Cambridge University Press has released a paperback edition of Andrew Jewett's ambitious investigation into how it is that many of America's intellectual and cultural leaders in the first half of the twentieth century came to see the country's universities—as opposed to its churches—as the arbiters and even the generators of the character traits that sustain a democratic culture. Beginning with the advent of the modern research university in the decades after the Civil War—and the subsequent rise of the social sciences—and ending with the rebellion against the social sciences and their “fatuous optimism about human perfectability” (338) that was launched in the 1940s and 1950s by historians such as Perry Miller and Arthur Schlesinger, Jewett has written a book that will probably become a staple on the exam lists of many future Ph.D. candidates in American intellectual history. I am not sure it should become a staple on the lists of those students who wish to specialize in American religious history, but Jewett certainly tells a story that will be of some interest and use to anyone who wants to interrogate the so-called “secularization” of American culture.

Jewett's subject is the “massive effort to mobilize science, so successful in its industrial applications, as a resource for strengthening American democratic practices” (1). This effort, according to Jewett, was rooted in the belief that science offered Americans “the cultural and political benefits that flowed from mainline Protestantism, without the divisive theological claims and metaphysical baggage” (2). Those benefits were thought to include the formation of a collective cultural character in the United States that would “strengthen the state as a counterpoint to big business” and “make possible the modes of self-government endorsed by republicans, liberals, and democrats” (1–2).

This belief in the potential of science, which Jewett calls “scientific democracy,” was held by politicians and business leaders such as Andrew Dickson White and Ezra Cornell, the founders of Cornell University; it found a popular audience in the last few decades of the nineteenth century, thanks to the publishing efforts of Edward L. Youmans, the founder of Popular Science Monthly; and it was articulated most vociferously—and perhaps most effectively, if educational reforms and regulations of industry are to be the standard of judgment—in the early twentieth century by psychologists such as John Dewey and William James, sociologists such and Talcott Parsons and Louis Wirth, philosophers and journalists such as Herbert Croly, Horace Kallen, and Walter Lippman, and anthropologists such as Franz Boas.

Scientific democracy, we are told, was an alternative to liberal Protestantism, though it did not stand in opposition to liberal Protestantism. Indeed, Jewett places some of the early architects of the social gospel movement in the same camp as Croly, who was known to have had a sympathetic attitude toward August Comte's calls for a secular “religion of humanity.” Jewett notes that George Herron referred to Sociology as a “science of sacrifice; of redemption; of atonement,” and that Walter Rauschenbusch aligned himself with progressive reformers who had been trained at Chicago's School of Social Service when he insisted that his task as a minister was not one of “getting individuals to heaven, but of transforming the life on earth into the harmony of heaven” (75–76). “Scientific democracy,” Jewett writes, “emerged within liberal Protestant circles and drew heavily on a pre-existing body of Christian political thought” (24).

As the Rauschenbusch quote shows, however, that Christian thought lacked a certain degree of theological precision, and its uncompromising faith in humanity ultimately brought neo-orthodox theologians like Reinhold Niebuhr, whom Jewett insists “shared many of the scientific democrats' political views,” to insist that the social sciences were unavoidably different from the natural sciences, because they should not “proceed without incorporating Christian insights” (218). Those insights needed to acknowledge the “irrational tendencies of the human person,” something that social gospelers, many of whom saw sin as a rational response to the endemic corruption of capitalism, did not do (327).

In the end, Andrew Jewett tells us, the movement toward scientific democracy “failed to achieve its political goals, even as it powerfully aided the growth of scientific authority in general” (1). The scientific democrats, in many respects, brought it on themselves. Not only did their “value-neutral” approach to the study of human psychology and behavior fail to capture the loyalties of a generation that had just experienced Adolph Hitler and witnessed the horrific capabilities of totalitarianism, but “by the mid-1960s,” Jewett writes, a “new generation of critics” had become alarmed at the cozy relationship between science and the growing military industrial complex (366). These critics—many of whom populate American universities today, according to Jewett—shared “a deep-seated suspicion of ‘scientificity,’ which is said to have caused dire political consequences as well as epistemological confusion” (366).

Anyone who is familiar with the work of Alex Rosenberg, who teaches Philosophy at Duke University, Daniel Dennett, who directs the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts, or Thomas Nagel, who teaches Philosophy and Law at New York University might question Jewett's conclusion that “a powerful aversion to pretensions of scientific status represents one of the strongest intellectual currents not only in the humanities, but also in what are sometimes euphemistically called the ‘humanistic social sciences’” (367). These scholars have maintained a rigorous commitment to the social and cultural potential of science, even as they have sought to correct some of the short-comings of Jewett's scientific democrats. Rosenburg in particular has put forward the idea of “nice nihilism,” which he says captures the genetic propensity among human beings to be committed to “fairness, justice, equality, and other norms that obstruct looking out for number one and number one's offspring” (The Atheist's Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life Without Illusions, [New York: Norton, 2011], 115–116).

Nevertheless, it is certainly true in the dawn of the twenty-first century, Americans are not exhibiting a collective cultural character that defines the state as a “counterpoint to big business”—which was, of course, the scientific democrats' goal (1). In that sense, then, Jewett's observations about the failures of the scientific democrats may be accurate.