ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a global overview of social empirical knowledge that ranged from US-style “applied social sciences,” descriptive “science of the state” to Soviet “Marxist science of society.” It deals with the phenomenon of worldwide deployment of social surveys—the key feature of the interwar era—to highlight particularisms of Western social sciences, while explaining their global appeal. It includes recent scholarship about social research that covers Eastern Europe, Soviet Union, China, Latin America, and colonial North Africa to show where, when, and how the process of making survey modernity played out. Special emphasis is given to producers of social scientific knowledge—national modernizers, who after World War I, and in particular during the Great Depression, experimented with scholarly canons and scientific novelties to modernize their countries and lay ground for the politics of developmental nation-state.
