Social Scientists as Experts and Public Intellectuals

Stephen P Turner, University of South Florida, Tampa, FL, USA

2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Abstract

Experts and intellectuals in the social sciences have a long history of relating to the state and the public. These relations vary in
kind from those based on technical knowledge applied to policy to cults to social scientists in organic relations to social
movements to organized attempts to develop public policy guided by social science knowledge. The most successful early
attempts were cameralism and ofcial statistics, but intellectuals like John Stuart Mill also reached a wide public audience in
the nineteenth century. In the late nineteenth century, social reform movements claimed expert knowledge. As the social
sciences entered the university, however, the forms of inuence changed. Under the inuence of the Rockefeller philan-
thropies, social science became more realistic and the emphasis shifted to creating professions dependent on academic
knowledge and certication. Think tanks and other forms of knowledge intervention developed which relied on academic
social science. Public intellectuals, however, speaking not to professions or bureaucrats, remained important.

People we now think of as social scientists and psychologists
were experts and sought to inuence public policy as well as
public discussion and personal behavior long before social
science was itself conceived of as an academic study. In many
elds of the present social and behavioral sciences, practice
preceded and formed the basis for the creation of a body of
theoretical or systematic empirical knowledge. This is true to
a signicant extent of science generally, as writers on the origins
of science in the 1930s, such as J.G. Crowther and Lancelot
Hogben, emphasized. But the social sciences exhibit some
distinctive patterns, and vary considerably depending especially
on the way in which they relate to ofcial bodies and publics.
These relations have changed over time, especially with the
disciplinarization of the social sciences, the support of foun-
dations, and the present situation, in which there is a substan-
tial governmental investment and use of social science. The
changes also reect changes in the state, in forms of social
provision, and in the means of state economic intervention.
In understanding the role of social scientists as experts and
public intellectuals, it is important to understand the ways in
which this role has both developed and varied under these
different circumstances. There are three major vectors relevant
to understanding this role: the question of who pays for
knowledge and how it is paid; the audience for knowledge; and
the bureaucratic and political structures and traditions within
which knowledge is applied. Audiences vary from the public to
private professional practitioners (such as physicians and
lawyers) to civil servants in expertized bureaucracies, the
purposes that experts have in speaking to them, and the kind of
knowledge at stake, varies as well. The purposes may range
from inuencing legislation or policy to inuencing adminis-
trative decisions, to inuencing personal behavior, to providing
intellectual orientations relevant to political issues, and the
content may vary from practical advice to abstract theory to
petition signing in support of causes.
Expertise: A Typology
Experts may be categorized according to the way in which they
relate to the public and public bodies. One kind of expertise,
which other forms emulate, is modeled on technical knowl-
edge, and specically limits the role of the expert to technical
advice based on empirical research. This kind of expertise is
normally rooted in academic training and a community of self-
dened and selected experts, and is made accessible to users,
who support research related to their own aims. It gains its
legitimacy from being publicly recognized as genuine expertise.
Technical expertise of this kind is ordinarily self-limited to the
specic domains of technical knowledge. In practice, this kind
of knowledge is insufcient in itself to inform public policy or
public opinion, but it can constrain the claims of other kinds of
experts. However, the line between technical expertise and
expertise beyond the narrow connes of what is established
technically is often vague, and those who possess technical
knowledge often claim more than is justied.
Expertise could be said to differ from scientic knowledge
proper in that it represents the state of knowledge at a particular
time, and is not limited to fully developed or tested theories or
facts accepted as textbook knowledge by the academic
community. In this respect, expertise resembles meta-analysis.
Experts are normally expected to be aware of conicting
claims and the range of relevant knowledge and opinion on the
topic in question, and to be able to aggregate this knowledge
and make judgments about the methodological adequacy,
signicance, and relevance of various knowledge claims to
present policy questions. But they are not expected to fully
agree on their advice and conclusions, which may involve
nontechnical elements, of values or policy considerations that
are contested, often by other experts.
