I. INTRODUCTION
During the first two decades of the Cold War, a new kind of academic figure became prominent in American public life: the credentialed social scientist or expert in the sciences of administration who was also, to use the parlance of the time, a “man of affairs.” Some were academic high-fliers conscripted into government roles in which their intellectual and organizational talents could be exploited. McGeorge Bundy, Walt Rostow, and Robert McNamara are the archetypes of such persons.Footnote 1 An overlapping group of scholars became policymakers and political advisers on issues ranging from social welfare provision to nation-building in emerging postcolonial states.Footnote 2 Many of these men—and almost without exception they were men—were also consummate operators within the patronage system that grew up around American universities after World War II.Footnote 3 Postwar leaders of the social and administrative sciences such as Talcott Parsons and Herbert Simon were skilled scientific brokers of just this sort: good “committee men,” grant-getters, proponents of interdisciplinary inquiry, and institution-builders.Footnote 4 This hard-nosed, suit-wearing, business-like persona was connected to new, technologically refined forms of social science. No longer sage-like social philosophers or hardscrabble, number-crunching empiricists, academic human scientists portrayed themselves as possessors of tools and programs designed for precision social engineering. Antediluvian “social science” was eschewed in favour of mathematical, behavioural, and systems-based approaches to “human relations” such as operations research, behavioral science, game theory, systems theory, and cognitive science.
Whilst many of the key actors and research programs of this period have fallen out of favour, the Cold War reformation of the human sciences is beginning to attract widespread scholarly attention. It may not be too strong to suggest that this “Cold War moment” in the history of the social sciences is becoming a genuinely interdisciplinary research field. Intellectual historians, sociologists and historians of science, and even practicing social scientists have begun to address a range of themes and puzzles concerning the postwar transformation of the American human sciences. The connections between these diverse inquiries, and the prospects for forging common cause (as well as marking points of divergence) have not, however, been explored in detail. My purpose in this essay is to begin work on this historiographical and methodological task. I do so in the hope that a greater degree of self-consciousness regarding research aims and methods will be of strategic benefit to those currently engaged in the field.
I shall not, however, offer an encyclopedic survey of the relevant literatures.Footnote 5 Instead, I want to take up what I view as a central thread in recent studies of the postwar human sciences. One way of viewing the Cold War reorientation of the American human sciences is through the prism of theory and practice. What we see, according to some commentators, is social-scientific knowledge in the service of the state. On this reckoning, the theoretical vocabularies of modernization theory, operations research, systems analysis, and kindred enterprises were used to undertake and legitimize certain kinds of political action: military intervention in the “Third World,” bureaucratic reform, welfare policy, and so on.Footnote 6 This understanding of the theory–practice relationship is familiar to intellectual historians, and especially to historians of political theory who adopt the contextual method of the Cambridge School.Footnote 7 Whilst acknowledging the force of this historical vision of theory-in-practice, my aim in what follows is to show that an alternative account of the theory–practice dyad, which cuts orthogonally across the contextual approach, offers a more comprehensive model for framing the connections between the Cold War human sciences and the social and political worlds in which they moved. This model interprets theories as forms of intellectual activity—that is, as themselves historically specific and culturally defined forms of practice. These theoretical practices involve a panoply of activities: operations of the self upon the self, with the aim of producing the kind of subject or persona who could be the bearer of the knowledge expressed in the theory; the production and skilful manipulation of certain kinds of instruments; and the use of theoretical tools and vocabularies as premises for certain kinds of social intervention. In a word, these ways of reading theory as a practical activity suggest that some of the major theoretical traditions in the human sciences may usefully be treated as forms of subculture.Footnote 8 That is to say, certain modes of human-scientific theorizing would seem to have embodied “forms of life” as much as cognitively grasped bodies of doctrine.Footnote 9
In section II, I will explain in more detail what historians mean when they treat theory as subculture, and why they have adopted this view in opposition to long-held visions of scientific theory. But it is worth stating at the outset what advantages such a perspective holds for historians of the Cold War human sciences. First, by viewing theory as, in the first instance, a form of social practice—rather than as a web of beliefs, a set of mental states, or a linguistic repertoire (bearing in mind that theories are these things too)—we align interpretive method with the instrumental, practically engaged perspective from which postwar social-scientific men of affairs viewed their own professional activities. Our present-day grasp of the material culture of theory follows in the wake of the scientific brokers and advisers who self-consciously built such a material culture in the decades after World War II. Second, the adoption of the theoretical-practices model allows us to draw parallels and contrasts between the history of the Cold War human sciences, where such an approach is present without yet having been completely articulated, and the history of the modern natural (usually physical) sciences, where the model has been most fully elaborated.
My exposition below will follow out the implications of both of these claims. After tracing the emergence of the subcultural view of theory in section II, I shall demonstrate in section III the effectiveness of the theoretical-practices perspective for the history of the postwar American human sciences. In section IV I take up two issues that would seem, in at least some cases, to mark out the subcultural view in the history of the human sciences from that in the study of the physical sciences: the potential and complicated operations of the “looping effect of human kinds,” and the question of the “performativity” of theory.Footnote 10 What these points of contrast suggest, I shall argue, is that the question of performance in the history of the human sciences cannot be limited to the theorists themselves; rather, elements of the theory itself—categories, classifications, descriptions—may be taken up into wider, non-scientific forms of social practice. As a tool for framing these interpretive challenges, I suggest in conclusion a threefold heuristic for historians who are engaged in understanding the tangled skeins of theory and world in the modern human sciences.
