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Calling the Social Sciences Names

The Behavioral Sciences at the University of Chicago, 1923–1955
Les sciences du comportement à l’université de Chicago (1923–1955)
Philippe Fontaine
p. 163-191

Résumés

Dans les années 1950, l’utilisation du terme behavioral sciences coïncide avec l’affirmation d’une ambition collective dans les sciences sociales nord-américaines autour des méthodes quantitatives et de la coopération interdisciplinaire. Elle permet pareillement de marquer des différences entre plusieurs modalités de mobilisation des sciences de la nature. Dans la Division des sciences sociales de l’Université de Chicago, il existe plusieurs conceptions des sciences du comportement et le terme (dans son acception anglaise) renvoie à des orientations scientifiques distinctes. Fortement inspirée de la biologie, la définition proposée par le Committee on the Behavioral Sciences diffère de celle, plus « sociale », des chercheurs préconisant une utilisation plus distanciée des méthodes des sciences de la nature dans un cadre principalement sociologique.

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Texte intégral

For comments and suggestions, I am extremely grateful to Edward J. K. Gitre, Jefferson Pooley and Wolf Feuerhahn.

Introduction

1Some anniversaries are especially meaningful. For Westerners, the eighteenth or twenty-first birthday commonly marks the beginning of adult life and reaching sixty signals entry into old age. For institutions, the lapse of time calling for celebration proves more elusive, but the passing of time creates the need for benchmarks, which in turn feeds the impression of transformations.

  • 1 On the occasion of the building’s twenty-fifth anniversary, historian James L. Cate admitted that: (...)

2When the University of Chicago Social Science Research Building was dedicated in December 1929, Robert M. Hutchins described it as an experiment devoted to determining whether cooperative social scientific research would help find solutions for society’s problems. As he acknowledged the achievements of social science, the newly arrived President could not but have in mind his recent proposal for an Institute of Human Relations at Yale University, so he cautioned: “The social scientists at Chicago will increasingly take account of groups with which their connection has hitherto been slight—in particular, biology, medicine, education, law, psychology, and divinity; otherwise the experiment in co-operation remains partial and inconclusive” (Hutchins, 1930, 3). The end of the first decade of work within the building offered the occasion for another celebration which emphasized the many benefits of bringing together under one roof a variety of social scientists, but a lukewarm Hutchins expressed skepticism about mere interdisciplinary cooperation as a solution to the problems of the day (Hutchins, 1940, 2–4). At the building’s twenty-fifth anniversary in 1955, emphasis was again placed on the efforts of social scientists to cross boundaries within eleven interdepartmental committees, by then an institutional hallmark of Chicago (see White, 1956, vi). Chicago political scientist Leonard D. White marked the moment with a newly fashionable term: the “center of the stage is now held by the so-called behavioral sciences; the new constellation is anthropology, sociology, psychology, with strong links in economics and political science and with an underwriting of statistics and mathematics. It would appear probable that notable advances will be made in the next decade, or the next quarter-century, from this fruitful and powerful combination of forces” (ibid., xi).1 

  • 2 Robin (2001, 27–9) aptly remarks that “an accurate history of the field” should not be confused wi (...)

3In a strange twist of fate, Chicago’s Committee on the Behavioral Sciences, a good example of the new forms of cooperation the now-gone Hutchins had called for in his address of dedication in 1929, was abolished a few months after White had celebrated the behavioral sciences’ centrality in Chicago’s social scientific landscape.2 Led by the chairman of the Department of Psychology, the Harvard-trained psychologist James G. Miller, with the assistance of the neurophysiologist Ralph W. Gerard, the committee had existed in various forms since 1949 and played an important role in the eponymous movement supported by the Ford’s Foundation’s Behavioral Sciences Program from the early 1950s. Its strong biological orientation, however, made it an imperfect representative of the broader behavioral sciences at Chicago.

  • 3 On Chicago’s Committee on the Behavioral Sciences, see Hammond, 2003, ch. 7; and Fontaine, 2016.

4It has been common to define the behavioral sciences as that part of the social sciences that endorses a more scientific approach (see, for instance, Berelson, 1963). Such a definition is certainly useful, but it does not help much in the way of distinguishing among “scientific” approaches within the behavioral sciences themselves. The abolition of the Committee on the Behavioral Sciences in early 1956 signaled reservations about a specific conception of the behavioral sciences at Chicago, not all of them. It suggests that Miller and some of his associates in the committee, on the one hand, and their former colleagues at Chicago, on the other, had different usages for behavioral sciences.3 Miller’s continuous insistence on his role in originating the term makes its story much simpler than it actually is. More importantly, it reveals tensions between his view of the behavioral sciences and that of others at Chicago who were less literal in their adherence to natural science methods. As Pooley’s points out, the “term quickly became a flash-point around which clashing visions of postwar social science were organized” (Pooley, 2016, 39).

5The title of this article is not meant to suggest that the main motivation behind using behavioral sciences was to prevent the unfortunate confusion between social science and social advocacy, though the term might have occasionally helped achieve that result; it implies, rather, that the phrase served broader purposes, including those of distinction from and promotion of certain ways of doing social science. At Chicago, calling the social sciences names went together with the affirmation of their collective scientific ambitions to use quantitative methods and to practice interdisciplinary cooperation, but it also served differentiation between and among disciplines by expressing different forms of engagement with natural science methods.

Behavioral science before behavioral science

6As Dorothy Ross pointed out, “the movement for a more scientific social science was already under way before the big money hit” (Ross, 1991, 400). The promoters of behavioral sciences in the late 1940s were eager to present themselves as the originators of the term, if only to make clear that they practiced social science differently, but significant antecedents suggested otherwise. In the late interwar years, the main advocates of the label, the political scientist Arthur Bentley (1870–1957) and the psychologist Clark Hull (1884–1952), already used it to signal the promotion of new theoretical perspectives within their respective disciplines (Pooley, 2016, 40–1; see also Senn, 1966 and Ward, 1981). The use of a new term to signal distinctiveness is common practice in science; it often precedes conceptual clarification. Yet, the claim for disciplinary distinction is worth further explanation because, most of the time, the historiography of the behavioral sciences has emphasized their cross-disciplinary nature. In the Chicago case, as in the term’s early usage, behavioral sciences was linked to disciplinary intellectual projects.

  • 4 It is important to distinguish between the uncoordinated attempts to promote forms of social scien (...)
  • 5 Note, however, that political scientists such as Bentley and David Easton used the “behavioral sci (...)

7From the 1920s, the increased endorsement of quantitative methods, helped by the concomitant effort to cross disciplinary boundaries, created the necessary conditions for the use of a new term—behavioral sciences—but internal developments within individual disciplines were critical to its actual endorsement.4 For instance, after 1945, the development of social psychology helped multiply contact between psychologists on the one hand and anthropologists and sociologists on the other, making their tripartite association within cross-disciplinary and quantitative projects a natural referent for the label. Conversely, as it became more difficult for political theory to find its place within political science after World War II, the efforts to make the study of politics more scientific provoked disciplinary self-reflection and made the relations with other social science disciplines a secondary concern. As a result, the participation of political science in the behavioral science movement took the form of a more discipline-centered contribution, depicted by a different term—behavioralism.5 

  • 6 This was not limited to Chicago, however. As Crowther-Heyck reminded, “Despite some heartfelt prot (...)

8The idea that interdisciplinary exchanges and quantitative methods inspired by natural science offered the basis for a new social science flourished at the University of Chicago where a number of entrepreneurial-minded social scientists laid the ground for a more scientific approach to human behavior.6 From the early 1920s through the 1930s, these social scientists made every effort to build the institutions that could offer social science the material conditions likely to solidify its status. Starting with the creation of the Local Community Research Committee (LCRC) and the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) in 1923, these efforts bore fruit with the opening of the Social Science Research Building in 1929, which helped make the University of Chicago an international reference in social science.

  • 7 Lemov points out that Ruml defined the social sciences in a way “that had not been before,” connec (...)
  • 8 The Committee did not include the Department of Psychology, which later took a significant part in (...)

