Were the social scientists “anxious democrats”?
The project I’m working on now is actually three different conference papers, and a fourth in draft. The first conference paper of the lot is all about Szasz and Eric Berne. The second one is just a close-reading of Harold Lasswell’s thought, and the third tries to tease out the intellectual relationship of Lasswell and C. Wright Mills. The project basically has Lasswell and Szasz as the poles of a way of thinking about the relationship between psychiatry and the state. I guess what I’m interested in is how Harold Lasswell thought that it would be good to use the state for projects of collective social psychiatry, and the state partly implemented his vision throughout the 1940s and 1950s. By the time Szasz rises to prominence in the early 1960s, his perspective is that psychiatry has no place in state functions, and that, furthermore, the whole medical model of mental illness is anti-scientific and mythological.
The past few months I’ve been toddling (i.e., I feel like a toddler) back and forth between Szasz’s papers, Lasswell’s papers, and the secondary literature, trying to understand what’s happening, intellectually, in the 1940s and 1950s that might help me make sense of the chasm that separates these two figures. Obviously, there’s plenty of room for people to just disagree, and there need not be some larger pattern to uncover. And there might be some idiosyncratic reasons that a figure like Szasz finds himself at odds with Lasswell. All the same, based on what I’ve been reading about the 1940s and 1950s intellectual world, it seems like there are some good reasons that I keep thinking there’s a missing piece in those decades.
One of the reasons, it seems, that the decades are somewhat “lost” is that the period is a massive change in how intellectual life is organized in the United States. The social sciences seem to have been ascendant in this period, and were not exclusively rooted in universities. Think tanks, government agencies, and major philanthropic foundations have as much to do with intellectual life as do the universities. And anyway, even if they were in a university, the universities rapidly change with the GI Bill. The flood of students, especially into graduate education, changed the role of “the professor” from a kind of priestly vocation to a managerial occupation. Some think tanks were embedded in universities, giving intellectuals within universities the opportunity to keep a foot in both government service and academia. The intellectual as a social type seems to have such porous boundaries that any analysis would be tightly specified to a particular scene or subgroup.
But one of the common themes that emerges is a kind of “anxiety” or “nervousness” or at least uncertainty about whether democracy was up to the task of defending the national interest of the United States, which was an unquestioned good. For reasons I still can’t fully articulate, I find the idea that the social scientists of this period were somehow disillusioned, or anxious about the possibilities of democracy to meet the challenges of the Cold War, unpersuasive. Not altogether wrong, but unpersuasive. One reason is that I don’t think many social scientists saw an incongruity between their democratic commitments and their desire to actively create democratic citizens through active psychological measures. The greater threat to “democracy” as such would be citizens who were not equipped to discharge their responsibilities, not persuaded that their responsibilities were worth discharging, or not committed to self-rule. I don’t think they were “nervous” or “anxious” about it. I think they believed that methodical, scientific observation and “treatment” of the populace was possible, practicable, and effective.
Moreover, it seems that, to the extent that there was a sense of crisis in the period, it predated the wartime experiences that have been posited as the source of some of these supposed anxieties. I am persuaded that the sense of crisis that was part of the larger discursive environment of the time has been read into the social scientists. But, as is often the case with social scientists, they are less worried than their more humanistic counterparts. They are nothing if not credulous about the capacity of the scientific method to resolve social problems. I think Szasz is dubious for two reasons, neither of which has to do with either faith in the human spirit or a sense of crisis. I think Szasz is dubious because he sees lots of claims to scientific understanding fail to make a dent in human problems. And, he’s dubious because he sees lots of petty tyranny being exercised in the name of the correction of psychological problems.