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)

New Books in Sociology · Mar 19, 2023 · 1h 20m

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…