9Together with the sociologist Albion W. Small and the economist Leon C. Marshall, the political scientist Charles E. Merriam played a central role in the creation of LCRC (Bulmer, 1980). Originally devoted to the study of the city of Chicago and its region, but later broadened to include research on less local subjects, the LCRC was supported by a gift from the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial then directed by Beardsley Ruml.7 The committee, which included representatives from the Departments of Philosophy, Sociology and Anthropology, History, Political Economy, and Political Science, alongside the School of Social Service Administration, illustrated the increased interest in new research techniques, notably those associated with an approach to social phenomena centered on measurement.8 There is no need to detail the constitution of the city as an object of study from the early twentieth century, but its definition as a social laboratory (Park, 1929, 3) spoke to the ambitions of a number of social scientists to use the “methods of disinterested observation and research” to subject social forces to the same kind of control that natural scientists had achieved over natural forces. To Robert E. Park and other Chicago social scientists, the urban community stood as the center of social change and, as a result, offered a window for “controlling our observations of social conditions in their relation to human behavior” (ibid., 11). LCRC likewise embodied the spirit of interdisciplinary cooperation that animated a number of social sciences in the interwar years, with sociology, political science and economics united in the common purpose of better understanding the questions concerning the well-being of the urban community of Chicago (Bulmer, 1980).

  • 9 White and Merriam’s advocacy of a more scientific approach to human behavior should not be confuse (...)
  • 10 Topalov (2014, 100–104) considers the reasons why the phrase “local community,” which had the favo (...)

10From the late 1920s, criticisms were levelled at certain orientations of research work at LCRC. Critics, mostly White and Merriam but also the newly arrived quantitative sociologist William Ogburn, advocated a more scientific approach to social phenomena, one in which hypotheses could be tested and evaluated empirically (see Bulmer, 1980, 103).9 These criticisms eventually led to the abandonment of the “local community” phrase to designate the main focus of the Chicago’s social science research group and its rechristening as the Social Science Research Committee in 1930. The committee was then placed under the authority of a new executive secretary— Hutchins’ onetime co-author Donald Slesinger—coming from Yale University’s Institute of Human Relations. It was likewise supplemented with representatives from departments and professional schools within the University of Chicago Social Science Research Council, not to be confused with the eponymous national organization (ibid., 105).10 

  • 11 In all fairness, it should be noted that the Columbia economist Wesley Mitchell and Ruml were also (...)

11The latter started as an effort to advance the research methods of political science and related social sciences by encouraging greater cooperation between disciplinary associations, including the American Statistical Association (Crane et al., 1924). A number of social scientists believed in the benefits of interdisciplinary cooperation, but the idea was realized by Merriam, “who identified a need for greater cooperation among researchers interested in empirical and policy-oriented analysis” (Worcester, 2001, 15). “From Merriam’s perspective, the aim of the Council was to help provide for the ‘closer integration of the social sciences themselves’ that he called for in his 1925 presidential address to the political science profession. ‘The problem of social behavior,’ he explained, ‘is essentially one problem, and while the angles of approach may and should be different, the scientific result will be imperfect unless these points of view are at times brought together in some effective way, so that the full benefit of the multiple analysis may be realized’ ” (ibid., 16).11 

  • 12 Needless to say, the actual relationships between the social sciences should not be viewed only th (...)
  • 13 I do not mean to suggest that those calls used the “interdisciplinary” label, which really picked (...)

12Alongside statistics, the three core social sciences of economics, political science and sociology formed the original institutional basis for the SSRC’s activities in 1923. Even though other social science associations were added two years later, it is worth mentioning that, with the exception of sociology, the disciplines regarded as illustrating increased use of quantitative methods and interdisciplinary cooperation were not those which became the symbol of the postwar behavioral sciences.12 The three social sciences associated with the interdisciplinary ambitions of the 1920s might have had difficulty translating them into practice. In other words, even if the help of private foundations was crucial to the emergence of cross-disciplinary research ventures, within each concerned discipline favorable circumstances were equally important to assure their continuation. Despite ritualistic calls for interdisciplinary cooperation, social scientists remained tied to departmental interests which occasionally thwarted their intentions. That explains why many interdisciplinary efforts in the 1920s took shape as extensions of reformist disciplinary projects.13 

13The efforts of Merriam and others at the SSRC were inevitably conditioned by discipline-specific reform efforts that—when they occasionally seemed consonant with a neighboring discipline’s reforms—led to more context-specific and short-run cross-disciplinary cooperation. The belief that advances in research methods could be facilitated by the latter may have been central to the founding of the SSRC, but it was not equally shared among social science disciplines themselves, making cooperation more difficult at times. In the eyes of Merriam, for instance, economics could appear as showing the way on the use of quantitative methods, but it is doubtful that—despite their long-standing interest in political questions—economists aspired to emulate political science in return (see Backhouse and Fontaine, 2018, 11). As a result, the interrelations between political science and economics proved secondary in comparison with its interrelations with psychology and statistics (Somit and Tanenhaus, 1967, 110). Even if Merriam collaborated with the economist Wesley C. Mitchell on a number of other occasions, including the Recent Social Trends survey (Smith, 1994, 109), their interdisciplinary ambitions did not translate into substantial interactions between economics and political science.

  • 14 As Francis Sutton reminds, “By the 1920s, there was in American universities a group of leaders wh (...)

14That being said, it is undeniable that the SSRC “offered a useful intermediary for foundations and government agencies that wished to lend their support to the burgeoning social sciences” (Worcester, 2001, 24). That support helped convince social scientists that they could be useful in a way that their colleagues in natural science were and that the best way to do it was to emulate its methods; moreover, that support tilted the balance in favor of certain forms of social science.14 But again, the affirmation of the latter would not have been possible without the existence within social science disciplines of specific intellectual projects aimed at redirecting them. In this regard, it is hardly surprising that among the Council’s early activities, the annual meetings held in Hanover, NH, between 1925 and 1930, gave pride of place to disciplinary self-reflections, such as “Anthropology as Social Science,” “The Pluralistic Measurement of Human Behavior and Attitudes as a Basis of Political Science,” “Research and the Law,” “Psychiatry and its Relation to the Social Sciences,” “Biological Methods in Human Problems” or “The Relation of Anthropoid Research to Social Science” (ibid., 25–6).

15The last, if not least, illustration of University of Chicago’s contribution to social science in the 1920s is represented by the opening of the Social Science Research Building in December 1929. The building’s dedication offered the perfect opportunity to celebrate “the new social science”—to borrow the title of a book published to celebrate the event (White, 1930). The volume’s contents reflect a number of significant changes in the US social sciences in general and at Chicago in particular. Among the most significant advances, contributors pointed out, was that Chicago’s social scientists were now fully aware of the need to provide adequate training in statistical technique and to encourage active interdisciplinary cooperation. On this score, Mitchell noted: “The points at which the University was once weak have become points at which it is exceptionally strong.” (Mitchell, 1930, 14) Accompanying this transformation was the realization that the establishment of new organizational structures in the form of institutes or laboratories was needed for quantitative and interdisciplinary work to be successful, raising the question of their actual relation to academic departments. Another contribution to the volume is its attention to the relationships between natural and social science, to which the participation of a number of natural scientists, including the paleontologist John C. Merriam (1930, 34–5), the political scientist’s brother, and the anatomist C. Judson Herrick, give an interesting turn. The former’s contribution emphasized the possible “extension of natural science into the social or humanistic field,” which a number of natural scientists, including some within Chicago’s Committee on the Behavioral Sciences, would go on to explore from the late 1940s. Herrick’s contribution, by contrast, continued to place the study of the relation between natural and social science within the broader division between science and the humanities. In a conclusion that seemed to beg the question, he warned: “If the social sciences attempt to straddle the Great Wall which until now has separated the humanities and the natural sciences, they will fall. That is not a practicable enterprise” (Herrick, 1930, 119). To the social scientists to be housed in the new building, the question was probably deemed solved. One of their most reliable supporters, their onetime benefactor and future dean, left no doubt about the “obsolescence of the issue as to whether social science is science” (Ruml, 1930, 100).

Enter Hutchins

  • 15 At the institute, “the fertile cross-disciplinary studies with psychologists, legal scholars, and (...)

