The Grudging Modernizer: A Trip to the Middle East and Cold War Social Science

The postwar era is generally recognized as a unique moment of impetuous growth of the social sciences, due to the interest of Western internationalist elites in the development of a set of pragmatically-oriented intellectual tools that could be of use in the confrontation between the self-proclaimed “Free World,” the Soviet bloc, and emerging postcolonial nations. In the last twenty years, however, doubts about the impact of the Cold War syndrome on the development of ideas, methods, and infrastructures of Western social science in the 1950s and the 1960s have been cast by historians and social scientists alike. This article uses the episode of the 1959 Middle East scholarly trip of a Harvard sociologist, Robert N. Bellah, to highlight the complexity and the ambivalence of individual trajectories, as well as the adumbrations of critical ideas and themes in the work of an intellectual who was a recognized, if peripheral, member of some of the most influential Cold War Social Science circles. A final hypothesis on a paradox of Cold War social science is advanced, according to which the need to staff centers and institutes for the training of Cold War technicians and elites put humanists and orientalists in the condition to influence those very students who should have been trained in the most advanced and practically-oriented social sciences.