REVIEWS
An absorbing account of the rise and fall of a notoriously provocative academic division... It gives readers an engaging glimpse into transformations within post–World War II higher education.
— Kirkus Reviews
Schmidt’s book is not only an instructive story of intellectual hubris and academic scandal. It also offers insight into ongoing debates over education, knowledge, power and progress.... In the case of Harvard's Quixotic Pursuit of a New Science, the unorthodox approach has borne fruit. Through meticulous research and compelling writing, Schmidt has taken a set of dry, inaccessible institutional records and turned them into a gripping intellectual drama. Best of all, he’s managed to do so without sensationalizing his subject or shying away from semantics. A must-read for anyone interested in how educational systems are developed and their effect on the way we view the world.
— New Humanist
All in all, Schmidt’s work stands as an important contribution to the history of the social sciences that will be of compelling interest to all who seek to understand how the human quest for knowledge evolves over time. To his credit, his account is blessedly free of academic jargon, and therefore accessible to readers from varied backgrounds.
— History of Anthropology Review
This is a story of massive personalities as much as it is intellectual hubris, with luminaries such as Talcott Parsons, Clyde Kluckhohn, and Gordon Allport feeling stifled in their original departmental homes and united by a desire to study "man as he functions in society".... Schmidt does not shy away from controversial elements in this intriguing history, and the department had several, especially in the 1960s: from the Students for a Democratic Society launching two classes in the department that covered radical problems with minimal grading, to Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert feeding undergraduates psychedelics as a research project, contentions were the norm...Initially intended as an undergraduate honors thesis, Schmidt’s work maintains something of an academic tone, but that’s balanced out by academic drama. It is deeply researched, drawing from conversations with people who were active members of the department when it was formed, and Schmidt offers an extensive index plus annotations and a bibliography. This text is a rich resource for future study in the history of related disciplines, and anyone interested in academic history will appreciate this dive into how Harvard scholars attempted, and ultimately failed, to unite disparate disciplines for intellectual and personal reasons.
— Booklife by Publishers Weekly
Harvard's Department of Social Relations made history in the 1950s and 1960s as the most ambitious program in social science in the United States. Dedicated to a synthesis of sociology, anthropology, psychology, and other disciplines, the scope of its ambitions were matched only by the scope of its failures. Patrick Schmidt's new volume Harvard's Quixotic Pursuit of a New Science: The Rise and Fall of the Department of Social Relations (Rowman and Littlefield, 2022) documents the history of SocRel, as it was called, in intimate detail. It paints a colourful and carefully researched picture of the personalities and events that are central to the department's story, ranging from the austere theoretician Talcott Parsons to the hallucinogen-ingesting Ram Dass.
— New Books Network
An undergraduate thesis, now amplified by correspondence, historical research, and secondary sources, charts the rise and fall of the Department of Social Relations, the revolutionary attempt to create a new interdisciplinary social science. Towering scholars like Talcott Parsons and David Riesman loom large, as do the intellectual stakes—and the personal and institutional factors that brought the department down.
— Harvard Magazine
In the popular Netflix documentary series How to Change Your Mind, host Michael Pollan briefly touches on the academic ecosystem in which psychedelic drugs were studied after LSD was synthesized in Switzerland. A much, much closer look at this ecosystem can be found in… Harvard’s Quixotic Pursuit of a New Science...The most infamous chapter in Schmidt’s history takes place during the 1960s, the decade Social Relations—always on the lookout for out-of-the-box thinkers—hired Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert. Before Leary took to wearing his signature Nehru-collared shirts and love-beads, he was a self-described “caricature of a professor,” sporting a tweed-jacket with those unsightly leather elbow patches.
— High Times
This book is based on a remarkable Harvard undergraduate honors thesis completed by Patrick Schmidt in 1978, now revisited and moderately updated following a long career in international law. Harvard's Department of Social Relations was formalized in 1946 in a merger of forces from sociology, social anthropology, and social and clinical psychology in an intended interdisciplinary collaboration. ...The book's very real value, however, lies in the intimate picture it presents of the inside maneuvering and negotiations that underlay the establishment, maintenance, and ultimate dissolution of a historically important university department devoted to the social sciences.
— Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences
MEDIA/EVENTS
Harvard's Quixotic Pursuit of a New Science — The Rise and Fall of the Department of Social Relations
by Patrick L. Schmidt
Hosted by Alex Golub
Harvard's Department of Social Relations made history in the 1950s and 1960s as the most ambitious program in social science in the United States. Dedicated to a synthesis of sociology, anthropology, psychology, and other disciplines, the scope of its ambitions were matched only by the scope of its failures. Patrick Schmidt's new volume Harvard's Quixotic Pursuit of a New Science: The Rise and Fall of the Department of Social Relations (Rowman and Littlefield, 2022) documents the history of SocRel, as it was called, in intimate detail. It paints a colourful and carefully researched picture of the personalities and events that are central to the department's story, ranging from the austere theoretician Talcott Parsons to the hallucinogen-ingesting Ram Dass.
In this episode, Patrick talks to host Alex Golub about SocRel as well as the wider context of the Cold War academy in which it was situated.
Alex Golub is associate professor of anthropology, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa.
Hopkins at Home presents, Alumni Author Book Talk: Patrick Schmidt, SAIS '03
Join us for an alumni book talk of Harvard’s Quixotic Pursuit of a New Science with Patrick Schmidt, SAIS '03. This engaging conversation will be moderated by Dr. Andrew Jewett as they explore the rise and fall of Harvard's Department of Social Relations, a bold mid-century venture to remake the social sciences by combining social and clinical psychology, cultural anthropology, and sociology in a single interdisciplinary department.
Academics gone wild: how social scientists tried a major step up at Harvard
Professional envy can make people do some things they might not be proud of later. Faculty members at Harvard University in the 1940s wanted to elevate the social sciences to a status on par with the university's big three: economics, government, and history.
The result was the creation of a Department of Social Relations, which attracted outstanding faculty, trained many graduates, and performed a lot of notable research. Some of it is now out of favor, like Timothy Leary's experiments with hallucinogenic drugs.
Patrick Schmidt tells the story in his book Harvard's Quixotic Pursuit of a New Science: The Rise and Fall of the Department of Social Relations.
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PRAISE FOR Harvard's Quixotic Pursuit of a New Science
"Present on the scene shortly after the demise of Harvard’s Department of Social Relations in the 1970s, Patrick Schmidt got the inside view of that remarkable three-decade effort to re-boot American social thought for the postwar world. The nervy founders of 'Social Relations' imagined that their multidimensional new science could eclipse the hegemony of Economics and explain the workings of welfare-state modernity. Whether deemed noble or delusionary, Social Relations represented one of the great episodes of 'institution-building' (as Talcott Parsons put it) in the history of mid-20th century US social science. Schmidt’s long-awaited book gives us, with insight and verve, the essential narrative of that ambition and its unraveling."
— Howard Brick, Louis Evans Professor of History, University of Michigan.
"Who knew that interdisciplinary academic politics could be so compelling? In this brisk, amusing and intellectually important book, Patrick Schmidt explores the grand ambitions and severe disappointments of one now-disbanded postwar innovation at Harvard. The Department of Social Relations intersected with everything from Timothy Leary's notorious psilocybin experiments, to the Unabomber's involvement with an abusive psychology test, to the training and careers of some of the top professors of the 20th Century, including David Riesman, Erik Erikson, Clifford Geertz, Talcott Parsons, David McClelland, Robert Bellah, and Howard Gardner."
— Jonathan Alter, author of a Substack newsletter and, most recently, His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, a Life.
"The story of a controversial academic department at an elite university might seem cut off from broader societal concerns, but Patrick Schmidt's excellent book reveals precisely the opposite: how the history of Harvard's Department of Social Relations offers a broad and deep vision of mid-20th century debates over education and knowledge, identity and community, power and progress. A must read for anyone interested in how educational and social systems make and remake our understandings of the world and ourselves."
— Benjamin Railton, Director of American Studies, Fitchburg State University.
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