Harvard's Quixotic Pursuit of a New Science

This book tells the little-known story of how some of the most renowned social scientists of the twentieth century struggled to elevate their emerging disciplines of cultural anthropology, sociology, and social and clinical psychology. Scorned and marginalized in their respective departments in the 1930s for pursuing the new and controversial theories of Freud and Jung, they convinced Harvard to establish a new department for their pursuits, promising to create an interdisciplinary science that would surpass in importance Harvard’s “big three” disciplines of economics, government, and history. The leader of the group was famed sociologist Talcott Parsons, who believed they could develop a single theory to explain all human behavior. It is a lively narrative as faculty members Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert (reborn as Ram Dass) became notorious for studying the effects of psilocybin on students. The Students for a Democratic Society infiltrated the teaching staff of the department’s largest course in the spring of 1969, scandalizing both the department and the university. The history of Social Relations is a fascinating instructive tale of hubris, ego, and academic politics overlaid on Parsons’s obsessive quest for an all-encompassing theory of social behavior – the white whale to his Captain Ahab.