Within this very broad denition, several major variants
may be distinguished. One model of expertise involves the
direct appeal to ordinary citizens and persons on the basis of
claims of special access to relevant knowledge with some sort of
certication or sanction of the status of the expert in
a community of experts or specialists that recognizes their
expertise. The expert speaking directly to the public on the basis
of specialized knowledge is, in contrast, speaking for specialists
whose knowledge is being publicly represented by the expert,
who is speaking for this community. This kind of expert appeal
plays a role in all the social and behavioral sciences, but is far
more developed in such elds as psychology and child

International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2nd edition, Volume 22 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-08-097086-8.03009-9 695
696 Social Scientists as Experts and Public Intellectuals
psychology than others. In this model, the audience of the
expert is a body of consumers who use this knowledge for their
own purposes, and judge it largely on grounds of its efcacy for
them. In economics, the body of users is persons interested in
issues of nance and policy who are themselves relatively
sophisticated, though not expert in the same sense. Public
intellectuals are a variant of this category. They are taken to
possess specialized knowledge, but they speak on issues that go
beyond that specialized knowledge, and attempt to direct or
inuence public opinion in domains beyond the narrow
domain in which they secured their professional reputation.
A second type of expertise is directed at ofcial bodies
from outside. An example of this is the eld of international
relations: here academic experts, with access to a body both
of theory and empirical and historical material, attempt to
inuence the conduct of diplomats and government bodies. In
this eld, depending on the national traditions governing state
bureaucracies, there is sometimes a revolving door between
academia and ofces. However, strong civil service traditions,
in general, tend to exclude outside expertise. Though there are
exceptions to this rule, there are signicant local differences in
the ways in which experts relate to bureaucracies.
An important particular form of this relation is expertized
bureaucracies: cases in which academic qualications or back-
ground become conditions for ofcial appointment and in
which advancement depends on continued engagement with
professional associations. A complex variant of this relation
was promoted by the Rockefeller philanthropies. The Rock-
efeller model, based on the experience of reforming American
medicine, involved multiple elements: the professionalization
of domains of activity, such as public administration in the
United States, and involved the creation of degree programs,
institutes, bodies of academic research, and intermediate
institutions for continuing education and for the promotion of
new expert knowledge to audiences of ofcials. This kind of
expertise is not directed at the public and indeed is claimed to
be form of technical knowledge, but it is also created to be
applied. The most developed social science application of this
model is the eld of public administration in the United States.
A variant of this use of expertise is associated with the New
Public Management movement of the 1980s, which out-
sourced work requiring specialized expertise to consultants.
This was motivated in part by efforts at reducing the size and
personnel costs of permanent bureaucracies, but also was
a response to long-standing issues that arose from the conict
between the hierarchical career structure and generalist char-
acter of civil service knowledge and the specialized technical
knowledge relevant to specic decisions. In the British case, this
conict initially arose in connection with the siting of telegraph
lines, and the anomaly of junior technical ofcials giving
instructions to senior (but nontechnical generalist) ofcials.
Another type of expertise is recognized primarily by
a specic audience, but not generally recognized or widely
dismissed. The extreme form of this is the expertise recognized
within a cult. This type of expertise shades into cases where
there are groups, including specialists, that accept the claims of
expertise, yet the claims are contested in the public domain.
This type of contested expertise has a signicant role in the
history of the social sciences. Psychoanalysis and Marxism are
examples, but there are many more: Auguste Comtes
positivism was turned into a literal cult, and such movements
as Reichian analysis were cultlike as well. But there is a simi-
larity as well to conscious attempts to develop ideological or
policy-oriented points of view on the basis of social science.
Austrian economics and the Frankfurt School might be exam-
ples of this.
A third kind of expertise is associated with social move-
ments and reform. The movements are independent of the state
and aim at producing state action, normally legislative or
regulatory change, and rely on expertise claims together with
political pressure and organized public support. This kind of
expert relationship has a large signicance in the history of
the social sciences in the predisciplinary period. During the
disciplinary period, this kind of relationship persisted, but
conicted with ideas about value-free science in elds like
sociology. A new form of this relation appeared in the relation
between womens studies and feminism, and is exemplied
presently in the idea of public sociology as involving an
organic relation between sociologists and particular social
movements.
