THE GROWTH OF SCIENCE:
ROMANTIC AND TECHNOCRATIC IMAGES

by Aant Elzinga

Introduction

Assessment of the social conditions of scientific progress will vary with one's understanding of what is knowledge and what constitutes progress. Debate on the essence of progress sometimes coincides with, sometimes runs counter to controversy regarding the role of science in society. On the one hand there is always a tension between the rival ideals of Enlightenment and Romantic philosophies—we find it recapitulated for example in the debates between hermeneutic and positivist views of science. On the other hand there is the historically more recent divergence of opinions which issues from internalist and externalist accounts of the growth of science: internalists typically are those who focus on the trajectory of disembodied intellectual pursuits; externalists, those who view science as a part and parcel of a larger societal complex, be it technology, economy, culture or the contradictions between warring nations.

I shall be concerned with two major misapprehensions regarding the growth of science—scientism and romanticism, two perspectives to avoid when one wishes to make a comprehensive assessment of scientific progress and its social conditions. [1]

In a second, subsidiary theme, I shall refer to the differences between internalist and externalist evaluations and insist on bringing the two together in mutual accommodation, without losing sight of some necessary distinctions or relinquishing the principle of a relative autonomy for science.

Now first a few terminological explications.

By scientism I shall understand

a) a view of science as a supra-historic socially neutral enterprise; and

b) the general philosophy which makes the claim that all aspects of the universe are knowable through science and that science as such is the only reasonable, adequate and successful mode of cognition, superior to all other ways. The latter are either degraded as second rate, or as not knowing at all—e.g., metaphysical nonsense, as it was put in the language of logical empiricists, who devoted so much of their energies to finding some criteria of demarcation between science and non-science.

The opposite standpoint, tending to romanticism, blurs the distinction between scientific and other ways of knowing. [2] Most recently this tendency flourished in an anti-science movement of the 1970s.

Romanticism denies the basic assumptions of scientism and challenges them. Indeed, in some cases the very idea of progress in and through science is denied. Being a child of a reaction to the technocratic optimism of an earlier century, it promotes intuition as superior, while scientific reason is equated with an advance of mechanization in human life. Also, the irrational is embraced as a possible road to truth. In the extreme this science criticism runs into critique of rationality generally, and therewith leads to anti-science.

What I am concerned with then are two images of science: one which links scientific advance with social progress, on the assumption of a principle of progress through science; the other is the counter-image, which ties scientific and technological progress to social regress. In both cases science is mystified as a kind of independent force with its own irrepressible imperative—the difference is that the technocratic assessment of this mystified force is uniquely positive, while the romantic evaluation casts it in the negative.

To indicate that the issue is not a purely academic one, I want to make reference to some present day theories and discussions. The most articulate spokesmen for the technocratic trend today seen to be those who advocate various notions of information society, post-industrial society or knowledge society. The future power base of this information society we are sometimes told is the class of knowledge workers who already are forming themselves as a "new class", viz., the intelligentsia. The new class theorists moreover, in their various ways claim that the domination of the intelligentsia as ruling class of the future will rest on a monopoly over information and knowledge. This instead of the old class�s dominance based on property and control over economic production. The motive force of this new revolution is said to be the so-called microelectronics revolution, which is imputed with the force of an unyielding technological imperative—a kind of technology running loose.

On the romantic side we find the notion, sometimes brought forward in the discussions pertaining to appropriate technology, that the so-called new technologies in themselves imply job dislocation, invasion of privacy, regimentation of the mind with computer logic, genetic manipulation, and so on. The response takes the form of alarm, uttered with varying degrees of radicality. The most moderate wing of protest calls for a moral and ethical catching up as more important than economic competition with other industrial nations. A more radical standpoint is to advocate zero-growth economies in the West, and look for alternatives in the way of science and technology. The most consistent position here is to call for a moratorium on certain types of R&D, or even on all new science, in the conviction that there already exists a wealth of scientific information in the world, but that the point is to achieve a redistribution and equitable utilization of this wealth on the global scale.

