American Conservatism and Government Funding of the Social Sciences and the Arts*. Himmelstein, J. L. & Zald, M. Sociological Inquiry, 54(2):171–187, 1984.
American Conservatism and Government Funding of the Social Sciences and the Arts* [link]Paper  doi  abstract   bibtex   
The efforts of the Reagan Administration to cut government funding for the arts and the social sciences reflects not only a general desire to curtail government spending but also a specific conservative effort to “defund the Left” by eliminating especially those programs regarded by conservatives as the basic source of liberal and radical social change in the United States. This paper examines the conservative animus against government support for the arts and the social sciences. The discussion has four parts: The first traces the history of contemporary American conservatism and identifies its central ideological themes. The second argues that the belief that government and intellectuals are the two main sources of liberal social change has led conservatives to target government programs allegedly guilty of social activism and to develop their own relatively autonomous counterintellectual network. The third examines how this political agenda and institutional structure have influenced conservative opposition to government funding of the social sciences and the arts. The final part suggests some implications our analysis has for defending the social sciences and the arts.
@article{himmelstein_american_1984,
	title = {American {Conservatism} and {Government} {Funding} of the {Social} {Sciences} and the {Arts}*},
	volume = {54},
	issn = {1475-682X},
	url = {https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1475-682X.1984.tb00055.x},
	doi = {10.1111/j.1475-682X.1984.tb00055.x},
	abstract = {The efforts of the Reagan Administration to cut government funding for the arts and the social sciences reflects not only a general desire to curtail government spending but also a specific conservative effort to “defund the Left” by eliminating especially those programs regarded by conservatives as the basic source of liberal and radical social change in the United States. This paper examines the conservative animus against government support for the arts and the social sciences. The discussion has four parts: The first traces the history of contemporary American conservatism and identifies its central ideological themes. The second argues that the belief that government and intellectuals are the two main sources of liberal social change has led conservatives to target government programs allegedly guilty of social activism and to develop their own relatively autonomous counterintellectual network. The third examines how this political agenda and institutional structure have influenced conservative opposition to government funding of the social sciences and the arts. The final part suggests some implications our analysis has for defending the social sciences and the arts.},
	language = {en},
	number = {2},
	urldate = {2019-09-17},
	journal = {Sociological Inquiry},
	author = {Himmelstein, Jerome L. and Zald, Mayer},
	year = {1984},
	pages = {171--187},
}

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