This kind of expertise differs from the cult form in that cult
forms generally demand exclusive loyalty and develop
factions, whereas social reform movements are normally
nonexclusive, allow for multiple involvement in different
causes by the same persons, and tend to proliferate aims rather
than factionalize, reecting the fact that they are goal-oriented
rather than ideological in character. The differences are not
absolute, and in certain periods reform movements were
colonized as fronts for ideological movements. Typically,
however, reform movements have attempted to cooperate and
coordinate with one another.
These different forms of expertise operate through distinc-
tive institutional structures, and have distinctive products.
Among the most important forms are what in science studies
are known as boundary objects: reports or other accessible
sources of knowledge that purport to represent the policy
relevant facts on a particular topic. These are often produced by
knowledge-intensive institutions, such as the World Bank,
which employ large numbers of experts and seek to inuence
governments through the diffusion of expert consensuses.
Expertise is disseminated in many other ways, however, from
journalism and television appearances to textbooks directed at
persons training for expertized bureaucracies. Among the
characteristic institutional structures are think tanks, commis-
sions, and panels.
Expertise and Public Intellectuals in the
Predisciplinary Period
The cameralists, the political arithmeticians, and various
political philosophers are acknowledged precursors and
models for what became social science. These intellectuals prior
to university social science were paid in various ways, and
their writings had public audiences. Niccolo Machiavelli and
Thomas Hobbes, for example, were courtiers, advisors to
powerful families whose public writings followed and were
based on their advice and experience. The cameralists, who
were administrators for the absolutist states of central Europe,
in contrast, developed an intellectual tradition and interacted

with one another, but were not concerned with persuading the
public. Instead, they represent a continuous tradition of
administrative expertise based on a theory of statecraft:
a doctrine of Polizeiwissenschaft, according to which the ruler of
a principality enhances his own power by improving the
economic and moral life of his subjects through mercantilist
regulation and the paternalistic use of state administrative
power through magistrates to improve morality. This was the
beginning of academic social science: many of the cameralists
were university professors who simultaneously held adminis-
trative positions, a pattern that persisted in the German-
speaking world well into the nineteenth century.
These two patterns, the public and the bureaucratic, devel-
oped in different directions. In the eighteenth century, Hume
and Adam Smith were supported by wealthy patrons, though
they were not entirely dependent on them. Smith became
a professor of moral science at the University of Edinburgh.
Humes history of England was a best seller. The Encyclope-
diasts, in France, also derived income from literary projects.
This was the beginning of a period in which the educated
public was a paying audience. Social science at this stage was
a part of a much larger body of successful literary publishing for
this audience, and beneciary of this growing and increasingly
prosperous group.
It was not until the eighteenth century and the development
of a signicant book market that enlightenment thinkers such
as Voltaire, Diderot, and Rousseau were able to support
themselves through literature, but they could do so only barely
and with aid. The famous Encyclopedia on which Diderot
collaborated sold 25 000 copies; the income from this and his
other writing was not enough to support him, but he was
helped by Catherine of Russia, who bought his library and paid
him a pension. Edward Gibbon and Hume were also supported
by aristocrats.
In the nineteenth century, John Stuart Mill, who has been
described as the greatest public intellectual of the last two
centuries, worked for the East India company and derived
income from his writings as well, especially his System of Logic
(1882), which outlined his account of the methodology of
social science, including his conclusion that social science,
together with the utilitarian principle, would provide
a complete policy science. He was part of a current of liberal
thinkers, including Harriet Martineau, Walter Bagehot, and
Herbert Spencer, who wrote for the market. The latter two got
their start in nancial journalism, which has ever since been
a major conduit for communicating expertise, especially in
economics, to the public, and was the rst domain in which mysticism, and a kind of church. August Comte, who had been
experts could support themselves through writing.
These writers had a complex relation to the public and the
literary market. Their most important intellectual works were
not the source of their income. Most of them needed an
inheritance to enable them to commit time to writing social
science: Karl Marx was subsidized by Friedrich Engels, Comte
by Mill. Spencer and Henry Buckle, author of the astonishingly
successful History of Civilization in England (1864), inherited
wealth that enabled them to turn to social science. It is a small
irony that the great exponents of liberalism were unable to
survive in the market. Nevertheless, the fact that they did derive
income from the public literary market, and often through
journalism, meant that they were subject of the discipline of
Social Scientists as Experts and Public Intellectuals 697
communicating to this market, and this was reected in their
writings on social science, which were accessible rather than
scholarly. For this reason, many of their works are still read
today, in contrast to the works of the early academic social
scientists.
