Morawski 2011

History of Psychology © 2011 American Psychological Association
2011, Vol. 14, No. 1, 1–25 1093-4510/11/$12.00 DOI: 10.1037/a0021984
THE EVOLVING VOCABULARY OF THE

SOCIAL SCIENCES:
The Case of “Socialization”
Jill G. Morawski and Jenna St. Martin
Wesleyan University
While the term “socialization” stands as a common and clearly understood term
This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly.
regularly used in social science and lay conversations alike, its history is
This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers.
complex. In the 19th century, socialization was introduced to refer to societal

activities or projects, and only in the early 20th century did it gain usage as a
term describing psychological processes transpiring within the individual. The
architecture of the newer meaning harbored ambitions and problems of modern
social science, including ideals of interdisciplinary theory and theoretic resolu-
tion of the individual/society dualism. Nevertheless, socialization became a
central object of social scientific inquiry after World War II. This significant
social scientific object was repeatedly altered: initially representing a vision of
conforming citizens who were free from certain troubling characteristics de-
picted in psychoanalysis and well-suited to democracy, it later was engaged to
create a vision of autonomous, resilient, and cognitively active actors able to
negotiate a complex social world.
Keywords: socialization, history, individual, psychoanalysis, science
You’ve got to be taught

To hate and fear,
You’ve got to be taught from year to year
It’s got to be drummed
In your dear little ear
You’ve got to be carefully taught.
A young American soldier, himself in love with a woman of a different

race, introduces into the 1958 hit movie “South Pacific” the psychological
circuit whereby irrational racial hatred—“to hate all the people your relatives
hate”—is understood as socially acquired, reinforced, and attained “before
you are six or seven or eight.” Opening first in 1949 as a Rodgers and
Hammerstein musical based on James Mitchener’s book, both Broadway and
film versions of “South Pacific” conveyed (most directly in the song, “You’ve
Got to be Very Carefully Taught”) the dominant social scientific explanations
for racism. The lyrics rehearse the popular model of “socialization” or the
process whereby man “becomes adapted to and incorporates within himself a
substantial portion of culture by which he is surrounded” . . . “an essential
Jill G. Morawski and Jenna St. Martin, Department of Psychology, Wesleyan University.
We thank Christopher McDonald and Jamie Cohen-Cole for comments on a previous version
of the paper.
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Jill G. Morawski, Department
of Psychology, Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT 06117. E-mail: jmorawski@wesleyan.edu
1
2 MORAWSKI AND ST. MARTIN
characteristic of human nature”(Klineberg, 1954, p. 64)1 According to the

1954 Handbook of Social Psychology, socialization is “a broad term for the
whole process by which an individual, born with behavioral potentialities of
enormously wide range, is led to develop actual behavior which is confined
within a much narrower range—the range of what is customary and acceptable
for him according to the standards of the group” (Child, 1954, p. 655).
A relatively uncommon term in psychology before 1940, socialization turned
out to be a social scientific hit after the war, soon appearing in empirical studies,
encyclopedias, handbooks, and textbooks. Researchers lauded socialization as an
exemplary interdisciplinary accomplishment, yet by the mid 1950s socialization
had become, despite claims of interdisciplinarity, largely a psychological matter.

“Socialization,” wrote Eugene and Ruth Hartley in their 1954 social psychology
text, “represents the process that largely creates the specific characteristics of the
individual person. A complete understanding of socialization would include a
knowledge of all the processes involved in growing up in any human society.”
They continued, “Socialization and personality development should not be split
up; they are both parts of the same entity” (p. 203). Even arch sociologist Talcott
Parsons shared this psychological perspective in emphasizing the psychological
components of socialization; he wrote, “human personality is not ‘born’ but must
be “made” primarily through families, the socialization “factories” which produce
human personalities” (Parsons & Bales, 1955, p. 16). Socialization came to be
understood by practitioners of numerous social sciences as a process either
occurring within the individual or producing the individual. All social institutions
were taken to be somehow implicated in this making of the personality, the
citizen, and the human. Along with the family, noted textbook author S. Stansfield
Sargent in 1950, schools are central to a child’s socialization: “The American
youngster learns in school much more than is furnished by the formal curriculum.
He learns respect for material progress, for making money, for working rather
than loafing. He realizes that one should be ambitious and set high goals and
ideals for oneself” (1950, p. 106). Values learned at school reflect “in large
measure the values of the community and of the culture as a whole” (p. 106).
Thus, although social scientists linked socialization to an array of institutions,
they causally connected it, both directly and centrally, to then central psycholog-
ical constructs of personality, adjustment, pathology, identity, and achievement.
The ubiquity of “socialization” in the social sciences since the 1950s—with
its myriad empirical projects, diverse applications, and impressive bricolage of
theory—might account for the subject’s neglect in histories of the social sciences.
1
The term is not found in the first ed. (1940) of Social Psychology. In that ed., Klineberg
dismissed ideas of “social organism” (social consciousness or group mind) and cited recent fascist
movements in Europe as illustrating the dangers of false beliefs about group welfare. Klineberg’s
unqualified rejection of those social theories, however, left him with the “important question”
concerning “why the individual is almost always willing to accept uncritically the customary
behavior of his community.” His own response to his question intimates American psychologists
appraisal of individuals as needing a social structure to fill, so to speak, their repertoire of social
behaviors. For instance, “A third important factor is that the individual who does not practice the
customary behavior related to the social and economic life of the group will soon be regarded as
outside the system of reciprocal rights and duties upon which life in the community may depend”
(1940, pp. 332–333).
CASE OF SOCIALIZATION 3
Socialization inhabited postwar thinking as a heterogeneous, slippery, scientific

object that perhaps ironically provided researchers a seemingly sure-footed un-
derstanding of the social, the individual, and the relations of the individual to the
social. Its very ambiguities and explanatory capaciousness, its “generosity” as
Nikolas Rose (1992) describes the versatility of modern psychological knowl-
edge, might well have boosted the idea’s successful entry into the vernacular,
eventually making “socialization” a ready, intelligible explanation in lay as well
as social science discourse. Yet, as a scientific object, socialization came to
possess extra attributes. Given its purported interdisciplinarity and scientific
standing, socialization indicated the realization of a unified social science, prom-
ising a science that operates through prediction and control. Moreover, the very
idea of socialization seemed to resolve a lingering problem of values in social

science by its transvaluation: once matters of epistemic concern (namely, the
problem of separating values and facts), social values became objects of objective
inquiry. Among these values was the essential sociality of humans: socialization
corrected the “nostalgic romanticism” of “the legend of the self-made man”
(Parsons, 1959, p. 318). Human sociality thus became a matter for empirical
investigation, not the conjectures of political philosophy. Yet, just as socialization
theory came to define what it means to be “civilized” and “human” in a “demo-
cratic” political order, and just as it offered a diagnostic tool for serving individ-
uals and institutions alike, so it harbored conceptual ambiguities and cultural
anxieties which ultimately surfaced as shortcomings. Consistent with the complex
reflexivity in the human sciences, what Anthony Giddens’ (1984, 1990) termed
the “double hermeneutic” or looping of thinking between intellectual projects and
the wider universe of human actions, cultural anxieties circulated and were
transfigured through social scientific work on socialization. And although social-
ization initially and comfortingly echoed the interwar aspirations toward harmo-
nious integration of the social world, an imagined realm of cooperation without
socialism, in the 1950s and 1960s it attracted other worries, including a growing
concern about conformism and consumerism in American society; a sensed need
to foster political individualism (autonomy) suited to negative freedoms (freedom
from coercion or forced compliance); and a certain nervousness about what had
come to be understood by many researchers and laypersons alike as the dynamic
and potentially dangerous play of unconscious, irrational motivations in everyday
human actions.
Seen in broader perspective, socialization defies straightforward historical
narrative, yet its very representativeness of central tensions of postwar human
sciences (individual-social, science-values, and rational-irrational) and its longev-
ity in social scientific discourse signal its historical import. Close analysis of
socialization studies in postwar American social science reveals resemblances to
earlier debates about the individual-social dualism, suggesting once again how the
“relation of the individual to the social is a political and moral as well as a
scientific subject” (Smith, 1997, p. 747). The longer history of the term social-
ization exemplifies dynamic relations between politics and science, and its evo-
lution correlates with certain changes in political thought. Within the social
sciences, socialization had a very different meaning in the nineteenth-century
when the term was used to refer to the organization and coordination of institu-
tions within a state, a usage that persisted into the 20th century. In the late 19th
century, social scientists began a redefinition that would bestow a new meaning.
Socialization was redefined in concert with radical changes in the understanding
of market economy–a shift from a traditional model of contracts, competition, and
self-interested individuals to one that understands the economy to be constituted
through cooperative, social practices and that assumes “a much more seamless
relation between self and society” (Sklansky, 2002, p. 9). This quiet but radical
reconceptualization of the concept was influenced, in part, by which social
scientists were employing the term but it owed much more to social scientists’
growing interest in interrogating the relation of society to the individual, on the
one side, and their burgeoning belief that social control was best accomplished
through control of individuals (individuals’ minds) on the other side (Bryson,