16The culmination of the very creative 1920s, the building’s opening augured well. The champions of social science at Chicago had reason to face the new decade with confidence. Of course, the arrival of Hutchins, Chicago’s new president, generated some uncertainty, but it seemed to offer reasons for hope. In recent legal scholarship Hutchins had called for the law to give up its “common sense art of behavior” in favor, wherever possible, of the latest advances in objective psychology, notably its “examination of explicit behavior.” More generally, he advocated “cooperation with non-legal students of human behavior” in legal scholarship and mentioned existing connections with economists and sociologists in a few law schools (Hutchins, 1927, 683, 690; Hutchins and Slesinger, 1929, 17). Finally, as dean of Yale’s law school, Hutchins, just before he departed for Chicago, joined with Medical School dean Milton C. Winternitz, to propose a “Human Welfare Group,” in which an Institute of Human Relations, combining the biological and social sciences, occupied a central place (May, 1971; Viseltear, 1984; Morawski, 1986).15 

17Those Chicago scholars who had emphasized the need for interdisciplinary social science and a more scientific approach to human behavior might have found some of Hutchins’ ambitions familiar. At the same time, the Yale project emphasized natural science and medicine, and the role it attributed to social science (social psychology aside) was limited. As Hutchins himself recognized in his address at the dedication of the new building,

The building is then in the nature of an experiment, a test case, to determine whether with such facilities in such an atmosphere we may more rapidly work out the problems that confront us. . . . The social scientists at Chicago will increasingly take account of groups with which their connection has hitherto been slight—in particular, biology, medicine, education, law, psychology, and divinity; otherwise the experiment in co-operation remains partial and inconclusive. . . . We begin today, therefore, an experiment in co-operation, an experiment in research, an experiment in education, all resulting from an experiment in housing. (Hutchins, 1930, 2–3)

18To Chicago’s social scientists, the above remarks might have sounded too prescriptive. In any event, the implementation of Hutchins’ views of the social sciences would hold surprises for the Chicago faculty.

  • 16 With regard to Hutchins’ opinion of the social sciences, one remark by the social anthropologist F (...)
  • 17 McNeill argues that for social scientists, by “the end of 1931 . . . the initial enchantment of Hu (...)

19Overall, the new president’s action proved unexpectedly detrimental to their interests. Hutchins’ friendship with the philosopher Mortimer Adler, who failed to see much science in social science, sowed confusion and occasionally clouded Hutchins’ judgment (Dzuback, 1991, 95–6).16 The most visible consequence of that influence was his skepticism of the disciplinary accomplishments of social science and parallel preference for cross-disciplinary research ventures. Here institutional reform and appointment policy, even if they were contained by faculty resistance, played some role in the shaping of Chicago’s social science. They reintroduced more significant presidential interference in departmental life and, accordingly, precipitated or buffered changes in the relative position of the social science disciplines.17 

  • 18 Singer (1991, 413) writes: “Many of the successes—and failures—of Hutchins’s administration from 1 (...)

20By the end of 1930, a new administrative organization was established with the creation of four Graduate Divisions—Physical Sciences, Biological Sciences, Social Sciences and Humanities. The Division of the Social Sciences was placed under the authority of Ruml, who “saw the new deanship as a chance to forward interdisciplinary study of the sort he believed was required for real understanding of human society” (McNeill, 1991, 33). Hutchins shared Ruml’s vision of the usefulness of cross-disciplinary research in the social sciences, but, with the exception of psychology, he was much less convinced of their scientific character. Following the new divisional organization of 1930–31, not all departments in the division suffered the same fate at Hutchins’ hands, but all of them experienced his occasional hesitation and indecision regarding appointments or promotions (see Dzuback, 1991, ch. 8). The difference in treatment often depended on the quality of Hutchins’ personal connections with people within departments and, more generally, on his idiosyncratic views of what constituted legitimate scholarship, which often went hand-in-hand with his judgement of the discipline’s importance to the division.18 

  • 19 For a detailed account of Chicago’s sociological tradition, spanning the years 1892 through 1961, (...)
  • 20 Dzuback (1991, 175) and Abbott (1999, 41) suggest that Hutchins had not a high opinion of Wirth, b (...)
  • 21 Given Hutchins’ opinion of 1920s sociology, Platt’s (1996, 264) remark that “it does not make sens (...)

21Following the glorious 1920s, the university’s sociologists could hardly expect to reach new heights, even if the arrival of Ogburn from Columbia in 1927 increased the visibility of quantitative work at Chicago.19 The Ogburn of the late 1920s, with his highly scientistic position, might have ushered in the kind of reassurance Hutchins sought with regard to the scientific dimension of social science in general and sociology in particular. Yet, for the most part, in the early 1930s, the department had not changed much. Ernest W. Burgess and Park were still around and the arrival of Louis Wirth and Herbert Blumer—two former Park students and not the most sociable people—in 1931 was not exactly bringing in new blood.20 The legacy of the department, its taste for data collection, Hutchins’ preference for theory over data and Adler’s influence, did not presage special consideration especially when the deepening of the Depression seemed to render descriptive sociology plainly inadequate (McNeill, 1991, 33–4).21 

22The beginning of Hutchins’ presidency coincided with the end of an era for Chicago sociology, to the point that “the department found itself in something of a doldrums in the 1930s and early 1940s” (Gross, 2007, 197). Over the period, its achievements were far from negligible, but the department “was beginning to lose its prominence in the discipline” (Devault, 2007, 161). Moreover, the new center of gravity constituted by the Division of the Social Sciences helped attract attention to sociology’s role in interdisciplinary undertakings more than to what made sociologists “specifically sociologists,” as was the case in the early twentieth century (see Calhoun, 2007, 22).

  • 22 Interestingly, there were plans for a separate anthropology building, but the crash forced anthrop (...)

23At Chicago, cross-disciplinary research is often associated with the development of interdisciplinary committees from the 1930s on, but such enterprises pre-dated the arrival of Hutchins. There is little doubt that the introduction of the four-fold divisional structure formalized interdisciplinary exchange. In so far as committees were often launched by gathering a number of department heads, however, it is worth remembering that other forms of departmental grouping existed as well. One of these was the joint Department of Sociology and Anthropology. Even before Hutchins landed at Chicago, there were discussions between Chicago’s Acting President, Frederic Woodward and the anthropologist Fay-Cooper Cole about establishing a separate department. In his request for a standalone department, Cole noted, interestingly, the variety of anthropology’s interdisciplinary connections both in natural and social science, but also cited its focus “on man and his culture” (Cole to Woodward, 26 Nov. 1928, cited in Stocking, 1979, 16). The issue was not the lack of shared interests with sociology; instead, Cole pointed to the multiplicity of anthropology’s interdisciplinary relationships, which placed sociology on an equal footing with psychology, history, geology, paleontology or biology.22 

24Of course, there were more general trends within sociology that helped spur the creation of a separate Department of Anthropology in February 1929. As Connell reminds us, “In the 1920s and 1930s, the internal problems of the society of the metropole became the intellectual center of sociology. Familiar markers of this shift are the prominence of the Chicago school’s urban research and the growth of specializations within sociology.” (Connell, 1997, 1535–6) As a result of sociology’s changing intellectual scope, a number of anthropological works investigating areas outside the metropole or indigenous populations of the Americas became themselves peripheral to the sociological enterprise.

  • 23 The arrival of Radcliffe-Brown to Chicago, only two years after the creation of a separate Departm (...)

25Cole’s pronouncements notwithstanding, the separation was not without consequences if only because anthropology’s constitutive subdisciplines encouraged a variety of contacts with disciplines outside the social sciences. As noted by Cole in his letter to Woodward, cultural anthropology had obvious affinities with sociology and psychology. Yet, when the three members of the newly created Department of Anthropology, Edward Sapir, Fay-Cooper Cole, and Robert Redfield, submitted a five-year plan to the Rockefeller Foundation, which eventually brought in $75,000, their emphasis was on archaeological and linguistic projects in the United States and ethnographic work in Mexico (Stocking, 1979, 19). Judging from this plan, it would seem that Cole’s justifications for the separation from sociology was not purely circumstantial—that the department’s ambition was also to strengthen its ties with natural science. With the departure of Sapir for Yale and the arrival of Arthur Radcliffe-Brown in 1931 and Lloyd Warner (jointly appointed to sociology) in 1935, however, the connection with social science was strengthened. Moreover, as a former student of Park, Redfield was sensitized to the similarity between anthropology and sociology as ways of work so that the connections between the two were never completely severed.23 

  • 24 Eggan had served as research assistant to Radcliffe-Brown in 1931–32 (Eggan, 1991, 405).