The bureaucratic tradition, which was initially limited
to the rationalizing absolutist states that were former parts of
the Holy Roman Empire, developed into two strands:
Nationalkonomie, a mercantilist state-oriented economic
tradition, and statistics, which altered its original meaning
of being concerned with the properties of states as part of
Staatswissenschaft to the collection and governmental use of
statistical data. The classic expression of the statistical ofce
was the Royal Prussian Statistical Bureau, founded in 1805,
which produced a large number of reports. Almost all of the
important German contributors to statistics before 1860 were
professors who had signicant practical experience and held
at some point, or at the same time, ofcial positions in
bureaus of statistics (Lindenfeld, 1997). In Britain, in contrast,
social statistics was associated with reform movements and
ofcial bureaus and the statistical society grew out of local
private statistical societies with a strong social reform interest,
while academic statistics developed in connection with agri-
cultural research. The leading gure of early social statistics,
William Farr, who worked at the General Register Ofce for
England and Wales, found it impossible to get academic
legitimation for the eld, but was nevertheless enormously
inuential as a sanitation reformer.
Statistics emerged as the best-organized social science by the
middle of the nineteenth century, with international statistical
congresses and a section of the British Association for the
Advancement of Science. Statistics was understood not merely
as a mathematical eld, but as a science of humanity. The study
of suicide was especially inuential on public discussion,
producing the suicide problem. In the latter part of the
century, the focus shifted to labor statistics, and national labor
statistics bureaus, which rapidly developed during this period,
exchanged publications and promoted information on the
cooperative and prot-sharing movements. Statistical reports
on wages and policy were widely discussed and debated,
particularly in relation to the statistical phenomenon of
unemployment and issues over wages.
Cultlike groupings played an important role among the
early nineteenth century precursors of social science. The
followers of Saint-Simon constituted a kind of lifestyle cult,
which included ceremonies, hierarchies, a form of religious
a secretary to Saint-Simon himself, created a similar structure
on the basis of his sociology, a religion of humanity with
churches (and a factionalized movement) that lasted almost
a century. It is a matter of controversy whether one should
include such movements as Marxism and psychoanalysis in
this category, but they exhibit some common features, notably
factionalization. Their claims to expertise were not universally
accepted, and they did not become, except in the case of
Marxism in the Communist world, academically normalized,
but they inuenced, as positivism did, many people outside the
cult. Similarly, Saint-Simonianism was a major source of
French feminism, and Marxs father was a member of a Saint-
Simonian reading group.
698 Social Scientists as Experts and Public Intellectuals
These movements shade into another important category:
reform movements with intellectual leaders, or, in the language
introduced by Antonio Gramsci, organic intellectuals, that is to
say intellectuals who identify with and intend to express the
thoughts and aspirations of a particular social group, such as
a class. The nineteenth century produced a vast array of these
reform movements, organized to educate, to inuence legisla-
tion, and often to provide services, including expert advice. The
topics ranged from household management and child-rearing
to social and economic legislation and prison reform. Among
the most intellectually fruitful of these movements were
cooperativism, Fabianism, and Henry Georges single tax
movement, which stimulated discussions of land reform. In the
United States, these movements produced such celebrities as
Jane Addams, in Britain Beatrice and Sidney Webb. These
movements promoted the entry of the social sciences into
the university, and for a while maintained a close relation
to the newly academicized elds, they eventually came into
conict with them, for reasons that will become clear shortly.
Transitions to Disciplinarity
The academicization of social science was uneven between
countries and between disciplines, but for the most part rested
on the promise that the development of academic expertise
would produce practical results. Much of it built directly on
social reform movements. Movements for such things as prison
reform and the special treatment of juvenile offenders as well as
the regulation of child labor were important elements of the
American Social Science Association of the nineteenth century.
This body, which had a British analogue, was the precursor to
the disciplinary social science bodies that were founded in the
United States and elsewhere around the beginning of the
twentieth century. These associations promoted the idea that
expert knowledge was needed in the operation of state insti-
tutions as well as the creation of university social science, and
were typically supported by wealthy donors as well as
membership fees.
