Behavioral science research in American universities was promoted and influenced by philanthropic foundations. In the 1920s and 1930s, Rockefeller philanthropies in particular financed behavioral science research projects that promised to fulfill their mandates to `improve mankind', mandates that foundation officers transformed into an informal, loosely defined human engineering effort. Controlling behavior, especially sexual and social `dysfunction', was a major priority. The behavioral scientists at Yale University, led by president James R. Angell and `psychobiologist' Robert M. Yerkes, tapped into foundation largesse (...) by crafting research programs that promised to contribute to the `welfare of mankind' through the investigation and control of sexual and social behavior. Foundation officers supported Yerkes' primate research because they accepted his premise that analyzing chimpanzee sexual behavior would yield valuable insights into the evolutionary underpinnings of human development and would thus give investigators the necessary information to ameliorate dysfunction. Between 1925 and 1940, philanthropic foundations contributed approximately $7 million to support the Yale Institute of Human Relations and the affiliated Yerkes Laboratories of Primate Biology. Yet, disappointment with the results of the Yale appropriations ultimately contributed to foundation officers turning away from behavioral sciences and toward biological sciences as they continued their efforts to improve mankind through human engineering. This article examines the interaction between foundation officers and Yale behavioral scientists to illustrate how scientific entrepreneurs successfully crafted rationales about human sexuality to solicit funds, how philanthropic foundation officers became enmeshed in the behavioral science research projects that they funded, and how a cooperative human engineering effort at Yale developed in the 1920s and unraveled in the 1930s. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article explores the effects of scientific governance on personal liberty in interwar Britain through the work and life of German-Jewish demographer Robert René Kuczynski. Kuczynski arrived in Britain as a refugee in 1933 and, within the span of a few years, moved from being a researcher and reader at the London School of Economics to becoming demographic adviser to the Colonial Office. In the service of the British government, Kuczynski realized the first complete demographic survey of the British (...) Empire. Based on extensive primary research at the London School of Economics Archives and the Zentral- und Landesbibliothek Berlin, this article analyses the complex ways in which Kuczynski’s experience as a forced intellectual migrant interacted with – and often contradicted – his scientific work on population and the national and imperial policies that were enabled by it. Doing so, this article points to the inadequacy of merely evaluating personal freedom by means of law and power politics and asks about the hidden constraints in technocratic governance based on scientific knowledge. (shrink)