26There is little doubt that the appointment of Redfield as Dean of the Division of the Social Sciences in 1934—a sign of confidence and respect—helped the Department of Anthropology grow in importance within Chicago’s social science landscape. Redfield’s disinterest in disciplinary boundaries helped strengthen the department’s original orientations towards interdisciplinary cooperation. Like Hutchins, Redfield believed it necessary to go beyond departmental logic (McNeill, 1991, 89). At the same time, he was prudent enough not “to attack the prevailing departmentalization of research and teaching precipitately” (ibid., 67). Conscious of Hutchins’ occasional heavy handedness as much as of his high ambitions for Chicago’s College, he was able to find a happy medium between encouraging the participation of the newly created department in cross-disciplinary ventures and helping it build a strong identity for itself. In that respect, it is worth noting that Redfield’s own inclinations were consistent with the more general shift of the discipline away from Boasian historicism. With the arrival of Warner and Fred Eggan in 1935, the “social anthropological mutation” within the Department was complete (Stocking, 1979, 27).24 

27This double movement—distantiation from, and rapprochement with, the other social sciences—of Chicago anthropology in the 1930s offers an interesting illustration of the complementary nature of the relationship between the disciplinary system and cross-disciplinary ventures. Similarly, it sheds light on the way administrators can use the resources made available to them to consolidate the position of their discipline in changing times. Both Cole and Redfield took advantage of their credit with Hutchins to reorganize the department in a way that could please his taste for interdisciplinary cooperation while respecting sensibilities within the Department of Sociology and satisfying the increased scientific ambitions of their own discipline. A number of contingencies, including Sapir’s departure and Radcliffe-Brown’s arrival, helped in the process, but the march of the discipline towards a more scientific approach to human behavior seemed irresistible.

28The case of the Department of Political Science shows that Hutchins’ interference could bring lesser satisfactory results, especially when it is remembered that by the late 1920s, thanks to the leadership of its head and without much intervention from Chicago’s presidents, the department had ascended, with Harvard, to the discipline’s leadership. Herbert Simon, a political science graduate student at the time, pointed out that “there had been harassment from the Hutchins administration, wrapped in its own dreams of Aristotelian and Thomistic glory and wholly unsympathetic to behavioralism in political science” (Simon, 1991, 60). If Hutchins already objected to certain forms of social science, he was not yet the uncompromising opponent he became when they were united under the banner of the Ford Foundation’s Behavioral Sciences Program (Pooley, 2016, 59). On the other hand, he did have reservations about Merriam and did not hesitate to deny advancement to full professorship to Harold D. Lasswell and Harold F. Gosnell, two of Merriam’s former students (Dzuback, 1991, 173), who had produced significant work in the 1930s. Lack of personal affinity with Merriam, reinforced by the feeling that he enjoyed excessive power within the department, made Hutchins wary of its recommendations for further development. Eventually, the forced departure of Lasswell in 1938, the retirement of Merriam in 1940 and the late realization of Gosnell, in 1942, that he would be better off taking a job in Washington precipitated the department’s reorientation.

  • 25 Carreira da Silva (2006) points to the dangers of Herbert Blumer’s reconstruction of Mead’s though (...)

29Last to be considered is the Department of Psychology which, through Miller’s particular brand of social psychology, played an important role in the history of Chicago’s behavioral science from the late 1940s. The history of social psychology at the University of Chicago wrote itself, in part, outside the confines of the department. In the early years of the university, courses in psychology were offered in the Department of Philosophy and animal research work was central within the psychological laboratory (Kingsbury, 1946). George Herbert Mead was responsible for the course in social psychology, where his conception of the self left a very definite mark on his students. In the early twentieth century, a number of psychologists began to endorse the idea that, in the course of his or her interactions with others, the individual develops organized tendencies to act—attitudes. Besides those who emphasized the neurological dimension of the attitude within the stimulus-response scheme, there were researchers who insisted on its definition as a readiness to act according to the meaning objects have for individuals. One of these objects was the individual’s own self. Though Mead was perfectly aware of physiological psychology, having taught it at the University of Michigan in the early 1890s when John Dewey was heading the Department of Philosophy there (Raphelson, 1973), his view of the formation of attitudes and organization of personality, in which role-taking is central, was used to ground a symbolic interactionist conception of selfhood. To the heirs of Mead at Chicago, more than to himself, that view stood in stark contrast to the stimulus-response approach and its “objective” research methods (see Blumer, 1937, 175–84).25 

  • 26 Unexpectedly, Thurstone’s (1952, 305) promotion to a full professorship at the University of Chica (...)

30It is no exaggeration to suggest that the Department of Psychology and more generally quantitative social science benefitted from the arrival of psychologist Thurstone in 1924. Among the most important U.S. psychologists of the first half of the twentieth century, Thurstone was a graduate student in psychology at Chicago while Ruml was there in the same capacity. His reputation extended beyond the department, not only because he taught statistics to sociology students (Bannister, 1987, 175), but also because his contributions to fundamental problems in psychological measurement resonated with work outside psychology (Guilford, 1957). Though social psychology was not his only interest, Thurstone acknowledged the great influence of Mead on his thinking (Thurstone, 1952, 302, 30–311). Moreover, as it applies to social values and attitudes, Thurstone’s work in psychological measurement connected with the study of personality (Thurstone, 1928, 1929, for instance).26 

  • 27 Following Britt (1937, 464), I take “empirical method” to refer to “three important techniques: th (...)
  • 28 That decision shifted the center of the discussion from the distinction between physiological psyc (...)
  • 29 The above paragraph is adapted from Fontaine, 2016.

31By the mid-1930s, however, the Department of Psychology began to experience turbulence, which Hutchins’ hesitation and indecision, aggravated by the tensions between physiological psychology and social psychology, did not help remedy. The departure of comparative neuropsychologist Karl Lashley for Harvard in 1935, tensions between Thurstone and primate psychologist Heinrich Klüver, and the endless debate about the transfer of the department to the Division of the Social Sciences, all signaled a change of direction. When Hutchins’ divisional plan was instituted in the early 1930s, it was expected that the department would be affiliated with the social sciences, but its members thought otherwise. They requested placement in the Biological Sciences Division, on the grounds that it could offer stronger scientific foundations for psychological training. Following the retirement of its chairman Harvey A. Carr in 1938—at a time when the empirical method was well-established within social psychology—Chicago’s psychology department entered an era of instability.27 When the educational psychologist Frank Freeman was made chair in 1939, the department was transferred to the Social Sciences Division with a view to coordinating the research and instruction in social psychology that was carried on in several departments and schools.28 This long-awaited decision crushed the hopes of the dean of the Biological Sciences Division to develop a more physiologically oriented approach to psychology; it likewise convinced Klüver to stay with the biological scientists. Because of Freeman’s short spell as chair, however, it was necessary for the administration to start all over again. For a few years, owing to unfruitful attempts, the department survived with no clear leadership and experienced additional disruption when several staff members departed for war service.29 

  • 30 Note however that thanks to Hutchins’ special effort, the interdisciplinary Committee on Social Th (...)

32With the dispersion of faculty for the war effort, the redefinition of research priorities and the influx of soldiers in need of special training, the dynamic of Chicago social science was largely disturbed. Departments and committees lost some of their major players and there began an era of short-termism that complicated long-range ambitions.30 On the positive side, the war consolidated the interdisciplinary and quantitative orientations characteristic of Chicago’s social science research—making them the imperatives of the day—and accentuated the prewar shift away from the head professor’s research model towards team work. It likewise transformed the expectations of natural scientists, notably physicists, in a way that heightened their sensitivity to the social problems posed by atomic energy in an unstable world and developed their willingness to participate directly or indirectly in the effort to tame social forces. Within social science, it was not long before Pearl Harbor made the prewar temptation to emulate natural science methods a matter of course.