II. THEORY FROM FRAMEWORK TO SUBCULTURE
The subcultural or practice-based view of theory I shall apply to the Cold War human sciences in section III issues from two independent sources. The first, and most long-standing, is science studies. As with so many traditions in this field, it began with a revolt against a vision of scientific knowledge advanced by the Vienna Circle. In the picture of science offered by logical empiricists, theories were viewed as changeable linguistic frameworks built upon a theory-independent and universally valid realm of observation, which was expressed in what the leaders of the Vienna Circle termed “protocol sentences.”Footnote 11 Scientific theories, in this view, were linguistic constructions imposed upon the observations contained in the protocol language. It was precisely this shared translatability into a neutral observation language that for Carnap made possible the much-vaunted “unity of science.” The fire of later “antipositivists” such as Thomas Kuhn and Norwood Russell Hanson was directed precisely against the existence of any such protocol language of pure observation. There was, they argued, no neutral language or Archimedean perspective against which theories could be tested. Rather, observation was unavoidably theory-laden; “the facts” existed only relative to a conceptual scheme or perceptual gestalt. In this construal, theory was primary and observation epiphenomenal.Footnote 12
In the 1960s and into the 1970s, this was a heady and exotic doctrine. But more recent work in the history and sociology of the physical sciences—itself stimulated by thinkers such as Kuhn and Hanson—has found unwarrantedly totalizing, historically insensitive aspects to antipositivist philosophy of science. The philosopher Ian Hacking was among the first to open up this line of critique,Footnote 13 but it was the historian of physics Peter Galison who pressed it most forcefully. By abolishing the autonomy of observational phenomena, Galison argued, Kuhn and his antipositivist colleagues assimilated theory and observation into a “block representation” of scientific knowledge: their epistemological independence revoked, experimental results “were no longer exempt from breaks” in theory. “When theory changed, the rupture tore through the whole fabric of physics—including experiment/observation.”Footnote 14 Antipositivists tacitly accepted the positivist claim that the unity of science could be secured only by a common language, but drew from their arguments against theory-neutral observation the conclusion that revolutionary changes in theory produced incommensurable languages and, indeed, different ontological worlds.
According to Galison, this inversion of “central metaphors” in the philosophy of science produced a series of holistic and relativistic images of scientific knowledge. Quine's “conceptual schemes,” Kuhn's “paradigms,” Lakatos's “research programmes,” Polanyi's “tacit knowledge”—each offered a variation on the theme of the theory-observation as a world unto itself.Footnote 15 Yet, for Galison, the most striking thing about the antipositivist vision of theory was its indebtedness to the logical empiricists. Carnap's “linguistic frameworks,” Otto Neurath's holism, and Philipp Frank's “conceptual environment” each rendered scientific knowledge relative to a conceptual scheme, with the crucial difference that the frameworks into which theories were to be paraphrased should in turn be translatable into a protocol language. Here were otherwise distinct images of science composed in similar epistemological registers.Footnote 16
Galison's criticisms of framework-based antipositivism drew not on new philosophical accounts of theory, but on historical and sociological studies of scientific experiment. The sharpest break with the science-as-theoretical-framework tradition came with the turn toward the study of experimental practices and the “material culture” of science during the 1980s. Focusing their attention on autonomous dimensions of scientific practice—the craft skill of the experimentalist, technology and engineering in the laboratory, patronage and politics in scientific research—few historians and sociologists of science in the 1980s and early 1990s had much time for the grand, abstract theoretical frameworks of yore.Footnote 17
In due course, however, the study of theory mounted a comeback in the history of science, precisely on the new empirical landscape of practice, technology, and instrumentation. Such an approach could already be glimpsed among the antipositivists. Kuhn's account of the “disciplinary matrix,” which was designed to correct the promiscuous use of the term “paradigm” in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, laid particular emphasis upon the concrete models and practices that bound scientific communities together around a common theory.Footnote 18 Clifford Geertz, meanwhile, issued a call in the early 1980s for an “ethnography of modern thought” in which the pursuit of pure mathematics or string theory was to be inspected as a culturally defined mode of being-in-the-world.Footnote 19 Some of the early science studies literature on material culture and laboratory life made similar claims. In Science in Action, published in 1987, Bruno Latour vigorously denounced the tendency to think of theories and scientific abstractions as processes closeted in the mind. They were better conceived of as concrete “centres of calculation” involved in the coordination of scientific inquiry.Footnote 20 Appearing in the same year as Latour's iconoclastic book, Peter Galison's How Experiments End argued that “theoretical commitments” in modern physics existed on multiple levels, and entered into the practical conduct of experiment and instrumentation in various ways and for a variety of reasons.Footnote 21
This perspective was given a programmatic statement during the 1990s in Galison's influential conception of the “trading zone” among scientific subcultures.Footnote 22 Galison invoked this notion explicitly as a countermetaphor against both positivist and antipositivist approaches. Rejecting the latter's all-or-nothing block representations of the relationship between theory and observation, Galison highlighted the “intercalation” of multiple subcultures of theory, experiment, and instrumentation in the microphysics community of the twentieth century. Theorists, experimentalists, and laboratory engineers tended to have their own journals, graduate programs, conferences, and institutional homes. Employing different understandings of theory, instrumental techniques, and standards of argumentation, these subcultures evolved at varying speeds and experienced “revolutionary” breaks in practice at different times. Drawing on linguistic anthropology, Galison suggested that these distinct subcultures coordinated their actions not by composing a comprehensive translation manual or learning to work in a different ontological world, but by fashioning “pidgin” and “creole” languages that could allow exchanges of ideas to take place in local settings.Footnote 23
