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and of the Americans for Democratic Action." But by the mid-1970s the
utopian hopes for racial harmony aroused by the civil rights movement
and its social science literature crashed into the dystopian reality of what
would shortly come to be known as the underclass.
"We want to eliminate poverty, crime and drug addiction," said the
prestigious Social Science Research Council in 1975, "but we don't
know how." For years the cry of the academy had been "give us more
time, we're only beginning, more research will give us the solid under–
pinning needed for scientific understanding." But tens of thousands of
Ph.D.'s later the traditional image of scientific research as a ladder, with
each study building on, amplifying, or qualifying earlier research, was re–
placed, in part, with the more fitting image of a widening puddle.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then of Harvard, was speaking for other for–
mer liberals termed neoconservatives when he was asked what had gone
wrong. He replied that the real disaster was the overextension of social
science. It was time, he said, for the social scientists to acknowledge their
lack of "knowledge with respect to many of the urgent issues...."
Moynihan called for the disestablishment of the predestinarian Church of
Social Science, but he did so without challenging the value of technical
evaluations of social experiments in particular and reason more generally.
But others didn't stop there, and in a radical replay of the concept of
the end of ideology, they mounted an assault on the Western tradition
of rationality itself.
The spirit of '68, the spirit of unrestrained subjectivity, redefined not
on ly science but rationality itself and majoritarian democracy as authori–
tarian restraints on individual desire. Theodore Roszak, whose 1969
book,
The Makill<<! oj Counter ClIltllre,
was an enormously influential as–
sault on the "arrogance" of science, looked back a decade later with
some satisfaction. Writing in the January 1981
Harper's
Magazine , he ar–
gued, "If we can agree that Western society's most distinctive cultural
project over the past three centuries has been to win the world over to
an exclusively science-based reality principle, then we have good reason
to believe ... the campaign has stalled and may even be losing ground
in the urban-industrial heartland."
The Enlightenment idea of progress, the growth of usable common
knowledge, and the liberal politics built on it had by the mid-1970s lost
what had once been its birthright of self-evident superiority to all other
forms of perception. Where radicalism was once defined by its commit–
ment to debunking "ruling class myths," the new dispensation embraced
mythmaking as a path to personal and political transcendence. "There
are," wrote George Steiner, summarizing the change, "three times as
many registered astro logers in Europe and the United States as there are