Claiming behavioral science status

33As the engineer and administrator Vannevar Bush’s Science, The Endless Frontier (1945) took science to mean the natural sciences, it is not surprising that their practitioners absorbed its message and interpreted it as an encouragement to tackle issues over which the social sciences and humanities could historically claim expertise. With the emerging Cold War and increased political polarization, problems of human welfare continued to occupy public attention and provoked discussion among university administrators, patrons and academic entrepreneurs. These problems were central to the Report of the Study for the Ford Foundation on Policy and Program of November 1949. The so-called “Gaither Report” followed the transformation of the foundation into the world’s largest philanthropy (Sutton, 1987). Organized by California attorney H. Rowan Gaither—wartime administrator of the Radiation Laboratory at M.I.T. and chair of the RAND Corporation’s board—the report was the work of a study committee comprised of a handful of academics, among them Donald G. Marquis, President of the American Psychological Association for 1948, and behavioral scientist of the first hour.

  • 31 In “Scientific Methodology in Human Relations,” Marquis (1948) proposed a behavioral conception of (...)
  • 32 On the Ford Foundation and the behavioral sciences project, see Geiger (1993, 99–105). The similar (...)

34The emphasis on social science as centerpiece of the foundation’s program, as much as the focus of its five program areas on the advancement of human welfare, made the Gaither Report a convenient and timely supplement to the Bush Report. While it offset the latter’s inattention to the social sciences, the Gaither Report endorsed the “scientific study of man,” an approach which favored the quantitative, rather than qualitative, dimension of the social sciences without neglecting their interdisciplinary nature.31 In defining the scope of Program Area Five, “Individual Behavior and Human Relations,” the report underscored that there were, in the social sciences, now scholars equipped with techniques allowing to test theories. More specifically, it mentioned psychologists, sociologists and anthropologists, but also “psychiatrists and psychoanalysts, as well as natural scientists, including geneticists and other biologists” (Gaither et al., 1949, 92). Finally, it pointed to “the established similarity of scientific methods throughout both the natural and behavioral sciences” (ibid., 93–4).32 

  • 33 As evidence of the close connection between Miller and Marquis, it should be noted that when the s (...)
  • 34 Capshew interestingly reminds that “Miller … was apparently able to convince Hutchins that his hum (...)

35In December 1949, some two years after he had joined Chicago as chair of the Department of Psychology, James G. Miller circulated a proposal for an “Institute of the Behavioral Sciences,” a by-product of a near-two-decade-long reflection within the central administration concerning the revitalization of the Department of Psychology and the development of psychiatry. Miller was not directly involved in the discussions at the Ford Foundation, but he had close connections with Marquis—one of the six committee members helping Gaither in his task—who occasionally advised him on strategic matters.33 Miller’s was originally meant as an institute of “mental sciences,” which would bridge the gap between the biological and social sciences. The project was originally supported by the physicists Enrico Fermi and Leo Szilard, who believed it necessary to develop a better understanding of interpersonal relationships in a nuclear age (Hammond 2003, 166–7), but Hutchins himself had a good reason to support it: Miller’s project was in the same mold as Yale’s Institute of Human Relations. Taken together, Miller’s effort to consolidate psychology as a social science with roots in the biological sciences, his focus on interdisciplinary team work, his search for a unified theory of behavior, and his intention to tackle practical problems could have served as an apt description of the Yale project in its early stages.34 

  • 35 For a more detailed description of discussions within the two committees, see Fontaine, 2016.

36Once he took the matter into his own hands in the summer of 1949, it did not take long for Hutchins to subject it to what had become by now a rather common administrative procedure—the interdisciplinary committee. Because the project concerned psychology, it made sense to have it examined by two distinct committees: one from the Division of the Biological Sciences and the other from the Division of the Social Sciences. On the side of the former, despite the support of the neurophysiologist Ralph Gerard, the head of the so-called “Committee on Neural-Mental Problems,” the project generated skepticism and even aroused the occasional hostility of Lowell T. Coggeshall, the dean of the division. Within the committee itself, different points of view regarding psychiatry—physiological cures, Freudian psychoanalysis, and a form of anthropological psychotherapy—provoked tense exchanges. As a result, Miller was increasingly led to seek the support of the dean of the Division of the Social Sciences, Ralph W. Tyler, and to give the project a more social scientific flavor. The social sciences committee, on the other hand, included no fewer than three members of the Committee on Human Development— Robert J. Havighurst, Ernest W. Burgess and Lloyd Warner—to whom Tyler added the political scientist Morton Grodzins, Thurstone, and Miller himself. Because of Tyler’s influence and his conviction that the relationship between education and psychology was central, the social science committee proved more favorable; yet, some of its members were resistant to Miller’s biology-inspired attempt.35 

37Miller himself had some responsibility for that. Even before his arrival at Chicago, using the Harvard example, he had pointed to the dangers of a cleavage between biologists and social scientists for psychology (Miller, 1947b). Of course, what was true of psychology was not for all the other social sciences, but Miller’s worries was a clue about the kind of psychology and “behavioral science” he favored—one that was biologically embedded. Similarly, while he was discussing his arrival with Chicago’s vice president and dean of faculties, R. Wendell Harrison, Miller expressed his regret about the overlap between the Department of Psychology and the Committee on Human Development in the fields of social psychology and clinical psychology, and even suggested that these areas be placed under the jurisdiction of Psychology (Miller, 1947b). Since the committee was originally meant to encourage research in areas of mutual interest to biologists and social scientists, Miller’s expectations were understandable, but they posed problems at a time when, under the authority of Havighurst—Burgess’ collaborator in the 1940s—the committee leaned towards a theory of social adjustment and its “research broadened primarily into the fields of sociology and anthropology” (Committee on Human Development, 1965, 7). An additional dissonance was that, since the 1920s, the study of personality and human behavior had been on the agenda of a number of Chicago’s social scientists, including sociologists and political scientists, whose biological sensibility were less marked than Miller’s. Some social scientists might have been open to considering physiological methods in personality studies. For most of them, however, physiology came second to considering the self in relation to social contexts. Moreover, when physiological aspects of the personality were considered, they were often filtered through psychometrics or psychoanalysis. The “interdisciplinary psychoanalysis–psychiatry–social science alliance” mentioned by Gitre (2010, 247) to describe the interests of leading social scientists, notably Burgess and Ogburn, at Chicago in the interwar period might have weakened by the late 1940s. But the alliance continued to influence the way psychiatry was approached in the Division of the Social Sciences and therefore the kind of reception Miller’s project could expect there.

38By the end of 1949, a general committee was appointed and placed under the authority of Havighurst. That was the time when Miller, following three months of discussion, circulated the “Institute of the Behavioral Sciences” draft. As we have seen, at Chicago, many social scientists had already endorsed a quantitative and interdisciplinary approach to human behavior, but the newly appointed Miller was one of the first, if not the first, faculty members to give the term extensive publicity and even claim credit for its creation. Having done “behavioral science” without claiming it explicitly, and realizing how profitable it might be to describe their endeavor as Miller did, now that the Ford Foundation was organizing the funding of behavioral science on a large scale, Chicago’s social scientists had good reasons to pay attention to Miller’s project. Its idiosyncratic orientation, focused on the relationship between the biological and social sciences, caused uneasiness among those whose approach was not orientated toward the psychophysiological substratum of behavior; moreover, the development of psychiatry at Chicago, a preoccupation of Hutchins since his appointment, fell within the scope of the project and interested not only the Medical School and psychologists, but also a number of faculty members in the Division of the Social Sciences. Finally, to social scientists, Miller’s description of the institute hardly evoked the social laboratory imagery: “It would contain,” Miller wrote, “floors for open and closed wards, outpatient psychiatric and psychological services, laboratories in neurophysiology, physiology, psychology and related areas, classrooms, seminar rooms, a common room, electronic, machine, and glassblowing shops, animal surgery rooms, animal quarters, electroencephalographic and other specialized laboratories, administrative and other offices” (Miller, n. d. [Nov.–Dec. 1949], 2).

39As discussions continued throughout 1950, Miller failed to prevent the rejection of his project by the biological sciences committee and was forced to recast it once more, this time with the help of Philip M. Hauser and Louis Wirth from the Department of Sociology. Now emphasis was laid on the contribution of social scientists to the study of a number of practical problems—industrial, racial and cultural—that had long been on the agenda of Chicago’s social scientists. Miller’s proposal ended with a list of current and proposed investigations in the behavioral sciences, all by social scientists (Miller, 1951b). In view of Miller’s description of the institute before, the apparent reorientation appeared somewhat circumstantial if not opportunistic. As it turns out, deemphasizing the natural scientific component of behavioral science in favor of its social scientific dimension left Miller with some leeway, especially when he dealt with psychology.