One of the most articulate spokesmen of the neo-Romantic protest is Theodor Roszak who influenced the anti-science movement of the 70s, giving it a coherent philosophical perspective. Roszak takes issue with the epistemological assumptions which he claims come in a straight historical line from Francis Bacon and René Descartes to permeate the logic of modern theories of, say, the information society. In his most influential books, The Making of the Counter-Culture: Reflections on Technocratic Society (1969) , and Where the Wasteland Ends: Politics and Transcendence in Post Industrial Society (1972), Roszak identifies science with a technocratic wasteland which has nothing of value to offer the human individual, only alienation, destruction and enslavement through "machine culture". He wants to see the worship of scientific reason put down, and in its stead a visionary mode of cognition reminiscent of certain practices and traditions in the culture of the North American Indian, or in the East.

Now, the theory of a microelectronics revolution transforming the economic and social power structure of society has been propounded from various angles and with different terminologies. The counter-position of the new class theorists and Roszak is most interesting because it reveals most clearly the essential assumptions on each side, and their respective intellectual heritages. The one goes back to the technocratic theorist of science and society, Saint Simon, and before him certain ideas of Baconian and Cartesian enlightenment. The other has roots in the Romantic movement of the 19th century, and a parallel in 17th-century defenders of antiquity.

The post Second World War period has in fact seen quite a number of technocratic fantasies put forth, perhaps more than Romanticist ones. In 1940 James Burnham, a former member of the Trotskyite organization, the "Fourth International" wrote a tract called The Managerial Revolution which predicted a power takeover by a new class, the managers, because of fundamental changes in the managerial structure of industrial life. It was a book that evoked both attacks and defence for his position in a discussion that continued for a long time in various guises. The technocratic image was strong in the 50�s, when it culminated in the idea of the end of ideology. This was actually the title of Daniel Bell�s influential essay reprinted in the book The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties (Free Press, 1960). His basic idea was that the U.S. had become a society of abundance in which intellectuals had become privileged and hence lost their incentive for radical social change. What remaining problems there were would be solved with the help of technical expertise.

In the 1960s John Kenneth Galbraith came with his pronouncement that capitalistic or communistic, all states tend to converge in character under the imperatives of technology. Burnham�s march of the managerial class which would take over from the owners of property and capital was replaced by a theory of techno-structures. In his The New Industrial State, Galbraith suggested that the structure and power relations of society were being transformed by the emergence of semi-autonomous power complexes—the military industrial complex, and parallel to it one might in our day speak of an energy-industrial complex, a medical-health industrial complex, etc. With mixed feelings Galbraith claimed the occupants of the techno-structures as a new technocratic power elite. Daniel Bell, also, defined the future in terms of a convergence of all social systems, particularly the US and the USSR into the model of a post-industrial society based on knowledge and service industries. Modernization theories also assumed that third world countries must follow the same road of development. And, today, as I have said, we meet with a similar type of sketch of the future, only now it is formulated in terms of an information society propelled by a microelectronics revolution; and Japan is portrayed in the role of the advanced model. Indeed it is not too far-fetched sometimes to speak of a Japan syndrome. Paradoxically the picture is the mirror image of what is portrayed in the negative by the neo-Romantic protest; both sides tend to exaggerate, or absolutize certain aspects of science and social evolution.

In his most recent book, Person/Planet, Theodor Roszak makes a plea for the legitimacy of the sacramental experience and the magical mystical road to knowledge, which he bemoans have been lost in the Western world together with the aristocracy. The two banners of democracy and science, he says, have certainly advanced hand in hand, and he admits that perhaps the original inscriptions on them were well intended—greater freedom and a better material life for a majority of people. However, was it really worth it, he asks, considering the cost of being robbed of some very fundamental dimensions in human experience. It is the loss of pageantry, lore, ritual and magic, and traditions still preserved in some cultures in the East. His conclusion is that this cannot really be considered progress; otherwise progress is a wasteland—and where this wasteland ends, the East begins, mysticism, magic and everything else that can be counterposed to science.