Recent studies of the physical sciences have elaborated upon the subcultural approach to scientific theory. Historians of physics and organic chemistry such as Andrew Warwick, Ursula Klein, Andrew Pickering, and David Kaiser have insisted that the insights and methods of the study of experimental practices be applied to the study of theories, now conceived not as systems of propositions or perceptual gestalts, but precisely as forms of technology, tool use, and craft skill. Noting the “asymmetry” that still existed in the early 1990s between “culture-specific explanations of experimental practice” and the study of “theorizing . . . as a transcendent and solitary activity,” Warwick insisted that the “same micro-sociological studies that inspired the historical investigation of experimental practice also provide a framework for the historicization of theoretical practice.” In a similar challenge to the prejudice that theoretical work in science was “more ‘night thoughts’ than desk work, more Weltbild than Fingerspitzengefühl,” Kaiser has defiantly asserted that the post-industrial theoretical physicist is primarily in the business of “fashioning theoretical tools and performing calculations.”Footnote 24
Theoretical artisans in science are to be found wherever precise formal techniques exist for manipulating ideas and data. In her studies of the early uses of Jacob Berzelius's famous chemical formulae, Klein treats the Berzelian symbolic machinery as “paper tools” that “became ubiquitous . . . in experimentation, model-building, classification, and conceptual and theoretical development” in organic chemistry.Footnote 25 Berzelian formulae became the mark of a particular subcultural style in Victorian chemistry. Moreover, just as individuals are inducted into a subculture by learning how to employ its signature motifs, so the appropriate use of theoretical tools demands calibrated forms of training and models of correct behavior. Already in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Kuhn had attacked the notion that scientific knowledge involved memorizing a body of formal laws and algorithmic rules for their application. Rather, trainee scientists learned to perform certain model puzzle solutions and then, with the appropriate examples, extended that model to new problems in the field.Footnote 26 Drawing on the work of Michel Foucault, Warwick and Kaiser have attempted to flesh out Kuhn's pedagogical theory of knowledge. The “disciplinary regimes” of schools and universities, they suggest, operate on the bodies and dispositions of scientists-in-training; supervised drills, classroom demonstrations, and graded levels of examination are designed to shape the bodily movements and comportments of the student so that they can become the subjects of particular forms of scientific knowledge. Such top-down mechanisms of power, Warwick and Kaiser insist, are intertwined with “complex regimes of self-discipline” in which the student works to constitute him-/herself as the recognizable subject of scientific truth. These internal and external mechanisms are the means by which a theoretical subculture generates its own particular skills and styles of thinking.Footnote 27
From this perspective, a theory can be characterized as a subculture if it requires a particular set of transformative exercises upon the subject of knowledge: a theory qua subculture will make people (“theorists”) with a distinct persona and set of practical capabilities. In seizing upon these aspects of theoretical practice, historians of science find themselves—to date unwittingly—making common cause with an emergent history of “theory” in the twentieth-century humanities.Footnote 28 This is the second source of the subcultural, practice-oriented view of theoretical discourses. In terms similar to those of Peter Galison, but with the historical study of philosophy and cultural theory rather than science as his primary target, Ian Hunter has decried the tendency to reduce historical understanding to “quasi-transcendental structures.” These “structures” include the “paradigm, problematic, Weltanschauung, and discourse.”Footnote 29 For Hunter, the appeal to these quasi-a priori frameworks forestalls a genuinely historical understanding of theory, because it converts empirical historiography into an instance of reason reflecting on its own conditions of possibility. In other words, the historian of theory is open to the philosophical charge that their mode of inquiry is itself derivative of, or subordinate to, a priori structures of historical reason (e.g. an “empiricist” episteme) that are properly comprehended by theory/philosophy itself.Footnote 30 The historicity of theory is thus made over into a philosophical–hermeneutic problem. Hunter's response to this challenge is to offer “falsifiable accounts of theory in terms of particular arts of reasoning, modes of cultivation, pedagogical routines, and so on.”Footnote 31 Like Warwick and Kaiser, Hunter eschews the notion that theories must be studied as bodies of formal propositions. Inspired by the historian of philosophy Pierre Hadot and by the later Foucault, he conceives of theoretical texts as encoding sets of “spiritual exercises” that a subject performs on his or her self in order to embody a certain kind of knowing subject. The practice of theory in the humanities, according to Hunter, represents a “technology of the self” in precisely Foucault's sense of an activity “which permits individuals to effect by their own means, or with the help of others, a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct and way of being.”Footnote 32
Hunter proposes that the texts of post-structuralism and critical theory specify spiritual exercises to be performed in order to acquire the persona of the theorist, in much the same way that Hadot has described the pedagogy of philosophy in antiquity.Footnote 33 This is just how Hunter reads Husserl's central concept of the transcendental reduction or epoché. For Hunter, the task of the historian of theory is to chart the rise, diffusion, and supercession of the “arts of reasoning” that make these kinds of persona possible in specific academic contexts.
Standing back from these diverse historiographical projects, we can make some general observations. Faced with similar obstacles, historians of science, on the one hand, and of the humanities, on the other, have opted for similar solutions. The shared challenge has been the problematic historicity of theories. The common solution has been to project theories out of the discursive realm of propositions, concepts, and Weltanschauungen, and into the non-discursive social arena of subcultural rituals, tools, and training exercises.Footnote 34 In the history and philosophy of science, the concept of theory has run the gamut of logical calculi, Weltanschauungen, and, in less charitable renditions, the occult operation of “night thoughts.” Theories were made objects for material histories by attaching them to subcultures characterized by distinctive modes of tool use, discipline, and subjectivity. In the history of philosophy and cultural theory, meanwhile, the challenge has been to overturn or circumvent the claim that the contextual and historical status of philosophy or cultural theory is itself a philosophical problem. The response here has been to interpret this claim as itself expressive of a certain art of reasoning, which can be studied in the terms of spiritual exercises and self-fashioning.
In both cases, historical attention has turned to the practical processes whereby certain kinds of subject are formed in local institutional and cultural contexts. The usual circuit of intellectual production is reversed: rather than examining historical agents who make theories about the world, we now speak of theories that mandate the institutionalization of certain kinds of subject and social practice. Theories, in this reckoning, are performed by those who espouse them in some sort of vocational or professional capacity—that is to say, they are performed by theorists.
