In Harvard’s Quixotic Pursuit of a New Science, Patrick L. Schmidt 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 controversial theories of Freud and Jung, they persuaded Harvard to establish a new department, promising to create an interdisciplinary science that would surpass in importance Harvard’s “great powers” of economics, government, and history in the ability to explain human behavior.

"An audacious aspiration, critics found it as imperious as it was implausible. Inspired by the new and controversial works of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, the group met clandestinely to plot the bold venture, giving their efforts a conspiratorial air. They called themselves the “Levellers” in recognition of the many levels they believed the study of behavior required."

Central to the story is the obsessive quest of legendary sociologist Talcott Parsons for a single theory unifying the social sciences – the white whale to his Captain Ahab. No sleepy department, it was, at times, a wild ride. Faculty members served as the secret research arm of the U.S. Air Force, State Department, and Central Intelligence Agency; ushered in the 1960s drug culture via faculty member Timothy Leary; experimented harshly and unethically on a young Theodore Kaczynski (later the Unabomber); and allowed the radical Students for a Democratic Society to hijack the department’s largest course in Harvard’s tumultuous spring of 1969. All in all, Schmidt’s lively narrative is an instructive tale of academic infighting, hubris, and scandal.

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