  • 36 I borrow this formulation from Gitre (2011, 28) though he uses it to describe the move of neo-Freu (...)
  • 37 Sociologists discussed the “Institute of the Behavioral Sciences” proposal during a session of the (...)

40As he worked through the project of an institute of the behavioral sciences, Miller realized that Chicago’s divisional structure could deepen the divide between the social and biological behavioral scientists. That divide was constitutive of psychology itself, and the strong presence of social psychology at Chicago made it even more tangible. So when Miller tried to clarify his vision of the field of behavioral science in a large May 1951 paper, he insisted on the possibility of bringing the two sides together around the measurability of behavior, while noting that in psychology behavior could be approached subjectively and objectively. Influenced by Gerard’s (1940a, 1940b, 1940c) organismic view of society, he proposed that there was a “subjective experience, conscious or unconscious, concomitant with every objective behavior of the organism, and that both follow from some neural process” (Miller, 1951c, 12). Miller’s theory of behavior rested on twenty-two basic principles expressed in functional terms and borrowed from a variety of fields and theories, including cybernetics, physiology, experimental psychology, mental measurement, leaning theory, perception, self-theory and phenomenology, psychoanalysis, and social and cultural influences on behavior (19–27). These principles were mostly psychological. The references to sociology and anthropology came last; they were meant to supplement the focus on the individual with considerations about the social and cultural environment. Miller’s brand of behavioral science was distinct from that of nonpsychological social scientists at Chicago—notably sociologists—who tended to emphasize the symbolic dimension of human experience and accordingly started with the “dynamic tensions between as well as within individuals and their society/culture.”36 Miller’s behavioral science was different, but its topics of study were to be those of social behavioral scientists, namely, industrial relations, racial and cultural relations, crime, social dependency, personal insecurity and maladjustment, familial disorganization, mental disease, etc.37 

  • 38 There were continuing reservations about the project in the Biological Sciences Division.

41In the following months, Miller’s behavioral scientific framework gained increased visibility outside Chicago, first when the new Chancellor, Lawrence A. Kimpton, asked that an ad hoc committee visit the university to make recommendations about the proposed institute, and then again when the Ford Foundation fully deployed its Behavioral Sciences Program. Interestingly, when Miller discussed names for the visiting committee with Tyler, he proposed Ford consultants Marquis and Hans Speier, a number of psychologists and the psychoanalyst Frieda Fromm-Reichmann. Judging from these suggestions, it appears that the institute had recentered on psychology and downsized its cross-disciplinary ambitions, unless Miller had hoped to avoid critical scrutiny from less biologically inclined social scientists. As it turns out, Marquis and Speier could not attend and the sociologist Robert K. Merton was added. Learning theorist Ernest R. Hilgard, one of the psychologists proposed by Miller, sent the visiting committee’s report to Kimpton in January 1952. The report suggested that a multidisciplinary Committee on Behavioral Sciences be established, but it also raised a number of criticisms. In particular, it was pointed out that “the scope of the behavioral sciences … is broader than the interests of psychology alone” and recommended that more emphasis be laid on anthropology, sociology, economics and political science (Hilgard et al., 1952, 3). In addition, the committee complained that “the relationship between the behavioral sciences and the total social science enterprise” was “only sketchily considered” (5). The message was crystal clear: the project of an institute of the behavioral sciences posed jurisdictional problems.38 

  • 39 Beginning in the fall of 1952, the meetings of the study group became more regular from early 1953

42In the wake of the report, Tyler made arrangements with Kimpton to help develop the institute and proposed to form two committees: one, chaired by Tyler, to deal with fundraising and inter-divisional relationships; and the other, intended to work out for itself the issue of leadership, to produce new theoretical formulations. For the latter, Tyler proposed Miller, the psychologists Donald T. Campbell, Donald W. Fiske and Ward C. Halstead; the neuropsychologist Roger W. Sperry; Henrietta Herbolsheimer from Medicine; the political scientist David Easton; the sociologist Edward A. Shils; and the anthropologist Sherwood L. Washburn. With a few exceptions, this eclectic group, with a strong psychological flavor, formed the basis of what later became referred to as the “Committee on the Behavioral Sciences,” but was first called the “Behavioral Sciences Study Group.”39 

  • 40 Sociologists participated in discussions preceding the establishment of the study group, and Shils (...)

43By the time the study group received notification from Tyler (1953a) that the Ford Foundation was launching a program of financial support for interdisciplinary research and study of human behavior, in February 1953, the study group had held only a few weekly meetings. Problems of definition and differences of approach continued to mark discussions. Interestingly, in its proposal to the Ford Foundation, Miller pointed to the collaboration between biological and social scientists as a distinctive feature of the behavioral science group at Chicago, but failed to acknowledge the low participation of sociologists within the group (Miller, 1953).40 

  • 41 In addition to Tax, the associate dean of the Social Sciences Division, the group included Redfiel (...)
  • 42 Geiger remarks that “the home committee at Chicago was deemed to be derelict in its task” (Geiger, (...)

44At about the same time Miller sent out the proposal, the Ford Foundation’s Behavioral Sciences Division invited 15 American universities to submit proposals to an experimental program of self-studies of their research and training in behavioral sciences. Even though the program’s announcement was concerned with “the university’s total resources for the scientific study of man’s behavior,” no mention was made of the biological sciences (Ford Foundation, 1953, 1). Following its successful application, in June 1953, Chicago formed a home committee chaired by the anthropologist Sol Tax. Inspired by Tyler (1953b), the choice of committee members struck a delicate balance between the “scientific approach to human behavior,” including a biological dimension, and other approaches that were traditionally closer to the humanities.41 The committee eventually gave birth to a Report on the Behavioral Sciences at the University of Chicago (1954).42 Published in October 1954, the report was instructive with regard to the place of Miller’s project within the university. By that time, the Committee on the Behavioral Sciences was in full swing under Miller’s leadership, with the participation of the historian Robert I. Crane, Easton, Fiske, the economist Jacob Marschak and a few others, with two of its regular members—the mathematical biologist Anatol Rapoport and Gerard—away as founding fellows at the Center for the Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Palo Alto.

45Yet, at times, the report seemed doubtful of Miller’s prospects for success. Tax and his colleagues noted that the divisional organization “produced a certain kind of inflexibility or impermeability within those sectors of the behavioral sciences which cross divisional lines” and that there were “cases where linkages which would be useful to both sides need developing—e.g., in the case of Psychiatry and the social sciences” (Report, 1954, 17). More specifically, it was pointed out that because of weaknesses in inter-divisional communication, “there tends to be a kind of water-shed between the ‘social’ behavioral scientists and the ‘biological’ behavioral scientists” (83). The question was also asked: “How ‘Interdisciplinary’ Are We At Chicago?” Using a military image, the home committee signaled “interdisciplinary penetration” (64) and offered a diagrammatic representation of the latter (see fig. 1), in which multiple connections appeared to link departments, professional schools and committees, but often concerned only a “minority of the faculty” (73). Even in interdisciplinary committees, research projects were often the “creation of one man,” so that their actual “interdisciplinarity” depended mostly on the breadth of interests of their leaders (82). The role of Miller at the Committee on the Behavioral Sciences seemed to confirm that point, but the home committee largely underestimated the learning effects associated with repeated interactions in multidisciplinary groups. It did, however, aptly identify the difficulties surrounding Miller’s effort to bridge the gap between the biological and social sciences.

46Following the publication of the report, the study group continued its activities within the Committee on the Behavioral Sciences, but Miller and his close associates Gerard and Rapoport were already turning their eyes towards the University of Michigan, where they would soon create that institute of mental sciences that more than 5 years of intense discussion with Chicago’s administration had failed to materialize. At the Committee on the Behavioral Sciences, various members had had educational experiences within cross-disciplinary groups in which natural scientists and social scientists interacted. Miller was a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows from 1938 to 1944 (Brinton, 1959, 204–206); Gerard joined the ranks of the Cybernetics Group (see Heims, 1993 [1991], passim); and Rapoport was part of Nicolas Rashevsky’s Committee on Mathematical Biology (Rapoport, 2000, 90–96). Within these groups, they developed a taste for the study of social phenomena and learned how to interact with researchers of different disciplinary cultures. They could draw on these experiences every time the group faced high levels of disagreement. In particular, they were perfectly aware of the necessity to explain again and again what is often assumed when conversation takes place between disciplinary peers. Yet, members of the committee could not solve the problem of indecision in the central administration and the shortcomings of the divisional structure. Their effort to make social science more quantitative and interdisciplinary remained conditioned by the dynamics of power relations within the university.

