| Participants in contemporary public discourse routinely claim that early-twentieth-century American intellectuals, by adopting the practices, methods, and rhetorical style of science, abandoned their moral responsibility to society. I argue that today's scholars pay too much attention to individuals and institutions that sustain this narrative, ignoring those figures—particularly numerous in the interwar years—who believed that scientific thinking was a precondition for ethical social engagement. I demonstrate that between 1900 and 1950, prominent academic and public intellectuals invoked socially grounded, politically inflected definitions of science which built on an analogy between the production of scientific knowledge and the making of collective decisions in a republican polity. These “scientific republicans,” found throughout the disciplines and in the worlds of education, journalism, and government, believed that training the American population in the scientist's fabled independence of mind was the only way to maintain self-government in an industrially advanced nation. Mental independence was prerequisite to political independence, they thought, and the former was inextricably linked to science. By showing that the scientific republicans protested in vain against the institutions of science policy and technological innovation created during and after World War II by professionally oriented scientists, progressive industrialists, and stability-minded politicians and bureaucrats, I challenge the accounts of those scholars who indiscriminately blame all of the science enthusiasts of the early twentieth century for the military-industrial complex and the consumer-driven economy of the Cold War years. The scientific republicans of the interwar period envisaged something far different than the military-industrial state, but their hopes were never realized because American political discourse narrowed dramatically with the rise of domestic anticommunism. I maintain that contemporary critics of the university's social role would profit from a more sustained engagement with the vigorous but largely forgotten discourse on the social dimensions of knowledge which flourished in early-twentieth-century America. |
