Review: Emily Hauptmann, Foundations and American Political Science: The Transformation of a Discipline, 1945-1970 (Lawrence: The University Press of Kansas, 2022)

John Hsien-hsiang Feng, Wuhan University

Money talks. Fundraising campaigns have substantial influence on American public life. Likewise, financial sponsorships have considerable impacts on American political science. Funding matters. Disciplinary development is beyond political scientists’ genealogies and debates. As archival sources become available, one might wonder how funding bodies shaped the discipline in the past. Emily Hauptmann explores such an inquiry in her latest monograph: Foundations and American Political Science: The Transformation of a Discipline, 1945-1970.

Hauptmann emphasises “an important material dimension” in the history of American political science (p. 9). She looks at the timespan between 1945 and 1970, namely the heyday of behaviouralism: “[T]he mid-twentieth-century programs of the Carnegie, Ford, and Rockefeller philanthropies influenced academic political science in powerful, lasting ways,” argues Hauptmann (p. 169). Behaviouralism prevailed in the discipline in the 1950s and 1960s. It wasn’t until David Easton’s 1969 call for a post-behavioural revolution that American political science shifted toward more diversified paradigms. Behaviouralism was intellectually rooted in the work of Charles Merriam during the interwar period. He was the leader of the Chicago School and helped to create the Social Science Research Council. The Chicago School and the SSRC were both vital to the rise of behaviouralism. Giving credit to Merriam, scholars are inclined to take the post-WW2 supremacy of behaviouralism for granted. Rather, Hauptmann skips Merriam’s interwar period and pays attention to the financial circumstances that contributed to the superiority of behaviouralism in the US.

The National Science Foundation allocated little budget to political science before the 1970s. According to Hauptmann, the Carnegie, Ford, and Rockefeller foundations filled the lacuna and provided large amounts of subsidies to political scientists for their behavioural research: “From 1950 until 1957, Ford invested $24 million to develop what it called ‘the behavioural sciences’… From 1959 to 1964, Ford funds for political science exceeded Carnegie and Rockefeller’s by 20 to 1.” (p. 50) Ford also financed universities. One of the receivers was the University of California, Berkeley. The university management used Ford’s grants to set up an interdisciplinary centre for behavioural research, bringing different social science faculties together. Meanwhile, the political science faculty was incentivised to offer new courses, in parallel with traditional political theories, studying interest groups, political parties, and the like. Ford’s monetary aids attracted political scientists to participate in interdisciplinary behavioural research and modify the conventional curriculum vis-à-vis behaviouralism. Hauptmann accordingly draws the conclusion that although the priorities were psychology and sociology, “the influence of the Ford Foundation’s program on political science was nevertheless profound” (p. 55).

The other two foundations were by no means trivial. The Rockefeller Foundation funded V. O. Key’s project using statistical data to analyse the voters in the South in the late 1940s. When Key chaired the SSRC Committee on Political Behaviour, when his ties with Rockefeller officers were enhanced, Rockefeller “gradually moved toward supporting behavioural political science” (pp. 83-86). The Carnegie Cooperation sponsored Angus Campbell and his colleagues’ project analysing the 1952 presidential election: “Carnegie officers made clear that their support would not extend past the 1952 election” (p. 45).  They favoured Key’s SSRC committee. Rockefeller stepped in and supported Campbell’s team to conduct surveys in 1956 and 1960. Campbell’s team project later became an integral part of the American National Election Studies. The ANES was established under the SSRC’s and NSF’s long-term auspices. In this regard, the ANES was an accumulative outcome of various funding organs. Carnegie was a proportionally smaller contributor. Intriguingly, Hauptmann attributes to Carnegie and remarks that “Carnegie’s ‘investment’ in the 1952 election study therefore yielded not only The American Voter but also the ANES.” (p 45)

Throughout her book, Hauptmann endeavours to demonstrate that behaviouralism thrived in American political science because Carnegie, Ford, and Rockefeller patronised behavioural research with enthusiasm between 1945 and 1970. The NSF and other federal agencies continued this trend. The foundations made behavioural research fiscally feasible and transformed the discipline in the US. Changes were brought to professional practices and curricula on campuses. American political scientists’ self-identity was reconstructed accordingly. A classic definition of politics is “who gets what, when, how”. In terms of American political science, other historians shed light on who published what and when. They contextualise scholars’ contesting academic discourses in the greater political or philosophical backgrounds. In contrast, Hauptmann discusses how the discourses were produced and reveals the financial resources behind them. In addition to genealogies and debates, scholars competed for grants and the funding bodies competed for influence. Hauptmann’s portrayal of American political science is not only material but also pragmatic.

Intriguingly, Hauptmann is reluctant to distinguish the types of funding bodies and explore the significances underlying them. Carnegie, Ford, and Rockefeller are private whereas the NSF is governmental. The latter marks state intervention. As American political scientists are governmentally patronised, what are the state-society or power-knowledge relations in the discipline? In terms of transnational exchanges, private funding bodies are more flexible. As American political scientists are sponsored by the foundations to collaborate with those from the Global North and South, what does it mean to the discipline vis-à-vis globalization? Hauptmann limits her discussion to the domestic development of American political science. Furthermore, the timespan between 1945 and 1970 focuses on the Cold War. What is the longer term history of American political science, private and governmental patronages, and the global ideological confrontation? The above-mentioned questions are left unanswered in the book. To be sure, Hauptmann’s book is insightful and reminds us that money talks in American political science. However, her partial portrayal leaves other avenues to explore.