History of Science and Technology Colloquium

The fusion of social science and state power represents a dominant theme in the history of the modern American state. The meaning of the "science" in social science, however, has changed markedly throughout the decades, from the qualitative traditions of the early twentieth century to the scientism of the post-World War II period. The combination of social investigation and advocacy as represented in the various social survey movements of the 1900s and 1910s, in which the scientific identification of social facts did not rule out subjectivity and political engagement, persisted well into the New Deal years. This paper will examine the path from the social survey movement, to reformist currents in legal thought in the 1910s and 1920s, to securities regulation within the Securities and Exchange Commission in the 1930s in order to explore the vitality of qualitative forms of social inquiry in the early decades of the twentieth century. Although advocates of scientific rigor strongly criticized New Deal methods, in the political context of the 1930s, the qualitative search for social facts nonetheless allowed the state to "see" new areas of national economic life and provided powerful justification and means for trying to regulate a chaotic, dysfunctional marketplace.