social science – History of The Human Sciences

Michael Pettit, York University, Toronto

Heather Love, Underdogs: Social Deviance and Queer Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021)

In Underdogs, Heather Love offers a densely argued, at times counterintuitive, and yet highly persuasive rereading of how her own field of queer theory relates to its own intellectual past. Love argues queer theory, despite its professed deep historicism, is in denial about its own history, much to its detriment when it comes to making both theoretical and political interventions. She offers Underdogs as something of a remedy to this collective amnesia. In her telling, queer theory as an anti-humanist humanities field is predicated on the notion of rupture: its leading practitioners see it as a field with neither a true academic parent nor a comfortable disciplinary home. Queer theory (and theorists) always stands alone, outside, without friend, kin, or even community. Love identifies this widespread sensibility with the field’s proximate roots in the radical oppositional politics of gay liberation, the women’s health movement, and especially 1980s AIDS activism. In this political crucible, the field disavowed any kinship with earlier social scientific, “empirical,” studies of sexuality (whether of the human animal or other species). Most importantly for Love’s story, queer theory denied its debts to mid-century, observational, qualitative, microanalyses of social interaction. Yet these sociologists of deviance profoundly informed how queer theorists understood both (social) normativity and their own outsider status as intellectuals. Her book seeks to excavate these lost linkages to challenge and enrich contemporary queer theory.

If Underdogs pivots around making uncomfortable kinship between deviance studies and queer theory, Love astutely traces how these two fields operate with very different politics of representation. Contemporary queer theory is predicated on the disruption of all norms and foundations. A profound, skeptical destabilization of all received notions is the field’s primary political intervention. In contrast, mid-century sociologists of deviance sought to uplift alternative forms of social life by making them legible. They related the minortized group to the majority through practices of immersion at the level of data collection and (thick) description as a mode of analysis. However, their sociology continued to traffic in postwar commitments to value neutrality. They staged this not through quantification but by adopting the methodological persona of the cool, hip, outsider observing a foreign scene. A later generation of queer theorists dismissed mid-century sociologies of deviance as hopelessly mired in normative assumptions and compromised by the demands of maintaining neutrality at the expense of explicit political commitment. In short, the sociologists of deviance sought to normalize the subversive, the countercultural, the stigmatized by representing them and their rituals of the world where queer theorists revel in their perennial outsider status as folks who forever operate under the sign of stigma.

Love’s book consists of a series of close and illuminating readings. This starts with her critical engagement with Eve Sedgwick’s highly influential reinterpretation of Cold War affect theory as a relevant framework for queer scholarship. Given the ubiquity of affect theory in the humanities, Love offers a timely reminder of how profoundly odd the reproachment was and remains. Erving Goffman with his theoretically light but richly conveyed ethnographies looms large over much of the book. He comes to serve as an archetype for the sociology of deviance as a body of knowledge and embodied persona. An intriguing chapter on “Just Watching” shows the surprising affinities between radical constructivist sociology and essentialist ethology when it came to their observational practices by juxtaposing Niko Tinbergen’s turn to human observation through his 1970s interest in autism with Laud Humphreys’ controversial, covert ethnography of male homosexual encounters in public restrooms. Perhaps Love’s most compelling case is her analysis of the Black American science fiction writer Samuel R. Delany’s relationship to queer theory. Delany entered the academic critical theory canon through historian and gender theorist Joan W. Scott’s influential reading of a key passage in his memoir The Motion of Light in Water (1988). In the passage, Delany relates his first visit to the Saint Mark’s Baths in New York City in 1963 when he became aware of the existence of a gay community. Writing at the height of the linguistic turn, Scott’s reading underscores the impossibility of an immediate, universal, transhistorical experience of identity, arguing instead for the mediating, reconstructive power of language as a mode of representation which structures consciousness and even the most inmate of identities. Scott exemplifies queer theory’s demand for disruption and destabilization, the critical humanities’ emphasis on interrogating the very categories of identity rather than populating texts with varied experiences of them. In contrast, Love reads Delany’s considerable writings on the changing sexual and political economy of New York City as a vivid exemplar of mid-century urban ethnography in the sociology of deviance mode. Throughout the book, Love plays with the dialectics of seeing but not being seen, of watching and (not) judging.

Love’s book also raises pertinent and disconcerting questions about why queer theorists and social psychologists have been so drawn to affect as a meta-theory for the past twenty years despite their very different political commitments. Certainly, Sedgwick offered an unfaithful reading of this psychology. However, critics like Ruth Leys have rightly point out how affect theory smuggles in with it deeply problematic notions about biology, universalism, and especially intentionality into critical, humanistic fields. Adding Goffman to the genealogical mix does interesting things to this debate. Despite their innumerable differences, queer theorists, the sociologists of deviance, and contemporary social psychologists all share the conviction that they are the smartest person in the room capable of detecting the cognitive failures of the rubes. It suggests these fields remain overly committed to their own coolness both socially and cognitively. As Love artfully demonstrates, this conviction has been as damaging to the kinds of interventions queer theory ought to make as it has been to social psychology. Adopting Goffman’s cruel coolness as the perennial outsider risks veering into the knowing smugness of the smartest kid in the room who conveniently directs the hermeneutics of suspicious at everyone but themselves. Denying the “evidence of experience” as another foundationalist trick means foreclosing oneself to experience of others. It results in a disposition both unkind and uncharitable.

I found Love’s book a challenging but inspiring read. It raises, if perhaps inevitably does not answer, important questions about how to create good relations between empirical research (both ethnographic and archival) and critical theory. In part, her book challenges a prevalent assumption in the humanities where theory takes precedence over method. Without succumbing to the methodolatry so common in many social science fields, Love’s genealogy problematizes the ways in which Theory is often left unresponsive and ultimately unresponsible to the world. Debunking queer theory’s origin myth that it was born whole cloth out of the AIDS crisis leads Love to challenge necessary alignments of the field’s activism with “paranoid” readings of (medical) authority and anti-foundationalist epistemologies. Underdogs is an insightful book for those seeking to repair the rift between the critical humanities and empirical social science.

