Join us for an alumni book talk of Harvard’s Quixotic Pursuit of a New Science with Patrick Schmidt, SAIS '03. This engaging conversation will be moderated by Dr. Andrew Jewett as they explore the rise and fall of Harvard's Department of Social Relations, a bold mid-century venture to remake the social sciences by combining social and clinical psychology, cultural anthropology, and sociology in a single interdisciplinary department.

ABOUT
Harvard's Quixotic Pursuit of a New Science: The Rise and Fall of the Department of Social Relations
In Harvard’s Quixotic Pursuit of a New Science: The Rise and Fall of the Department of Social Relations, Patrick L. Schmidt tells the little-known story of how some of the most renowned social scientists of the twentieth century struggled to elevate their emerging disciplines of cultural anthropology, sociology, and social and clinical psychology. Scorned and marginalized in their respective departments in the 1930s for pursuing the controversial theories of Freud and Jung, they persuaded Harvard to establish a new department, promising to create an interdisciplinary science that would surpass in importance Harvard’s “big three” disciplines of economics, government, and history. Although the Department of Social Relations failed to achieve this audacious goal, it nonetheless attracted an outstanding faculty, produced important scholarly work, and trained many notable graduates. At times, it was a wild ride. Some faculty became notorious for their questionable research: Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert (reborn as Ram Dass) gave the psychedelic drug psilocybin to students, while Henry Murray traumatized undergraduate Theodore Kaczynski (later the Unabomber) in a three-year-long experiment. Central to the story is the obsessive quest of legendary sociologist Talcott Parsons for a single theory unifying the social sciences– the white whale to his Captain Ahab. All in all, Schmidt’s lively narrative is an instructive tale of academic infighting, hubris, and scandal.

For more information about the book, visit
https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781538168288...

https://www.amazon.com/Harvards-Quixo...

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/harv...

Patrick L. Schmidt SAIS '03 is an attorney in Washington D.C., focusing primarily on matters relating to Latin America and the Caribbean. He received a BA, magna cum laude, from Harvard College, a JD from Georgetown University, and an MIPP from Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. Schmidt also completed graduate studies in the PhD program of the University of Madrid (Complutense) Faculty of Law. He first examined the history of the Department of Social Relations in his undergraduate honors thesis at Harvard, interviewing 28 of its faculty and other key players.
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Andrew Jewett is in the Medicine, Science, and Humanities program at Johns Hopkins. He is currently serving as the lead author on an institutional history of Hopkins that will appear in conjunction with its 150th anniversary in 2026. Prof. Jewett received his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley in 2002 and is the author of two previous books: Science, Democracy, and the American University: From the Civil War to the Cold War (Cambridge University Press, 2012), and Science under Fire: Challenges to Scientific Authority in Modern America (Harvard University Press, 2020). Before coming to Hopkins last July, Prof. Jewett taught at Harvard for ten years and held a variety of other teaching positions and fellowships.
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