2002; Burnham, 1988; Eghigian, Killen, & Leuenberger, 2007; Napoli, 1981;
Wagner, 1998). During the interwar years the original meaning was largely set
aside as socialization was reconceptualized as a process occurring within indi-
viduals whereby they acquire the facility to function as competent and cooperative
members of society. By the 1950s socialization was explained with a heady mix
of psychoanalysis, behaviorism, culture and personality, learning theory, and
functional sociology, making it a model of social science’s epistemological
aspirations to “interdisciplinarity” and “unification.” Unpacking these features is
a necessary prologue to appreciating socialization’s deep connections with ideals
of rationality, civility, autonomy, and control.
The maturation of the contemporary meanings of socialization, therefore,
reflects scientific experts’ responses to changes in the social world as well their
reconfiguring of that world. Socialization provided answers to real world situa-
tions, or what Rose has termed “problematizations” which social scientists be-
lieved required psychological ways of seeing in order to render such problems
“thinkable or practical in certain ways” (1992, p. 353). More specifically, the
project of defining socialization represented one way of reconciling the problem
of the individual in the social world. It changed over the twentieth century from
its initial use to describe relations of production and social institutions to one
describing the social self in a world of cooperation and coordination and even-
tually to an explanatory account of a social yet autonomous self whose individ-
uality and rationality ensured freedom from social constraints. These changes in
meaning parallel revisions in what Gregg Mittman identified in biology’s shifting
notions of the individual that ultimately yielded “the erosion of the social
organism and the pervasiveness of a genetic conception of self within biological
discourse in the years following World War II” (1995, p. 271). In fact, as Dennis
Bryson has found, the social scientists engaged in a “pacification of the social”
were informed by these biologizing perspectives on the individual and social
world. For researchers guided by and working within philanthropic programs,
“the fostering and guidance of the individual and his or her capacities and social
adjustment was aimed at the integration of the individual within the social in order
to foster social order and pacification,” making the individual personality a part of
the social (2002, p. xxv). In a dynamic twist, this distinctly social understanding
of the self entailed a “psychologization” of society and, ultimately, a reconfigu-
ration of individual psychology.
The present examination of socialization neither denies nor presupposes that
socialization exists. Nor does it attempt to track disciplinary politics, for such a
task would be tangled and perhaps halted by socialization’s promiscuous presence

across institutions and disciplines and use by a sizable number of social scientists.
The study is framed by appreciation that socialization is an exceptionally complex
object that has been made and remade through an assemblage of experts in several
disciplines, political and philosophical aspirations, empirical constraints, and
conceptual problems. While focusing on the work done within psychology (a
crucial discipline once socialization came to be associated with the individual and
not the socius), due attention is given to the multidisciplinary roots. Given its
complex and evolving life, and given the paucity of historical work on socializa-
tion, we sketch here an introduction to the “object” (Brown, 2003; Daston, 2000;
Kopytoff, 1986) of socialization by tracing the changing meanings within a key

discipline, psychology, between 1900 and 1960. This account draws upon defi-
nitions found in dictionaries, encyclopedias, and textbooks. It highlights the ways
socialization was engaged by postwar researchers to quell anxious concerns about
human nature, democracy, and civilization more generally. Attention to its post-
war life also makes possible a closer analysis of the kinds of individual/citizen
represented as normative in these postwar socialization studies, the political world
they implied, and the efforts to revise its meaning in accordance with cultural and
political change.
The structure of this introductory exploration abides by the dynamics of this
scientific object, its dramatic shifts in meaning, differing borrowings of social
scientific theories, and changing political objectives. These vibrant forces of
social scientific ambition, political vision, and heterodox theories defy any strictly
chronological telling or mapping of individual researchers. Rather, historical
study of this evolving object first requires familiarity with fundamental conceptual
challenges accompanying the object as well as its several dramatic and political
shifts in meaning. The first section introduces three key structural features of
socialization: recurring conceptual paradoxes, visions of ideal society, and the
goal of unified social science. Although some researchers apprehended one or
another of these architectural features, for the most part they went unacknowl-
edged.2 The wholesale redefining of socialization in the early 20th century and the
subsequent refinement of its distinctly psychological (individual) focus is consid-
ered next. The final two sections trace several postwar revisions of socialization,
notably the effort to remove vestiges of psychoanalytic thinking and the endeavor
to represent human resilience to social forces by incorporating capacities of
human agency, rational decision making, and cognitive autonomy.
The Architecture of Socialization

What can be called the “psychological” conception of socialization that began
early in the 20th century and burgeoned after World War II entailed more than its
simple definition as a process whereby individuals come to be competent mem-
bers of a social world, ultimately enabling the better functioning of that world.
The newer meaning produced logical problems if not a paradox; political visions
2
For instance, Gordon Allport (1943) published an article on the paradoxes in William James’
psychology but did not address the paradox of individual and society that historians and theorists
later examined.
of a good society; emerging aspirations for unified social science; and anxious
concerns about world conditions as well as the “real” nature of human nature.
These structural features, and not just the theoretical postulate of explaining the
individual’s acquisition of social competence or the maintenance of cooperative
cultures, gave socialization a deeper if more complicated life space. All three of
these features are intimated in the South Pacific song lyrics, and were given
further illustration in a plea made by Gordon Allport in his 1954 history of social
psychology:
Social psychology began to flourish soon after the First World War. This event,
followed by the spread of Communism, by the great depression of the 1930s, and
by the rise of Hitler, the genocide of the Jews, race riots, the second World War
and the atomic threat, stimulated all branches of social science. A special chal-
lenge fell to social psychology. The question was asked: How is it possible to
preserve the values of freedom and individual rights under conditions of
mounting social strain and regimentation? Can science help provide an an-
swer? (Allport, 1954, p. 2).
For many, socialization was the answer to Allport’s questions. Socialization

