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One of the most vibrant subfields of American intellectual history over the last fifteen years has been the history of the social sciences during the late twentieth century, a period when the size and quality of American social-scientific output grew explosively. Given that the major historiographic push to historicize this period of social science began in the 1990s, in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the declaration by some Americans of Cold War victory, it was perhaps inevitable that the geopolitics of the Cold War emerged as a major tool for accounting for what was distinct about the social science and broader culture of the postwar period. After all, wasn't it obvious that what made the 1990s different from the decades that came before it was the fact that the Cold War was over? And wasn't it further obvious that the bipolar geopolitics and nuclear night terrors of the Cold War had deformed everything they touched, not least the work of American social scientists? One marker of this obviousness was the transformation of the term "Cold War" from a noun describing (perhaps already too vaguely) a particular sort of geopolitical struggle into an adjective that could explain all sorts of extra-geopolitical activity. 1By the turn of the century this adjectivalization of the Cold War had become something of a historiographic cliché, a blunt (if not lazy) way to historicize our immediate forebears. When John Lewis Gaddis chose to title his "rethink" of Cold War history Now We Know, he didn't even need to add Better.
More recently, however, some scholars have begun to question the causal weight that this first generation of scholarship ascribed to the Cold War in explaining the peculiarities of postwar American social science.2The implicit periodization provided by the moniker Cold War has become dubious in the face of sustained historical scrutiny: 1945 and 1989 may have seemed like obvious world-historical breaks to those who lived through them, but given enough historians and enough time, it would seem that even revolutions have a tendency to be replaced by an endless tyranny of historiographic continuity. As a result, many of the particular intellectual and cultural practices of the 1950s through 1980s that fifteen...