The London School of Economics was a project of the
Fabian society, and was needed because of the reluctance of the
traditional universities to accept the social sciences. In France,
sociology entered the university under the academic heading of
pedagogy. Psychology entered under this heading in the United
States. Aside from Staatswissenschaft, the eld with the greatest
initial success in entering academic life was German Nationa-
lekonomie, which presented itself not as a pure science but as
providing the basis and ideology for national economic policy
and development. German economists exercised their expertise
in various ways, for example, through commissions. Max
Sering, Adolph Wagner, and others represented the dominant
Socialists of the Chair, and were organized in the Verein fr
Sozialpolitik, which produced policy advice and studies. The
problem of agricultural policy and rural life was common to all
major countries, and produced a variety of responses in the
form of commissions and research projects, as well as policy
recommendations. These provided both a basis and transi-
tional stage to the creation of academic policy-oriented elds of
agricultural economic and rural sociology, and embedded this
form of expertise in agricultural bureaucracies.
The transitional period in which there were a large number of
nonacademic expert organizations and a relatively small
academic presence of social science varied from country to
country. In the United States, there was a vigorous reform
community, especially in New York City, that paralleled the
Fabian society with which academic social science cooperated,
for example, by providing graduates and by participating in
public educational efforts (Recchiuti, 2006). These organiza-
tions were oriented to the task of public education, and created
many novel forms. By the early twentieth century, there were, for
example, Social Museums in Paris, Budapest, Munich, Bremen,
Charlottenburg, and Frankfurt. In addition, these institutions
typically held lecture series. In Britain, Patrick Geddes created
Outlook Tower in Edinburgh to educate about the social world;
he also put on masquescostume dramas illustrating human
progress. At LePlay House in London, the Sociological Society
held lectures and exhibited the results of social surveys. In the
United States, Harvards Emerson Hall housed the Peabody
Social Museum, and temporary museum-like displays were
created for the major social surveys, notably the Pittsburgh and
Springeld surveys. There were also social institutes of various
kinds in Belgium, Denmark, and Sweden, and a large number of
societies with specic problem orientations in Germany.
There were also innovative expert organizational forms,
such as the Municipal Research Bureaus in the United States,
which supplied objective statistical information on issues
related to urban governance, under an ideology of efciency
that had a large international following. But in the 1920s, the
reform community was losing direction, having achieved many
of its most popular practical goals, and was suffering from its
association with prohibition and the temperance movement,
one of the most powerful and visible reform movements,
which had a vast international following.
The connections were broken in part because of the efforts of
the Rockefeller philanthropies, which engaged in massive
support for the social sciences. In Europe, the support was
largely an effort to better establish the social sciences, but
preference was given to work that was realistic. In the United
States, the aims were more precise. The aim of the foundations
was to improve on the social reform movements of the nine-
teenth century and the efforts of such reformist foundations as
the Russell Sage foundation, which provided reform expertise in
a range of areas, by basing them on better data and greater
objectivity. The strategy was to rst promote more objective
social science, then for it to be applied to social and economic
problems. In this respect, they were largely disappointed:
objective social science did not turn out to be a panacea.
Nevertheless, such works as William F. Ogburns massive Recent
Social Trends project (1933) did establish objective social science
in the public mind as a distinctive form of expert knowledge.
During the 1930s, Franklin Roosevelt assembled a team of
expert advisors, known as the Brain Trust, mostly from law
schools, to help formulate policy. Among them, however, were
academic social scientists, such as Rexford Tugwell, an agri-
cultural economist and advocate of planning, which was a key
issue of the decade. A similar role was played by John Maynard
Keynes in Britain, who advised the cabinet directly, and in Italy
by Mussolinis statistician, Corrado Gini. These prominent
gures legitimated the idea of academic expert advisors. In the
United States, economic advice was formalized in the Council

of Economic Advisors, and academically trained economists
dominated the boards of the Federal Reserve Banks.