could explain how individual freedom could be preserved in a society that
requires cooperative participation. His expansive observation on the state of
society captures the psychic and political temper of postwar America, particularly
as professional scientists apprehended it.3 On several important dimensions,
Allport’s problems resemble those of South Pacific’s soldier in love: both decry
the high costs of a regimented and prejudicial world and both seek freedom, the
freedom found in a genuine democracy. The psychologist and the soldier con-
curred that the fate of the individual is bound in the particular conditions of the
social. Bracketing for now the specific contexts of their speaking, we can use their
common diagnoses to uncover the social scientific remedies contained in the idea
of socialization. Socialization’s architecture connected the self and the social,
harbored hopes for a harmonious social world, and outlined a footprint for unified
social science. It supplied components for engineering of the self as cooperative
and conforming and yet free, and it addressed the apparent paradox of the
individual and society.
1. Problematics and paradoxes. Allport and the soldier’s shared under-
standing of the individual’s dynamic relation to the social world is a distinct
accomplishment of modern social science. From the late 19th century onward,
social scientists labored to understand the newly secularized “self” in naturalistic
(instead of moral, legal, economic, or contractual) terms. They aimed to figure
that self as intimately and ontologically linked to social existence (Eghigian et al.,
2007). For William James (1890), whose idea of the “social self” fertilized a
century of psychological studies, this view meant that humans “were individuals
whose meaning as individuals derived paradoxically from the fact that they were
inescapably social” (Coon, 2000, p. 94).4 Shaped by myriad social forces, the
3
For instance, Allport’s observations about America and social science resemble those of
Louis Wirth in “The Unfinished Business of American Democracy” (1946).
4
On the changes in social scientific understandings of social self see Smith (1997); Sklansky
(2002); Bryson (2002), and Greenwood (2004).
individual is a fragmented being, one not only susceptible to dissociations or

splitting but also to being compelled by the demands of others— by the demands
of the external or social world.5 His new conceptualization of the social self
harbored the paradox of an independent self that is at once dependent on the
social, and this paradox persisted through the 20th century, periodically providing
fodder for trenchant critiques of social science and even of American culture.
During the decade when socialization arrived as a scientific object in psychology
textbooks, the 1950s, these critiques were common.6 In 1931 sociologist Ernest
Groves could comfortably posit that while democracy requires self-expression,
“Its emphasis on personal achievement must be tempered, however, by an
insistence upon the necessity of obedience to social authority” (pp. 284 –285).
Postwar researchers rejected such a compromising compact. These later experts

adamantly claimed that, in Erik Erickson’s words, “The individual must be able
to convince himself that the next step is up to him and that no matter where he is
staying or going he always has the choice of leaving or turning in the opposite
direction if he chooses to do so” (1950, p. 286). As Floyd Ruch and Philip
Zimbardo argued in their influential psychology textbook, socialization can go
wrong, such as when “Uncritical acceptance of the society’s values and norms
minimizes the chances that the individual will revolt against the established,
traditional values. It may also lead to the pathological identification with external
power . . . .” (1967, p. 563).
Socialization ideas thus retained James’ paradox. In the early 20th century,
George Herbert Mead confronted the relations of self and society, and historian
Ruth Ley’s analysis of Mead’s social self elucidates the consequential theory
problems. Researchers who were committed to democratic and antitotalitarian
governments and who sought to discard a “metaphysics of the autonomous
individual” repeated, unsuccessfully if inadvertently, attempts “to “reground” the
origin of the subject ever more firmly in a process of radical indistinction between
self and other” (1994, p. 217). Leys’ account of the rise and demise of late-19th
century imitation-suggestion research is uncannily descriptive of the tangles in
postwar socialization notions:
Imitation-suggestion seemed a productive and enabling concept in the formative

years of American social science when theorists were seeking to break with the
Cartesian ontology of the autonomous subject by defining the self in terms of the
social. But it came to seem increasingly problematic as sociologists attempted to
develop a genetic explanation of the process of socialization. It is as though an
entire generation were simultaneously attracted to and repelled by the imitation-
suggestion paradigm, as though the basis of that paradigm’s appeal to American
social theorists—its ability to provide an answer to the fundamental question of
how one person influences another and by so doing to account for social solidarity
based on identity or sameness—were also its chief defect—its inability to impose
limits on change, its threat to an ideal of individual autonomy, its challenge to an
existing social order based on hierarchy and difference (p. 213).
5
On the new scientific thinking about dissociation, splitting, and multiple personality see Lears
(1981); Burnham (1988), and Hacking (1995).
6
For instance, David Riesman’s Individualism Reconsidered (1955).
So persistent were the efforts to bind the individual and the social, that the
idea of socialization seems to have a much longer history than, in fact, it does. By
the postwar era, it circulated as a social scientific metalanguage allowing scholars
to premise whole projects on the idea that “As cultures change, so do the modal
types of personality that are their bearers” (Rieff, 1966, p. 2).7 Socialization
studies reenacted the paradox James had identified some half-century earlier.
Through iterative and multiple revisions these studies eventually created an
apparent theoretical space for reinserting a self prior to the social. That is,
reformulations introduced in the 1960s aimed to accommodate essential human
qualities of social conformity with those of rational autonomy and cognitive
flexibility. Thus, one feature of the architecture of socialization is the configura-

tion of self as genuinely social, but this social determinism harbored a built-in
undoing that eventually surfaced through assertions of individual autonomy and
freedom. While the social self still remained a thriving idea in 1970, new and
compelling reconceptualizations looked beyond or rather, under, the socialized
human to discover among other things an autonomous and cognitively active
mind, a “naked ape,” or a self-actualizing organism.
2. Visionary features. A second component of this intellectual architecture
follows from the first. Allport and the soldier dreamed of a social world that
socialization concepts would validate. That is, given the presumed dynamics of
self and society, individual and culture, and given attendant hopes for social
harmony (for democratic progress), the scientific object of socialization was
fashioned through cultural desiderata (much like its nineteenth-century connec-
tions with political economy). During the first decades of the Cold War, a period
marked by suspicion, doubt, and uncertainty, socialization was coordinated with
a specific constellation of societal ideals. That is, embedded in the idea of
socialization was an outline of harmonious society, thereby rendering socializa-
tion a scientific story containing ideals of democracy, civility, freedom, develop-
ment, and rights. This integrated story line wove a nonlogical loop connecting
necessary social structural control (the good, antitotalitarian society implied in
Gordon Allport’s statement) with the freedom of the individual to detect and
escape deleterious social controls (the soldier’s ability to think beyond and
ultimately reject a racist social order). As if in dialogue, the soldier lamented that
to be socialized is not necessarily to be civilized, and Allport responded with the
guarded hope that science would direct the civilizing process. Most socialization
research tacitly advanced Allport’s hope by indicating how a fair, rational, and
democratic social system (be that system a nation state or grammar school)
produces healthy, rational beings. Their societal visions for socialization thus
register distinct politics just as they retain the aporia of its academic predecessors
in providing no clear ontology of the individual prior to socialization. Neglecting
these matters meant repeating the circular tactics of earlier social theorists, but
such neglect nevertheless guarded against unappealing alternative scenarios that
social scientists apprehended in the seemingly regimented world of the Soviet
Union or the social determinism of B. F. Skinner’s Walden Two.
7
Perhaps it is because of these very repetitions that otherwise careful historians refer anach-
ronistically to earlier twentieth-century projects (projects predating the actual introduction of the
term) as theories of “socialization.”
3. Toward unified science. After 1945 American social scientists ad-

vanced socialization not as an explicit political vision but, rather, as an objective,
scientific solution to a number of problems confronting them. And its scientific
grounding proved to be centrally important. Returning to civilian life, researchers
had to refocus on nonwar social issues. As Mark Solovey (2001, 2004) has
convincingly shown, American social scientists also faced the challenge of
gaining support for their enterprise and ultimately did so by advancing a social
science epistemology that mimicked a natural science model. To this end, social
science was aligned with ideals derived from the political mainstream and the
natural sciences and, thus, linked the realization of democratic harmony to a truly
scientific (prediction and control), objective, and unified study of social life. The
scientific alignment of social science was more than a strategy or rhetoric of

