A Requiem for “Soc Rel”: Here’s to Synthesizing Social Science
As both an undergraduate at Harvard College in the early 1960s, and as a doctoral student at the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences in the late 1960s, I studied in a field called “Social Relations”—universally shortened to “Soc Rel” (and pronounced “Sock Rell”). Right after I received my degree in 1971, the field was terminated. Almost no one nowadays has even heard of Soc Rel, and accordingly, its demise has not lamented. Yet I believe it was an excellent example of interdisciplinary social science. We should seek to preserve the valuable lessons that it embodied.
First, a brief potted history. In the late 19th century and early 20th century, the social sciences were born. Following loosely on European examples, American scholars began to carry out empirical research in psychology (e.g. experiments); in sociology (e.g. surveys); and in anthropology (e.g. field work in remote cultures). (Comparable work was carried out in other social sciences, such as political science, economics, and linguistics, but that’s another story.) These fields of study often spawned departments in universities; and there were also collective enterprises across fields—as organized, for example, in the New York based Social Science Research Council (SSRC), founded in 1924. (SSRC supported my research in the early 1970s, and I subsequently served on its Board.)
The period before, during, and after the Second World War saw considerable interdisciplinary work in the social sciences (some, indeed, spurred by WWII). In my own field of developmental psychology, there were Bureaus of Child Welfare in several Midwestern universities, and Committees or Departments of Human Development at schools like Yale and the University of Chicago.
The establishment of institutes, committees, and departments is almost always a joint product of history, biography, and funding (chiefly private foundations, in those days). Disciplines develop alone, in tandem, or, more rarely, together, while scholars from these fields also carry out their work alone, in tandem, and, more rarely, together. At Harvard, during the 1940s, there was an unusual collection of distinguished scholars who came to know one another and to be invigorated by one another’s work. Specifically, the major figures were psychologists Gordon Allport and Henry A. Murray; anthropologists Clyde Kluckhohn and Cora DuBois; and sociologists Samuel Stouffer and Talcott Parsons. Among these scholars, Parsons was notably ambitious: he was intellectually ambitious, trying to tie the social sciences together through a conceptual framework (very influential in its time, now largely forgotten); and he was organizationally ambitious as well, thinking/hoping that the heretofore separate disciplines could, if integrated, prove to be far greater than the sum of their parts.
Hence in 1946 the Department of Social Relations was launched, as both an undergraduate major (or concentration) and as a doctoral degree department. (The name is truly awful!) For a while it thrived, because of the leading scholars involved; because of the interesting work that they carried out, sometimes jointly; and, it has to be stated, because Soc Rel was seen as being an easy major, one favored by many athletes.
And now an autobiographical turn. When I entered college in 1961, I had not heard of Soc Rel (probably very few high school students had). I assumed that I would be an history major and that I would go on to law school (adults had often told me that I would become a lawyer some day). But through a combination of circumstances, I became interested in this new field of study (new to me, still new to the academy), and when I was turned off by my sophomore tutorial in history, I decided to switch to Soc Rel—which turned out to be a fine home for my interests and my intellectual style.
When I look back on this experience and wonder why I was attracted to Soc Rel, I can identify two separate reasons. On the one hand, I liked very much several of the major professors—sociologists David Riesman, Daniel Bell, and Charles Tilly, personality psychologist Henry Murray, cognitive psychologist Jerome Bruner, psychologist of language Roger Brown, anthropologists David Maybury-Lewis and Lawrence Wylie, and several others (alas, no women scholars). (I also liked the work of social psychologist Stanley Milgram, though we clashed personally.) Above all, there was the eminent psychoanalyst Erik Erikson, and I was fortunate enough to be his tutee as both a junior and senior in college. Though Erikson often told his students “Don’t try to be me,” it’s clear that he was a role model for me throughout college, just as Roger Brown and Jerome Bruner became role models in graduate school.
The other reason had to do with the kind of work that was central to scholarship in this area—and the real reason for this blog!
