Harvard Club of Philadelphia

Author Series: Harvard’s Quixotic Pursuit of a New Science 

Please join the Harvard Club of Philadelphia to hear Patrick L. Schmidt ‘78 discuss his book, Harvard’s Quixotic Pursuit of a New Science: The Rise and Fall of the Department of Social Relations, which 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.  

About the book:

Harvard’s Quixotic Pursuit of a New Science: The Rise and Fall of the Department of Social Relations 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.

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. 

About the author:

Patrick L. Schmidt is an attorney in Washington D.C. He also teaches a course on comparative politics in the Government Department of American University’s School of Public Affairs. He received a BA, magna cum laude, from Harvard College, a JD from Georgetown University Law Center, and an MIPP from Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. He first examined the history of the Department of Social Relations in his undergraduate honors thesis at Harvard.

https://patrickschmidtauthor.com/

Date & Time:  Wednesday, February11th, 6pm

Location: Zoom link to be provided prior to the event

Cost:  Free!