THE GROWTH OF EXTERNAL FUNDING FOR ACADEMIC RESEARCH

In the years immediately following World War II, universities in the United States received huge infusions of grant money from the federal government and private foundations.¹

Not surprisingly, the academics who received the most of this money belonged to the “hard sciences” and conducted research related to the development of new weapons systems (Lowen 1997, 2, 6–13; Slaughter and Rhoades 2004, 28–29). But social scientists, though they received significantly less money as a group than did their colleagues in physics, did not go begging (Dahl 1961, 765). Some of the most lavishly supported fields in the social sciences were game and decision theory as well as quantitative analysis of political behavior (Amadae 2003; Lowen 1997, 191–223; SSRC Annual Reports 1952–1961). Although they provided the dominant rationale for the funding of academic research during the 1950s, Cold War imperatives did not dictate the shape of every grant program developed during the decade.²

FOUNDATION FUNDING FOR POLITICAL THEORY AND POLITICAL SCIENCE IN THE 1950s

Over the 10 years of its life (from 1953 to 1962), Rockefeller's program in legal and political philosophy awarded just under $1.7 million in grants and fellowships; of this money, $258,750 went to the Social Science Research Council to administer a fellowship program for advanced graduate students and $380,000 to three departments for their own programs in political theory (The Rockefeller Foundation, Program in Legal and Political Philosophy, n.d., folder 80, box 9, series 910, RG 3, RFA, RAC).⁴

One of the most important questions facing those who crafted LAPP was a straightforward, practical one: how to define the fields the program was being designed to aid? That is, what sorts of projects were to count as examples of legal and political philosophy? LAPP was created in the early 1950s, a time when the identity of “political theory” in the discipline was inchoate and the behavioral revolution was just beginning. Examining how the Rockefeller Foundation went about trying to define the fields LAPP was designed to support, therefore, serves as a window onto what proved to be a period of rapid change within the discipline.

In what follows, I focus on policy making by the Rockefeller Foundation during the early years of the LAPP program, drawing on correspondence among Foundation officers and records of conferences among appointed advisory committees of academics. The officers most directly concerned with the new program focus both on characterizing its scope as well as its place within the constellation of all the other programs sponsored by the foundation's social sciences division. The first policy making conference, held in the fall of 1952, was intended to help officers make the case for the need for the program as well as to sketch the parameters of the kinds of work such a program might support. The second, convened by the Rockefeller Foundation and the SSRC in the fall of 1954, sought to define what kinds of projects the newly established SSRC phase of the LAPP program would fund. All the participants in each of these phases of the foundation's policy making for LAPP confronted several basic issues: what the relation between political theory and social science was and ought to become; and which approaches to political theory merited the most support.

FOUNDATION SUPPORT FOR POLITICAL THEORY: MAKING THE CASE

In 1952, Joseph Willits, Director of the Division of Social Sciences at the Rockefeller Foundation, began soliciting comments from academics on the need for a program in legal and political philosophy. A conference was convened to discuss the design of the new program in the fall of 1952. Shortly thereafter, Louis Hartz of Harvard wrote to Willits to underscore the relative lack of outside support for work in political theory: “[T]here is one concrete issue which this Conference has gotten hold of and which I would be reluctant to see forgotten. This is the fact, familiar to almost anyone working in universities in political science, that men working in the theory field are at an enormous disadvantage when it comes to the allocation of research funds” (Hartz to Willits, November 6, 1952, 75:8, RAC-1). Other participants made similar observations; Robert MacIver echoed Hartz's point and noted that Franz Neumann, his colleague at Columbia, had made it as well. He went on to say, “the most promising students [in political theory] find it next to impossible to get the aid in the way of research scholarships and fellowships that would be possible had they presented projects of the type, for example, that are acceptable to the SSRC” (MacIver to Willits, November 7, 1952, 75:8, RAC-1). Another participant, Frederick Watkins of Yale, wrote to urge the Foundation to begin a program in this area, but to regard it as a “speculative investment,” the returns of which might not be seen for years, if ever: “Can a responsible foundation afford, in addition to its more readily defensible expenditures, to risk an occasional mad splurger [sic] in American Tel. and Tel.?” (Watkins to Willits, November 12, 1952, 75: 8, RAC-1). By comparing the “investment” Rockefeller was considering making in political theory to buying stock in AT&T, Watkins was suggesting that though it might seem risky now, such a program might prove as shrewd as early investments in AT&T had been.

