Sign up to save your podcasts
Or
Share Patrick L. Schmidt, "Harvard's Quixotic Pursuit of a New Science: The Rise and Fall of the Department of Social Relations" (Rowman and Littlefield, 2022)
Share to email
Share to Facebook
Share to X
Share to email
Share to Facebook
Share to X
Or
Patrick L. Schmidt, "Harvard's Quixotic Pursuit of a New Science: The Rise and Fall of the Department of Social Relations" (Rowman and Littlefield, 2022)
Harvard's Department of Social Relations made history in the 1950s and 1960s as the most ambitious program in social science in the United States. Dedicated to a synthesis of sociology, anthropology, psychology, and other disciplines, the scope of its ambitions were matched only by the scope of its failures. Patrick Schmidt's new volume Harvard's Quixotic Pursuit of a New Science: The Rise and Fall of the Department of Social Relations (Rowman and Littlefield, 2022) documents the history of SocRel, as it was called, in intimate detail. It paints a colourful and carefully researched picture of the personalities and events that are central to the department's story, ranging from the austere theoretician Talcott Parsons to the hallucinogen-ingesting Ram Dass.
In this episode, Patrick talks to host Alex Golub about SocRel as well as the wider context of the Cold War academy in which it was situated.
Alex Golub is associate professor of anthropology, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
View all episodes
By New Books Network
5
55 ratings
Harvard's Department of Social Relations made history in the 1950s and 1960s as the most ambitious program in social science in the United States. Dedicated to a synthesis of sociology, anthropology, psychology, and other disciplines, the scope of its ambitions were matched only by the scope of its failures. Patrick Schmidt's new volume Harvard's Quixotic Pursuit of a New Science: The Rise and Fall of the Department of Social Relations (Rowman and Littlefield, 2022) documents the history of SocRel, as it was called, in intimate detail. It paints a colourful and carefully researched picture of the personalities and events that are central to the department's story, ranging from the austere theoretician Talcott Parsons to the hallucinogen-ingesting Ram Dass.
In this episode, Patrick talks to host Alex Golub about SocRel as well as the wider context of the Cold War academy in which it was situated.
Alex Golub is associate professor of anthropology, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
More shows like New Books in the History of Science
View all
In Our Time
5,411 Listeners
Radiolab
43,890 Listeners
Freakonomics Radio
31,896 Listeners
99% Invisible
26,136 Listeners
New Books in Critical Theory
145 Listeners
Conversations with Tyler
2,397 Listeners
Why Theory
552 Listeners
If You're Listening
303 Listeners
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
4,107 Listeners
The Morning Edition
83 Listeners
Post Reports
5,406 Listeners
Throughline
15,931 Listeners
7am
160 Listeners
Acid Horizon
175 Listeners
The Ezra Klein Show
15,007 Listeners