Politics & Science: An Historical View
Volume 73 No. 4
Winter 2006
Arien Mack, Editor

Theodore M. Porter

Authority, Political Theology, and the Politics of Knowledge in the Transition from Medieval to Early Modern Catholicism
Rivka Feldhay

This paper is a contribution to a revision of the narrative about science and religion in Catholic culture, represented in modern historiography as a story of inevitable conflict. The main thread of the argument follows Catholic notions of cognitive and political_theological authority as they developed from the High Middle Ages to early modernity. A nuanced analysis of the ways in which the concept of authority functioned in Catholic discourses about faith is the background for interpreting the possibilities and constraints that guided the Jesuit educational project in the 17th and 18th centuries.

Rivka Feldhay teaches history of science and intellectual history at Tel Aviv University. Some of her related publications include Galileo and the Church: Political Inquisition or Critical Dialogue? (1995) and "Recent Narratives of Galileo and the Church or: The Three Dogmas of the Counter_Reformation" in Context (2000).
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The “Imperial Chancellor of the Sciences”: Helmholtz between Science and Politics
David Cahan

This essay uses aspects of Hermann von Helmholtz's career and analyzes parts of several of his major addresses to convey his understanding of the relations of science and the state in nineteenth_century Germany. It suggests that there were practical institutional and ideological constraints within German university life, and in the relations between the universities and the individual German states that imposed a considerable measure of insulation on science in Germany; paradoxically, this allowed the universities and the sciences freedom to grow institutionally and flourish intellectually within what was otherwise a politically conservative and authoritarian state structure and landscape. Finally, the essay seeks to describe Helmholtz's general political outlook while suggesting that, though he was unpolitical in the conventional sense of "political," his prominence as a scientific and cultural figure in Germany after 1850 made him into a political symbol of science.

David Cahan is Charles Bessey Professor of History at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln. He has edited three books by or about Hermann von Helmholtz, and is writing a biography of him. His other work includes, as editor, From Natural Philosophy to the Sciences: Writing the History of Nineteenth-Century Science (2003).
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Patent Republic: Representing Inventions, Constructing Rights and Authors
Mario Biagioli

Today's discussions about the pros and cons of intellectual property are essentially political in nature, hinging on different views on the right balance between what should be or remain public and what should be allowed to become private (and for how long) so as to provide incentives to innovation. My goal in this paper is to examine this balance in the mundane details of patent applications, particularly a very mundane but key step in the patent application: the disclosure of the invention. The very discourse of disclosure emerges together with a shift in economic political regimes from absolutist/monarchic to liberal and then liberal democratic. It is this transition that creates the conditions of possibility for disclosure requirements in patent law. This shift in patent law marks the first time the state required that technology be made public (in the sense of being accessible to citizens). This is also the beginning of the modern legitimation of the patent system. It is the act of disclosure to society that justifies the otherwise problematic practice of giving monopolies.

Mario Biagioli is Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University. He is the author of Galileo Courtier (1993) and Galileo’s Instruments of Credit (2006), editor of The Science Studies Reader (1998), and coeditor of Scientific Authorship (2003) and Contexts of Invention (forthcoming). He is currently working on a book on intellectual property and authorship in science.
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Big Revolution, Little Revolution: Science and Politics in Bolshevik Russia
Nikolai Krementsov

This article examines the multilayered interactions between science and politics in the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution that paved the way for the "little revolution" -- the transition from "little science" to "big science" in Soviet Russia. It explores the mechanisms and dynamics of the alliance between Russian scientists and the Bolshevik state, identifies the talking partners and the languages they spoke, and analyzes the institutional structures and professional cultures that emerged as a result of this developing symbiosis.

Nikolai Krementsov is Associate Professor at the University of Toronto. He is the author of Stalinist Science (1997), The Cure: A Story of Cancer and Politics from the Annals of the Cold War (2002), and International Science between the World Wars: The Case of Genetics (2005).
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Public Knowledge and the Difficulties of Democracy
Philip Kitcher

This paper undertakes an initial foray into the central problems epistemological problems for our times, not problems of individual knowledge but of the character of knowledge as a public good and the systems that generate and sustain that good. Given that we do not exist in an epistemic utopia of significance, reliability, and transparency, I present the Inquiry_and_Information_System (IIS) as a focus for epistemological discussion, scrutiny, and improvement. There is a myth about the state of current democracies, that exposing their inadequacies shows the kinds of reforms of the IIS that are needed, that we can recognize, in general, the modifications of public reasoning that are required, and that the elaboration of this should be through detailed responses to particular issues that now confront us. I suggest we should take up Dewey's socio_political conception of epistemology as the piecemeal improvement of the IIS.

