Toward a "New Humanism"? Time and Emotion in UNESCO's Science of World-Making, 1947–1951

Abstract:This article examines how the newly formed United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) aimed to construct a programme of social science research that would dispense with determinist theories of racial evolution and promote a new humanism for a postwar world. As scholars and politicians debated the shape of a new world order, they turned toward apparently universal categories of time and emotion to explain both individual behaviors and collective cultures. However, the only time that counted was developmental and the only emotions that mattered were those that could be managed and utilized. This article shows how UNESCO's search for a new humanism remained constrained by racialized discourses that closed down the emancipatory potential of reckoning with the past in the present. The possibilities for open futures, generated by anticolonial politics and by new institutions of knowledge production, would remain marginalized by the teleology that underpinned UNESCO-sponsored social science.