociology (New York: Philosophical Library, 1944),
226.
36. See Coleman, ‘‘Columbia in the 1950s,’’ 88.
37. See Platt, A History of Sociological Research Methods in America, for this argument.
Steinmetz / Prewar and Postwar U.S. Sociology 121
ever tried in sociology.’’ 38 But this assumes that the only relevant definition
of positivism is to be found in some philosophical urtext. One distinction that
is sometimes made contrasts inductivism and deductivism: positivist posi-
tions in the twentieth century were deductivist, but in mainstream sociology,
it was standard practice to throw data into a statistical procedure (or later
into a computer program) and then to invent ad hoc theoretical explanations
for any empirical relationships that could be discerned. But the patron saint
of scientists’ spontaneous positivism is Hume, for whom inductively discov-
ered regularities were the sole source of knowledge.39
Direct critiques of methodological positivism within sociology were
almost imperceptible in the 1950s, aside from Mills and Sorokin. Most soci-
ologists whose work diverged epistemically from the dominant model simply
carried on.40 Alvin Gouldner inched up to his full-blown epistemological cri-
tique of U.S. sociology only gradually after the 1950s, and in 1954 he quoted
Homans to the effect that ‘‘sociology may miss a great deal if it tries to be too
quantitative too soon,’’ implying that quantification was the ultimate telos.41
The antipositivism of Hans Gerth at the University of Wisconsin had to be
gleaned from his decisions about what to translate and from his teaching,
since he published so little.42 Adorno’s writings from the early 1960s were
the most sophisticated critiques of positivism in this entire period, but they
were not translated into English until 1976. Marcuse worked as an intelli-
gence analyst for the U.S. Army during the war and headed up the Cen-
tral European Section of the Office of Intelligence Research afterwards, and
when he finally returned to teaching in 1951, it was in philosophy rather
than sociology. Some earlier critics toned down or subtly adjusted their
former antipositivism in ways that made their work more compatible with the
reigning framework. Sorokin turned sharply against what he called ‘‘sham-
38. Nicholas C. Mullins and Carolyn J. Mullins, Theories and Theory Groups in Contem-
porary American Sociology (New York: Harper and Row, 1973), 218.
39. On this, see the work of Roy Bhaskar, especially The Possibility of Naturalism (New
York: Humanities Press, 1979).
40. I am thinking of sociologists such as Leo Lowenthal, Harold Blumer, Erving Goffman,
Reinhard Bendix, and Barrington Moore Jr.
41. Alvin W. Gouldner, Patterns of Industrial Bureaucracy (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1954),
17, my emphasis.
42. But see Gerth, ‘‘The Relevance of History to the Sociological Ethos,’’ Studies on the
Left: A Journal of Research, Social Theory, and Review 1, no. 1 (Fall 1959): 7–14. See the
bibliography of Gerth’s work in Politics, Character, and Culture: Perspectives from Hans
Gerth, ed. Joseph Bensman, Arthur J. Vidich, and Nobuko Gerth (Westport, Conn.: Green-
wood Press, 1982), 275–83.
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43. Several years later, Sorokin ended his autobiography with the suggestion that the
empiricist ‘‘sensate order’’ was leading to the destruction of mankind and an ‘‘abomina-
tion of desolation.’’ See A Long Journey: The Autobiography of Pitirim A. Sorokin (New
Haven, Conn.: College and University Press, 1963), 324. This lent ammunition to those
who dismissed him as increasingly ‘‘shrill,’’ ‘‘eccentric,’’ and motivated by personal bitter-
ness. Lewis A. Coser, Masters of Sociological Thought (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovano-
vich, 1971), 508.
44. C. Wright Mills, ‘‘The Professional Ideology of Social Pathologists,’’ American Journal
of Sociology 49, no. 2 (September 1943): 166; and ‘‘International Relations and Sociology:
Discussion,’’ American Sociological Review 13, no. 3 (June 1948): 271.
Steinmetz / Prewar and Postwar U.S. Sociology 123
sports, distance from necessity might accrue to bodily movements that are
more artificial and more clearly distinct from natural or everyday gestures,
or to games that are wasteful of time (e.g., sailing) and space (e.g., golf). But
how could Bourdieu’s theory account for the prestige of positivism in soci-
ology? While empiricism is certainly more concrete than depth realism, and
thus in certain respects closer to necessity, positivism can be construed as
less concerned with the messy details of the specific individual case, which
it tries to subsume under covering laws. Quantification might be described
as a substitute for the cruder ‘‘classification of events which our senses pro-
vide,’’ in von Hayek’s words.45 Although ‘‘distance from necessity’’ need not
be defined in aesthetic terms, it is remarkable that positivists in the social
sciences spontaneously adhere to an aestheticizing language of ‘‘elegance’’
when describing statistical models.
