7/21/22, 9:35 AM Cold War social science: transnational entanglements https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/epub/10.1080/00033790.2022.2087904?needAccess=true 1/2 ANNALS OF SCIENCE 2022, VOL. 79, NO. 3, 416-417 https://doi.org/10.1080/00033790.2022.2087904 Cold War social science: transnational entanglements: by Mark Solovey and Christian Dayé, eds., Cham, Palgrave Macmillan Ltd., 2021, xxvi +400 pp., 9 ill., €139 (Hardback); $159, ISBN 978-3-030-70246-5 John Krige School of History and Sociology, Georgia Institute of Technology This book aims to break new ground by stressing the importance of transnational entanglements to disrupt U.S. and Soviet nation-centered approaches to the history of the social sciences during the Cold War, “understood as an all-pervasive super-power conflict that produced a bipolar world order” (3). To that end the editors have assembled a fine collection of studies that cover a wide variety of fields, including “anthropology, area studies, education, economics, political science, psychology, scientometrics, and sociology” (4). They have also embraced a broad geographical terrain that goes beyond the superpowers and Western Europe, to include Turkey, Eastern Europe and China, and the Philippines, Brazil and Latin America. Intellectual coherence is achieved by identifying three themes that weave though the papers: the role of institutions in enabling transnational movements and exchanges; the mutual impact of intellectual debates, scholarly trajectories and lines of research on the centres of power in the U.S. the Soviet Union, and decolonizing nation states; and the transnational construction of the nature and purposes of the social sciences. Solovey and Dayé further flesh out these themes in their excellent introduction. Among the institutions that facilitated transnational flows – over and above the major U.S. philanthropies — they single out UNESCO, the Mont Pèlerin society and the Congress for Cultural Freedom, the Social Science Research Council, and Radio Free Europe that was based in Germany. The relationship of social sciences to state power is analyzed through a well-known approach proposed by Nils Gilman, who identified a spectrum of political engagement ranging from complicity to explicit criticism of the premises of the Cold War. They stress that their collection, while being usefully read through this lens relating knowledge to power, also shows that, even in seemingly obvious cases of complicity, matters are far more complex than they might seem at first sight. Finally, when it comes to reflection on the nature and purposes of the social sciences, the editors explain that the comingling of transnational perspectives liberated scholarship from the grip of simplistic ideological agendas. It stimulated debates on the meanings of liberation and repression, on the importance of scholarship as value-free and detached versus value-laden and engaged, and on the significance of thinking about transnational communities in terms of center-periphery or polycentric power relations, notably in Latin American dependency theory. The book makes good on its claim that, by taking a transnational approach, the image of the social scientist as dominated by capitalist or socialist ideology yields to a far richer picture that emphasizes the diversity of intellectual agendas, traditions and values that defined social scientific research and researchers during the Cold War. That said, it is clear that that richness was mostly restricted to the capitalist system. Indeed one striking feature of these studies is that, in the majority of cases, the transnational circulation of people and ideas occurred within the geographical confines of the ‘free world’ (including emigrés from the Soviet bloc in the case of Radio Free Europe). Transnational exchanges across the Iron Curtain are described in the field of educational psychology, and in the institutionalization of Eugene Garfield’s scientometrics, as a tool to organize and access data on scientific publications, which floundered until enthusiastically embraced in the Soviet Union. This exceptionalism is partly an effect of the choice of authors and topics: we