David C. Engerman

Social science in the Cold War.

This essay examines ways in which American social science in the late twentieth century was—and was not—a creature of the Cold War. It identifies important work by historians that calls into question the assumption that all social science during the Cold War amounts to “Cold War social science.” These historians attribute significant agency to social scientists, showing how they were enmeshed in both long‐running disciplinary discussions and new institutional environments. Key trends in this scholarship include a broadening historical perspective to see social scientists in the Cold War as responding to the ideas of their scholarly predecessors; identifying the institutional legacies of World War II; and examining in close detail the products of extramural—especially governmental—funding. The result is a view of social science in the Cold War in which national security concerns are relevant, but with varied and often unexpected impacts on intellectual life.

Rethinking Cold War Universities: Some Recent Histories

Detailed research in archives and other primary sources has added a great deal to our understanding of American universities during the Cold War. Recent studies of the Cold War University describe the sometimes contradictory ambitions surrounding these institutions: faculty members seeking an escape from the classroom through external funding, administrators hoping to enhance their universitys prestige and balance sheet, and government agencies promoting cutting-edge research with practical (usually military) applications. By examining four recent books on the topic, this article asks whether these impulses created a genuinely new institutiona Cold War Universityor merely built on existing trends.

Learning from the East: Soviet Experts and India in the Era of Competitive Coexistence

��� rom the earliest days of Bolshevik rule, Soviet leaders established institutions to teach the East — w hich they used as an economic rather than a geographic category — t he ways of revolution. This pedagogical mode began even before the stabilization of Soviet rule of the territories of the former Russian empire. In 1919, with foreign and domestic armies still arrayed against them, the Bolsheviks convened the Communist International (Comintern); soon thereafter they established the Communist University for Toilers of the East. By the 1930s, Soviet hopes for revolution in the East faded; Stalinist leadership all but gave up on the Asian and African colonies of European empires. This dismissive attitude continued even after the first of these colonies — I ndia and Pakistan — a chieved independence in 1947. With invective typical of the period, Soviet newspapers railed on India’s founding prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, as a “nimble servant” of the imperialist powers and a “bloody strangler of progressive forces in India.” 1 Even with India’s dramatic exit from the British Empire and Nehru’s repeated declara tions of nonalignment, Soviet officials placed it firmly in the capitalist world economy and the imperialist bloc. 2 As Soviet contacts with the decolonizing world expanded in the years following Stalin’s death, the pedagogical mode remained: Soviet leaders planned to teach India the ways of revolution and of modern economics, serving as an “elder brother” to this South Asian nation much as it had generously acted as elder brother for the Soviet republics in Central Asia and the Caucasus. 3 In spite of assuming this pedagogical (at times pedantic) attitude, the Soviet Union was substantially altered by the encounter, in some ways perhaps even more than India. The effects on the Soviet Union are particularly visible in the realm of economic ideas, though this of course was only one aspect of a complex and multifaceted relationship. The key moment to observe the effects of the encounter with India is the decade or so after the first serious engagements in 1954, a periodization that coincides with the rise and fall of Nikita Khrushchev. Khrushchev’s enthusiasm for the Third World was visible as early

JOHN DEWEY AND THE SOVIET UNION: PRAGMATISM MEETS REVOLUTION

John Dewey, like many other American intellectuals between the world wars, was fascinated by Soviet events. After visiting Russia in 1928 he wrote excitedly about the “Soviet experiment” and especially about Soviet educational theorists. In his early enthusiasm Dewey hoped that the US and the USSR could learn from each other, especially among the cosmopolitan group of progressive pedagogues he met on his trip. Observing the rise of Stalinism in the 1930s, though, his optimism dissipated; at the same time he came to emphasize historical and cultural differences between the US and the USSR. The result is apparent in Deweys writings in the late 1930s (especially Freedom and Culture , 1939), as he began to evaluate the Soviet Union in terms that would have been anathema to him a decade earlier. He increasingly blamed Russias cultural heritage for inhibiting Soviet development along the lines he had envisioned. Deweys transformation suggests the importance of a cultural reading of American ideas about the USSR. Many American observers joined Dewey in seeing the USSR as the product of Russian culture, with its historical traditions and its own national character—and not just as the instantiation or betrayal of a political doctrine.