The problem with this approach is its ad hoc and portmanteau quality.
One could just as easily tell a story according to which nonpositivist ap-
proaches are more disdainful of necessity than positivist ones and hence
more distinguished. It could be emphasized that the parsimonious accounts
preferred by positivism are actually closer to commonsense understandings
of social causality. Bourdieu’s framework is best equipped to account for the
workings of consolidated, settled fields, but its analyses of the origins or the
substantive contents of any given settlement are less compelling. Bourdieu
indicates how practices and perceptions are likely to be framed, the general
kinds of arguments that will be mobilized by anyone trying to control a field,
but he cannot explain why certain projects of distinction will be more suc-
cessful than others, without falling back into an economism that he wants
to avoid.
So why was sociological positivism so successful in its bid for leader-
ship and prestige after 1945? The most significant and all-encompassing
development after the war was the consolidation of the social patterns that
retrospectively have come to be known as Fordism. The Fordist ‘‘security
state’’ relied to a greater extent than previous state forms on the skills of
social scientists, and this entailed an enhanced level of public funding for
sociological research. By the 1950s and early 1960s, the intellectual, finan-
cial, and political forces that had existed before 1945 were combining with
the ideological effects of the newly consolidated Fordist mode of regulation
to catapult the methodological positivists to victory.46
45. Von Hayek, ‘‘Scientism and the Study of Society (Part 1),’’ 275.
46. I cannot address other elements of the overdetermining conjuncture that led to the
124 boundary 2 / Summer 2005
success of positivism, one of which was the heightened level of anxiety around totalitarian
irrationalism.
47. Alain Lipietz, ‘‘Akkumulation, Krisen und Auswege aus der Krise: Einige methodische
Überlegungen zum Begriff ‘Regulation,’’’ Probleme des Klassenkampfes 15, no 1 (1985):
109.
Steinmetz / Prewar and Postwar U.S. Sociology 125
48. On Projects Troy and Camelot, the Special Operations Research Office, the RAND
Corporation, and other militarily funded social science during the Cold War, see the essays
in Irving Louis Horowitz, ed., The Rise and Fall of Project Camelot (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press, 1967); and Christopher Simpson, ed., Universities and Empire: Money and Politics
in the Social Sciences during the Cold War (New York: New Press, 1998).
49. Samuel Z. Klausner and Victor D. Lidz, ‘‘Introduction,’’ in The Nationalization of the
Social Sciences (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986), vii.
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social science funds; by 1976, the rate was around 56 percent.50 In 1966,
the federal government spent $26,621,000 on ‘‘basic and applied sociologi-
cal research’’ alone, and the Department of Defense spent $34 million on
behavioral and social science research; by 1970, the Department of Defense
was spending almost $50 million.51 Before 1930, only 1.3 percent of articles
in the American Journal of Sociology acknowledged financial support from
any outside source at all, but by the 1960–64 period, the percentage of
articles acknowledging financial support in the American Journal of Soci-
ology, the American Sociology Review, and Social Forces had risen to 52.5
percent.52 The proportion of total revenues at Lazarsfeld’s Bureau of Applied
Social Research coming from government sources rose from 0 to 91 per-
cent between 1945 and 1974.53 Methodological positivists were being offered
unprecedented resources and allies in their intradisciplinary struggle, from
the 1940s through the mid-1970s.
The integration of sociology into the Fordist scientific infrastructure
seemed paradoxically to validate the claim that science was ‘‘value-neutral’’:
social scientists could now conceive of themselves as a separate and autar-
kic ‘‘scientific community,’’ after having freed themselves from dependence
on the corporate funding that dominated interwar science.54 As autonomous
professionals, social scientists felt released from responsibility for the ways
policy makers would use their research.55 State Fordism thus supported the
fact/value dichotomy, a mainstay of methodological positivism. By the 1950s
or 1960s, social policies whose original historical roots lay in socialist, cor-
poratist, or religious traditions were being implemented by ‘‘postideological’’
Fordist Economy
Another way in which Fordism contributed to positivism’s plausibility
was by dampening economic turbulence and crisis, through fiscal policy, and
by lessening some of the economic upheavals in the individual life course
through wage and welfare state policies. These developments, which par-
ticularly affected the middle wage-earning classes (including many soci-
ologists), made it seem more conceivable that social practices did, in fact,
repeat themselves in ways that could be represented by covering laws, sta-
tistical models, and replicable experiments. Steady improvements in the
standard of living and the thickening of the welfare-statist safety net lent cre-
