Transatlantic History of the Social Sciences

Christian Fleck is Professor of Sociology at the Karl Franzens University of Graz and Director of the Archive for the History of Sociology in Austria. He has been a Fellow at Harvard University and at the Center for Scholars and Writers, New York Public Library and in 2008 he was Visiting Austrian Fulbright Professor at the University of Minnesota, USA.

A thoroughly researched study of the ways in which American foundations (notably the Rockefeller Foundation) promoted and supported the development of “empirical” social sciences in twentieth-century Europe. Christian Fleck has not only used contemporary statistical methods but has done exhaustive research in historical archives and records (including the “paradise” of the Rockefeller archive) to lay out what comes close to a collective biography of some 800 German-speaking “sociologists” (a category broad enough to include some persons also known in other social science disciplines) who benefited from financial and professional backing by American philanthropy from the 1920s through the 1950s...This volume offers many useful tables and is very clearly written and translated. Fleck discusses frankly the problems of writing collective biography, but his methodological explanations appear sound and his archival explorations more thorough than many previous efforts along these lines...this dense and thoughtful work offers interesting new approaches and insights into the give and take of transnational intellectual influence and the shaping of new professional disciplines.

• Fellowships, and What they Entailed | Institutional Support in Europe | In the Shadow of Nazi Rule: Two generation units of social scientists | The Radio, Adorno, and the Panel | The History of an Appropriation | Reconnaissance Expeditions, Reconstruction Support,and the Rare Return | Red Threads | Appendix: Comparative Income