The postwar era is generally recognized as a unique moment of impetuous growth of the social sciences, due to the interest of Western internationalist elites in the development of a set of pragmatically-oriented intellectual tools that could be of use in the confrontation between the self-proclaimed “Free World,” the Soviet bloc, and emerging postcolonial nations. In the last twenty years, however, doubts about the impact of the Cold War syndrome on the development of ideas, methods, and infrastructures of Western social science in the 1950s and the 1960s have been cast by historians and social scientists alike. This article uses the episode of the 1959 Middle East scholarly trip of a Harvard sociologist, Robert N. Bellah, to highlight the complexity and the ambivalence of individual trajectories, as well as the adumbrations of critical ideas and themes in the work of an intellectual who was a recognized, if peripheral, member of some of the most influential Cold War Social Science circles. A final hypothesis on a paradox of Cold War social science is advanced, according to which the need to staff centers and institutes for the training of Cold War technicians and elites put humanists and orientalists in the condition to influence those very students who should have been trained in the most advanced and practically-oriented social sciences.

中文翻译：

---

勉强的现代化者：中东之旅和冷战社会科学

战后时代被普遍认为是社会科学急速发展的独特时刻，这是因为西方国际主义精英对开发一套实用主义的智力工具感兴趣，这些工具可用于对抗自我与社会科学之间的对抗。宣布“自由世界”、苏联集团和新兴的后殖民国家。然而，在过去的二十年里，历史学家和社会科学家都对冷战综合症对 1950 年代和 1960 年代西方社会科学的思想、方法和基础设施的发展产生了影响表示怀疑。本文使用哈佛社会学家罗伯特·N·贝拉 (Robert N. Bellah) 1959 年中东学术之旅的插曲来强调个人轨迹的复杂性和矛盾性，以及一位知识分子的作品中对批判性思想和主题的暗示，他是一些最有影响力的冷战社会科学界公认的（如果是边缘的）成员。提出了关于冷战社会科学悖论的最终假设，根据该假设，需要为冷战技术人员和精英培训中心和机构，使人文主义者和东方主义者能够影响那些本应接受培训的学生在最先进和以实践为导向的社会科学中。