It is of vital importance to underscore the specificity of these claims. The notion of a more or less autonomous domain of “theory” and of professional “theorists” is salient in modern physics, and in the Anglo-American humanities academy since the 1960s. Unsurprisingly, the history of these fields has produced significant work on theoretical practices and the “social production” of theorists. But these are not unchanging or universal categories. Theories are, of course, heterogeneous things: even in a single discipline, the word “theory” can denote an eclectic range of concepts and activities.Footnote 35 Even more importantly, there are disciplines with no clear boundaries between theory and experiment, or between theorists and general practitioners in the field. Among the natural sciences, for example, the subcultural view of theory would be much harder to apply in biology than in physics. In the humanities and social sciences, meanwhile, the notion of a theorist in psychology or anthropology is also less obviously salient than in literature or cultural studies. Of course there are many theories and theoretical texts in biology or anthropology, but the critical mass of institutions and traditions of academic practice that can make theorizing into an independent way of life within these disciplines would not seem to be present.
In bringing the subcultural view of theory to bear on the Cold War human sciences, then, we should not suppose that this is a routine operation, which might be carried out in any academic discipline, or that it is straightforward even for the fields examined below. Nor do I mean to suggest that this is the only view of the practical dimensions of theorizing. (In addition to the contextual method of Skinner, noted above, Pierre Bourdieu's treatment of scholarly fields offers an alternative manner of interpreting the articulation and defence of theoretical programs.Footnote 36) Rather, I aim to show that the subcultural model illuminates and raises to explicit methodological articulation ongoing research concerns in the history of the Cold War human sciences. Equally, however, I shall highlight important points of divergence in this field of inquiry from the accounts of theoretical practices outlined above. Indeed, whilst the next section explores a movement toward the subcultural model in the historiography of modernization theory, systems theory, and other theoretical discourses in the postwar human sciences, in section IV I outline the ways in which the literature on these disciplines stretches this model in new and significant directions.
III. THEORY, SUBCULTURE, AND THE AMERICAN HUMAN SCIENCES
Historians of the American human sciences have not as yet been direct contributors to the methodological upheavals surrounding the study of theories. One explanation for this is that the concept and practice of theory in the human-science disciplines has a peculiar history. When the social sciences were formed into professional academic fields in the United States, “theory” was not a keyword.Footnote 37 From the late nineteenth century to the interwar decades, many social scientists claimed expertise and professional status by emphasizing the rigorously empirical, quantitative, and objective status of their research findings. Eager to cross the threshold from good works to scientific vocation, university practitioners of the social disciplines placed their faith in measurement and instrumentation, treating the accumulation of statistics and observational data as the cardinal scientific virtues. America's encounter with modernity was made the object of empirical laws and transhistorical norms.Footnote 38
The stock of theory in the social sciences rose slowly during the 1930s, and only then after prodding from several quarters. Relativity theory and the quantum revolution had shown that sheer conceptual creativity could in itself drive scientific innovation.Footnote 39 In addition, heuristic conceits, notably that of “system” and “organism,” had come to play a central role in the natural sciences, thereby drawing attention to the centrality of conceptual frameworks in the making of knowledge.Footnote 40 Meanwhile, a widespread “anthropological sensibility,” nurtured during the 1920s and pushed hardest by the students of Franz Boas, underscored the centrality of symbolic practices in defining cultural difference and human understanding.Footnote 41 The influx of intellectual émigrés from Hitler's Germany intensified an existing awareness of the European efflorescence of social theory.Footnote 42 Moreover, aspects of social phenomena, principally those of economic exchange and market dynamics, yielded to mathematical formalization at the hands of a new generation of technically sophisticated inquirers.Footnote 43 These developments did not induce social scientists to abandon their empiricist predilections, but they legitimized the idea that theoretical abstraction had a role to play in the discovery of social laws. The possession of a systematic conceptual scheme became the sine qua non of cutting-edge social science.Footnote 44
The tipping point for the fortunes of theory in the American human sciences came during World War II. The wartime maelstrom of problem-oriented, interdisciplinary research plunged human scientists into a new world of concepts, methods, and research practices.Footnote 45 In the wake of this scientific–technological immersion, the nature and function of “theory” became a subject of increasing concern in sociology, political science, and economics; new traditions of theory slowly became embedded in these and cognate fields. Historians have identified four major interdisciplinary networks of theoretical practices in the early Cold War era: the systems sciences, rational-choice theory, behavioural science, and modernization theory.