expediency; it was readily internalized in the training and production of the next
generation of researchers.
Such ideals were one thing, their realization another. Socialization theory was
heralded as an exemplar of scientific social science: it supported the goals of
harmonious democracy, suggested bureaucratic techniques of assessment and
management, and conjoined research programs from a variety of social science
disciplines. Despite proclamations and appearances, however, empirical investi-
gations of socialization did not meet all the criteria of natural science research: the
concept did not adhere to the rigorous positivist philosophies of science advocated
by many experimental psychologists. Socialization was developed and promoted
without any detectable logic of justification, sometimes even without notable
empirical evidence, a process resembling the production of other psychological
terms (Collins, 2007; Danziger, 1997; Smith, 1992a, 1992b, 2005). Values or
“subjective knowledge” were not eliminated but merely displaced. Socialization
researchers took values as a purported object of analysis and in so doing,
according to critic Alvin Gouldner, conceived of values “not so much as man-
made but as man-transmitted and man-received things” (1970, p. 423). Through
such transvaluation, values receded from clear view.
Finally, this scientific object was hardly unified, confected as it was from
learning theory, imitation research, psychoanalysis, culture and personality stud-
ies, and functional sociology. These were not projects that shared core assump-
tions about human nature. The apparent unification was neither logical nor
rigorous but, instead, was pressed into existence by forces of anticipation, hope,
professional strategizing, and some measure of suppression. In fact, one of the
first approximations of socialization theory in its modern form appeared not in an
empirical report or monograph but in a best seller supported and directed by the
Social Science Research Council (Solovey, 2004, p. 414) and written by a leading
proponent of social engineering (Jordan, 1994). Stuart Chase’s, 1948 The Proper
Study of Mankind aimed to demonstrate the advances of scientifically grounded
social science along with its purported applicability “to the problems of human
relations” (p. 3). Organized to introduce lay readers to correct scientific method
along with a sampling of social scientific blockbusters (e.g., the work of Gallup,
Kinsey, Mitchell, etc.), Chase’s book coheres through a tacit theory of the relation
of the individual to the social. The individual is “a product of his culture; he is a
living part of his group, and can be understood and appraised only in relation to
it. To judge him outside this matrix is like trying to understand a fish without
reference to water.” Given this fact, social scientists “have begun to ask the right
questions, and have demonstrated that man is a social animal to a degree hitherto
unappreciated. Apparently he has always been one since he came down from the
trees” (pp. 62– 63). Like the professional formalization of socialization that would
emerge just several years later, Chase’s metatheory takes substantial license in
unifying distinct theories and claiming their scientific bases. These generously if
superficially integrated theories included knowledge about learning from Yale’s
Institute of Human Relations, which Chase marshalled to state, “The political
implications are especially dynamic. If any kind of behavior can be learned by
anybody, it follows logically that changes in individual or social behavior can be
deliberately engineered” (p. 230). Knowledge about culture was taken from the
culture and personality work about which Chase asserted, “The culture concept
provides a stabilizing element to one’s thinking in this careening postwar world.
When one gets a firm grip upon it, he knows, on the highest scientific authority,
that he belongs to something more enduring than his nation” (p. 289). For Chase,
the purported potential of such scientific unification was derived from postwar
rhetoric of harmony and peace: “Less than a generation would be enough to train
all of the children of the world to be citizens of the world” (p. 275). This
conglomerate model of socialized beings championed (limited) freedom as well:
“To be really free, as a tiger is free, would strip us of our humanity. Social
relations would mean nothing except an occasional stormy mating and minimum
care of offspring” (p. 290). Chase here responded to critics of social engineering
by mapping a place for “freedom” onto a technical science.
Socialization as a scientific object glimmered with the ideals of a genuinely
scientific social science, but only glimmered. In actuality, textbook accounts
melded a variety of human science (predominantly but not exclusively psycho-
logical) constructs and theories. Some authors, like Fred Keller and William
Shoenfield, defined socialization in strict behaviorist terms: “culture” makes its
“product” and “It does this by training: by reinforcing the behavior it desires and
extinguishing others . . . . By conditioning the emotional and anxiety reactions to
some stimuli and not others. It teaches the individual what he may and may not
do . . .” (1950, p. v). Others married several theories: Floyd Allport (1924) and
Kimball Young (1930) meshed behaviorism and psychoanalysis in their texts
while Floyd Ruch and Philip Zimbardo (1967) combined theoretical notions of
identification, imitation, psychoanalysis, culture and personality, and learn-
ing theory.
4. Anxieties. Albeit in a social scientific voice, Gordon Allport echoed the
soldier in South Pacific’s worries about the modern social world, specifically
about the cultural forces that can distort or destroy the individual. Their concerns
would be joined by what are now well-documented anxieties about the Cold War
and its accompanying us-them or “bunker mentality” (Lutz, 1997). So wary of
international discord were social scientists that textbook authors Stansfield Sar-
gent and Robert Williamson embellished their chapter on “International Rela-
tions” with a cartoon of an atomic bomb devastating New York City (1958, pp.
606 – 607). Others grew more concerned about the fate of the individual in the face
of coercive state powers. In the entry on socialization in the 1969 Handbook of
Social Psychology, Edward Zigler and Irwin Child acknowledged gains made in
understanding one of the “major issues” of socialization: “the question whether
the human being, child or adult, should be considered an active or passive agent
in his socialization” (p. 468). Zigler and Child lauded the move toward portraying
the socializee as an active agent and away from earlier depictions of passive
individuals. Some researchers viewed the individual as vulnerable, and the Soviet
Union exemplified the crucial importance of socialization. Social psychologist
Otto Klineberg found in Soviet ideology evidence that, “The source of error was
now found at least in part in man himself; he needed the right training, the right
self-training, to set him upon the proper road” (1953, p. 65). These changes are
consistent with Ellen Herman’s observation that after World War II researchers
cleaved to the belief “that psychological theories and applications were inextri-
cably, dynamically linked with democratic politics” (1995, p. 65).

The very architectural features of socialization yielded an auxiliary set of

anxieties that were disseminated if not produced by social scientists. Compelled
by world events and professional ambitions, researchers could see socialization as
an object with common sense validity as well as utility. While socialization theory
tided researchers through certain cultural challenges presented by the Cold War,
by the 1980s it stood almost as an empty signifier except that it had attained a firm
belief in its existence and still lingers as an undisputed fact in contemporary social
thought. Perhaps socialization’s own internal complications propelled rather than
hindered its life course, and perhaps the multiple and resolute assertions of
socialization as a scientific object effectively offset some anxieties of postwar
social science.
A Term Turned Upside Down

