ABSTRACT
This chapter conducts a brief historical reconnaissance, arguing that the relevance of the first two responses can be tied to the adoption of the social sciences at the core of university planning education in the United States since about 1950. Many planning academics adopted theoretical ideas drawn from the social sciences that fostered the split between theoretical understanding and practical reason. This effort not only imported epistemological problems of the social sciences into academic planning debates, but it simultaneously separated these debates from the practical moral and political concerns of students and alumni pursuing careers in a rapidly-growing profession. The rapid growth in employment opportunities for planners in the 1950s and 1960s stimulated the formation and expansion of graduate schools of planning, preparing students to meet the growing demand. The rational planning model attempted to provide a framework for both the social scientist role as a generator of knowledge and the staff role as an administrator.
