Ideological Pressure and Social Science

As the bandwagon to censure Mark Regenerus and his work on marriage grows, following its harsh rejection by a MIchigan judge,  the hoard focuses on conservative funding of social science and attempts to create the appearance of a debate within the field for the purposes of public relations and for legal action.  Nevertheless, there is much more that should be considered. 

Let me first be a little personal.  In 1990 I went to Buenos Aires as a recently minted Ph.D., on a Fulbright grant, to help train a new generation of social scientists since their ranks had been decimated by the dirty wars, when voices raised in concern or opposition, and science that ran counter to official presumption, were silenced, often for good. At the time, it seemed to my naive self that the military government’s censoring of social science was a rare event. 

Since then, I have spent thirty years as a professional social scientist and, in that time, have seen constant interference by power in the day to day workings of the field. Generational style and the need for faculty to establish themselves by using a hook to draw attention are far from the main reasons theories and concepts change in the area.  

To show this, let me rely on the first sentences of a book by the eminent Oxford anthropologist and philosopher Ernest Gellner, Conditions of Liberty: Civil Society and its Rivals. There he notes how this concept appeared, almost like Athena, full-born from the head of a neo-liberal Zeus, armed with political intent.  It had the point of reorganizing and reconceptualizing society in ways that marginalized competing concepts for the ends of neo-liberal elites.  

Yet the concept became a main stay of political science and political anthropology during the nineties and the first decade of the twentieth century. It was technified and also became the basis of projects, impelled in part by multilateral agencies’ bureaucracies, to transform national societies around the globe as a means of enhancing democracy. In my personal experience I saw this clearly in the Bolivia of the 90s and 00s, until 2003 when the neo-liberal government fled. 

Yet, outside of Gellner, few people raised the concern of the political and ideological basis of this concepts.  We should have. 

I have also seen the concept of terrorist be reworked for political ends, such that it had little relationship any more to the tactical notions of guerrilla movements who had employed this tactic prior to 9 11 and the massive foreign policy adventure of the US  government, with corollaries  in political science and other social science fields. 

I could easily go on, and on, to write of the incoherencies in the conceptual apparatus of the social science study of religion--but shall leave that for another time. 

Instead, I disagree with Regenerus et al.  I also disagree strongly with attempts to force social science for ideological ends. But, Regenerus is in good company.  Much of the social science mainstream has been co-opted in my lifetime by one powerful ideology or another. It is very difficult to claim and maintain an independent voice, or a scientifically coherent voice, in a field so crossed with the warring forces of ideology. The proof is in the concepts.