Now a ubiquitous social-scientific term, one used to refer generally to the
myriad social forces and factors influencing individuals’ development, socializa-
tion once had a radically different meaning. Etymological dictionaries register the
significant changes in meaning over the last two centuries by providing two
distinct definitions. The Oxford English Dictionary definition lists “1. The action
or fact of socializing or establishing upon a socialistic basis.” And “2. Social sci.
the process of forming associations or adapting oneself to them; esp. the process
whereby the individual acquires the modification of behavior and the values
necessary for the stability of the social group of which he is or becomes a
member” (1989; cf. Random House Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary, 2000). Its
first meaning, the one employed almost exclusively until the 20th century, was
advanced by utopian socialist Charles Fourier, whose theory of social progress
included a stage termed “socialization” defined as “complete simple association,”
a point in societal development where social and economic systems would be
based on cooperation and not “competitive industrialism” (anon., 1841, p. 505).
Karl Marx and Frederich Engels adopted a similar definition in their 1848
Manifesto of the Communist Party: “socialization” there referred to the elaborate
process of coordinating labor and production to create conditions for producing
common profit rather than individual gain.
That socialization’s nineteenth-century usage concerned sociopolitical theory
and macro social realities (not individual-centered ones) is further evident in the
writings of German sociologist Georg Simmel. In 1895 he wrote, “The overthrow
of the individualistic point of view may be considered the most important and
fruitful step which historical science and the moral sciences generally have made
in our time” (p. 412). With this explicitly social perspective Simmel adopted the
term socialization, making it a concept he believed to be sociology’s central object
of study. He considered socialization in terms of “association of individuals” not
in terms of the processes through which individuals come to associate. He soon
defined it as “the sum of . . . the manifold interactions between individuals”—a
term to describe group formation, not individual development (1896, p. 169).
Simmel delineated “types of human socialization,” naming social interactions and
organizations such as “superiority and inferiority, the erection of hierarchies,
competition,” and “division of labor,” among others (1898, p. 663). It was his
understanding of the term that was adapted by progressive-era judges and reform-
ers in Chicago who advanced a project for “socialization of the law” (Willrich,
2003).
Early twentieth-century reference works in psychology, the quintessential
science of the individual, offer such a macro, organizational definition of social-
ization even as they present the term’s apparently newly minted, second defini-
tion. The 1928 edition of A Student’s Dictionary of Psychological Terms defines
socialization as the process of “learning to get along with others” and also the
process of “bringing industry or any institution under social control for the
welfare of the group” (English, 1928, p. 116). The 1934 Dictionary of Psychology
forewords the same dual definition in referring to socialization as “the process by
which individuals acquire socially desirable habits and become able to live as
members of a social group” and “the control of industries by the community”
(Warren, 1934, p. 254).
This meaning was not to last and the object was to be transformed. How this
definitional upturning occurred is not explicated by the involved social scientists.
Even if, as some have claimed, Floyd Allport (1924) introduced the “modern”
sense of socialization as a process of the individual’s modification of habits to
participate in group life, the logic of dislodging the term from its markedly
different theoretic place remains unexplained. One clue to the displacement and
reconceptualization is found in the grand theorizing of economist Franklin Gid-
dings. Subsequent to an 1888 essay asserting that economic nature is neither
rooted in the individual nor fixed (but, rather, is an organic and evolving creation
of social interaction), Giddings (1897) elaborated on those ideas, asserting “so-
cialization” to be the key construct in understanding political economy, sociology
and psychology. He rejected Simmel’s definition of socialization as the function
of social groups and organized associations and replaced it with a definition of
socialization “as the development of a social nature or character—a social state
of mind—in the individuals who associate” (1897, p. 2). He advanced socializa-
tion as both the effect and the cause of association: aggregation is necessary for
socialization to occur but then socialization produces further association. Gid-
dings claimed, “Associated individuals modify each other’s natures, and associ-
ation, if continued, creates the unified personality, with its powers of psychical
determination and its desire for a cumulative happiness” (p. 22). He extended
biological models of organicism and social evolution to argue that “society is
precedent to the individual” (1888, p. 40) whereby socialization entails the social
production of the individual. If Giddings’ usage of the term to pinpoint individuals
as the locus of socializing processes supported distinctively positivist and indi-
vidualist (anti-organicist) research agenda such as Floyd Allport’s, then Giddings’

discovery had an inadvertent effect of eroding his social ontology.8 Yet, the
economist Giddings and his contemporary social scientists were less interested in
methodology than in the much grander enterprise of replacing a political eco-
nomic model based on a “federation of autonomous agents” and the modes of
production with a worldview emphasizing social interdependence, “an indivisible
union of interdependent parts” (Sklansky, 2002, p. 228). This reformulation,
undertaken by political scientists, sociologists, economists and psychologists,
directly corresponds with the transformation of socialization’s definition from the
description of macro and societal processes to social psychological ones. As
attention shifted toward articulating the sociality of individual agents, space

opened for psychologists and psychologically-minded sociologists (early social

psychologists) to build these new models of the socialization process.
By the late 1960s the term was deemed mature enough to warrant historical
treatment by its social scientific practitioners. In the opening chapter of an
interdisciplinary text on socialization, John Clausen surveyed the term’s devel-
opment in sociology, anthropology, and psychology. Markedly presentist, Claus-
en’s study quoted Floyd Allport’s, 1924 definition as representative of its then
current (and ostensibly correct) meaning.
In order to be adapted to civilized society, a man must not only be sensitive to the
social objects about him; he must also develop permanent habits of response that
are in accord with the necessities of group life. Such development may be called
the socialization of the individual. It consists of modification of the original and
purely prepotent reflexes through instruction received in the social environment
(Allport quoted in Clausen, 1968, p. 35).
Clausen acknowledged the “vagaries” of the term, and even opened his
historical chronicle by listing several different meanings, but marked the dramatic
change in usage only with a dismissive footnote (1968, pp. 23–24). That change
in usage, however, is strikingly apparent in the entries on socialization in the 1934
and 1968 editions of the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. Initially described
as an object of societal organization, in the later edition socialization was
described as an attribute of persons. In the 1934 entry, socialization is attributed
to “Marxist Sociology,” primarily to Marx’s definition of “the characteristic of the
modern development of the productive powers as the progressive socialization of
the processes of industry and manufacture. As industrialism advances, it involves
a rapidly growing degree of cooperation among the individuals engaged in
production” (Cole, 1934, p. 221). The entry concludes, “The socialization of any
particular industry or indeed of industry as a whole is thus regarded not as a
deliberate and artificial creation but as the realization in the field of economic
policy of the inherent necessities of the general course of historical evolution in
the modern world” (p. 225). In contrast, the 1968 entry in the newly titled edition,
International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, did not even note these extant
definitions but, instead, located the term’s operational origins in John Dollard’s,
8
Some theorists engaged Gidding’s theorizing ( for example, Almack, 1925), but by the 1930s
these organismic notions of groups and cooperation were rarely associated with the idea of
socialization.
1935 description of socialization as “an account of how a new person is added to

the group and becomes an adult capable of meeting the traditional expectations of
his society for a person of his sex and age” (quoted in Whiting, 1968, p. 545). The
evidently interdisciplinary (unifying) approach to socialization was underscored
through four (separately authored) sections dealing with psychology, anthropol-
ogy, political socialization, and adult socialization respectively. These separate
depictions so resembled one another as to be practically interchangeable. For
example, the political socialization section rang of the psychological: political
socialization is said to encompass “all political learning, formal and informal,
deliberate and unplanned, at every stage of the life cycle, including not only
explicitly political learning abut also nominally nonpolitical learning that affects
political behavior, such as the learning of politically relevant social attitudes and
the acquisition of politically relevant personality characteristics” (Greenstein,
1968, p. 551).
The wholesale redefining, begun at the end of the century and advanced
significantly after World War II, transpired across the relevant social science
disciplines. Within social psychology, this unification also paralleled key changes
in the definition of the “social.” John Greenwood has characterized this change as
the “disappearance of the social:” abandonment of a conception that beliefs,
attitudes, and behaviors are “social by virtue of their orientation to the represented
beliefs and attitudes of members of social groups.” In its place, the social came to
be understood as cognition that is deemed social “merely by virtue of the objects
to which it is directed, namely, other persons or social groups” (2004, pp. 5– 6).
For Greenwood, the new understanding of the social embedded in socialization
also exemplifies the rise of “methodological individualism,” and social scientific
practitioners’ growing preoccupation with scientific method. Cast in broader
historical context, socialization was one object that was fundamentally refash-
ioned alongside a comparably profound reconceptualization of the economic
world. Between the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, intellectuals
“reconceived market society as a fast-moving mainstream of culturally created
desires, habits, and mores, instead of an unchanging arena of contract and
competition among independent proprietors” (Sklansky, 2002, p. 3). Economic
notions of individual autonomy gave way to those of social interdependence, a
change that gave social scientists the task of determining how such interdepen-
dence operated.
In redefining socialization as the processes of production of individuals (and
not social constellations, productions, or economies) and dismissing dynamic or
dialectic understandings of the relation of the individual to the social, researchers
fixed their analytic lens on the individual psyche. They focused on those features
of the individual that constituted not only a “personality” (increasingly being
understood as a direct outcome of socializing practices), but also a “citizen” and
“human.” Socialization came to be known as the process through which the
individual is made into a person, a personality: the object represented “the process
whereby one becomes fully human” (Clausen, 1968). Conversely, the absence of
socialization experiences was thought to produce the “unhuman.” According to
one textbook author, “We conclude that in at least a few cases of feral and isolated
children the data show that a potentially normal child was made ‘unhuman’ by the
effect of his unusual environment. This suggests very strongly that human nature,
or normal personality, depends significantly upon interaction with and learning

from other human beings” (Sargent, 1950, p. 89; see also Martin & Stendler,
1959, p. 164). In such a spirit of grand theorizing, the 1954 edition of the
Handbook of Social Psychology opens by asserting, “socialization refers to a
problem which is old and pervasive in human life—the problem of how to rear
children so that they will become adequate adult members of the society to which
they belong.” The author noted, however, “the use of a fairly uniform label for
socialization in scientific discussion is new, and there is not even yet complete
agreement on the terminology” (Child, 1954, p. 655).
Conceptualizing socialization as a primarily psychological yet broadly inter-
disciplinary social-scientific object did not ensure concurrence among researchers.

