This paper will explore how political critiques of the welfare state in 1960s America intersected with epistemological challenges to claims of value-neutrality in the social sciences. The leading ideological defenses of the post-World War II “New Deal order” leaned heavily on the assumption that a robust, reliable social-scientific enterprise could arm an activist state with the knowledge it needed to intervene effectively in economic and social practices. From the late 1930s forward, the paper will argue, critics of New Deal liberalism routinely attacked this linchpin assumption about the character of social knowledge, even as they also made openly normative arguments against the welfare state and its policies. In other words, the strong epistemological claims underlying postwar American liberalism led its challengers to see epistemological criticism as a particularly effective form of political dissent. At the same time, this aspect of New Deal liberalism also inclined those who began by criticizing value-neutrality in the social sciences on epistemological (or religious) grounds to become suspicious of the policy orientations associated with the welfare state of that era. The convergence of politics and epistemology within the New Deal order led to a similar convergence of politics and epistemology among its opponents.

The paper will trace these dynamics among the early American neoconservatives who broke with conventional liberal views on race and poverty in the 1960s. Rejecting environmentalist understandings of human behavior, these figures attributed persistent social inequalities to disadvantageous personal traits imbued in individuals by an entrenched “culture of poverty.” In launching their political challenge, the paper will show, the early neoconservatives challenged not only the capacity of the state to eliminate poverty but also the capacity of social science to understand it. They rejected the possibility of value-neutral social knowledge in much the same terms that Catholic leaders and neo-orthodox Protestants had done since the 1930s, conservatives and some humanistic progressives had done since the 1950s, and radicals were beginning to do in the mid-1960s. In these political critiques lay some of the deepest roots of today’s scholarly interest in the social conditions and cultural matrices of knowledge-making, at least as that interest has found expression in American universities.