Platt, Jennifer. Fifty Years of the International Social Science Council

International Social Science Review, Spring-Summer, 2004 by Harold M. Green

Platt, Jennifer. Fifty Years of the International Social Science Council. Paris: International Social Science Council, 2002. 112 pages. Paper, $13.50.

Established in the fall of 1952 pursuant to a resolution passed a year earlier by the Sixth UNESCO General Conference, the International Social Science Council (ISSC) was the product of a post-World War II optimism about the educative function of social science in eradicating the intellectual climate that created fascism. As originally conceived, the ISSC sought to foster and promote worldwide contact among social science scholars, its social meliorism being only a secondary consideration.

In Fifty Years of the International Social Science Council, Jennifer Platt, a British historian of sociology, has updated F. W. G. Baker's 1992 unpublished study, Forty Years of the International Social Science Council: The Evolution of the Social Sciences. Drawing upon an unprecedented cornucopia of source material (most notably, data from the UNESCO Archives in Paris; memoranda from the ISSC office; and the papers of Stein Rokkan, ISSC president from 1973 to 1977, housed at the Bergen, Norway, State Archives), Platt has prepared the definitive study of the ISSC. Her fifty-year conspectus traces the convoluted history of an organization that began as an appendage of UNESCO that, over the years, developed its own identity with important research programs.

In a major section of the study (pp. 9-60), Platt chronicles, at roughly ten-year intervals (1952-60, 1961-71, 1971-81, 1981-91, and 1992-2002), the basic achievements and orientations of this continually evolving social body. She notes that perhaps one of the most significant changes during the course of the ISSC's history was its 1972 transformation into a federation of eleven international disciplinary associations, a strategy that facilitated greater autonomy for the council. Following this reorganization, and with Rokkan as president of the council, in 1974, four ambitious interdisciplinary projects were proposed: a "Group of Twenty on Man's Social Condition," to set social science research priorities; "World Models," to study computer models for predicting long-term trends of social change; "Urban Networks," to analyze on a comparative level interactions among cities; and, "World Science Development," to develop project agenda among Third World social scientists (p. 31).

The story of the ISSC above and beyond its organizational aspect is also one of academic hypocrisy and intrigue. Platt's anecdotal material adds interest to an otherwise labyrinthine treatise encumbered by dense citations. Thus, for example, the reader learns that Claude Levi-Strauss, the organization's first secretary-general, despite public utterances to the contrary, actually thought very little of the ISSC, writing in 1988: "I strove to give the impression that an organization without aim or funtion had reason to exist.... Above all, one needed to organize international meetings, and to invent themes for discussion" (p. 19).

Although Platt enumerates in some detail the ISSC's member associations (pp. 64-74), the background she gives on the pre-World War II organizations is rather sketchy, without reference, for example, to the League of Nations or to the Committee for Intellectual Cooperation, a forerunner of UNESCO. Nevertheless, this thin volume is of inestimable reference value as a companion to Kenton Worcester's The Social Science Research Council, 1923-1998 (2001). It will be of interest to educators and historians of sociology alike.

Harold M. Green

Liberty, New York