They did not always share a precise understanding of what sort of object
socialization constituted: it was variously called a theory, system, process, fact,
concept, term, problem, and model. These variations in nomenclature rarely
received comment. Researchers did concur, however, that socialization was a
crucial object for understanding human behavior and social order. By claiming
such an ambiguous object to be crucial to personhood, socialization exemplifies
what Jackson Lears depicted as the postwar social scientists’ “reification of
abstract concepts into things which acted autonomously on people.” Fomenting in
the “bogs of reification,” such concepts actually lacked any precise epistemic form
as theory or fact or hypothesis (1989, pp. 42– 43).
However grand or ambiguous, the object did not lack for explanatory mech-
anisms, and researchers postulated the cause-and-effect chains of behavior and
thought which over time result in socialization. Socialization was rendered intel-
ligible alternately through metaphors of production, genetic transmission or
reproduction, and consumption/absorption; sometimes it was even represented
through admixtures of these metaphors. Deployment of these metaphors mostly
went without explanation or justification, but they often served to resolve or
smooth over the individual–society paradox. When socialization was represented
through a metaphor of production, individuals were held to be shaped, induced,
instructed, or otherwise produced to conform to social institutions and mores. As
one textbook author claimed, “the culture is steadily imposing its emphases on the
world of the child. He perceives himself in accordance with the standards of his
culture . . . by the time he has reached maturity he has developed a solid sub-
structure of attitudes, opinions and beliefs in conformity with the prevailing
cultural pattern” (Marcuse, 1954, p. 209). Via these molding experiences “an
individual becomes a member of a given social group” and thus “represents the
process that largely creates the specific characteristics of the individual person. A
complete understanding of socialization would include knowledge of all the
processes involved in growing up in any human society” (Hartley & Hartley,
1952, pp. 202–203). Engaging metaphors of genetics or reproduction, some
researchers portrayed socialization as the “problem of how it is that infants
become “socialized” and come to influence the “socialization” of others.” Thus,
the “individual has become a transmitter of culture—that is, of his society’s form
of civilization. He has somehow got society ‘inside’ himself” (Newcomb, 1950,
pp. 5– 6). This latter definition joins together the metaphors of genetics and
consumption as the individual somehow has society “inside himself.” Here,
socialization is understood as a more or less active process of bringing into the
individual psyche the ideas, habits, attitudes and beliefs of the social world.
Instructing his undergraduate readers about their own psychology, Theodore
Newcomb pointed out that “in common with other members of your groups, you
have interiorized many social norms so that they are now part of your own
psychological make-up” (p. 225). Although more common after 1950, metaphors
and metaphoric mixing are evident even in the early, pre-World War II attempts
to describe socialization. John Dollard’s, 1935 Criteria for the Life History
illustrates such admixture of metaphors: “From the standpoint of life history the
person is viewed as an organic center of feeling moving through a culture and
drawing magnetically to him the main strands of the culture. In the end the
individual appears as a person, as a microcosm of the group features of his

culture” (p. 4).9

Deemed interdisciplinary despite a core psychological orientation, ascribed a
relatively vague epistemic status, and explained through various causal mecha-
nisms, socialization of the 1950s nevertheless signaled the fact and desirability of
homogeneity, compliance, and the responsibility of individuals, both the social-
ized and the socializing agents. Here power, difference, and social conflict were
backgrounded as individuals were foregrounded and, or so it seemed, psychic
anxieties were becoming a thing of the past. Soon, however, the psychological
attributes associated with socialization would change, notably by the insertion of
more agentic ones as experts began to rethink the individual as “transactor,”
“processor” and “transformer” (Zigler & Child, 1969).
Humans Without Neurosis

By the end of the 1950s, this scientific object, even with its theoretical
looseness and nearly comical relevance to all facets of social life, had become a
central category for analyzing individuals (from infants to the elderly) along with
their socializing agents (from the parent to the military). That socialization was
essential to selfhood, adult development, and psychological wellbeing went
unquestioned. The human necessity for appropriate socialization was evidenced in
cases where socialization went awry: feral children, individuals who experienced
extended periods of isolation or deprivation, and people living in nondemocratic
states. Experts studying poor or unsuccessful socialization as well as successful
processes could “no longer to afford to rely, for example, on Freud’s magnificent
but largely intuitive speculations” on socialization theory, wrote Urie Bronfen-
brenner (1963). Instead, researchers employed scientific tools to detect variables
that cause or constrain sound socialization, and many studied the deviant, abnor-
mal, or deprived in order to isolate crucial factors for sound socialization.
Urie Bronfenbrenner’s extensive comparative study of socialization in the
Soviet Union and United States, begun in 1960 and published in 1970, epitomizes
the enormous confidence in social scientific knowledge, socialization theory, and
the therapeutics of sound socializing processes. Bronfenbrenner’s analysis of the
Soviet Union embraces a liberal perspective, lauding some of their techniques of
9
Dollard’s life history project was intensely dedicated to establishing the place of culture in the
study of the individual and he “stressed emphatically that there are no personality problems alone.
Personality problems are always culture-personality problems” (p. 5).
socialization while rejecting the over conformity to which Soviets aspire. His
comparative study rehearses not just the factors of socialization but the (mythic)
ideals as well: the “evil” produced by individuals is in our own institutions, not
in human nature (1970, p. xxv). Our personhood, he claimed, “is a matter of social
rather than biological inheritance.” The study underscores the related fact that
“being socialized is not necessarily the same as being civilized” (p. 4). With the
same analytic clarity, Bronfenbrenner concluded the report with a testimony on
the political necessity of scientific research. That testimony relayed a confidence
that shadowed his admission of a political perplex that “the principles that we in
the West have investigated—and largely confined to—the laboratory, the Rus-
sians have discovered and applied in practice on a national scale” (p. 151).
Not all intellectuals subscribed to such an overarching model of the civilizing