Fig. 1—Faculty inter-connections

Fig. 1—Faculty inter-connections

This cluttered organizational chart connects departments, professional schools and committees within the Division of the Social Sciences, and distinguishes between three degrees of interconnections. The visual effect produced by the proliferation of connections on the chart deemphasizes their often problematic nature (Report, 1954, 74).

Conclusion

47In 1963, as he was asked to comment on papers gathered by Bernard Berelson, former director of the Ford Foundation’s Behavioral Sciences Program, Merton (1963, 272), who had assessed the merits of Miller’s institute in the early 1950s, could not avoid the unhappy conclusion that the field was an “uneven and unfinished” mosaic. The metaphor conveyed the failure of the integrative ambitions of a number of researchers more than a decade after they embarked on the enterprise of a unified theory of behavior. It likewise suggested the existence of different conceptions of the behavioral sciences, some of which Merton found misguided. In particular, he castigated those behavioral scientists that tended to dismiss the ethical and aesthetical part of human behavior while studying society from the perspective of the natural sciences. This criticism should be put in perspective, however. Since the 1920s, if not earlier, social scientists had regularly attempted to emulate an image of science supposedly rooted in natural scientific practice. In fact, Merton believed that there was a danger of the behavioral sciences joining in the attempt to displace humanism with scientism. In other words, though he used the terms of the Two Cultures debate (Ortolano, 2009), Merton aimed at the social sciences themselves: he primarily meant to curb the excessive, mechanistic and materialistic ambitions stemming from adherence to natural science methods.

48In this respect, the story of Chicago’s behavioral sciences shows that labels count, not only because they serve to emphasize the newness of intellectual enterprises, but also because they represent powerful transformative forces within disciplines. The behavioral sciences label helped social scientists reaffirm their common identity at a time when the division between science and the humanities continued to inform academic debates, making social science alternatively a scientific or humanistic enterprise. Because its usages varied, however, the term referred to a variety of social scientific practices along a spectrum running from biological to social determinism.

49That being said, the history of the behavioral sciences at Chicago is not just a history of words. Looking at the development of Chicago’s social science prior to the Second World War, it appears that the push for quantification and interdisciplinarity inspired by the success of natural science, which later appeared as a defining characteristic of the behavioral sciences, was not associated with the use of the eponymous label. Though the term was in limited circulation in the interwar years, it would not make sense to assume that the research methods, theoretical interests, ways of work and interdisciplinary orientation characteristic of social science research then were completely different from those of the postwar era when the term acquired much wider currency. It was no less necessary for postwar social scientists to signal the difference between their intellectual orientations and those of others which were often deemed inadequately informed by natural science methods. That difference goes well beyond the uses of the phrase: it is constitutive of social science’s transformations, which are marked by the to and fro between interdisciplinarity and specialism, qualitative and quantitative approaches, team and individual work, natural science and the humanities. These dichotomies combined with the various usages of the word behavioral sciences are central to the understanding of Chicago’s social sciences.

50When Miller decided to embark on the project of an institute of mental sciences, he was resuscitating an idea that Franklin McLean, the director of the Chicago University Clinics, had contemplated some twenty years ago. So his intention to bridge the gap between the biological and social sciences was mostly motivated by the desire to embrace the different interests in mental health. When the Ford Foundation and his friend Marquis began to reflect on a more scientific approach to human behavior, Miller had no hesitation in deciding for a different name for the institute. From then on, he made every effort to defend the term behavioral sciences. Later, following a change in the wind at Chicago, he came back to the original label and created the Mental Health Research Institute at the University of Michigan. The behavioral sciences label had not lost all its merits in his eyes, however. In 1956, building on the dense network of researchers devoting themselves to the scientific study of human behavior, Miller launched a new interdisciplinary journal meant to promote broad theories of behavior and their empirical testing. As the official publication of the Mental Health Research Institute, Behavioral Science materialized the latest episode in Miller’s half-decade arbitration between scientific ambition and institutional expediency.

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Notes

1 On the occasion of the building’s twenty-fifth anniversary, historian James L. Cate admitted that: “an outsider might wonder at the number of celebrations, to say nothing of the amount of oratory, lavished upon so young a building. But this is wholly within our Chicago tradition” (Cate, 1956, 426).

2 Robin (2001, 27–9) aptly remarks that “an accurate history of the field” should not be confused with the creation myth of the behavioral sciences, which offers a recurring narrative on their origins with the Committee on the Behavioral Sciences, Harvard’s Department of Social Relations, the interwar Yale’s Institute of Human Relations and the Ford Foundation as its main protagonists.

3 On Chicago’s Committee on the Behavioral Sciences, see Hammond, 2003, ch. 7; and Fontaine, 2016.

4 It is important to distinguish between the uncoordinated attempts to promote forms of social science that later became associated with the term behavioral sciences and the movement itself. As far as disciplines are concerned, the usefulness of that distinction is expressed by political science’s central role in interwar scientistic social science and its wearing off when the anthropology-psychology-sociology association became the symbol of the behavioral sciences movement after WWII. Regarding research universities, the Yale of Hull, Hutchins, Donald G. Marquis and the like failed to shine in the post-WWII despite its inspiring role for a number of cross-disciplinary institution builders at Harvard, Michigan and elsewhere.

5 Note, however, that political scientists such as Bentley and David Easton used the “behavioral science” label with no hesitation. Political science’s self-differentiation within the behavioral sciences can be explained by its closer ties with economics and history, which both sat uncomfortably within the behavioral sciences movement: the former because of the predilection of its practitioners and the latter because of its ambivalent association with the social sciences as a whole. On the history of behavioralism, see Adcock, 2007.

6 This was not limited to Chicago, however. As Crowther-Heyck reminded, “Despite some heartfelt protests against scientism in times of social crisis, especially in the 1930s, the vast majority of leading social scientists in America have espoused a ‘natural science’ model of what social science should be since at least the 1880s. An aspiration to the status and rigor of natural science has been a constant among social scientists: what has changed is what they thought made natural science so powerful.” (Crowther-Heyck, 2006, 426)

7 Lemov points out that Ruml defined the social sciences in a way “that had not been before,” connecting a number of intellectual enterprises aimed at understanding “human capacities and behavior” (Lemov, 2005, 56). Though he did not use a new term to describe his own vision of the social sciences, Ruml shared the preoccupations of administrators and social scientists who later used behavioral sciences to identify fields that qualified as parts of a new intellectual enterprise in social science (see also Herman, 1995, 349 n. 29).

8 The Committee did not include the Department of Psychology, which later took a significant part in the formation of the Committee on the Behavioral Sciences. Yet, the LCRC recognized the advances made by the psychologist L. L. Thurstone—who joined the department in 1924—in methods of social science research (for instance, Gosnell, 1929, 107). “In connection with studies made under the Local Community Research Committee,” the political scientist and Merriam’s collaborator Harold Gosnell pointed out that “a constant effort ha[d] been made to use quantitative methods wherever possible” (Gosnell, 1929, 90).

9 White and Merriam’s advocacy of a more scientific approach to human behavior should not be confused with the widely accepted belief at the LCRC that it should be recognized as “an impartial, disinterested fact-finding agency” (White, 1929, 33).

10 Topalov (2014, 100–104) considers the reasons why the phrase “local community,” which had the favor of Park and Burgess and for some time Merriam, was abandoned in 1929. He argues that reformist movements had a strong local dimension in the United States of the Progressive era: social problems were regarded as urban problems. Yet, with the increased professionalization of the social sciences and the development of a federal and national space for reformist ambitions from the late 1920s, new theoretical agendas emerged that made urban problems less of a priority and changed the balance of power between and among disciplines.

11 In all fairness, it should be noted that the Columbia economist Wesley Mitchell and Ruml were also crucial to the early success of the Council (Worcester, 2001, 18–9).

