Sandra M. Sufian. Familial Fitness: Disability, Adoption, and the Family in Modern America Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 2022. 360 pp.

Abstract

final chapter, Markus Arnold retreads the classic debate about the relationship between planning, knowledge, and freedom that took place between Americans, such as C. Wright Mills, and Austrians, such as Friedrich Hayek. Arnold emphasizes social-science practitioners whose ideas were not simply “caused” by military funding structures, but who were actively reckoning with the problems of the role of the social sciences in Cold War culture—a worthwhile aim, even if other contributors successfully demonstrate that seemingly rigid Cold War institutions were also populated by fractured selves, tense debates, and individuals in transit, thinking reflexively while weaving in and out of nations and orthodoxies. The studies in the volume are most revelatory and engaging when focused on the individual lives that composed, questioned, and worked between national ideological projects. At other times, the breadth of the volume threatens its structural stability. The contributions provide no coherent conclusion to central interpretive questions, such as the utility of the “Cold War” as a framework. Are its temporal bounds rigidly deceptive? Does it privilege bipolarity and obfuscate local narratives? Or is it an essential lens, properly wielded, through which to examine the debates about subjectivity, knowledge, and social change that raged across the world in the latter half of the twentieth century? The volume’s keywords—“transnational” and “entanglements”—provide messy guidance for harmonization. But polyphony need not descend into Babel. The category of the Cold War social sciences is capacious enough to incorporate more voices, even as their voluminous questions strain its seams. For researchers interested in the history of the social sciences, Cold War history, intellectual history, or global postwar political history, as well as critical practitioners of social science, this volume and its concerns are an essential entanglement in which to become enmeshed.