dence to the idea of social regularities. The relatively generous protections
against the risks of unemployment, sickness, and poverty in old age allowed
the better-paid sectors of the working and white-collar classes, for the first
time in capitalist history, to develop a horizon of stable expectations for the
future. Increases in real wages were pegged to increasing productivity. The
social ontology of the Fordist subject was aligned with security. Historical
analysis became less significant for sociology now that the world seemed to
have become ‘‘synchronic.’’ Long before Francis Fukuyama, social scientists
were urged to ‘‘go beyond history.’’ 56
56. Bernard Brodie, ‘‘Strategy as a Science,’’ World Politics 1, no. 4 (July 1949): 474.
128 boundary 2 / Summer 2005
Fordist Geospace
The refusal of hermeneutic or cultural interpretation was paired with a
denial of the importance of spatial or geographic difference. Two aspects of
the Fordist manner of configuring social space contributed to this change in
social epistemology. First, the concentration of economic development and
transactions on the scalar level of the nation-state and the relative evening
out of regional developmental differences encouraged social scientists to
take this level for granted as their unit of analysis.58 The containment of most
practices within the boundaries of the nation-state made it seem more self-
evident that they could be described by general laws. By contrast, where
practices are objectively more dispersed among multiple and shifting sites
and scalar levels, as in present-day post-Fordist ‘‘globalization,’’ they con-
found simple dichotomies of local and national. Countries no longer appear
to be the natural units of comparative analysis.
Fordism’s relative homogenization of domestic space also under-
wrote the positivist disavowal of the cross-cultural variability of concepts
and causal mechanisms. The tendency to seek universal laws of human
behavior, to disavow cultural difference, was opposed to the humanist and
historical-hermeneutic emphasis on the unique and idiosyncratic. For be-
haviorists in the 1950s, including those social scientists who adopted a sci-
57. According to the new division of academic labor, anthropologists were to focus on
(post)colonial peoples, while sociologists would attend to the metropoles, and, after the
1940s, only the former were seen as having ‘‘culture’’ in the anthropological sense. See
my ‘‘Culture and the State,’’ in State/Culture: Historical Studies of the State in the Social
Sciences, ed. George Steinmetz (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1999), 1–49.
58. On Fordism and space, see David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry
into the Origins of Cultural Change (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1989); and Neil Bren-
ner, ‘‘Between Fixity and Motion: Accumulation, Territorial Organization, and the Historical
Geography of Spatial Scales,’’ Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 16 (1998):
459–81.
Steinmetz / Prewar and Postwar U.S. Sociology 129
Fordist Imperialism
Of course, the collapse of Fordism was not the only reason for the
erosion of faith in the universal applicability of U.S. social science cate-
gories. A final structural characteristic of the postwar period that was closely
linked to the fate of methodological positivism in sociology was the emerg-
ing role of the United States as imperialist global hegemon. U.S. imperialism
cannot be equated with Fordism, even if it was entwined with it in this epoch;
indeed, we are currently in the midst of a rearticulation of U.S. imperialism
with post-Fordist neoliberalism.61 Two aspects of the cold war global con-
figuration tended to work in favor of sociological positivism: the U.S. orien-
tation toward an ‘‘imperialism of free trade’’ rather than colonialism, and its
emphasis on counterinsurgency research, spawned by the rivalry with the
Soviet Union.
59. Edward Twitchell Hall, The Silent Language (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1959), 13.
60. Alex Inkeles, ‘‘Understanding a Foreign Society: A Sociologist’s View,’’ World Politics
3, no. 3 (April 1951): 269.
61. See Naomi Klein, ‘‘Baghdad Year Zero: Pillaging Iraq in Pursuit of a Neocon Utopia,’’ in
Harper’s 309, no. 1852 (September 2004): 43–53; see also my ‘‘The State of Emergency
and the Revival of American Imperialism: Toward an Authoritarian Post-Fordism,’’ Public
Culture 15, no. 2 (Spring 2003): 323–45. The founder of regulation theory, Michel Aglietta,
insisted that ‘‘it should never be forgotten . . . that the rise of the United States to world
hegemony forms an integral part of the social transformations’’ of Fordism, but he then pro-
ceeded to bracket this global aspect entirely; see A Theory of Capitalist Regulation: The
U.S. Experience, trans. David Fernbach (London: New Left Books, 1979), 32. Alain Lipietz
discussed only the economic aspects of ‘‘global’’ and ‘‘peripheral’’ Fordism in Mirages and
Miracles: The Crisis in Global Fordism (London: Verso, 1987).