The “cyborg” or systems sciences encompassed game theory, cybernetics, operations research, information theory and early computer science.Footnote 46 If, as Philip Mirowski argues, economics became a cyborg science in the 1940s, so too sociology, political science, psychology, and urban studies had a stake in the systems approach.Footnote 47 Standing close to the systems sciences was rational-choice theory. With its origins in economic decision theory and the mathematical logic of relations, the rational-choice research program blurred into the cyborg sciences. But its associations with political theory, political science, public policy, and even Rawlsian political philosophy prevented it from being assimilated entirely to systems research.Footnote 48 Lying athwart these ambiguously imbricated traditions of theory is “behavioral science”—a phrase on the lips of many social scientists and foundation officers after World War II. Pioneers like James Grier Miller demanded their own “general theory” for the behavioral sciences that drew on psychology, psychiatry, functional sociology, and quantitative methods, as well as the systems approach.Footnote 49 A connected, but again distinct, endeavor was modernization theory. Incubated in the hothouse of Talcott Parsons's interdisciplinary Department of Social Relations, modernization theory put down roots in Chicago and at MIT, drawing into its ambit economists, area-studies specialists, anthropologists, political scientists, social psychologists, and sociologists. Modernizationists studied political, economic, and social systems, and they drew deeply from the well of behavioral science. But, as Nils Gilman has shown, their ideas trace a different genealogy from that of the cyborg sciences, rational-choice theory, or behavioral science.Footnote 50
The cyborg, modernizationist, rational-choice, and behavioralist traditions of theorizing make a good fit for the subcultural glove. Much of Philip Mirowski's Machine Dreams: How Economics Became a Cyborg Science is given over to detailed accounts of the research culture at RAND (in operations research) and the Cowles Commission (as it moved from quantitative economic analysis to embrace a panoply of systems models).Footnote 51 Like Galison, Mirowski is interested in locally formed theoretical practices, each with its own favoured tools and norms of good practice. Again like Galison, Mirowski aims to reveal the ways in which these discrete subcultures combine to form an intercalated culture, although now the culture in question is that of neoclassical economics rather than microphysics.Footnote 52 E. Roy Weintraub, meanwhile, has explored the changing meaning of the principal stylistic motif of neoclassicism in postwar American economics: mathematical expression.Footnote 53
The capacity of the postwar human sciences to generate distinctive subjects of theoretical knowledge has also been demonstrated. In his biography of Herbert Simon, Hunter Crowther-Heyck tracks the parallels between Simon's intellectual concern with the systems sciences and rational-choice theory, on the one hand, and, on the other, his performance as a “scientific broker” within the organizational maze of postwar scientific patronage. Simon's attempts to build up the Graduate School of Industrial Administration (GSIA) at Carnegie Tech during the 1950s reveal an exemplar, as much as a student, of organizational behavior.Footnote 54 Jamie Cohen-Cole's microhistory of interdisciplinary exchange at Harvard's Center for Cognitive Studies in the 1960s provides the most detailed example of how an emphasis upon subcultural practices can illuminate the history of the human sciences. In this analysis of the institutionalization of the field of cognitive science, Cohen-Cole's principal focus is on economies of tool exchange at the Center. In the interdisciplinary enthusiasm of the postwar human sciences, tool-trading was valued in its own right as the mark of progressive science. Cohen-Cole shows how these economies were established in seminars, lunch halls, and corridor conversations. Students of human cognitive creativity were themselves encouraged to embody the principles of creativity, informality, and open-mindedness.Footnote 55
The studies mentioned thus far have been produced by scholars with at least one foot in science studies. It might be thought natural that the subcultural conception of theory has made an impression upon these writers. But intellectual historians and social scientists have displayed a similar interest in subcultural histories. The literature on modernization theory, for example, is anchored in detailed case studies of the institutional spaces where modernization theorists forged ideas and plied their trade. These include Harvard's Department of Social Relations, the Social Science Research Council's Committee on Comparative Politics, and the Center for International Studies at MIT.Footnote 56 Precisely because these institutions were (with the partial exception of the SSRC's Committee on Comparative Politics) trading zones for practitioners of various disciplines, historians have enquired after the norms of intellectual exchange and theoretical research in such characteristic sites of academic practice in the Cold War era. David Engerman has undertaken a similar task for the shadow discipline of “sovietology,” which flourished primarily in interdisciplinary research institutes and centers within the expanding mid-century academy.Footnote 57 Equally institutional in orientation are Emily Hauptmann's investigations into the ramified meanings of “theory” in postwar political theory. Her attempts to tease out the contested claims to the mantle of theory among behavioralists, rational-choice theorists, and traditionalist political theorists draw her into explorations of theoretical ideologies at Harvard, Berkeley, and the Social Science Research Council.Footnote 58 S. M. Amadae and Bruce Bueno de Mesquita have pursued similar ends in their study of William Riker's school-building in “positive political theory” at the University of Rochester.Footnote 59
Hence many of the typical features of theoretical subcultures identified by the likes of Warwick, Kaiser, and Hunter are found in the American human sciences after World War II: tool use, pedagogical discipline, and subject-making are all present in recent histories of the postwar theoretical ferment of the social and psychological disciplines. I want to draw particular attention to one other subcultural device that was especially important to postwar human scientists. This is what I call the epistemological narrative. An important means of identifying oneself with a subculture is learning and then reproducing communal stories about the disciplinary subculture in question: its history, its aims, and the nature of the enterprise as a whole. The (re)telling of such stories not only demonstrates allegiance and signals membership; it may also justify and rationalize the ongoing practices and norms of the subculture. What I want to suggest is that narratives about the nature of theory and the epistemological standing of a particular discipline serve exactly these purposes. In the history of the American human sciences, such narratives have been a defining feature of a wide spectrum of disciplines since theory itself became a keyword in the 1930s.
There were both lay and specialist versions of epistemological narratives in these years, with a shift from the preponderance of the former to the latter taking place slowly during the 1950s. Emily Hauptmann's description of the three starkly divergent accounts of theory offered by Sheldon Wolin, David Easton, and William Riker offers an example of the importance of lay narratives about knowledge in defining the meaning of theory in political science. The young Easton drew on Talcott Parsons's epistemic accounts of social-systems theory, whilst Riker sought to echo an epistemological narrative about the nature of economic theory laid down by Milton Friedman in his 1953 essay “The Methodology of Positive Economics.”Footnote 60 The “specialization” of epistemological narratives ran more or less parallel to the emergence of the professional subfield of the philosophy of science, which was defined in its early years by a strongly linguistic and empiricist reading of the work of Carnap and Hempel.Footnote 61 Chicago-based students of Carnap such as Herbert Simon and the political scientist Abraham Kaplan began to frame their stories about theory in social science in terms of the syntactic or formal models of their teacher.Footnote 62 In later years, many behavioral scientists began to cite Kuhn in an effort to narrate themselves as moving beyond pre-paradigmatic chaos in social science. Economists, deep into the process of mathematization by the 1950s, worried less about philosophy of science, and held to Friedman's catechism about idealized assumptions and testable hypotheses.Footnote 63 But in each case, whether homespun common sense or technical articulation, stories about how disciplines made knowledge were woven into the practices that gave theoretical subcultures an identity. Epistemological narratives helped to stabilize modes of theorizing.
