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By Dorothy Ross. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. xxii + 508 pp. $29.95, ISBN 0-521-35092-1.)
The last twenty-five years or so have witnessed the publication of a considerable body of work on the history of modern American academic disciplines, particularly the social sciences. Most of this scholarship is workmanlike, but even the best of it has rarely been expansive or provocative enough to command much of an audience. There is a grayness to academic life that impedes a compelling narrative, unless, like Simon Schama, one is lucky enough to find a professor given to murder and dismemberment. Historians of the social sciences must raise the stakes if they expect readers to take an interest in yesterday's faculty meeting.
Dorothy Ross raises the stakes. The Origins of American Social Science is a big, bold, and nasty book. Based on years of wide research, it surveys the development of the disciplines of economics, sociology, political science, and history from their beginnings in the antebellum period to the eve of the Great Depression. But this is no baggy encyclopedic compendium, for Ross marshals her erudition on behalf of a single-minded assault on three or four generations of social scientists for infecting social thought in the United States with the toxin of "American exceptionalism." She leaves no doubt that she believes it is the ideological origins of American social science that should command our troubled attention.
Unmaskings of the baleful ideological assumptions of social science are, of course, a dime a dozen. What sets Ross's argument apart is her effort to place the work of her sizable cast of academic characters within the context of a larger claim about the failure of American historical consciousness generally. At the heart of the long tradition of American exceptionalism, as she sees it, is...