Mark Solovey and Christian Dayé, eds. Cold War Social Science: Transnational Entanglements. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021

Abstract

Immanuel Kant’s famous 1784 essay “What Is Enlightenment?” suggested a bold vision of governance in which political obedience could be achieved through neither religious indoctrination nor the violence of bureaucratic apparatuses, but rather through the cultivation of “freedom in the arts and sciences,” and where a new class of free-thinking scholars could teach the rest of the population to act rationally for the public good. “Enlightenment” was not just about “the courage to use your own understanding” per se (Kant n.d.), but rather about epistemic citizenship, that is, a human condition based upon a European intellectual tradition aiming to merge scientific reason and rational political organizations, something that Michel Foucault (1988a) noted in his lifelong project to explore new forms of social governance associated with European modernity. With twentieth-century globalization and especially the Cold War, these forms—known collectively as scientific governance—became increasingly prominent across the world, in particular, through their rootedness in social science disciplines, which is the central focus of the volume under review.

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