HEREDITARIANISM, EUGENICS, AND AMERICAN SOCIAL SCIENCE IN THE INTERWAR YEARS: MEET THE CARVERIANS

sI am much interested in what you say regarding your analysis of my social philosophy. If I understand it myself, I believe that starting point is that social activities should be studied under the general concept of biological adaptation.s–Thomas N. Carver to Norman E. Himes, December 18, 1933s1sI.sTHE ISSUEsWhile largely forgotten today, Thomas Nixon Carver can be considered one of the key figures in the early development of social science at Harvard, where he taught economics and sociology for more than three decades (1900 to 1933). As an economist, he was among those who most significantly contributed to establish and consolidate neoclassicism in the United States. In his appreciation of twentieth-century economics, Theo Suranyi-Unger (1931, p. 245) observed that Carver “deserves without doubt the most eminent place in the construction of economic systems that have appeared in America since the war,” and even Joseph A. Schumpeter (1954, p. 836) felt compelled to observe that “[a]mong theoretical writings of importance, the one that comes nearest to developing Clarkian doctrine is Carver’s.”s2sBut Carver was not just a fine theorist. He developed his economics within a distinct Darwinian framework, which was reflected in his sociological teachings (Hofstadter 1945, p. 151). As Carver himself summed up in his reminiscences (1949, p. 172), his “Principles of Sociology,” the course he taught until the arrival at Harvard of Pitirim Sorokin in 1930, “developed into a study of the Darwinian theory as applied to social groups.” In his approach, he continued, variations among different “forms of social organization and of moral systems,” and the “selection or survival of those system or forms that make for group strength,” were considered to constitute the central “method of social evolution” (p. 172).sWhat Carver omitted to mention here is the close connection between his...