Science, Democracy, and the American University: From the Civil War to the Cold War by Andrew Jewett (original) (raw)
Related papers
Science, Democracy, and the American University: From the Civil War to the Cold War
Journal of American History, 2013
This book reinterprets the rise of the natural and social sciences as sources of political authority in modern America. Andrew Jewett demonstrates the remarkable persistence of a belief that the scientific enterprise carried with it a set of ethical values capable of grounding a democratic culture-a political function widely assigned to religion. The book traces the shifting formulations of this belief from the creation of the research universities in the Civil War era to the early Cold War years. It examines hundreds of leading scholars who viewed science not merely as a source of technical knowledge, but also as a resource for fostering cultural change. This vision generated surprisingly nuanced portraits of science in the years before the military-industrial complex and has much to teach us today about the relationship between science and democracy.
SOCIAL SCIENCE, SCIENTISM, AND AMERICAN DEMOCRACY
Reviews in American History, 2014
Review: SOCIAL SCIENCE, SCIENTISM, AND AMERICAN DEMOCRACY Reviewed Works: Science, Democracy, and the American University: From the Civil War to the Cold War by Andrew Jewett; Shaky Foundations: The Politics-Patronage-Social Science Nexus in Cold War America. Studies in Modern Science, Technology, and the Environment by Mark Solovey Review by: Allan A. Needell Reviews in American History Vol. 42, No. 2 (June 2014), pp. 360-366 (7 pages) Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
The widespread impression that recent philosophy of science has pioneered exploration of the ''social dimensions of scientific knowledge'' is shown to be in error, partly due to a lack of appreciation of historical precedent, and partly due to a misunderstanding of how the social sciences and philosophy have been intertwined over the last century. This paper argues that the referents of ''democracy'' are an important key in the American context, and that orthodoxies in the philosophy of science tend to be molded by the actual regimes of science organization within which they are embedded. These theses are illustrated by consideration of three representative philosophers of science:
Political Science and the Post-Modern Critique of Scientism and Domination
The Review of Politics, 1975
It is by now a commonplace among American political scientists that the philosophical grounding of political inquiry is in dire need of critical reflection and serious repair, if not radical reconstruction. The sources of this widespread recognition are no doubt diverse, but not the least resides in the impact of the key ideas of Thomas Kuhn's celebrated work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. For, although Kuhn's work was narrowly interpreted by Almond, Truman, and other key figures in the behavioral elite corps to conform to their image of science (basically a naive positivist image), the very breadth and subtlety of Kuhn's work, his commitment to formulating his conception of science from the history of science as practiced, and his ultimate antagonism to that tradition of the philosophy of science (logical positivism/empiricism) which behavioralists have embraced ensured that a lively and contentious debate would ensue.