IV. LOOPING AND PERFORMATIVITY
Everything I have said so far about the American human sciences indicates the applicability and fruitfulness of the subcultural understanding of theory for the history of these disciplines. But I shall now argue that certain methodological and empirical considerations regarding the human sciences lead us in hitherto unanticipated directions. Insofar as theories involve certain forms of practice, they are caught up in worldly, quotidian matters: performances, comportments, training regimes, and so on. In the case of some of the human sciences at certain historical moments, however, theoretical practices are entangled in special ways with the world they seek to limn: as practices that are designed to produce knowledge about practices, theories in the human sciences may be taken up by the very objects they seek to understand. Hence the whole question of performance and theoretical practices is, as a matter of empirical concern, much broader in the history of the human sciences than it is in the history of the physical sciences.
It seems obvious to point out that the kinds of people posited in the human sciences—delinquents, the insane, homosexuals, the average citizen, the autistic child—are not neutral or purely external classifications. As Ian Hacking has observed, our knowledge of people of a certain type is meant to provide “principles according to which we can interfere, intervene, help, and improve.” That is why so many of the “human kinds” studied by the human sciences are linked to deviance and abnormality: child-abusers, suicides, schizophrenics, and so forth. Crucially, however, the lack of objective distance between the human sciences and the objects they study goes further than this. Theories and classifications in the human sciences do not “discover” an independently existing reality; they help, in part, to create it. Much of this comes down to the publicity of knowledge. Insofar as scientific descriptions of people are made available to the public, they may “change how we can think of ourselves, [and] change our sense of self-worth, even how we remember our own past.”Footnote 64 As such, the descriptions and classifications of persons generated by the human sciences have the capacity to “alter the space of possibilities for personhood”: they may become part of the descriptions that the individuals being classified draw upon when formulating their actions and identities.Footnote 65 Those labeled delinquents, for instance, may feel ashamed when they learn the meaning of this concept, and change their behavior in order to conform to the “normal” type. Or, to take an alternative example, those identified as homosexuals may incorporate that category into their own positive sense of personhood.Footnote 66 But these reactions in turn generate feedback effects: “New sorting and theorizing induces changes in self-conception and in behavior of the people classified. Those changes demand revisions of the classifications and theories . . . Kinds are modified, revised classifications are formed, and the classified change again, loop upon loop.”Footnote 67
Human kinds are by no means solely the provenance of fully fledged, systemic theories. Statistical categories found in the census, the survey, and the community study are as apt to become looping human kinds as are refined theories about the human mind or economic behavior. My principal point is that the looping effect places peculiar demands upon the history of theoretical subcultures in the human sciences when compared with the natural sciences. Hacking notes,
What camels, mountains, and microbes are doing does not depend on our words. What happens to tuberculosis bacilli depends on whether or not we poison them with BCG vaccine, but it does not depend upon how we describe them. Of course we poison them with a certain vaccine in part because we describe them in certain ways, but it is the vaccine that kills, not our words. Human action is more closely linked to human description than bacterial action is . . . The microbe's possibilities are delimited by nature, not by words. What is curious about human action is that by and large what I am deliberately doing depends upon the possibilities of description.Footnote 68
Here is philosophical terrain on which we must mark an important historical distinction. The historians of theoretical cultures whom we discussed earlier have tended to instrumentalize theories as “paper tools” or “spiritual exercises” and then turn them inward upon those who wielded or carry out those instrumental practices. It follows from this approach that one comes up against what one might call “mediation problems”: if theory is a way of life, then one has the problem of conceptualizing the relation between theoretical subcultures and the other disciplinary and institutional subcultures with which they are intercalated. This is exactly what Galison's trading-zone metaphor is designed to address. Compare this to Hacking's picture of the human sciences. Rather than confronting thick subcultural membranes through which they pierce only with great difficulty, the concepts and categories of the human sciences have the potential to contaminate the wider cultures of which they are a part. The theories and classifications of sociology, economics, psychology, anthropology, psychoanalysis, and kindred enterprises can therefore directly inform the intentional descriptions that constitute social practices.Footnote 69
In the history of the human sciences, then, the claim that theories are embedded in certain kinds of performance requires reinterpretation. Historians of theory such as Kaiser, Warwick, and Hunter have applied this maxim only to the theoreticians themselves. But if theoretical terms and classifications from the human sciences enter into the descriptions drawn upon for carrying on a social practice, those concepts and classifications are expressed in, and thereby shape, the social practices that the human sciences attempt to comprehend.Footnote 70 As such, human-scientific theories may not be performed exclusively by theorists, but also by social actors of others kinds: those who are studied by theorists, or those who wish to deploy a theoretical practice for ends other than the creation, maintenance, or transformation of the theoretical subculture itself. The performative dimensions of theories in the human sciences are thus, in principle, more extensive than in the natural sciences: in the latter, performativity relates only to theorists, whereas in the former either a theorist or a non-theorist drawing on an element of the theory itself may be said to “perform” a theory.
There, however, is the rub. Hacking's looping thesis might be an unexceptionable piece of philosophy, but as history or sociology it runs the danger of promiscuity. One might be seduced into thinking that the seepage of theory into the practices it comprehends is a transcendental condition of the human sciences. That intuition conflicts directly with the countervailing claim that the models and theories of the human sciences are by their very nature cut off from quotidian social practices. Pierre Bourdieu has argued that the origins of Western scholarship lie in the emergence, during the Renaissance, of a social division between the realm of economic necessities and the realm of symbolic production—art, literature, and science. Only in virtue of this social break have the arts and sciences been able to constitute themselves as distinct and autonomous fields, governed by their own rules and marked by jockeying for intellectual prestige and institutional power.Footnote 71 Bourdieu, no doubt, would cut the looping of theory at the threshold of the scientific field.
