The discipline that came in from the cold: American human geography becomes a Cold War social science

Abstract

The high–Cold War period – from the Truman doctrine to the Cuban missile crisis – brought not only profound changes in geography but also profound changes to Geography. The discipline moved from a museum-like, fusty subject to aspiring to be a Cold War, cutting-edge hybrid social science (or behavioural science) ‘cross-bred’ with physical and applied sciences. The vehicle was social physics. Its origins were in the 17th century, but the actual name was not coined until 1835 and then in French, ‘Physique Sociale’, by the Belgian astronomer, statistician and social tabulator, Adolphe Quetelet (1796–1874). As a project, social physics rested on the belief of monism in which the same formal explanatory scientific principles held in both natural and social worlds. In the particular case of Cold War geography, monism meant asserting that specifically Newtonian equations describing the movements of celestial bodies in the heavens could explain equally as well movements of human bodies down on earth. In American human geography, social physics was pioneered from the early 1950s by William Warntz, who collaborated early on with the Princeton astrophysicist, John Stewart, who, in turn, had previously worked with the Harvard linguist, George Zipf. Together Warntz and Stewart using home-made early computing devices and drawing on Newtonian formulations of potential cast geography as social physics, extolling its virtues as ‘macrogeography’ and on par with other disciplines that already had entered the Pantheon of Cold War social science.