Civic Sociology Robert Bellah: A Cold War Sociologist? Arvind Rajagopal 1 a 1 Department of Media, Culture, and Communication, New York University, NY, US Keywords: Bellah, Cold War, Social History, Bortolini https://doi.org/10.1525/cs.2022.37887 Civic Sociology Comment on Matteo Bortolini’s A Joyfully Serious Man: The Life of Robert Bellah Social science was born as the intellectual pendant of liberal ideology. If it remains this, it will die as liber- alism dies. Social science built itself upon the premise of social optimism. Can it fnd something to say in an era that will be marked by social pessimism? I believe that we social scientists must totally transform our- selves or we shall become socially irrelevant and rele- gated to some minor corner of some minor academy, condemned to while away our time in meaningless rit- uals as the last monks of a forgotten god. I believe that the key element in our survival is to return the concept of substantive rationality to the center of our intellec- tual concerns. —Immanuel Wallerstein, “Social Science and Contem- porary Society” Matteo Bortolini has made a remarkable contribution to postwar intellectual and social history, using as its prism the trajectory of one scholar to show some of the complex and conficting tendencies of the time. I believe his book is a resource that any future intellectual or social history of the period would fnd relevant, and perhaps even indis- pensable. It offers the life story of someone who moved from the dominant intellectual consensus of the time to the edges of this consensus. 1 Bortolini thereby offers (among many other things) an elaboration of the space of Cold War social science traversed by Robert Bellah and others like him, whose training and funding refected Cold War inter- ests even if they sought to resist its ideological strictures. If signifcant aspects of social science disciplinary forma- tion took shape during the interwar period, the Cold War was more lasting in its infuence since it created a kind of force feld, as Nils Gilman has called it, one that defned the contours of intellectual activity during that time. Cold War social science was not simply research intended to assist in accomplishing the goals of that war. It could also be schol- arship that channeled attention toward those topics whose importance was presumed by policymakers, and away from those where offcial attention was limited and opportunities were scarce. Gilman (2016, 516) calls this “second order cold war social science,” research whose conditions were shaped in part by the Cold War even if the research did not align with Cold War concerns in any overt way. In an essay published after his book, Bortolini has sug- gested that Bellah’s work can be understood as second-or- der Cold War social science. Such a statement is hardly meant to conclusively defne a major scholar; rather, it is to identify key unresolved tensions running through his work that indicate its historical provenance. In this short essay, I will try to explore the scope and limits of his suggestion. Bortolini offers circumspect homage to postwar US social science, arguably rose to become internationally dominant due to a combination of circumstances. Academics formed in this context were also intellectually ambitious in ways that can be opaque to those whose intellectual formation occurred much later. One sign of the feld’s ambition is sug- gested in the scope of what was perhaps Bellah’s great- est interest, a theory of religion across space and time. He sought, among other things, to elaborate on the relation- ship of the contingent to what Mikhail Bakhtin called “great time”; the latter is allied to notions of the transcendental and unchanging (Bellah 2017; on great time, see Bakhtin 1986, 170 passim). Its ambition notwithstanding, such a stance broke away from the dominant mode of progres- sivism of the postwar period, with its conviction that sci- ence and social engineering could settle all the unresolved problems of human history, with the United States leading the way. Bellah, as a man of his time, certainly retained the idea of a future that could be improved through human ef- fort, his own work included. But his sense that “nothing is ever lost,” together with a growing despair about what was to come, meant that he looked to the past, as much as or more than to the future, for answers to his questions. If ideas and interests, play and work, conviviality and confict, and symbolism and materiality formed the poles of regnant debates, Bellah resisted the social sciences’ tilt toward the second of each of these terms in preference to the frst. “Re- ligion” as he understood it brought these foci together. One can scroll through many histories of postwar social science and fnd little discussion of religion. Some indices don’t list the word at all. 2 We might say that attempts to ar67@nyu.edu My distinction here between a putative core and periphery pertains to the historical prestige of the forms of knowledge involved, not to the intellectual value we might assign them today. See, e.g., Ross 1991; Solovey and Dayé 2021. a 1 2 Rajagopal, Arvind. 2022. “Robert Bellah: A Cold War Sociologist?” Civic Sociology 3 (1). https://doi.org/10.1525/cs.2022.37887. Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/cs/article-pdf/3/1/37887/746088/civicsociology_2022_3_1_37887.pdf by New York University user on 25 November 2022