process— of becoming human. Some cultural critics pushed beyond Bronfen-
brenner’s optimistic liberalism to query the central principles of personhood and
social system that were being promulgated in postwar socialization research.
Sociologist Dennis Wrong, for example, acerbically castigated his fellow sociol-
ogists for confecting an oversocialized man who “internalizes” norms and seeks
positive self-image by conforming to others’ expectations. The postwar model of
man rendered social revolt unlikely, if not impossible: whereas “constraint” and
“control” were once considered to originate outside the person, with socialization
theory they became “internal, psychological and self imposed as well” (1961,
p. 186). Conformity, in regards to this oversocialized man, is thought to be at once
normative and normal; people want to conform. Wrong found this new man to be
largely without bodily and sensual experiences, yielding a “view of man as
sufficiently disembodied and nonmaterialistic to satisfy Bishop Berkeley as well
as being de-sexualized enough to please Mrs. Grundy” (1961, p. 191). His dismay
resembled other contemporary social critiques, notably Riesman and Whyte’s
criticisms of “groupism” and “outer-directed” personalities, and C.W. Mills and
Barrington Moore’s political claims about America’s overintegrated society.
Beyond their theoretical differences, these critics shared a sense that American
culture was yielding conformist individuals and stifling individual agency (the
very selves of citizens), a view even Parsons expressed (Brick, 2000).
Wrong argued for a return to Freud’s account of human sociality. Psycho-
analysis, specifically Freud’s writings, had figured prominently in the early
psychological thinking about socialization. In the 1930s, the decade that saw the
sudden inversion of socialization from the societal to the individual, socialization
came to be envisioned in a rough image of Freud’s “civilization.” John Dollard
and colleagues’ 1939 Frustration and Aggression features a chapter on “Social-
ization in America” wherein socialization is defined in broad Freudian terms. The
chapter describes “the frustration incident to growing up in American society,” the
aggressions “instigated by these frustrations,” “the punishments with which
society suppresses . . . . Many forms of aggression,” and the “social implications
of the displacement of this aggression” (p. 55). Among the frustrations delineated
are exploratory dominance, cleanliness training, early sex behavior, age grading,
and school frustration. Although necessary for social life, socialization comes at a
cost, and although appreciating the “gratifying character of social life in America” (p.
56), the authors advanced a singular thesis that “frustration is a constant feature of
in-group life because of the necessity of interfering with existing goal-responses
so that new ones may be learned” (p. 90). They acknowledged that when the
scientific object of socialization is understood as constituted by bodily and
emotional drives, as argued in Frustration and Aggression, it follows that con-
formity is realized only at the cost of internal psychic tensions.10 Once adult status
is attained there still remains frustration resulting from the physical nature of man,
inadequacies in social techniques in managing the material world, and the inhi-
bition of goal responses necessitated by societal life.
Over the course of the next two decades, socialization researchers would
forsake such psychoanalytically informed propositions about an originary antiso-
cial being who trades drives and pleasures for civilization and who forgoes certain
bodily experiences for conformity to normative social life in America. Regarding

reformulations that removed conflict and biological drives, Walter Weisskopf

critically observed, “The Americanization of psychoanalysis has meant its ‘so-
cialization’” (1957, p. 51). Influenced as well by social scientists’ enchantment
with genuinely scientific methods (see Ball, 1989; Capshew, 1998; Solovey,
2004) and a consequential focus on observable behavior, socialization work
proceeded with minimal (or no) consideration of internal tensions, bodily drives,
conflicts, and/or estimation of what the individual forfeits through socialization.
Intraindividual “conflict” and “anxiety” were eliminated from the socialization
processes. These deletions cleared the way for a more optimistic therapeutics of
socialization where deviance and difference could be engineered, abetted by a
positive rhetoric of “permissiveness” in child rearing, “becoming” human, and
“internal locus of control.”11 Without the individual-society tensions postulated in
psychoanalysis, human development researchers could abide by the trajectory of
“predictable technoperfection” that Donna Haraway (1989) located in the primate
studies of Harry Harlow. In other words, by disregarding classic psychoanalysis,
experts could move smartly forward in redefining the human in terms apparently
better suited for Cold War democracy and postindustrial life.12
Protean Personhood: To Be Human (Is to Be Free)
Just as socialization experts largely abandoned the psychoanalytic dynamics
of earlier theorizing (with the exception of the idea of “identification”), so they
eventually moved away from notions of passively conforming individuals. They
likewise became less complacent about the particulars of “society” and undertook
an impressive number of comparative analyses of socialization in different soci-
eties and institutions (these institutions ranging from the “Negro” home and
mental hospitals to nation states). While most socialization studies in the 1950s
took homogeneity and conformity to be a goal for society and the individual alike,
by the 1960s critical concerns about these goals grew, although not usually via
direct critique. Researchers began to consider just how socialization processes
yielded individuals who would conform under certain conditions yet who also
10
For a popular version of these natural internal states and their relation to socialization, see
Grabbe (1939).
11
On the changing social scientific beliefs in a therapeutics of the self, see Ball (1989); Baistow
(2000); Graebner (1987); and Tuttle (2001).
12
On these postwar changes in social scientists’ broader perspective on the social world, see
Lutz (1997); and Noble (1989).
were rational enough to detect and resist conformity to inefficient, irrational,

uncivil, or immoral conditions. Some commented on a change in the concept of
the human assumed in socialization work, a shift “from that of an undifferentiated,
passive recipient of stimulation to that of an active, competent organism in
reciprocal interaction with the environment” (Zigler & Child, 1969, p. 469). As
Zigler and Child admitted, however, “this newer view has not been universally
accepted, and the more passive conception of the child, associated with classical
psychoanalysis and American learning theory, continues to find adherents” (p.
469). The shift meant that socialization theory could represent individuals differ-
ently, or represent different kinds of individuals, and calmed certain anxieties
about conformity and acquiescence to authority.

Starting in the 1960s, then, theoretical and empirical writings often articulated
distinctions between humdrum understandings of socialization as making the
human or making productive members of society, and newer understandings of
socialization as enabling autonomous actors—preparing individuals who were
able to think for themselves when necessary. Researchers introduced new human
capabilities as well as nuances of the socialization process, deploying a rhetoric
of how the socialized being was not a passive, compliant or conforming person.13
Entries in the 1969 Handbook of Socialization reveal the shift to thinking about
socialized beings as more than simply trained or “shaped” or “role following”
beings. In many of the Handbook’s chapters, socialization is taken to involve
more than imitation, absorption, or reproduction of social roles and rules; rather,
the socialized individual is found to possess generative cognitive capacities. The
socialized individual possesses self regulation and, therefore, a self. The “self-
system,” for instance, serves as “a monitoring, direction-maintaining, and deci-
sion-reference system” as well as securing a “sense of being” and “identity”
(Cottrell, 1969, p. 549). Socialization is augmented, even transformed, through
inclusion of “active processes of attention, information-gathering strategies, mo-
tivated thinking, and so forth” wrote Lawrence Kohlberg in 1969 (p. 349).
Kohlberg’s rendering of an attentive, cognitively engaged socialized agent assim-
ilated the new thinking about a flexible and protean selfhood and, consequently,
quickly gained acceptance. “Identification” and the internal themselves thus
became vibrant objects of researchers’ attention. To these ends, psychoanalytic
theory was carefully revisited in order to recover an interior of identification and
ego development, albeit one without libido and bodily needs (Bronfenbrenner,
1958, 1960; Kohlberg, 1963). With this perspective, researchers such as Eugene
Weinstein distinguished between “rigidity” resulting from passive socialization
and “freedom to be interpersonally competent” (1969, p. 769). This “American-
ization of psychoanalysis” and growing emphasis on autonomous individuals was
part and parcel of midcentury ideas of protean beings in search of what Elizabeth
Lunbeck (2000) has called the “real self.”
Cognitive engagement and flexibility, an independent self, and rational-moral
decision-making capabilities, when figured into socialization, signaled that hu-
mans were not entirely conforming or complacent beings. In his study of Cold
13
Of course, some earlier writers held that there was a space for individual variation, for what
Blanchard described as the “ample scope for the development of individuality” which assures us that
socialization is not merely “shaping them into the same stereotyped mold” (1928, p. 215).
War thinking about thinking, Jamie Cohen-Cole detected similar psychological

attributes circulating through political culture as well as academic life, and traced
their presence in the new cognitive psychology taking shape in the late 1950s. The
“human nature constructed by cognitive science,” Cohen-Cole found, “had the
characteristics of the admirable social scientist and the good democratic citizen”
(2003, p. 19). By incorporating a modified version of “self actualization,” social-
ization researchers could redefine “successful socialization . . . as including the
maintenance of appropriate autonomy in the face of social pressures. It is defined
not as conformity but as the attainment of a transactional relationship in which the
individual is able to actualize his own potentialities within the framework of his
society” (Zigler & Child, 1969, p. 472).