130 boundary 2 / Summer 2005
U.S. imperial hegemony after World War II, like today, was oriented
mainly toward making the world into an ‘‘open’’ capitalist marketplace. The
United States increasingly struck an imperialist but anticolonial stance. This
reflected the shift in priorities toward anticommunism and ‘‘containment,’’
and a preference for free trade as against the more protectionist type of rela-
tionship that prevailed between metropoles and their colonies. Because the
United States generally eschewed direct colonization, it was not compelled
to enforce a formal ‘‘rule of difference’’ (Partha Chatterjee) in its periph-
eral dependencies, which were treated as self-governing. Unlike colonial
powers, for whom, in Jean-Paul Sartre’s words, assimilation ‘‘taken to its
extreme meant, quite simply, the ending of colonialism,’’ U.S. imperialism
sought convergence between peripheral polities, cultures, and economic
approaches and the American model.62 Without gainsaying the exploitative,
manipulative, and violent character of U.S. interventions, we cannot ignore
the fact that the postwar United States had fewer opportunities than Euro-
pean colonial powers to intrude racist views of ‘‘native’’ life directly into the
global peripheries. Postcolonials were increasingly treated as a mass of
interchangeable potential customers, as junior Americans in the making;
social scientists were enlisted in promoting this transformation. The organi-
zation of core-periphery relations in the period from the 1880s to 1945 had
encouraged the development of separate theories and even separate sci-
ences for the colonized (anthropology) and the colonizer (sociology). The
U.S.-dominated postwar global regime reinforced the positivist program of
seeking a single model for ‘‘other nations’’ and ‘‘one’s own country.’’
The pressure to develop a generalizing approach to the non-West
also stemmed from national security interests. Faced suddenly with the
problem of managing a world of former European colonies and the ‘‘pre-
sumed imperial ambitions of the Soviet Union,’’ a core substantive focus of
social science research was counterinsurgency.63 Walt Whitman Rostow’s
The Stages of Economic Growth explicitly drew lessons from U.S. economic
development for ‘‘the men in Djakarta, Rangoon, New Delhi, and Karachi;
the men in Tehran, Baghdad, and Cairo; the men south of the desert too,
in Accra, Lagos, and Salisbury,’’ as well as Mexico, China, and India.64 As in
U.S.-occupied Iraq in 2003 and 2004, universal models, rather than models
tailored to an ‘‘Arab mentality,’’ were generally preferred.
Other aspects of the U.S.-dominated postwar world order were cor-
rosive of the positivist unity of science program. Once the periphery is re-
garded from the standpoint of production rather than trade, for example, it
immediately takes on a very different appearance. First, Fordism was just
one of the many forms of societalization, and usually a minor one, in the
global South. The social complexity that resulted from the articulation of dif-
fering ‘‘modes of regulation’’ and ‘‘modes of production’’ in the peripheries
seemed to defy generalizing social science laws. The somewhat disparaged
essay entitled ‘‘The Basic Concepts of Historical Materialism’’ at the end
of Louis Althusser and Étienne Balibar’s Reading Capital (1968) may have
proposed a universal classification of ‘‘elements of the structure,’’ but here,
and in For Marx, Althusser explicitly rejected uniform models of social devel-
opment. The real differences between the (post)colonies and their former
metropoles made the application of universal models to peripheral soci-
eties much less compelling for those social scientists who actually lived in
(or studied in detail) the so-called Third World. The complex forms of cul-
tural hybridity in postcolonial sites made generalization even more difficult,
whether we are talking about resistance to Western-style ‘‘development’’ or
the problems of converting labor power into labor. But among the shrink-
ing numbers of sociologists who attended to the world outside the United
States, many did so from the vantage point of Berkeley or Ann Arbor, where
they were unlikely to be confronted with these shocks to their homegrown
epistemologies.
Generalizing approaches were also undercut by the pervasive ‘‘three
worlds’’ model, which was predicated on the division between the commu-
nist, advanced capitalist, and postcolonial sectors of the world system. This
mental map called attention to the instability of the third category, which
was associated in this scheme with ‘‘tradition, culture, religion, irrationality,
underdevelopment, overpopulation, political chaos, and so on,’’ and was
permanently susceptible to the lures of communism, which was usually seen
as an ‘‘ideological’’ system rather than a ‘‘rational-natural’’ one.65 Another
barrier to the universalization of general models was racism, despite the
countervailing impetus of U.S. imperialism to assimilate the foreign Other.66
4. Conclusion
American empire, analyzed trenchantly by Carl Schmitt in The Nomos of the Earth (1950),
trans. G. L. Ulmen (New York: Telos Press, 2003).