The historian must, I think, steer a middle course between the Scylla of the Hackingtonian loop and the Charybdis of the Bourdieusian field. We must never assume that the looping of theory into social performances is preordained, but neither should we separate as sharply as Bourdieu the realm of theoretical labour from that of worldly practice and embodied skill. Our task is rather to trace the tangled, shifting, and uncertain connections between the practices contained within a theoretical subculture and social practice of other kinds. It is up to historians of the human sciences to examine in what ways, if any, knowledge has looped into social practices, and how the transformation of those social practices in the face of such knowledge has, in turn, fed back into the inquiries of the human sciences. Much of Ian Hacking's recent historical research has explored how the human kinds of demography, social statistics, and psychology have been performed in the uses of social concepts such as the “normal” citizen, child abuse, multiple personality disorder, and autism. The critical intent of Hacking's diverse inquiries has been to demonstrate how tangled the looping of human kinds has been. Once released among the public, kinds have been stretched, restricted, and applied for a variety of social purposes.Footnote 72 Sarah Igo has carried out a similar project in her history of the circulation of social scientific surveys and the creation of a mass public in the United States during the middle decades of the twentieth century. Among historians of American social science, Igo is one of the few to have explicitly adopted Hacking's looping framework as the foundation for a study of social-scientific knowledge.Footnote 73
The question of looping and performativity has been examined at most length in recent anthropological studies of modern financial economics and the operation of markets. This literature has emerged from the work of Michel Callon, who aims to combat a prevalent “externalism” which holds the discipline of economics apart from the empirical existence of economies. Drawing primarily on the examples of marketing and accounting, Callon asserts that the centrality of those practices to economic activity makes it “meaningless to distinguish between an existing reality (economy) and the analytical discourse explaining it.” Rejecting the tendency of economic sociologists to bemoan the thin account of economic agency provided by neoclassical economics, Callon declares, “economy is embedded not in society but in economics.”Footnote 74
Turning anew to the sociology of capitalist markets, one of the great themes of classical social theory, scholars are rejecting the traditional notion that economics attempts to create freestanding representations of market processes (which economic sociologists must then insist leaves out power, or cultural context, or the fullness of human agency). Advocates of the performative approach “recognize economics not as a (misguided) science of capitalism but as its technology, that is, as one of the active ingredients in the production and reproduction of the market order.”Footnote 75 Rather than interposing causal arrows between people and cultures on the one hand, and the operation of markets on the other, economic sociologists are now investigating how knowledge, custom, and people are built into, and generated by, markets.Footnote 76 The most radical forms of performativity are those in which an economic model is incorporated into the “algorithms, procedures, routines, and material devices” by which a market operates.Footnote 77
Donald MacKenzie and Yuval Millo have tested Callon's sweeping claim about the performativity of economics in one crucial case: the history of financial derivatives exchanges formed during the early 1970s.Footnote 78 Their study makes the contingency and complexity of the looping effect clear. Taking the establishment and development of the Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE) as their core example, MacKenzie and Millo suggest that economic theory (more specifically, the theory of financial derivatives markets) was performative in two respects. First, the arguments of economists played a central role in making derivatives markets appear legitimate investment strategies. Trading in options and futures had been met with “instinctual hostility” for generations by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Speculation on stock options, in particular, had been held responsible for the Wall Street Crash of 1929; such derivatives markets were held by many regulators to be the moral equivalent of gambling. (One SEC chairman “compared options to ‘marijuana and thalidomide’.”) However, two studies in the late 1960s—one by the Princeton economists Burton Malkiel, Richard Quandt, and William Baumol on options, the other by Milton Friedman on currency futures—argued for the rationality and prospective stability of derivatives markets, and helped to remove the cultural stigma that surrounded them. The success of those arguments, along with the creation of new mathematical techniques for modeling stock price volatility, helped to smooth the path for the SEC's approval of the establishment of the CBOE and a sister currency futures exchange, the International Monetary Market. These Chicago-based derivatives markets spawned similar exchanges in Europe, thereby setting the model for the revolution in global finance since the early 1970s.Footnote 79
Economic theory was also embedded in the CBOE in the form of the seminal Black–Scholes–Merton option pricing model. Many economists view “Black–Scholes” as a remarkably successful predictive theory of how options markets function; for some, it is “the most successful theory not only in finance, but in all economics.”Footnote 80 The Black–Scholes option pricing equation provided a means of calculating what the price of an option should be given certain information on underlying stock prices, the price volatility of that stock, and other parameters whose values could in principle be empirically determined. MacKenzie and Millo show that Black–Scholes was far from a neutral tool used to predict developments in an independent market reality. Black, Scholes, and Merton had built what were in the early 1970s some unrealistic assumptions into their model, including unattainable requirements for the adjustment of the stock portfolios upon which options prices were fixed. Just before and immediately after the CBOE opened in April 1973, prices predicted by the Black–Scholes model did not closely match those actually produced in the Chicago options market.
