Patrick L. Schmidt, "Harvard's Quixotic Pursuit of a New Science: The Rise and Fall of the Department of Social Relations" (Rowman and Littlefield, 2022)
New Books in Anthropology
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The Failure of the Social Relations Department
The social relations department lasted from the mid 1940s to basically the late 1960s. It was supposed to be the great post World War II, synthesize everything and unify all of the disciplines. The professors I talked to who were two of the founders, Talcott Parsons and Henry Murray, did not dwell on the failure so much but others did.
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