Bolstered by such comments about the effects of the dearth in funding for work in political theory, those who crafted LAPP emphasized that it was meant to be a counterweight to social science. Notably, Herbert A. Deane, the consultant hired by the Foundation to oversee the creation of LAPP, contended that the neglect of theory had led to a dangerous kind of cultural illiteracy—a development many social scientists recognized and deplored, though they were “unaware that they and their imitators bear any share of the responsibility for the rise of this new barbarism” (Deane to Willits, January 12, 1953, pp. 1, 2, 76:8, RAC-1). Although LAPP ultimately became an eclectic program that sponsored a number of projects informed by behavioral social science, its principal architects were young Columbia-trained theorists determined to counteract what they saw as the ever-increasing power of social scientific approaches to the study of politics.⁸

INFILTRATING THE SSRC

Shortly after LAPP was first established in 1953, several people within Rockefeller's Division of Social Sciences (DSS), including Willits, its head, suggested that the program fund fellowships for advanced graduate students and that these fellowships be administered by the SSRC. Although Willits strongly favored such a plan, he acknowledged that others had good reason to be wary of it, especially because “the SSRC has shown a decided lack of sympathy in helping men in these fields of inquiry” (Minutes of Division of Social Sciences Staff Meeting, Legal and Political Philosophy, October 9, 1953, p. 4, 77: 8, RAC-1). Still, Willits argued that it would be worth the Foundation's while to insist upon the SSRC administering the program. Among the many reasons Willits cited to support his view, he noted, “[t]here are also advantages to the theory of infiltration. There might be an advantage in pushing the SSRC and thus through infiltration an interest might be established in this area of study and research at the SSRC” (Minutes, p. 5).

Informed by a similar spirit, the grant action that announced the first appropriation to the SSRC for this fellowship program a few months later represented the relation between political theory and social science as a conflict between parties of unequal strength: “Concern has been expressed by many persons, chiefly laymen, but also academicians, at the consistent spread of the assumption that the scientific study of social phenomena is enough, and at the increasing neglect by our generation of those political values on which our society was founded, attention to which is necessary if wisdom is to be realized” (Social Science Research Council—Fellowships in Legal and Political Philosophy, Grant Action RF 53181, December 1–2, 1953, 2470:255, series 200E, RG 1.2, RFA, RAC).⁹

These records of the early years of LAPP reveal that the Foundation's officers and consultants crafted the program as a response to what they regarded as large-scale and worrisome changes in the social sciences. For one, they were worried about how other funders were allocating their money and how this was fueling change in the social sciences; the decision to induce the SSRC to administer part of the program in political theory arose out of these concerns.¹⁰

“POLITICAL THEORY” AS A CATEGORY IN THE 1950s

These questions were daunting ones, mainly because “political theory” was such a large and porous category in the 1950s. Not only did a wide range of work fit into it, but also it permitted dual citizenship, in the sense that belonging to it did not exclude one from belonging to other fields at the same time. Both of these features made the practical task of defining what ought to count as “political theory” more difficult. Moreover, the disagreements over what ought to count as political theory were not confined to where its outer boundaries lay; people also disagreed over how to characterize prototypical examples of the field. The core of political theory was as deeply contested as its periphery.

To see how large a category political theory was in the 1950s, consider the variety of projects that won support from the Rockefeller Foundation's LAPP programs. Among those established scholars who received LAPP grants-in-aid for work in political theory were Gordon Tullock (for mathematical models of political choice), Henry Kissinger (for a theory of international affairs), Allan Bloom and Leo Strauss (for studies of the ancient roots of modern Western values), Herbert Storing (for a reconsideration of theories of public administration), Herbert McClosky (for an empirical study of the psychology of political extremism) and Hannah Arendt (for “a basic study of the theory of politics”).¹¹

In addition to being a broad category, political theory in the 1950s was a porous one. From our perspective today, among the most notable of those members of the discipline who held “dual citizenship” in political theory and another field were William Riker, Herbert McClosky, and John Wahlke.¹²

Another sign of how porous the field was can be found in how some scholars who seem associated with political theory exclusively sometimes made strategic forays outside it or had their work described in terms one would expect to have reserved for “dual citizens.” An example of the former would be the Ford Foundation's Behavioral Sciences Division's sponsorship of a project supervised by Leo Strauss for an “analysis of relations between political theory and empirical research” (Ford Foundation Annual Report 1956, 56). An internal document from the Rockefeller Foundation illustrates the latter; its author summarizes Sheldon Wolin's early work on what was to become Politics and Vision (1960) as being about “public opinion in democracy” (Thompson to Rusk, November 28, 1958, p. 1, 80: 9, RAC-1).