I think it becomes evident how the neo-Romantic protest here lands itself in a reactionary stance, one that makes a virtue of irrationalism for its own sake. Paradoxically, however, this tends to feed the same prejudice that, from another angle, is nourished by the opposite deformation, scientism. Both scientism and romanticism reinforce the same prejudice, viz., that logic and science stand for the West while the intuitive-mystical mode of experience is the Eastern way. Both absolutize complementary aspects of human experience and culture into mutual opposites, the positivist by the uncritical affirmation of science, the neo-Romantic by the wholesale rejection of the same. As Joseph Needham has warned in a long preamble to one of the later volumes of Science and Civilization in China, in certain situations and political circumstances such a prejudice can flare up divisive notions like racism and elitism. Himself associated with part of the radical science movement of the 1970s, Needham evidently (in volume V of his monograph) felt compelled to present his standpoint, to draw a line between his own and the neo-Romantic view of science. In his own view science is a unity, it is ecumenical in character. Warning against combatting scientism from the standpoint of cultural relativism, he says: "There is a danger to be guarded against, the danger of falling into the other extreme, and of denying the fundamental continuity and universality of all science. This would be to resurrect the Spenglerian conception of the natural sciences of various dead (and even worse, the living) non-European civilizations as totally separate, immiscible thought patterns, more like distinct works of art than anything else, a series of different views of the natural world irreconcilable and unconnected. Such a view might be used as a cloak for some historical racist doctrine, the sciences of pre-modern times and the non-European cultures being thought of as wholly conditioned ethnically, and rigidly confined to their own sphere, not part of humanity�s broad onward march." (Aant Elzinga and Andrew Jamison, 15.)

This is a rejoinder to the neo-Romantic view which supposes science in each culture to be an "ethnoscience" that can only be evaluated in terms of and on the basis of its own culture. Claude Alvares, who argues for such a relativist conception in his book Homo Faber, uses the term "anthropological" Islamic, "anthropological" Indian, European and Chinese science, saying that each is a proto-science in its own right�he is of course referring to pre-modern science. Each ethnoscience is supposed to have its own basic thought categories determined by the cultural setting. Hence to ask why the Chinese for example did not encourage a mechanistic approach and quantification—and hence fell behind 17th-century Europe—is as absurd as asking why did not they have a European culture?

In the discussions on appropriate technology for third world countries one sometimes meets with similar assumptions, which basically rest on some notion of ethnoscience.

Another example in the same direction is the view of the Iranian historian of science, Seyyed Hossein Nasr, who was already referred to by Dr. Needham in this morning�s session. In Hossein Nasr�s case the critique of scientism combines with an Islamic partisanship to favour the "gnostic"-value of traditional rites and learning as more important than their "truth"-value. This tallies well with Theodor Roszak�s view also. Hossein Nasr maintains that the development of science in the West has meant a loss of a reverential attitude toward nature, a desacralization whereby rationalistic interpretations of natural phenomena are substituted for what he calls gnostic symbolic interpretations. The reverential attitude may still be found, for example, in Chinese landscape painting which carries a symbolic message transcending reality�s immediate presence. Against the physics-ideal of scientism, Hossein Nasr poses the alchemical ideal: "For alchemy, nature is sacred, and the alchemist is the guardian of nature considered as a theophany and reflection of spiritual realities. A purely profane chemistry could come into being only when the substances of alchemy became completely emptied of their sacred quality. For this very reason a rediscovery of the alchemical view of nature, without in any way denying the chemical sciences which deal with the substances from another point of view, could reinstate the spiritual and symbolic character of forms, colours and processes that man encounters through his life in the corporeal world" (Nasr, 1976).

Implicit in this statement, although less radical than Roszak�s, is the assumption that scientism, i.e., the technocratic frame of mind is the philosophy inherent in modern science. Against this Needham makes the point that one should distinguish between science and scientism. The philosophy of scientism should be supplanted by a more humane system of values, while science may still be affirmed as part of democratic tradition and social progress.