The academic social sciences turned away from the
reformers in the 1920s and 1930s in the United States, and
a model of the role of the social scientic expert that limited the
expert to the factual emerged out of this reorientation. One
motivation was the experience of the First World War, in which
academics in all countries provided intellectual support for
their side. In the victorious countries, this produced brutal
recriminations after the war, exemplied by Julien Bendas
The Treason of the Intellectuals (1928[1927]). In the United
States, the psychologist James McKeen Cattell was dismissed
for his public opposition to the draft and became a hero in the
cause of academic freedom, which led to resignations by other
prominent Columbia faculty. The propaganda operations of
the Ofce of War Information were retrospectively vilied, and
a wave of historical revisionism challenged the assignment of
war guilt to the Germans. In Germany itself, there was a broad
debate, occasioned in part by Max Webers address Science as
a Vocation (2012[1919]), on whether professors should
attempt to provide valid worldviews.
This was an important part of the background to develop-
ments in which social scientists, especially in the early-and
midtwentieth century, sought to free themselves of the
accusation that they were merely ideologists or apologists for
the state or the established order by identifying a domain of
science or expertise that was entirely factual or at least neutral.
This claim also facilitated the entry of social sciences into the
university as scholarly disciplines, an entry which in many
countries was very late and often controversial. Initially, this
more limited conception was associated with fact-mongering
and criticized as such, but later was given a more coherent
defense by George Lundberg in Can Science Save Us? (1947) in
terms of a version of the ideal of value-free social science, which
associated democratic decision making with questions of ends,
and made social science into the servant of decision making by
supplying the factual basis on which to choose means a way
of making the distinction that recalled Mill and Weber, but
could serve as a practical professional ideal for secure academic
disciplines. This way of separating science from politics was
criticized in such polemics as Robert S. Lynds Knowledge for
What? (1939) and Howard S. Beckers speech Whose Side are
We On? (1967), and by 1960s radicals.
These self-limitations, however, were inuential primarily
in disciplines formerly associated with reformism, such as
sociology, and were less important in such elds as economics,
which recognized a normative as well as a positive aspect of
disciplinary knowledge, and psychology, which had a clinical
side. Management theory, which produced both a practical
discipline and one of the most prominent public intellectuals,
Peter Drucker, always had a normative or best practices
component. International relations as a eld has, especially in
the United States, been associated with advising, and with
powerful political positions in the diplomatic or national
security system.
National Differences
Much of the literature on both expertise and public intellectuals
focuses on national differences. In Raymond Arons ironic
Social Scientists as Experts and Public Intellectuals 699
phrase, France passes as the paradise of the intellectuals. French
intellectuals, since the Dreyfusards, are taken to be respected and
inuential, especially for their political pronouncements, and
their collective approval or disapproval, classically in the form of
petitions, has been the characteristic mode of action. The French
intellectuals of the middle twentieth century are commonly
taken as the high water mark of the inuence of intellectuals, and
this included some social scientists, such as Georges Friedmann
and Aron himself, though it is normally philosophers and
literary gures, such as Sartre and Camus, who are now regarded
as paradigmatic public intellectuals.
This is quite different from possessing inuence over minis-
tries as experts, or of exercising control over the professional
status and reputation of bureaucrats through professional orga-
nizations dominated by academics, or even of being party
intellectuals with inuence over party members. It has also been
observed that the public role of French intellectuals reects in
part the limited possibilities of more direct impact on political
and administrative decision making. When French intellectuals
are driven to public commentary on politics, the commentary is
especially on the morality of political decisions. This in turn
points to the more general issue of the ways in which political
and administrative structures as well as the receptivity of the
relevant publics determines the possible roles of experts.
The case of international relations exemplies the general
principle that the role of social science experts is limited by the
bureaucratic structures with which the social scientist interacts:
In the United States, there is a revolving door between
government and academia and think tanks, while in Central
Europe the civil servant tradition is strong, and there is nor-
mally very little direct inuence on policy making by academic
experts. However, there is a larger role of intellectuals in
providing political orientation. Britain, which had a particu-
larly insular and strong civil service tradition hostile to social
science expertise, had two of the most inuential of all social
scientists: Keynes in economic policy, whose advice went
directly to the cabinet, and R.H. Tawney, who laid the intel-
lectual and moral foundations for the welfare state through his
writings and also his engagement with the Christian social and
workingmens organizations. In Germany, intellectuals are
widely discussed in newspapers, and are expected to have
political viewpoints and to provide worldview-like intellectual
orientation to political matters, though are not expected to
engage in details of ministerial policy, and normally do not, as
in France, engage directly in specically moral leadership.
