This research project examines the ways in which politics, broadly defined, shaped the ongoing debate about `intellectual identity` in American social science from 1945 to 1985. This debate has centered on the question of whether the social sciences are part of a unified scientific enterprise, or whether there are fundamental differences between them and the natural sciences. This issue has been intimately linked to other important matters concerning the status and influence of the social sciences within the broader society. This study will show that the problem of intellectual identity obtained heightened national significance in the U.S. during the post-WWII period. In examining the relationship between national politics and the social sciences, this study will focus on federal science policy, namely the role of the National Science Foundation in funding social science research. The NSF serves as a means to illuminate certain fundamental questions about the post-war development of social sciences in the United States. Drawing on insights contained in recent studies about the political shaping of American Science, this study explores some of the ways in which national politics shaped the debate about what counted as social science in the first place, about whether social science inquiry was of a piece with investigations in the natural sciences, and about whether the social and natural sciences were all cut from the same cloth. Such questions were central to the development of federal science policy for the social sciences over the decades; they were thus important in decisions about what areas of the social sciences were eligible for funding; and they served as a common area of concern for the political and academic communities. From a long-term perspective, the prominence of such questions at NSF makes this agency an imporant part of the much larger story about the intellectual identity of the social sciences.
