The Open Mind: Cold War Politics and the Sciences of Human Nature PDF
Preview The Open Mind: Cold War Politics and the Sciences of Human Nature
The Open Mind The Open Mind Cold War Politics and the Sciences of Human Nature jamie cohen-cole the university of chicago press chicago and london Jamie Cohen-Cole is assistant professor in the Department of American Studies at George Washington University. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2014 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2014. Printed in the United States of America 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 1 2 3 4 5 ISBN-13: 978-0-226-09216-4 (cloth) ISBN-13: 978-0-226-09233-1 (e-book) DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226092331.001.0001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Cohen-Cole, Jamie Nace, 1972– author. The open mind : cold war politics and the sciences of human nature / Jamie Cohen- Cole. pages ; cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-226-09216-4 (cloth : alkaline paper) — ISBN 978-0-226-09233-1 (e-book) 1. Human behavior models—Political aspects—United States. 2. Cognitive science—Political aspects—United States. 3. Social sciences—Political aspects—United States. 4. Social sciences—United States—History—20th century. I. Title. BF39.3.C645 2014 153—dc23 2013020551 This paper meets the requirements of ansi/niso z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper). For Eugenia and Naomi Contents introduction 1 The American Mind chapter 1. Democratic Minds for a Complex Society 13 chapter 2. The Creative American 35 The Academic Mind chapter 3. Interdisciplinarity as a Virtue 65 chapter 4. The Academy as Model of America 104 The Human Mind chapter 5. Scientists as the Model of Human Nature 141 chapter 6. Instituting Cognitive Science 165 chapter 7. Cognitive Theory and the Making of Liberal Americans 190 The Divided Mind chapter 8. A Fractured Politics of Human Nature 217 conclusion. The History of the Open Mind 253 Acknowledgments 261 Notes 263 References 341 Index 385 Introduction The Cold War was a time when psychology came into its own as a tool of social analysis. With marked rapidity the structural, institutional, and economic ways of understanding American society that had domi- nated academic and public discourse in preceding decades gave way to explanations framed in terms of the psyche. Historian Carl Schorske, re- calling the intellectual currents of the immediate postwar period, found the “sudden blaze of interest in Sigmund Freud” particularly memora- ble. “Truly the premises for understanding man and society,” he wrote, “seemed to be shifting from the social-historical to the psychological scene.”1 The sociologist Daniel Bell observed at the threshold of the 1960s that the previous decade “mark[ed] the difference” between “a Marxist analysis of America” and one cast in a “cultural anthropology cum a Jungian and nervous sociological idiom.”2 So warmly, it seems, had American intellectuals and social critics embraced the psychologi- cal idiom that eight years later the political writer Samuel Lubell could write, in the infl uential political journal Public Interest, “our society seems to have developed a predilection, even craze, for reading psycho- logical explanations into anything and everything that happens, moving as far toward this extreme as Marxians once did in assigning an eco- nomic cause to anything and everything.”3 If psychology could explain everything, there was one aspect of the self that held special importance to the intellectual and policy worlds: open-mindedness. Open-mindedness was a kind of mind characterized by autonomy, creativity, and the use of reason. To the scientifi c experts, intellectuals, and policy makers who developed and utilized the con- cept of the open mind, this type of self served simultaneously as model and ideal of national and intellectual character. They projected upon the
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