Mark Solovey, Social Science for What? Battles over Public Funding for the ‘Other Sciences’ at the National Science Foundation (Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press, 2020). 398 pp. $50.00 (pb). ISBN: 978-0-262-53905-0.

Lucian Bessmer, Harvard University

Social Science for What? is a remarkably detailed history of the National Science Foundation (NSF) from 1945 to the late 1980s that makes a compelling case for the influence of the Foundation on American social science. Those familiar with author Mark Solovey’s Shaky Foundations will recognize the care that he has put into presenting an account built on rich archival materials to “follow the money” in order to show the impact of what he calls the “politics-patronage-social science nexus” (10-12). Where Shaky Foundations examined how the Ford Foundation, the U.S. military, and the NSF shaped the social sciences, Social Science for What? delves deeper into the NSF in an attempt to address a gap Solovey identifies in the literature: the role of civilian agencies as patrons of social science. This in itself makes this book an important contribution to the large body of work on Cold War scientific patronage, which generally focuses on the relationships between science, the military, and intelligence agencies. But the more ambitious claim of Social Science for What? is that the NSF played a significant part in positioning the human sciences as participants in the “unified scientific enterprise” (12). Solovey argues that mimicking the methods and epistemic justification of the natural sciences may have enabled the social sciences to carve out a tiny redoubt in the NSF, but ultimately it created barriers to their health and development, disincentivizing the most beneficial aspects of these fields.

The book’s ten chapters offer a roughly chronological investigation of how stakeholders of the social sciences, both inside and outside of the NSF, sought to legitimize a collection of fields that were treated with skepticism at best and as a menace to American society at worst. Solovey crafts each chapter around a person, a set of legislative proposals or controversies, or the shifting organization and priorities of the social science division leadership at the NSF. Chapter 1 sets the stage with the first efforts to create the NSF in 1945. During the post-war period there was tremendous enthusiasm for science (and especially physical science) in the United States, creating an opportunity for prominent figures in the scientific community to advocate for additional federal support for basic physical science. Many of the most influential people spearheading this effort, such as Vannevar Bush, science advisor to President Harry Truman, doubted the relevance and rigor of the social sciences, but calculated lobbying led to the reluctant inclusion of the social sciences in the NSF, on the grounds that these fields were a nascent branch of a unified science. Chapter 2 follows Harry Alpert, the head of social science efforts at the NSF during the McCarthy era. In a time when social science was under intense scrutiny, Alpert chose a pragmatic approach to champion social science, described by his successor Henry Reicken as “underdogging” or “allying one’s cause with stronger others, in this case the physical and biological sciences” (56). Chapters 3 and 4 show how this further cemented the strategy of proponents of the social sciences at the NSF from the late 1950s to the late 1960s, with a continued effort to attract funding through the proximity to other more respected fields at the Foundation. Many scholars opposed this positivist approach, instead calling for a defense of social science through a demonstration of its unique strengths. Despite this criticism, leaders at the NSF sought to maintain legitimacy through scientism, actively working against attempts to separate from their aspirational peers such as the creation of a separate National Social Science Foundation (130). Chapter 5 shows how the combination of financial austerity and opposition from legislators in both the Democratic and Republican parties in the late 1960s and 1970s created a hostile environment for social science research at the NSF. Emblematic of this period was Senator William Proxmire’s “golden fleece,” which he awarded to the federal research that he saw as the biggest waste of taxpayer money – often NSF-supported social science research (146-155). Chapters 6 and 7 highlight the emphasis the NSF put on the “hard wing” of social science. This included “big science” work like the National Election Studies, and projects that incorporated economics methods and theories (195, 256). Chapters 7 and 8 bring us through the massive cuts to federal support of social science during the Reagan era, further driving the NSF to supporting only the “hardest” social science research.

The two final chapters directly address the through line of the book: The NSF played a major role in the post-war ascendance of a positivist case for the social sciences, one where research is objective, non-controversial, and above all, scientific enough to be a part of a unified scientific community. Those controlling the NSF’s purse strings perennially sought legitimacy through association with more respected fields, a choice that ultimately weakened, rather than strengthened, social science. Solovey closes with the recommendation that social scientists should seriously consider advocating for a separate national foundation. He acknowledges how unlikely it is for such an effort to succeed but argues that we should not make excuses “for resigned acceptance of the status quo” (316). This is a compelling argument, and this history of the social sciences at the NSF is strong evidence that the scientism approach has failed, but it is unclear who Solovey is trying to convince. He points to Congress and the NSF itself as obstacles to such a foundation, but what about rank-and-file social scientists?

Social Science for What? includes portraits of those in or closely tied to the NSF who were true believers in the unity of science, those that promoted scientism despite their private beliefs, and examples of the exclusion of left-leaning social scientists from decisions on the future of the NSF. An important part of this story is the choices made by departments that prioritized the “hard wing” of social science to legitimate themselves, and their legacy through the students that they trained, which could be addressed more explicitly in this study. Social Science for What? is an excellent book, and one that I am glad to have on my bookshelf, but it leaves open the question of where a new National Social Science Foundation would fit into existing efforts to buttress nuclear age social science. Perhaps the implications of the NSF’s impact on these fields further reinforces how patronage moulds social science, but are the biggest barriers to a better social science Congress, the NSF, and private sources of funding? I left this book wondering that if social scientists must abandon the positivist argument of their contribution, does the path forward involve convincing the people with the purse strings or should we rather convince our colleagues?