Philippe Fontaine and Jefferson D. Pooley (eds.), Society on the Edge. Social Science and Public Policy in the Postwar United States
Philippe Fontaine and Jefferson D. Pooley (eds.), Society on the Edge. Social Science and Public Policy in the Postwar United States, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2021, 403 pages
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1The chapters that make up this impressive volume examine the relation between social science and public policy in nine different problem domains. The authors of these chapters discuss what the different social sciences contributed to each problem domain and how people connected to different disciplines worked together, came into conflict, or ignored one another in the process. Happily, many of the chapters do not stand alone but frequently refer to the other chapters of the volume. In addition to these explicit cross-references, one encounters multiple discussions of how particular scholars influenced the study of different social problems. Reading through this volume gives one the feeling of traveling back and forth along several intellectual-historical paths but from a different starting point each time. It is a rare edited volume that has such cumulative power.
2To acquaint readers with the aims of the volume and how its structure fulfills them, editors Philippe Fontaine and Jefferson D. Pooley have written a substantial, wide-ranging introduction. If, however, one reads this introduction first (as I did), one expects to see much more substantive agreement among the contributors than I believe there actually is. Most of the chapters, in my view, do not fully corroborate the core narrative the editors develop in their introduction: that by the 1970s, economics and psychology had “won” a struggle for influence in academic and public policy circles—and that sociology had lost. In what follows, I spell out my reasons for this view and how much this matters to my overall evaluation of the volume.
3The editors begin their introduction with an extended discussion of Robert K. Merton and Robert A. Nisbet’s Contemporary Social Problems (1961), a book they pronounce a “surprising intervention.” Theorists like Merton and Nisbet, they remark, were more likely to ignore sociology focused on “social problems” rather than try to shore it up. Such an opener prompts one to wonder how the editors see their volume’s intervention. Into which debates or discussions does this volume intervene? What does it aim to shore up?
4Some hints at answers appear in the three main sections of the introduction; these address debates over how social problems are identified, how disciplines have divided the labor of addressing particular problems, and whether these problems have been analyzed with an individual, social, or systemic focus. The editors pointedly object to accounts that minimize the role of social scientists in defining social problems for policy makers (p. 21-22) and to those that date the onset of rivalries between social sciences with policy-influencing ambitions in the 1970s (p. 22-23). They counter that by the 1970s these contests had already been decided: “Economists, and to a lesser extent psychologists, displaced sociologists at the public center of the social science of society’s problems.” Documenting and explaining that outcome in “the high-stakes domain of policy, politics, and public discourse” (p. 52) is one of this volume’s principal aims—an aim most directly fulfilled by Leah N. Gordon’s chapter on discrimination and Jean-Baptiste Fleury’s on crime, less so by the others.
5To support their core narrative, the editors portray sociology as so consistently beleaguered by internal divisions and extra-disciplinary competitors that its late 20th-century eclipse in public policy circles seems all but inevitable. For instance, they point out that already in the 1930s, sociologists, anxiously aware of the greater “public stature” of the other social sciences, were disagreeing bitterly about the merits of a social problems-focused discipline (p. 4-7, 25, 28). The postwar “efflorescence of sociological work […] much of it consciously policy-relevant” —the one bright chapter in sociology’s story—was brief, had already “weakened” by the end of the 1960s and never recovered (p. 10).
6The editors do not build their argument on this portrait alone, however. This seems clearer later in the introduction when they insist that “the waning of the social […] demands an explanation” (p. 41). Briefly considering whether the erosion of the US welfare state might answer that demand, they caution that any explanation cannot be “neatly causal” but must instead be characterized by “many layers of mutual entanglement” (p. 42). Much of the introduction develops variations on this entanglement theme: economics and psychology were in the best position to shape US public policy because of an “elective affinity” between them and the “public imagination” (p. 12). Like all elective affinities, this was a dynamic relation, characterized by “mutual shaping” (p. 57). At the same time that economists and psychologists reinforced the already well-rooted individualistic sensibilities in public discourse, these dominant social sciences themselves were also “remapped by the changes they helped bring about” (p. 42). How could the social do anything but wane in this climate? Explaining its endurance within any small sector of US public and academic discourse seems the more interesting question.
7Rather than trying to capture what was or was not part of the public imagination, a number of the individual problem chapters point to specific political shifts to explain the marginalization of sociological influence on public policy. For instance, George C. Galster notes that “political ideology of those in power in Washington” rather than “definitive new scholarship” has shaped public policy on the Black ghetto for the last fifty years, “since each political position could selectively cite research supporting their predetermined policy perspective” (p. 238). Similarly, Alice O’Connor, Fleury, Nancy D. Campbell, and Andrew Scull’s chapters zero in on particular actions of the federal government that undermined sociological analyses of poverty, crime, addiction, and mental health. All underscore that it was federal policies and agencies created in the 1960s and 1970s that squeezed these problems into narrower outcomes-based frames.
