David Apter on Ideology, Economic Development, and Social Science (1964) January 9, 2013
Posted by Will Thomas in Ideology of Science.Tags: Barry Goldwater, Clifford Geertz, Daniel Bell, David Apter, Erik Erikson, Georges Sorel, Karl Mannheim, Karl Marx, Richard Hofstadter, Sigmund Freud, Walt Rostow
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David Apter in 1953 at University College of the Gold Coast at Achimota. Photo by Eleanor Apter. Click for a larger version at the Apter Collection of photographs at Yale University Manuscripts and Archives
Clifford Geertz’s well-known 1964 essay, “Ideology as a Cultural System” appeared in a volume called Ideology and Discontent, which was edited by David Apter (1924-2010). Apter (you might recall from this post) was a modernization theorist. His best-known work on the subject was The Politics of Modernization (1965). The appearance of Geertz’s essay in Apter’s volume should be no surprise since Geertz was himself a scholar of modernization, and served with Apter as a member of the University of Chicago’s Committee for the Comparative Study of New Nations. (Relevant here is Geertz’s long discussion near the end of his 1964 essay on the political culture of newly independent Indonesia.)
Apter’s own introductory essay in the volume (titled “Ideology and Discontent,” pp. 15-46) is a discussion of the relationship between economic development, political ideology, and social science, and is very much in the tradition of the intellectual liberalism of that era. But it also zigs in certain places where you might expect it to zag, and, though it is not as lucid or valuable as Geertz’s essay, it is very much worth a read to try and get a beat on some of the contours of the kind of critical-interpretive social science in which Apter was engaged. Additionally, it is the earliest reference I have so-far come across to the “ideology of science,” which is a concept I have been tracking off and on through this blog (though Google Books informs me there are a number of earlier precedents).
Useful Portraits in the Mid-Century Social Sciences December 30, 2012
Posted by Will Thomas in EWP Book Club, History of the Human Sciences.Tags: Ashley Montagu, Benjamin Lee Whorf, Benjamin Spock, Carl Jung, Clifford Geertz, David Engerman, David Levy, Erik Erikson, Jamie Cohen-Cole, Janet Martin-Nielsen, Joel Isaac, John Bowlby, Leonard Bloomfield, Marga Vicedo, Mark Solovey, Michael Bycroft, Nadine Weidman, Noam Chomsky, Peter Mandler, Philip Wylie, Pitirim Sorokin, Sydney Lamb, Zelig Harris
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My meditation on whether there is a “whig” narrative permeating the historiography of the social sciences may give the impression that I have a fundamental objection to the Cold War Social Science (CWSS) volume. In fact, I like the book a great deal. Rather, as someone who is probably among the top 20 people worldwide with practical use for the book, thinking about a “whig” narrative helps me articulate what aspects of it are the most useful.
Having worked for some time in the history of the related subjects of operations research, systems analysis, and decision theory, I have become intimately familiar with the argumentative tropes that permeate their historiography, and which overlap with the ones surrounding the social sciences of the Cold War era. These include the supposed historical existence of: a faith in science, a particular authority attributed to formalized knowledge, and a systematic discounting of tradition and cultural peculiarity.
Even if I didn’t think these tropes were seriously misleading (though I do), the simple repetition of them in different contexts would not be very helpful to me. Locating the tropes within a general narrative allows me to identify what those tropes would look like in a different segment of the narrative (say, a post-1970 history, or the history of a different field), and thus what things I “already know,” even if the precise details are foreign to me. For example, I am not especially well versed in the history of psychology, but if the stories historians tell me about it conform to the general narrative I already know, then they are not really telling me much that is useful beyond making me aware of perhaps a new proper name or two, which I will probably promptly forget. By this criterion, a good portion of CWSS is not especially useful.
But much of it is. Here I will briefly discuss what I personally found to be the most useful pieces in the volume.
Clifford Geertz on “Ideology” as an Analytical Term, Pt. 2 April 11, 2012
Posted by Will Thomas in History of the Human Sciences, Ideology of Science.Tags: Benjamin Lee Whorf, Charles Sanders Peirce, Clifford Geertz, Edmund Burke, Erik Erikson, Ernst Cassirer, Eugene Galanter, Francis X. Sutton, Karl Mannheim, Kenneth Burke, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Murray Gerstenhaber, Thomas Kuhn
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This post continues Pt. 1 of a look at Clifford Geertz’s “Ideology as a Cultural System,” first published in Ideology and Its Discontents, ed. David E. Apter (Free Press of Glencoe, 1964), pp. 47-76.
But, before returning to Geertz, I’d like to detour for a quick look at Erik Erikson (1902-1994). In addition to being a psychologist, Erikson was part of an illustrious club of postwar intellectuals. His Young Man Luther: A Study in Psychoanalysis and History (1958) was cited in a particularly broad literature in the ’60s and ’70s (here’s the Google ngram for “Young Man Luther”), and he was particularly important in establishing “identity” as a term of analysis. Here’s his take on “ideology” and its relationship to “identity” from the introduction to that book (22):
The Post-Marxist Social History of Science of Morris Berman, Pt. 2 April 19, 2011
Posted by Will Thomas in Cult of Invisibility, EWP Book Club.Tags: Charles Lyell, Clifford Geertz, E. P. Thompson, Erik Erikson, Herbert Marcuse, Karl Mannheim, Michael Faraday, Morris Berman, Oskar Kokoschka, Theodore Roszak, Viktor Frankl, William Thomas Brande
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This post continues Pt. 1 without re-introduction
What I like to call the “cult of invisibility” was a staple of Marxist analysis, with its constraining socio-economic structures and its psychology of false consciousness. Invisible constraints of this sort are taken to render certain classes of actors in some sense powerless and ineffectual — their invisibility or silence or inability to articulate or perhaps even feel their own plight explains a failure of something to happen, such as the ascendancy of the working class.
In addition, historians often connect such invisible constraints to a historiographical prejudice, whereby the persistence of psychological and intellectual constraints through history restricts present ideas about what sorts of things constitute proper history, which renders certain aspects of the past systematically invisible to historical memory. This second, historiographical form of invisibility establishes a social need for the services of the critically trained historian who can identify invisible prejudices, recover systematically concealed aspects of history, and make them more generally known, possibly helping to overcome the forces of invisibility in our own time. E. P. Thompson’s (1924-1993) The Making of the English Working Class (1963) is probably the key work in this tradition.
The cult of invisibility not only survives, but thrives in the transition to post-Marxist historiographical analysis — a transition in which Thompson’s work was arguably instrumental. In Morris Berman’s book on the Royal Institution (RI), the role of science as a cultural force that creates invisibility is emphasized. His major demonstration of this point comes in his extended analysis of Michael Faraday’s (and, incidentally, Charles Lyell‘s) role in the investigation verdict that there was no fault in the 1844 Haswell coal mine explosion, which had killed 94 mine workers including young boys (pp. 179-180): (more…)
Ether Wave Propaganda 