While the scholars in this field usually had their own specific expertise—ranging from linguistics to psychoanalysis—they moved readily and comfortably across the social scientific terrain. Riesman and Erikson—the individuals who had the greatest influence on me in college and later in life—did not represent a discipline at all. Riesman was trained as a lawyer, not a social scientist; and Erikson had never gone to college! To try to put them into a disciplinary bin was hopeless. Instead, they carried out what I have called "synthesizing social science."
In this work, they surveyed large bodies of knowledge, did considerable field work, and then put together powerful syntheses. Most famously David Riesman (and his colleagues Nathan Glazer and Reuel Denney) focused on the new social arrangements emerging in the United States. They contrasted the "tradition directed" perspective of the 18th century Americans with the "inner directed" perspective of the frontier-attracted 19th century and the new "other directed" perspective of suburban Americans (white middle class, we would now underscore) of their own period. For his part, Erikson observed widely across several distinctly different societies, probed the life cycle through psychoanalytic sessions with hundreds of patients, and put forth his theory of eight stages of the life cycle—beginning with the conflict between trust and mistrust of the infant; highlighting the crisis of identity versus role diffusion of adolescence and early adulthood; and culminating in the struggle between integrity and despair as one’s powers wane in old age.
It would take many pages to detail how these authorities went about their work and reached their conclusions—and this is a blog, not a door-stopping book. But it may help to point out that the scholarly efforts of these researchers and writers—and others in the “Soc Rel” tradition—fell between two examples. While their work often came up with "easy to summarize" conclusions, it was not "mere" journalism; the authorities spent years observing and reflecting and took their time in reaching and expressing their conclusions. (They also wrote well!) On the other hand, the work was not quantitative science. While there were certainly "data," they were informed by informal observations rather than large surveys or carefully controlled experiments, complete with tests of statistical significance.
Put differently, they were more informed individual and societal portraits than traditional science: not putting forth claims that could be "tested" in the sense of Karl Popper, but rather sense-make syntheses that sought to capture the world in its complexities. Neither Riesman nor Erikson nor their colleagues would have dreamed of claiming that they had obtained "truths" in the manner of astronomer or a geneticist.
And there, perhaps, lies the major explanation for the decline and demise of Soc Rel. Within universities, individual departments, and especially their doctoral training programs, are powerful entities. With the passage of time (and the passing of the pioneers), up-and-rising scholars wanted to be known as developmental psychologists, or sociologists of religion, or physical anthropologists—and not as experts in “Soc Rel” or even as synthesizing or qualitative social scientists.
But there were also the factors of age and successions. As I was going to graduate school, the founders of Soc Rel were all retired or about to retire—and only rarely had they nurtured successors of equal scholarly eminence and organizational skills. With first rate scholars retreating to their disciplinary trenches and budding Soc Rel scholars (like me!) who were less eminent, the pull toward safe and secure traditional departments was powerful.
Indeed, the demise of Soc Rel in the early 1970s could be well analyzed in terms of its constituent disciplines. There was the psychology of ego on the part of ambitious faculty; the sociology of departmental power; and the ethnography of a particular set of characters who had shared a vision but had not built the infrastructure or recruited the next generation of leaders. RIP Soc Rel.
But not entirely. As I and my colleagues pass the age of the founders, some of us still carry the Soc Rel banner. Among my own classmates, Rick Shweder of the University of Chicago clearly spans the range of disciplines; and among colleagues at other schools, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, long at Chicago and now at Claremont Graduate School, moves easily among the social sciences and also writes in the synthesizing mode of Riesman, Erikson, and their associates—nearly all male, given the university environment of the period. And in recent memory, there were other scholars who clearly carried the Soc Rel banner—for example, sociologists Robert Bellah and Neil Smelser.
I am bold enough to assert that there will long be a need—and perhaps also a hunger—for the kind of synthesizing social science embodied by the leaders of Soc Rel. To be sure, without institutional support (from universities and philanthropists), it will be more difficult to pull off this approach. But I have sufficient optimism that young scholars with the “Soc Rel” gene will be able to learn from the powerful role models of an earlier generation and to continue to compose impressive works in that tradition. How else will we understand the times in which we live, and the people with whom we live?