12 Needless to say, the actual relationships between the social sciences should not be viewed only through the prism of the SSRC’s original institutional arrangement, even if the organization fostered interdisciplinary cooperation. For a more comprehensive perspective on interdisciplinary exchange in interwar social science, see Ogburn and Goldenweiser’s (1927) The social sciences and their Interrelations.

13 I do not mean to suggest that those calls used the “interdisciplinary” label, which really picked up after WWII. The Chicago sociologist Louis Wirth, however, used the adjective as early as 1937 (see Sills, 1986, 18).

14 As Francis Sutton reminds, “By the 1920s, there was in American universities a group of leaders who wanted more objective and empirical study of society than the social reformers practiced and the [Laura Spelman Rockefeller] Memorial’s grants gave lasting impetus to the social sciences in American universities, the Social Science Research Council, the National Bureau of Economic Research, the Brookings Institution, and the London School of Economics.” (Sutton, 1985, 58)

15 At the institute, “the fertile cross-disciplinary studies with psychologists, legal scholars, and social scientists yielding comprehensive, interdisciplinary understanding of major social and legal problems never materialized the way Hutchins had predicted they would in his proposals and reports” (Dzuback, 1991, 63).

16 With regard to Hutchins’ opinion of the social sciences, one remark by the social anthropologist Fred Eggan is worth mentioning: “During the lecture series [on the nature of the social sciences in 1936], Radcliffe-Brown listened to Mortimer Adler’s thesis that there was only one possible social science and its name was psychology” (Eggan, 1991, 409; italics mine).

17 McNeill argues that for social scientists, by “the end of 1931 . . . the initial enchantment of Hutchins’ presidency was over. His agenda for the university was not the same as that of most faculty members, who wished merely to be left alone to do whatever they were doing already” (McNeill, 1991, 39–40).

18 Singer (1991, 413) writes: “Many of the successes—and failures—of Hutchins’s administration from 1929 to 1950 depended on the quality of the deans he appointed to administer each of the divisions and schools,” but social affinities played an important role too.

19 For a detailed account of Chicago’s sociological tradition, spanning the years 1892 through 1961, see Chapoulie, 2001.

20 Dzuback (1991, 175) and Abbott (1999, 41) suggest that Hutchins had not a high opinion of Wirth, but Bulmer (1984, 205) points out that the “decline of Chicago sociology during the 1930s owed little to Hutchins.”

21 Given Hutchins’ opinion of 1920s sociology, Platt’s (1996, 264) remark that “it does not make sense either to draw a sharp boundary between ‘sociology’ and other activities [by groups outside the academy], or to treat the latter as subsidiary” is of special interest. Likewise, the emphasis on firsthand data collection by their authors themselves or their “little sense of any felt responsibility to distinguish data from interpretation,” noted by Platt (1994, 61, 68), may have encouraged the feeling that sociology was insufficiently theoretical, indeed unsystematic.

22 Interestingly, there were plans for a separate anthropology building, but the crash forced anthropologists to go to the Social Science Research Building instead (Stocking, 1979, 19).

23 The arrival of Radcliffe-Brown to Chicago, only two years after the creation of a separate Department of Anthropology, supported its move towards greater independence, since Radcliffe-Brown played an important role in anthropology’s emergence as a standalone discipline. The latter maintained its privileged relationship with sociology, however. Stocking notes the “contrast between R-B’s rather ahistorical scientism and Sapir’s humanistic search for symbolic ‘meaning’” (Stocking, 1979, 21).

24 Eggan had served as research assistant to Radcliffe-Brown in 1931–32 (Eggan, 1991, 405).

25 Carreira da Silva (2006) points to the dangers of Herbert Blumer’s reconstruction of Mead’s thought through the lenses of symbolic interactionism.

26 Unexpectedly, Thurstone’s (1952, 305) promotion to a full professorship at the University of Chicago came through Merriam, not the Department of Psychology.

27 Following Britt (1937, 464), I take “empirical method” to refer to “three important techniques: the experimental method; the use of first-hand observation; and the employment of statistics.”

28 That decision shifted the center of the discussion from the distinction between physiological psychology and social psychology, which occupied a number of Chicago’s social scientists including Mead (1909), to the distinction within social psychology between psychologists and sociologists. Britt (1937) offers an instructive presentation of the latter distinction.

29 The above paragraph is adapted from Fontaine, 2016.

30 Note however that thanks to Hutchins’ special effort, the interdisciplinary Committee on Social Thought was created during the war. Likewise, Hutchins took advantage of the absence of a number of faculty to push ahead his idea of the undergraduate College curriculum of general education.

31 In “Scientific Methodology in Human Relations,” Marquis (1948) proposed a behavioral conception of the social sciences even though he had yet to use the term behavioral sciences. More importantly, he argued that interdisciplinary cooperation could expedite the process whereby the social sciences acquire the six-step sequence characteristic of the scientific process.

32 On the Ford Foundation and the behavioral sciences project, see Geiger (1993, 99–105). The similarity of methods did not imply similar degrees of advancement in their use in the natural and social sciences, as Marquis (1948) himself made clear.

33 As evidence of the close connection between Miller and Marquis, it should be noted that when the social psychologist Dorwin Cartwright approached Miller about the relocation of the MIT Research Center for Group Dynamics, Miller consulted Marquis and replied that he thought it better for the Center to go to Michigan than to Chicago (Cartwright, 1947; Miller, 1947a; Miller, 1948). Miller (1951a) later acknowledged discussion with Marquis about the proposed Institute in a letter to the new Chancellor, Lawrence A. Kimpton, who incidentally had suggested Marquis for the foundation’s Study Committee (Pooley and Solovey, 2010, 203).

34 Capshew interestingly reminds that “Miller … was apparently able to convince Hutchins that his humanistic university might profit from a fresh transfusion of scientific psychologists” (Capshew, 1999, 194; emphasis mine).

35 For a more detailed description of discussions within the two committees, see Fontaine, 2016.

36 I borrow this formulation from Gitre (2011, 28) though he uses it to describe the move of neo-Freudianism away from biological determinism. As Abbott (1991, ch. 2) shows, the 1950s were a difficult time for the Chicago Department of Sociology where the split between quantitative and qualitative members was exacerbated by the administration’s antagonistic attitude.

37 Sociologists discussed the “Institute of the Behavioral Sciences” proposal during a session of the faculty seminar of 1951–52, which Abbott (1991, 62–77) regards as a key moment for the department.

38 There were continuing reservations about the project in the Biological Sciences Division.

39 Beginning in the fall of 1952, the meetings of the study group became more regular from early 1953.

40 Sociologists participated in discussions preceding the establishment of the study group, and Shils was even considered for inclusion, but, from the summer of 1952 to the next, no sociologist took part in debates. And yet during the administrative committee headed by Tyler on 27 March 1952, Burgess had “indicated that there would be no difficulty in finding a sociologist to participate [in the study group]” (Folder 2, Box 34, Ernest W. Burgess Papers, 1886–1966, University of Chicago Library).

41 In addition to Tax, the associate dean of the Social Sciences Division, the group included Redfield, former dean of the Social Sciences Division, the Law School Dean Edward Levi, the biological psychologist Howard Hunt, the chair of the Sociology Department Everett Hughes, and the educational psychologist and Tyler’s former student Benjamin Bloom.

42 Geiger remarks that “the home committee at Chicago was deemed to be derelict in its task” (Geiger, 1993, 103).

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Table des illustrations

Titre Fig. 1—Faculty inter-connections
Légende This cluttered organizational chart connects departments, professional schools and committees within the Division of the Social Sciences, and distinguishes between three degrees of interconnections. The visual effect produced by the proliferation of connections on the chart deemphasizes their often problematic nature (Report, 1954, 74).
URL http://0-journals-openedition-org.catalogue.libraries.london.ac.uk/rhsh/docannexe/image/5333/img-1.jpg
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Philippe Fontaine, « Calling the Social Sciences Names »Revue d’histoire des sciences humaines [En ligne], 37 | 2020, mis en ligne le 01 avril 2021, consulté le 12 février 2025. URL : http://0-journals-openedition-org.catalogue.libraries.london.ac.uk/rhsh/5333 ; DOI : https://0-doi-org.catalogue.libraries.london.ac.uk/10.4000/rhsh.5333

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Philippe Fontaine

École normale supérieure Paris-Saclay

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