In the following fifteen years, however, Black–Scholes was made accurate because the market and its traders were adjusted to fit the assumptions of the model. Legal and technological restrictions on the construction of stock portfolios were lifted, such that adjustments could be made in the ways Black–Scholes had supposed. More important, the cumbersomeness of using the Black–Scholes model as a calculating tool on the trading floor came to seem less of an obstacle. A spike in stock prices in 1978 wiped out many of those traders who had forsaken the cautious hedging and spreading tactics encouraged by the use of Black–Scholes for a bet on continued payoffs for options on “blue-chip” stocks. The larger firms that were increasingly replacing individual traders were keen to use the careful calculations of the Black–Scholes model to guide their commitments across several markets. Finally, option pricing theory was creatively “misused.” Rather than using Black–Scholes to calculate option prices, traders began to run the model backwards, taking option prices and feeding them into the equation to calculate the “implied volatility” of the underlying stock. It was this volatility that determined whether options on the stock in question were more or less valuable. Black–Scholes was now used to determine trading strategies. Hence traders themselves, by incorporating the model into the very understanding of what they were doing, helped Black–Scholes pass the empirical tests for accuracy to which econometricians subjected it. The equation “made itself true” by providing the descriptions according to which traders “performed” the CBOE.Footnote 81
Then came the calamitous stock market crash of October 1987. That event is seminal for MacKenzie and Millo because it points to the limits—or rather the complexity—of performativity in economics. The October crash traumatized CBOE traders. They could no longer believe that price changes in stock markets would be “log-normally distributed”—a key assumption of Black–Scholes. Rather, they began to price stocks on the assumption that there would be regular crashes in stock prices. This made options to sell at low strike prices relatively more desirable and hence expensive.Footnote 82 In “theory,” the Black–Scholes equation should still hold; certainly, options traders still use it to calculate implied volatilities. But they no longer make it entirely true because they do not follow the (statistically rational) assumption of log-normal distribution of price changes. Now it is the economists who must revise their assumptions and retheorize their understanding of options markets in order to take account of the new situation. Performativity is not a one-way street. Economics cannot merely perform the market it wishes to have any more than political theorists can have the polity they desire simply by theorizing it. Performativity entails the possibility of “counterperformativity”—or what Hacking calls “feedback.”Footnote 83
V. CONCLUSION
In sections II and III of this essay, I outlined the concept of theoretical practices and showed how it helped make sense of existing strands of research on the Cold War human sciences. My aim in the previous section was to show that, if we adopt the idiom of social practices and performances in the historiography of the human sciences, we must be prepared to examine a much wider terrain of social activity than those circumscribed in scientific or scholarly practices. The sociology of Bourdieu reminds us that powerful social boundaries may prevent or distort the diffusion of academic jargons and practices into broader fields of culture and social life. But these signal warnings are best read as an interpretive challenge. Their primary virtue is to train our attention on the multiple and unpredictable forms in which theories are expressed in particular kinds of practice: political, economic, scientific, and so on.
For historians of the Cold War moment in the American human sciences, sensitivity to these shifting domains of theoretical practice seems especially useful. A standing challenge in the field is to frame the different relationships between social-scientific theory and academic, political, and cultural practice. Traditional accounts of the theory–practice relationship, along with the science-in-the-service-of-the-state narrative, have proved themselves unable to grasp this knotty historiographical problem. In conclusion, I want to outline a heuristic, drawn from the foregoing discussion, that will, I hope, offer a better framework for investigating the ways in which theories are embedded in various kinds of social practice.
Perhaps the most obvious mode is intervention. The human sciences have long nurtured the desire to forge knowledge about people and their behaviour that will allow for intervention, reform, and aid. Theories about the origins of multiple personality disorder or the sources of economic poverty are obvious examples of knowledge that may be incorporated into psychiatric therapies or social policy respectively.Footnote 84 The forms of knowledge vouchsafed by modernization theorists during the 1950s and 1960s likewise helped make possible American military, cultural, and economic intervention—some would call it neo-imperialism—across the globe. Another, overlapping technique whereby theories are embedded in practices is incorporation. There are more or less reified versions of this kind of embedding. Perhaps the least reified form of incorporation involves the taking up of aspects of a theory into the descriptions that underpin a social practice. This is what the philosopher Charles Taylor claims for social theory as a practice.Footnote 85 Accounts of incorporation of this sort must speak in general terms about concepts in the human sciences entering into the “social imaginary” or “normative vocabulary” of a society.Footnote 86 But there are other, more reifying forms of incorporation. As we have seen, a mathematical model in finance theory may serve as a technology of financial markets; it is part of the machinery and calculations that allow a market to function. In a similar fashion, certain forms of systems analysis were designed to serve as technologies for urban reform under the Johnson and Nixon administrations.Footnote 87 In these cases, a “paper tool” becomes materially embedded in practices outside of the particular academic subculture in which it was formed.
We come finally to the form of practice that has been of most concern to historians of the Cold War human sciences: subcultural embodiment. This is the technique whereby a given theoretical paradigm is embodied in an array of subcultural elements—formulae, diagrams, proofs, epistemological narratives, and training regimes. The major postwar academic entrepreneurs in the human sciences seem to have understood that the authority of their conceptual schemes rested to a large degree on their ability to establish a set of practices that would embody them. In the Department of Social Relations, in the GSIA at Carnegie Tech, in the Center for Cognitive Studies, and at many other departments and institutes, academic entrepreneurs tried to make their theories stick by attaching them to theoretical practices.
The rise and fall of theoretical doctrines in the human-science disciplines is seldom a simple matter of validity, rhetorical persuasion, predictive success, and falsification. Theories may also prosper by providing instruments for disciplinary training and self-transformation, they may become attached to the epistemic and moral norms of a community of inquirers, and they may help make certain kinds of people. A theory's success in so embedding itself in several vectors of social practice—science, economics, politics, self-cultivation—helps to determine its historical prominence, its waxing or waning in the culture of its time. The threefold heuristic outlined above is intended only as a tool for grasping these historical dimensions of theoretical activity. Several scholars have begun to reveal these complex aspects of theorizing in the postwar human sciences; my goal in this essay has been to extract some of the underlying methods and themes in this ongoing historiographical project.
