Rebels within the Ranks

During the 1930s, psychologists Gordon Allport, Gardner Murphy, and Lois Barclay Murphy emerged from the fields of social and personality psychology to challenge the neobehavioralist status quo in American social science. Willing to experiment with the idea of "science" itself, these "rebels within the ranks" contested ascendent conventions that cast the study of human life in the image of classical physics. Drawing on the intellectual, social, and political legacies of William James' radically empiricist philosophy and radical Social Gospel theology, these three psychologists developed critiques of scientific authority and democratic reality as they worked at the crossroads of the social and the personal in New Deal America. Appropriating models from natural history, they argued for the significance of individuality, contextuality, and diversity as scientific concepts as they explored what they envisioned as the nature of democracy, and the democracy of nature.

First sentence: As children of the Progressive Era who would later choose to work in the social sciences, Allport and the Murphys came of age in social and intellectual worlds that have been well scrutinized by scholars.

Year

1997

Language

English

Publisher

Cambridge University Press

Editions

4

Pages

272

ISBN

9780521524940

Data source: Wikidata