The protean citizen/humans depicted in this period of socialization research

could not only resist totalitarianism, mindless obedience, or commercialized
conformity, they were also suited to democracy and the capitalist enterprise.
Given these rearticulations, socialization researchers can be placed among what
Alan Brinkley has termed “architects of the Cold War” who assayed a “Diverse
and rapidly changing world through the prism of a simple ideological lens,
smoothing out the rough spots and seeing a uniformity of beliefs and goals that
did not in fact exist” (2001, p. 72). Perhaps more so than other kinds of social
architects, socialization experts not only crafted a context-sensitive definition of
consensus behavior, they also supplied blueprints for performing consensus. In
fact, part of the forging of social scientific consensus involved development and
dissemination of popularized accounts for ordinary citizens, especially for moth-
ers. One expert account of Spock’s baby book suggested that the “mothers not
only read these books but take them seriously, and that their treatment of the child
is affected accordingly. Moreover, middle-class mothers not only read more but
are also more responsive; they alter their behavior earlier and faster than their
working-class counterparts” (Bronfenbrenner, 1958, p. 411).14 Through the 1960s
the ideally socialized person also was becoming flexible, capable of handling the
societal changes as well as the multiple roles expected of them across the life
span.15 Socialization had come to explicate not only the individual’s ability to
prosper as a participant in society, to be a civil citizen abiding by social norms,
but also his or her capacity to be a rational, autonomous agent. These formula-
tions, folding flexibility and protean capacities into the batter of a social norm
assimilator, represented a fresh twist to resolving the individual-society paradox.
Nearly but not quite postmodern in appearance, the socialized characters in the
research literature of the late 1960s certainly were protean, seeming more versatile
as they became more autonomous, mindful, and rational.
Conclusion
The biography of this social scientific object is conceptually complex. Framed
as a new object in the 1920s, the word was radically displaced from its original
usage and then markedly reimagined through the 1950s and 1960s. Just after
14
Researchers generally commended their fellow social scientists for writing popularizations
of socialization. For example, see Komarovsky and Sargent (1949).
15
The change is evident in journal articles, textbooks, and collected writings. See, for instance,
Goslin (1969).
World War II its meaning remained intricately tied to interwar aims for “pacifi-
cation of the social” (Bryson, 2002) yet was soon inflected by postwar political
visions along with social science’s missions of scientism, interdisciplinarity, and
psychologization of the social world. Yet even this new, dramatically revisioned
object, one intended to represent dynamics between the individual and social,
hopes for a cooperative world, and scientific unification, did not hold still.
Whereas the interwar ambitions were to understand individuals in their social
world in order to realize cooperation and harmony without imposing socialist
ideology, anxious ambitions after World War II fixed on rethinking the individ-
ual’s psychological nature. The immediate postwar worries of psychologist Gor-
don Allport and the fictional soldier of South Pacific demanded experts’ attention.
By the 1960s social scientists, mainly but not only psychologists, discerned even
newer, apparently anxiety-free, relations between the social and individual. They
crafted an understanding of the “social” as a psychological, internal phenomenon,
and began to depict the socialized person as relatively autonomous, competent,
responsible, and civilized. And they interrogated the optimal and suboptimal, the
normal and deviant, ways of becoming a social actor. In keeping with the
American postwar political climate, socialist ideas remained absent. What is
more, the properly socialized citizen was becoming, in the decades following the
war, one who could productively conform to everyday situations yet also capably
resist undemocratic or inefficient ones. Bestowed with values (utopian and anx-
ious alike), this idea of the socialized citizen entered popular discourse, cultural
institutions, and visual representations. Socialization theories and discourse thus
came to explain ideals and deviations alike. The object of socialization offered
scientific explanations for human forms as well as guidelines for rearing, training,
and adult conduct. Postwar changes in configuring the socialized being—the shift
from socially determined to more autonomous, active, and rational beings—
illustrate how “The history of the relationship between politics and the human
sciences is clearly ill-suited to being written either as story of cumulative progress
or one of the disintegrating autonomy of the individual” (Eghigian et al., 2007,
p. 17).
These newer models of the relation between social and individual permeated
social scientific discourse and social policy, yet they encountered further chal-
lenges, notably those posed by humanist psychology with its far-ranging, utopian
notions of freedom and autonomy; sociobiology with its arguments against the
plasticity of man and for man as “naked ape;” cognitive psychology with its bets
on rationality and computational mind as both prior to and more consequential
than social learning. Liberation movements (with their own critiques of social-
ization as ideology formation) posed yet another challenge, one in which the very
subjects of social-scientific analysis began to speak back. Such challenges belong
to this biography’s next chapter.
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Received June 2, 2010
Accepted June 8, 2010 y

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History of Psychology © 2011 American Psychological Association

2011, Vol. 14, No. 1, 1–25 1093-4510/11/$12.00 DOI: 10.1037/a0021984

THE EVOLVING VOCABULARY OF THE

complex. In the 19th century, socialization was introduced to refer to societal

Keywords: socialization, history, individual, psychoanalysis, science

You’ve got to be taught

A young American soldier, himself in love with a woman of a different

characteristic of human nature”(Klineberg, 1954, p. 64)1 According to the

had become, despite claims of interdisciplinarity, largely a psychological matter.

Socialization inhabited postwar thinking as a heterogeneous, slippery, scientific

idea of socialization seemed to resolve a lingering problem of values in social

through control of individuals (individuals’ minds) on the other side (Bryson,

task would be tangled and perhaps halted by socialization’s promiscuous presence

Kopytoff, 1986) of socialization by tracing the changing meanings within a key

The Architecture of Socialization

For many, socialization was the answer to Allport’s questions. Socialization

individual is a fragmented being, one not only susceptible to dissociations or

Postwar researchers rejected such a compromising compact. These later experts

Imitation-suggestion seemed a productive and enabling concept in the formative

flexibility. Thus, one feature of the architecture of socialization is the configura-

3. Toward unified science. After 1945 American social scientists ad-

scientific alignment of social science was more than a strategy or rhetoric of

cably, dynamically linked with democratic politics” (1995, p. 65).

The very architectural features of socialization yielded an auxiliary set of

A Term Turned Upside Down

vidualist (anti-organicist) research agenda such as Floyd Allport’s, then Giddings’

attention shifted toward articulating the sociality of individual agents, space

opened for psychologists and psychologically-minded sociologists (early social

1935 description of socialization as “an account of how a new person is added to

or normal personality, depends significantly upon interaction with and learning

disciplinary social-scientific object did not ensure concurrence among researchers.

individual appears as a person, as a microcosm of the group features of his

culture” (p. 4).9

Humans Without Neurosis

Not all intellectuals subscribed to such an overarching model of the civilizing

bodily experiences for conformity to normative social life in America. Regarding

reformulations that removed conflict and biological drives, Walter Weisskopf

were rational enough to detect and resist conformity to inefficient, irrational,

about conformity and acquiescence to authority.

War thinking about thinking, Jamie Cohen-Cole detected similar psychological

society” (Zigler & Child, 1969, p. 472).

The protean citizen/humans depicted in this period of socialization research

D. A. Goslin (Ed.), Handbook of socialization theory and research. Chicago: Rand

English, H. B. (1928). A student’s dictionary of psychological terms. Oxford: Harper.

Erikson, E. (1950). Childhood and society. New York: Norton.

Kohlberg, L. (1969). Stage and sequence: The cognitive-developmental approach to

Lears, J. (1989). A matter of taste: Corporate cultural hegemony in a mass-consumption

Simmel, G. (1895). The problem of sociology. Annals of the American Academy of

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