Other national differences have signicant effects for the
way in which intellectuals in general and social scientists in
particular interact with the public and with decision makers.
The tax law governing foundations in the United States,
together with a tradition of private sponsorship, creates a situ-
ation in which nominally nonpartisan organizations can seek
to inuence policy by studies and reports, or by creating an
intellectual environment. Think tanks represent a variation on
this model. They are funded in order to provide intellectual
substance to a point of view or policy orientation favored by
the funders. They are normally not associated directly with
a social movement, but do seek to inuence policy and policy
discussions. The private Mt Pelerin Society did this on an
international level by developing promarket intellectual
orientations to public policy issues in the postwar period, in
700 Social Scientists as Experts and Public Intellectuals
response to the intellectual dominance of planning-oriented
intellectuals in the 1930s (Mirowski and Plehwe, 2009).
Differing legal denitions of freedom of speech have effects as
well. Political parties in Europe involve paid memberships, and
generally exclude large donors, and political messages to the
public are driven by parties, and think tanks normally receive
some government support, whereas in the United States, they
are normally privately funded.
See also: Comte, Auguste (17981857); Keynes, John Maynard
(18831946); Keynesianism and the Question of State
Interventionism; Positivism, History of; Positivism,
Sociological; Science and Technology Studies: Experts and
Expertise; Smith, Adam (172390); Vienna Circle: Logical
Empiricism; Weber, Max (18641920); Weberian Social
Thought, History of; von Hayek, Friedrich A. (18991992).
Bibliography
Becker, Howard S., 1967. Whose side are we on? Social Problems 14 (3), 239247.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/799147 (accessed 09.05.13.).
Benda, Julien, 1928[1927]. The Treason of the Intellectuals (Richard Aldington,
Trans.). William Morrow & Company, New York.
Bliss, William D.P., 1897. The Encyclopedia of Social Reform. Funk & Wagnalls
Company, New York & London. http://archive.org/details/encyclopediofsoc00blisrich
(Internet Archive. Accessed 13.05.13.).
Buckle, Henry, 1864. History of Civilization in England, second ed. Appleton, New York.
Collini, Stefan, 2006. Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain. Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Debray, Rgis, 1981. Teachers, Writers, Celebrities: The Intellectuals of Modern
France (David Macey, Trans.). New Left Books, London.
Jacoby, Russell, 2000[1987]. The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of
Academe. Basic Books, New York.
Judt, Tony, 1992. Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals, 19441956. The University of
California Press, Berkeley, CA.
Lindenfeld, David, 1997. The Practical Imagination: The German Sciences of State in
the Nineteenth Century. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL.
Lundberg, George, 1947. Can Science Save Us? Longmans, Green & Company,
New York.
Lynd, Robert, 1939. Knowledge for What? The Place of Social Science in American
Culture. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ.
Mill, John S., 1882. A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive: Being a Connected
View of the Principles of Evidence and the Methods of Scientic Investigation,
eighth ed. Harper & Brothers Publishers, New York. http://www.gutenberg.org/
ebooks/27942 (accessed 09.05.13.).
Mirowski, Paul, Plehwe, Dieter (Eds.), 2009. The Road from Mont Plerin: The Making
of the Neoliberal Thought Collective. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.
Ogburn, William F., 1933. Recent Social Trends in the United States; Report of the
Presidents Research Committee on Social Trends. McGraw Hill, New York & London.
http://archive.org/stream/recentsocialtren01unitrich/recentsocialtren01unitrich_djvu.
txt (Internet Archive. Accessed 13.05.13.).
Posner, Richard, 2001. Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline. Harvard University
Press, Cambridge, MA.
Recchiuti, John L., 2006. Civic Engagement: Social Science and Progressive-era
Reform in New York City. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, PA.
Turner, Stephen, 2001. What is the problem with experts? Social Studies of Science
31 (1), 123149.
Weber, Max, 2012[1919]. Science as a profession and vocation (H.H. Bruun, Trans.).
In: Bruun, Hans Henrik, Whimster, Sam (Eds.), Max Weber: Collected Methodo-
logical Writing. Routledge, London, pp. 335353.