A Transatlantic History of the Social Sciences: Robber Barons, the Third Reich and the Invention of Empirical Social Research

(Hardback)

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This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. From the beginning of the twentieth century, scientific and social scientific research has been characterised by intellectual exchange between Europe and the US. The establishment of the Third Reich ensured that, from the German speaking world, at least, this became a one-way traffic. In this book Christian Fleck explores the invention of empirical social research, which by 1950 had become the binding norm of international scholarship, and he analyses the contribution of German refugee social scientists to its establishment. The major names are here, from Adorno and Horkheimer to Hirshman and Lazarsfeld, but at the heart of the book is a unique collective biography based on original data from more than 800 German-speaking social scientists. Published in German in 2008 to great acclaim, Fleck's important study of the transatlantic enrichment of the social sciences is now available in a revised English-language edition.

Reviews

A thoroughly researched study of the ways in which American foundations (notably the Rockefeller Foundation) promoted and supported the development of empirical social sciences in twentieth-century Europe. Christian Fleck has not only used contemporary statistical methods but has done exhaustive research in historical archives and records (including the paradise of the Rockefeller archive) to lay out what comes close to a collective biography of some 800 German-speaking sociologists (a category broad enough to include some persons also known in other social science disciplines) who benefited from financial and professional backing by American philanthropy from the 1920s through the 1950s...This volume offers many useful tables and is very clearly written and translated. Fleck discusses frankly the problems of writing collective biography, but his methodological explanations appear sound and his archival explorations more thorough than many previous efforts along these lines...this dense and thoughtful work offers interesting new approaches and insights into the give and take of transnational intellectual influence and the shaping of new professional disciplines. -- Charles E. McClelland, University of Texas * American Historical Review *
A book to remind us how sociological heroes are made and unmade by not only wars, migration, university politics and research grants, but also by each other in the making and unmaking of particular versions of history . . . [The later chapters] should be compulsory readings for those who regard research methods as an unfortunate detraction from the proper business of critical theorising. -- E Stina Lyon, London South Bank University, UK * Work, Employment & Society *

Author Bio

Christian Fleck is Professor of Sociology at the Karl Franzens University of Graz and Director of the Archive for the History of Sociology in Austria. He has been a Fellow at Harvard University and at the Center for Scholars and Writers, New York Public Library and in 2008 he was Visiting Austrian Fulbright Professor at the University of Minnesota, USA.