ABSTRACT
Samuel Stouffer's sociological survey of Americans' attitudes toward communism made him a target of surveillance. J. Edgar Hoover seems to have held a general disdain for sociologists, so it is no wonder that the sociological imagination was placed under surveillance. Young Soviet sociologists in the 1950s attempted to import methodologies from the natural sciences as a protective shield with which to avoid running afoul of the reigning orthodoxy of historical materialism. The Federal Bureau of Investigation's (FBI's) activities, including its widespread surveillance of American sociologists, served to silence dissent, inhibit democratic discourse, and push the mainstream of the discipline toward an uncritical support of the status quo. If there is a lesson to be learned from this, it is that sociologists must always remain vigilant, for while the FBI has been reigned in and McCarthyism long discredited, new threats have appeared on the horizon.
