Rebels Within the Ranks: Psychologists' Critique of Scientific Authority and Democratic Realities in New Deal America

ISBN-13: 9780521583589 / Angielski / Twarda / 1997 / 274 str.

Katherine Pandora

Opis

This book examines the work of social and personality psychologists who, in the 1930s, criticized the increasingly restrictive vision of scientific life being promoted by neobehaviorist social scientists. This critique has been overlooked by historians who have concentrated on the rise of neobehaviorism, rather than the challenges advanced by such "rebels within the ranks" as Gordon Allport, Gardner Murphy, and Lois Barclay Murphy. All three contributed to ongoing public and professional debates about democracy and the authority of scientific knowledge in New Deal America.

Recenzje

'Pandora really does show, compellingly, the vitality of a professional-psychological endeavor in the 1930s that stood strikingly aloof from the discipline-building and behaviorist-advancing stories that dominate our histories of psychology. And she is wonderfully successful in detailing the link between this 'dissenting' psychology and the social gospel Protestant milieu that was drawn upon by social scientists of the 1930s to an extent that embarrassed later, proudly secular custodians of the social scientific past. This work demonstrates how a distinctive cluster of 'professional' social scientific initiatives at a particular historical moment were partly driven by, and contributed materially to, controversies in the politics and public philosophy of the American nation.' David Hollinger

Spis treści

Introduction; 1. The Deep Context of Dissent: Jamesian Philosophy and Social Gospel Theology; 2. Challenging the Rule of the Game; 3. Defying the Law of Averages: Constructing a Science of Individuality; 4. The Pursuit of 'Impure' Science: Constructing a Science of Social Life; 5. Natural History and Psychological Habitats; 6. Exploratory Relativism and Patterns of Possibility; Conclusions; Endnotes.