Philip Kitcher is John Dewey Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University. He is currently interested in the ethical and political constraints on scientific research, the evolution of altruism and morality, and the apparent conflict between science and religion. His recent books include Science, Truth, and Democracy (2001) and In Mendel’s Mirror: Philosophical Reflections on Biology (2003).
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The Physics of Spin: Sputnik Politics and American Physicists in the 1950s
David Kaiser

Despite frequent assurances to the contrary, political posturing and public relations have always been a part of scientific life,. This essay examines two episodes from the 1950s, in which American scientists and policymakers sought to gauge the scientific strength of their Cold War rivals. Leading physicists in the United States successfully used the surprise launch of Sputnik to lobby for increased federal aid for science education and to inaugurate several new journals. Their tactics might hold lessons for scientists today, who face new political challenges in everything from denials of global warming to religious attacks on basic scientific facts.

David Kaiser is Associate Professor in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a lecturer in MIT's Department of Physics. He is the author of Drawing Theories Apart: The Dispersion of Feynman Diagrams in Postwar Physics (2005) and editor of Pedagogy and the Practice of Science: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives (2005).

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Thoughts on the Politicization of Science through Commercialization
M. Norton Wise

There are two genres of outcry in the US concerning the current state of science in public life: politicization of science in the federal government and commercialization of academic research. Strangely, these two genres have never been systematically connected. In the process of politicization since the 1990s, commercially funded think tanks have supplied one of the primary sources for politically charged science policy. But the rapidly accelerating commercialization of academic research threatens to make universities and federal research institutions look similarly political. This development has already begun to undermine public trust in science. Erosion of public trust presents a public challenge for democratic societies, which rely on trustworthy knowledge for the responsible action of citizens and legislators.

The solution cannot lie in any attempt to recover the largely mythical divide between pure (academic) and applied (industrial) research. Commercialization of academic research is inevitable, which suggests that new institutions of evaluative oversight will be required. One model already exists in nonprofit corporations set up as academic/industrial collaborations to maintain a code of ethics and to maintain open access to research results and tools. Another model could be a rejuvenated Office of Technology Assessment with representatives from academic, industrial, and governmental bodies charged with evaluating promising directions for research.

M. Norton Wise is Professor of History and Codirector of the Center for Society and Genetics at the University of California at Los Angeles. He has recently edited Growing Explanations: Historical Perspectives on Recent Science (Duke, 2004) and coedited, with Angela N. H. Creager and Elizabeth Lunbeck, Science without Laws: Model Systems, Cases, Exemplary Narratives (Duke, 2007).
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Speaking Precision to Power: The Modern Political Role of Social Science
Theodore M. Porter

The modern compact between science and the state allows for the flow of public money to research and an expectation that politicians will generally not meddle with the scientific work, on condition that the science, reciprocally, should stay clear of politics. That seems at first a harmless constraint, yet in none of these areas can scientific research now stand apart from charged public issues. The claim for its ideological neutrality depends on consigning social science to the realm of facts rather than values, while conceding the legitimacy of political judgment in deciding how to use this information as a basis for action. Not its objects--which, being social, political, economic, and historical, are very human--but its methods, rigorous and impersonal, are taken as the ground for social science objectivity.

The ideal of methodological rigor is threatened by the current flourishing of partisan think tanks. Yet their prevalence, ironically, makes a reputation for objectivity all the more precious. I am concerned in this paper less with the explicit politicization of social science than with the sacrifices required to shore up a reputation for rigor and freedom from ideology. Typically, this has required focusing on objects and problems that can be examined impersonally and trying to minimize the explicit invocation of judgment or insight. In the idiom of quantification, social science has been preoccupied with precision, with neutral information, even when the thing measured or characterized is not exactly what the situation requires.

Theodore M. Porter is Professor and Vice Chair for Undergraduate Affairs in the Department of History at the University of California at Los Angeles. His publications include Karl Pearson: The Scientific Life in a Statistical Age (2004) and “The Social Sciences” in Cahan, ed. (2003).
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