Social Critics and Dissident Experts: Postwar Critiques of Technology

University Of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison WI

Investigators

Abstract

SES 00-80392 - Eric Schatzberg (University of Wisconsin - Madison) "Social Critics and Dissendent Experts: Postwar Critiques of Technology" This award supports first stage in a major study of post-World-War-II critiques of technology, a study that will explore both the intellectual origins of these critiques and their practical consequences. In the 1960s and 1970s, these critiques became potent social forces in the form of movements that sought to reshape the dominant technological order, most importantly the consumer and environmental movements. This project seeks to understand the origins of these movements in the social and cultural landscape of the 1950s. Historians of the 1960s have done little to explain why movements critical of technology emerged suddenly after so many years of intense technological enthusiasm. This project will seek an explanation in two amorphous groups from the 1950s. The first group comprises social critics, that is, public intellectuals who fostered critical discourse about aspects of postwar technology from big science to suburbia. These social critics included prominent scientists like Norbert Wiener, public intellectuals like William H. Whyte, and journalists like Vance Packard. The second group emerged from the scientific community itself in the form of "dissident experts" who raised doubts about key postwar technologies. These were the men and women who worked in university laboratories and government bureaus, where they conducted research and authored technical reports that provided the essential evidence needed by Ralph Nader's movement for auto safety and Rachel Carson's critique of pesticide misuse. Together, the social critics and dissident experts laid the groundwork for the movements of the 1960s and 1970s. This project will undertake an intellectual history of the social critics of the 1950s, along with a study of the origins and motivations of the dissident experts. The project will then connect these two groups with the most significant social movements critical of technology in the early 1960s, namely the resurgent consumer movement promoted by Ralph Nader and the new environmental movement inspired by Rachel Carson. These two movements followed similar paths; each inspired by a path-breaking expose that relied heavily on scientific and engineering research. This project will also examine two methodological issues of importance to science and technology studies. The first issue concerns the role of culture in shaping technological change, extending the PI's earlier work on this topic, and the second involves the relationship between theory and practice, stressing practices outside the laboratory.