ABSTRACT
The statement poses numerous puzzles about causal linkages that impinge on social science and shape effects that flow therefrom. The road to “health” through any federal agency is paved with public monies. Statistical arrays, even fairly simple ones about money, can be trying. In the realm of science, dissonance emerges as pleas and priorities are voiced from fields as diverse as physics, economics, mathematics, biology, psychology, engineering, and sociology. As the idea for a new federal funding agency for science emerged in the 1940s, social science sparked expressions both of fear and of longing in the deliberations over proposed forms of the organization. The academic engine of social science has in fact become a vast, pluralistic intellectual and organizational enterprise as diverse and dynamic in features as the subject matter it attends: the social relations between human beings. Seeds of adversity were sown in the isolation of American social science from government.