8Several of these chapters take an additional step, highlighting how federal policy restructured social science departments and disciplines. Fleury argues that the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA) had a particularly strong influence on the academy, spurring the creation of criminal justice departments in a number of public universities in the US in the 1970s. Effectively, the LEAA built an alternative vocational-academic hybrid discipline that undercut academic sociology’s studies of crime (p. 276). Analyzing an analogous development in academic psychology, Scull argues that copious postwar federal funds available for clinical psychology reconfigured university psychology departments, pulling them towards clinical training and away from laboratory research and psychoanalysis (p. 331-336). Later in the 20th century, Scull notes that “political pressures […] reinforced […] an increased focus on neuroscientific and psychopharmacological research,” while “much of the federal money that had once underwritten sociological work had been sharply curtailed” (p. 345). Each of these accounts underscores the independent influence of federal policymaking and funding on how social scientists addressed social problems and how they were trained to do so in the first place.
9Significantly, the editors acknowledge that some of the contributions to this volume do not wholly support their narrative of the triumph of economics and psychology over sociology. For instance, a number conclude that however successful economics and psychology may have been in framing social problems in the policy arena, they were far less so in the academy. As the editors put it, in “the social sciences themselves, debates that in the early postwar years were plural and polyphonic remained so […] by the late 1980s” (p. 52). This point is well-illustrated in Savina Balasubraminian and Charles Camic’s chapter on the family, which concludes that despite the influence of the individualistic, investment-oriented “economics of the family” on conservative US administrations in the late 20th century, it failed to spark “much social scientific rethinking.” Instead, most scholars working in this area continued to regard “the family’s role in transmitting social inequalities from generation to generation” as the most “pervasive” problem (p. 96-98). Many other chapters—including Andrew Jewett’s on education, Gordon’s on discrimination and Galster’s on the Black ghetto—also underscore the stubborn pluralism of academic discourse on the problems they examine, while acknowledging that the individualistic analyses advanced by economists and psychologists had a considerable, even disproportionate influence on US public policy in the 20th century. Even greater outliers are Campbell’s chapter on addiction and Joy Rohde’s on war, each of which concludes that neither economics nor psychology shaped public policy in these problem domains. Instead, Campbell shows that neuroscientific knowledge sidelined what any of the social sciences had had to offer, while Rohde shows that it was political scientists and scholars of international relations who undid older conceptions of war as a social problem.
10Beyond addressing the relation between the social sciences and public policy, the chapters in this volume offer fascinating and instructive accounts of the histories or “careers” of particular problems. Campbell’s chapter presents the history of the problem of addiction by detailing the “struggles for cultural authority over” it between nearly all the social sciences—struggles that ended in the triumph of neuroscience, “the least social of these sciences” (p. 292-293, 313-315). O’Connor recounts the history of the problem of poverty as a process of “disembedding,” one which uproots poverty “from any meaningful grounding in class politics” and the “inequities of class, race, and gender” (p. 156). This analysis also captures a good deal of Gordon’s account of the history of discrimination as well as Fleury’s on crime. By contrast, Galster’s chapter on the Black ghetto and Rohde’s on war offer an interesting twist on the history of the problems they examine. Each pointedly concludes that by the end of the 20th century, what had once been understood as profound, urgent social problems either had “steadily waned” (Galster, p. 250) or, in the case of war, had been redefined as not a problem but as a “tool of statecraft” capable of being “rationally managed” (Rohde, p. 359). One thus finds in this volume stories of the emergence, redefinition, and disappearance of social problems.
11Even though sociology is cast as the loser in many of this volume’s chapters, reading this volume seems likely to sharpen readers’ interest in, and appreciation for, it. Clearly, many of the contributors to this volume—and not only the sociologists—value the insights of 20th-century sociologists enough to want to re-present them and make them speak to our present. More broadly, the histories of social problems presented in this volume offer readers some imaginative leverage against what seem to be intractable contemporary problems. Intractable problems, they show, are made, not given.
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Emily Hauptmann, « Philippe Fontaine and Jefferson D. Pooley (eds.), Society on the Edge. Social Science and Public Policy in the Postwar United States », Revue d’histoire des sciences humaines, 43 | 2023, 239-242.
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Emily Hauptmann, « Philippe Fontaine and Jefferson D. Pooley (eds.), Society on the Edge. Social Science and Public Policy in the Postwar United States », Revue d’histoire des sciences humaines [En ligne], 43 | 2023, mis en ligne le 24 novembre 2023, consulté le 16 janvier 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/rhsh/8946 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/rhsh.8946
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