The Positivist, the Keynesian, the Poet, and the Bombs

Résumé En

In the aftermath of World War II, the U.S. government commissioned a survey in order to assess the effects of the massive aerial bombing of German cities. The United States Strategic Bombing Survey (USSBS) included two teams of social scientists which reached opposite conclusions regarding the effects of the bombing on civilian "morale". The team led by Keynesian economist John K. Galbraith concluded that the bombings had the opposite effect of what was intended : they remobilized the civilian population against the aggressors. The team of positivist psychosociologist Rensis Likert, on the other hand, wrote that the bombing did demoralized civilians and, therefore, contributed to the victory. This second conclusion was used to justify the creation of the US Air Force in 1947 and, three years later, the strategic bombings in Korea. This article examines this controversy by applying the symmetry principle theorized, among others, by David Bloor. The argument is that the conclusions of both teams stem, partly, from their respective proximity and distance vis-à-vis the military-industrial complex, but also from their relation to positivism. I unfold this argument by opening the black box of this controversy and by commenting on the testimony of a member of the USSBS: British-American poet Wystan H. Auden.