"Though this be madness, yet there is method in it": Cold War fantasiesCentral European University, Budapest, Hungary
Department of History
CEU Instructor: Istvan Rev
External instructor: Ioana Macrea-Toma
The two-credit course that is intended both for PhD. and advanced M.A. students, approaches post-World War II history through the lens of Cold War social science on both sides of the ideological divide; their interdependencies and mutual influences on each other. It will explore, based on unique, up-till-now barely used archival sources, how the social sciences contributed to the emergence of the fantasy of past, present and future that guided both the programs of the sciences and perceptions of the world.
Members of the class will work on two sets of documents: The Harvard Refugee Interview Project, 1950-1954 (available online), and the Central European refugee interviews, including the Vera and Donald Blinken digital refugee interview archive at OSA. The research on surprisingly unexplored primary sources, will be complemented by a comprehensive analysis of contemporary research techniques, including early public opinion research, clandestine investigation and interrogation techniques, real and imagined biological and environmental manipulation, cybernetics, applied system analysis, etc.
The course will try to demonstrate the impact of ideologically driven wild imagination on scientific theories and methods; the influence of phantasmagorical scientific ideas on the perception of the present and projections into the future. Fantasy, as much as empirical exploration of tangible reality shapes the course of actions that, for a retrospective view, solidifies the past as history.
We are in the process of trying to open up the historical archive of IIASA, the International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis in Laxenburg, Austria, and hope that the members of the class will have the opportunity to explore this underutilized archive of quintessential Cold War institute as well.
- Tabula Rasa theories of the mind
- Frames and phantasms of the ‘closed world’ discourse: the birth of ideational and informational complex
- History of experts of the Other
- Homo Pavlovius: from behavioral experiments to a manchurian philosophy of science
- Engineering opinions (1): history of (mass) (public) opinion research
- Engineering opinions (2): serendipities of strategic radio and communication research
- Methods and criticism of surveys – the case of interviewing refugees
- Communist hermeneutics of the soul: questioning, interrogating, investigating
- Subservient science? Assessing public opinion in the Soviet bloc
- Spying and its fantasies
- Secrecy
- Optimizing the unknown: machine dreams and cyborg sciences in East and West