Abstract
The chapter is a study of the diplomatic activities and funding operations of the Rockefeller Foundation (RF) in the area of social sciences in interwar Czechoslovakia. It introduces the instruments and objectives of the massive funding that the RF provided for the development of social sciences in the US and in the world and the various principal forms of this support.
It details the establishment of contacts between the RF and representatives of Czechoslovak academic and expert institutions at the turn of the 1920s and 1930s and how these contacts evolved over time. It describes the relations between the RF and the institution that the foundation chose as its main partner in Czechoslovakia, the Social Institute of the Czechoslovak Republic.
The chapter specifies all the projects awarded by the RF for the development of Czechoslovak social sciences, and the scholarship program of the RF for Czechoslovak social scientists is also outlined. More detailed description is provided of the particular circumstances and dynamics of the project on the urbanization of the Prague surroundings which was awarded, via mediation of the Social Institute, to the Sociology seminar at the Faculty of Arts, Charles University in Prague.
The chapter concludes by stating that the extent of support provided by the RF to the Czechoslovak social sciences was relatively small and various likely reasons are presented to explain it. The research presented is original and based on archival sources from Czech and US archives.