67. Ron Robin, The Making of the Cold War Enemy: Culture and Politics in the Military-
Intellectual Complex (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001), 149; Herman
Kahn, ‘‘Toward a Program for Victory,’’ in Can We Win in Vietnam? ed. Frank E. Armbruster
et al. (New York: Praeger, 1968), 340–41.
68. Webb Keane, ‘‘Estrangement, Intimacy, and the Objects of Anthropology,’’ in The Poli-
tics of Method.
Steinmetz / Prewar and Postwar U.S. Sociology 133
that these representations accurately reflected social reality, any more than
the field-specific status of methodological positivism meant that positivists
were better sociologists. The Fordist mode of regulation was accompanied
by a theater of relatively uniform self-interpretations that guided its sub-
jects’ understanding of their own society. The core components of U.S. Ford-
ism were broadcast to the denizens of the Fordist cities and suburbs as
the American Way of Life. When positivists pointed out the connections
between existing social patterns and their preferred manner of studying so-
ciety, reality seemed to directly ratify their approach.69
One result of this conjuncture after 1945 was the firm implantation of
methodological positivism as doxa within the field of sociology. Despite dif-
ferences of taste or viewpoint, most of the players in this field recognized
common stakes and agreed on common definitions of distinction. Symbolic
or reputational capital, like research funds, tended to accrue to the more
positivist positions. ‘‘Fluency’’ in these codes functioned as a field-specific
form of scientific prestige. Even those who disagreed with positivist posi-
tions tended to collude in their dominance; those who did not adjust to the
new regime were often channeled into less rigidly positivist fields or into
poorly ranked departments. Sociology had at last become a well-structured
field.
By returning to this period, we may begin to understand the ways
in which contemporary sociology continues to be haunted at every turn by
specters of a seemingly obsolete epistemology. Settlements like the one
I have discussed here are more fragile and internally heterogeneous than
they appeared at the time. Indeed, the same can be said of all modes of
societalization, regulation, or governmentality, including Fordism: they are
inherently tenuous and prone to dissolution. But while poststructural theo-
ries have been salutary in calling attention to the inherent instability of social
life, we should also recognize the existence of temporarily and partially sta-
bilized patterns of social practice. The intensity of agreement on the basic
features of social ontology varies both historically and spatially, among ‘‘lay’’
actors as well as professional analysts of those same social actors. Tem-
porarily stabilized patterns are not the positivists’ ‘‘constant conjunctions of
events,’’ however. They are both more elaborately woven and more fragile
than is suggested by languages of general theory or probabilistic laws.
69. A further element of U.S. culture in this period that tended to strengthen the positivist
position in the social sciences was the discussion of the role of antiscientific sentiment in
the rise of Nazism and Stalinism.
134 boundary 2 / Summer 2005
70. See R. W. Connell, ‘‘Why Is Classical Theory Classical?’’ American Journal of Soci-
ology 102, no. 6 (1997): 1511–57.
Steinmetz / Prewar and Postwar U.S. Sociology 135
spontaneously, coding all deviations from the American way of life as vari-
ants of tradition that should, and would, eventually crumble.
How might U.S. sociologists’ disinterest in and disavowal of the rest
of the world be changing? Contemporary U.S. empire is no more inclined
toward an official racism than was the liberal empire of the postwar period,
so that form of differentiating essentialism is unlikely to make inroads into
sociology. The neoliberal institutions that have been introduced in postwar,
U.S.-occupied Iraq and in other countries subjected to ‘‘structural adjust-
ment’’ policies have universal models of human subjectivity as their prem-
ises. At the same time, neoliberal post-Fordism introduces a whole array of
social destabilizations and fragmentations in these zones of imperial pres-
sure, as in the imperial ‘‘homeland.’’ Peripheral Fordism was certainly less
prosperous and less homogenizing than Fordism in the global core, but the
change in the peripheries is still marked. Fundamentalism and neotradi-
tionalism are flourishing in part due to the resulting social dissolution. This
makes it much more difficult for area specialists simply to overlook politi-
cal ‘‘irrationalism’’ and cultural incommensurability. Like the social scientists
focused on the global North, those who work on the global South are also
facing contradictory epistemic pressures. Whether the positivist domination
of U.S. sociology will persist in the discipline’s third century is still, it appears,
an open question.