The Rise of Policy Institutes in the United States, 1943-1971

In the period after World War II, an eclectic assortment of scholars, policymakers, and managers presided over the creation of academic centers for the study of war. This article examines the intellectual and administrative assumptions of many of these actors. Made up of academic scholars from the fields of political science, sociology, and economics, they advanced a vision based on what might be called “instrumentalist-positivist social science,” but in appeals to donors they employed basic scientific language.1