The point is not that these characterizations reveal some authentic aspect of these scholars' work that current disciplinary divisions are likely to make us miss. Rather, the way “political theory” worked as a category in the discipline in the 1950s allowed one to call scholars like Riker and McClosky political theorists even while acknowledging that the former was developing formal, mathematical theories of politics and the latter was closely tied to the emerging behavioralist movement. That is not to say that everyone in the discipline would have accepted calling Riker and McClosky political theorists in the 1950s; some pointedly did not.¹³

POLITICAL THEORY AND ITS OTHERS

Academics often specify what it is they do by showing how their work is distinct from what gets done in contiguous, but to their minds separate, academic territories (Becher and Trowler 2001; Brown 2002). Indeed, an important part of how one understands one's intellectual identity may lie in one's choice of academic “others,” those fields to which one pointedly says one does not belong. What sorts of qualities one attributes to these others may vary a great deal—one may portray them as fundamentally muddled and obtuse or just specifically deaf to what one finds intellectually engaging. But no matter how great the variety of attributes one might assign to them, they all share one: potency. When one appeals to others in order to flesh out one's own intellectual identity, one emphasizes how strong is the tide against which one must swim or how cramped the space available for one's contribution betwixt and between those that are well established. One may read the power one attributes to one's intellectual others as malicious or not - but powerful they must be.

Though a common enough feature of academic discourse, scholars can of course specify their identity without using an intellectual other as a foil. So how ought we to read the presence or absence of intellectual others in how academics identify what they do? As I have suggested above, to present another approach as an other is to recognize it—and to recognize it as powerful. The converse of identity-through-opposition might be called identity-through-accommodation, where the point is to combine, unify, and even fuse what appear to be differing approaches. In the first meeting of the Advisory Committee for the SSRC's LAPP fellowship program, one finds examples of both of these presentations of academic identity.

Without naming the proponents, the minutes for this meeting summarize arguments for several differing approaches to political theory—the empirical, the historical, and the eclectic—each with distinct standards for awarding fellowships. Only the defenders of the empirical approach explicated what they did by citing an approach to which theirs was opposed—namely, “morally oriented theory.” By contrast, those who advocated the historical approach pointedly refused to designate an intellectual other and rejected any attempt to oppose their approach to the empirical one. And as its name suggests, the eclectic approach sought to incorporate variety rather than to posit others (the only plausible one of which, again by definition, was specialization; Minutes of the Conference on Legal and Political Philosophy, SSRC, November 20, 1954, pp. 2–6, 2470:255, RAC-2).

Once these various approaches were presented, however, the committee declined to choose one in particular—thereby de facto opting for the eclectic approach (Minutes, pp. 11–12). Following suit, the SSRC decided against using the phrase “empirical theory” in its announcement of the new program, apparently on the view that the phrase would be read as an invitation only to those who accepted this particular approach (SSRC brochure, “Announcement of Fellowships, Grants-in-Aid, and other Appointments to be offered in 1955,” pp. 11–12, 2470:255, RAC-2).

Another account of the same meeting, written by John Stewart, consultant to Rockefeller for LAPP, highlights several disagreements among the participants and, unlike the Minutes discussed above, makes clear who said what. First, although several participants (David Easton and Earl Latham) identified “moral theory” and “metaphysics” as the opposites of the kind of political theory they argued the SSRC ought to support, others (most notably Herbert Deane and Norman Jacobson) objected that defining the program this way would amount to requiring all fellows to accept doing theory along behaviorist lines, even if they were disinclined to do so. This dispute over the implications of the particular identity-through-opposition presented by Easton and Latham unfolded within an even more fundamental disagreement about the disciplinary milieu in which political theory should be placed. Again, Easton and Latham argued that because political theory is properly located within the social sciences, the recipients of the SSRC's LAPP fellowships ought to be encouraged to seek training in the social sciences and in mathematics. But Deane, Jacobson, and Stewart objected that making such training a prerequisite for LAPP fellowships would erase the distinction between this program and other more explicitly social scientific programs administered by the SSRC. And Deane also countered that the fields of “[h]istory, philosophy and law are perhaps more important” to enhancing the training of LAPP fellows than the social sciences (JBS interview notes, November 20, 1954, pp. 1–4, 67).

In both of these accounts, the advocates of “empirical theory” identified their approach in a strikingly different way than those advocating other approaches. Only the advocates of “empirical theory” consistently identified their approach by citing ways of doing theory to which they were opposed; other participants, though clearly critical of the empirical approach, declined to present what they advocated in opposition to it. Instead, they sought to incorporate empirical theory, arguing that there was room enough in how they conceived of the field to accommodate empirical theorists, albeit not in a central location. Such a response to the challenge posed by early advocates of the empirical approach was, I believe, both an acknowledgment of its growing significance and a move intended to contain it. By declining to posit empirical theorists as their others, advocates of the historical or eclectic approaches to political theory attempted to make what “political theory” meant even broader without ceding any of its vital territory to the empirical theorists. The empirical theorists, on the other hand, consistently defined themselves in opposition to an other, highlighting the power of the kinds of theory that stood in their way.