Taking this point of departure, it seems clear that the claims concerning power and alienation based on knowledge or information or science, are overrated from both sides. In actual fact, it seems to me at least, economic power still buys computer power, and many information systems have elaborate arrangements for blocking would-be electronic spies. Information, as distinct from knowledge, may to some degree be likened with a commodity, constrained by the laws of commodity exchange. To some extent knowledge is certainly subject to the same economic constraints which divide society into haves and have-nots. However, the more interesting conflict then must be the economic one. In the future, a tendency to watch is probably the contradiction then between traditional and modern forces of capital, between old style private monopolists whose power flows from their ownership of capital and on the other hand the state bureaucratic institutions and their actors—both political and administrative—who challenge this private power in the economic realm. In Sweden we have this conflict mow in the tensions which have built up around a proposal for employee or wage earner funds that are to be accumulated in the name of public interest and welfare. In short, I think the basic conflicts in our societies, both East and West still issue from the realms of economic and political power in the first place, and only secondarily from science and technology in this social context.

For my own part I think that both technocratic and romantic images of science exist side by side in our Western cultures and in the East too. The tensions between them become visible and intensified in times of social stress. The reasons for this stress may be different and vary from time to time. At the same time it may well be that those with a vested interest in the process of change based on technological and scientific advance have a greater propensity to slip into the landscape of technocratic imagery, while those whose livelihood is threatened or uncertain may spontaneously drift into romanticist imagery, wishing to stop the wheel or copy a lifestyle imported from pre-industrial cultures or times gone by.

I call these spontaneous tendencies, meaning that they will occur in the absence of conscious analysis and political awareness of the changing social relationships involving both science and society.

In speaking of scientism, I refer only to the epistemological basis of technocratic thought and policy. In a similar manner, I associate with romanticism a corresponding socio-political dimension, let us call it populism�partly for lack of a better term, partly because it is in populist thought and policy one often finds it expressed.

Now, let me go on to review briefly the origins of the concept of scientific progress and the Romantic reaction to it. Thereafter I shall note some features of modern science and suggest we must recognize at least three types:—academic science, industrialized science and finally, a critically conscious service science. Each of these has associated with it a different approach to the evaluation of progress and its social conditions.

Genesis of the concept of scientific progress

An excellent study of the social origins of the notion of scientific progress may be found in Edgar Zilsel�s article of 1945, "The Genesis of the Concept of Scientific progress". There Zilsel notes how, "science both in the theoretical and utilitarian interpretation is regarded as the product of cooperation for non-personal ends, a cooperation in which all scientists of the past, the present and the future have a part. Today this idea or ideal is almost self-evident. Yet no Brahmanic, Buddhist, Muslim or Catholic scholastic, no Confucian scholar or Rennaissance humanist, no philosopher or rhetor of classical antiquity ever achieved it. It is a specific characteristic of the scientific spirit of Western civilization, it appears for the first time fully developed in the works of Francis Bacon" (Zilsel: 1945, p. 325).

Now, historians of science night quarrel with some parts of this statement, but Zilsel�s point is important�something special happened in Europe in the period he is referring to—for him it is the breakthrough of a concept carried forward by a particular stratum of people, the "superior artisans of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries". This artisan-craftsman group included painters architects, military engineers, and some such mathematicians as came to science from problems in commerce—Albrecht Dürer, Leonardo da Vinci, Simon Stevin, Tartaglia, etc. They combined practical endeavour with theoretical work to influence the emergence of new order both in society and in intellectual life.

Zilsel�s reconstruction highlights three main elements in the concept of scientific progress: (1) the idea of a continuity and stepwise improvement of knowledge perpetrated by each generation building on the results of the foregoing, questioning, affirming, amending gradually the findings of the predecessors; (2) the conviction that this is a never-ending process; and (3) that contribution to this development, either for its own sake, or for public benefit, constitutes the very aim of the true scientist.

In one form or another these are the elements one also finds formulated in various modern philosophies of science, be it in Robert Merton�s sociological scheme of the four norms comprising the ethos of modern science (universalism, disinterested inquiry, organized scepticism, and intellectual communism or common ownership of ideas), or be it in Sir Karl Popper�s doctrine of scientific growth by conjecture and refutation. It is interesting to note that Merton postulated his scheme on the eve of the Second World War, when he was contemplating the fate of European science in Nazi Germany. After the war his conception was taken up to claim that the norms of science and Western liberal democracy (or as it was also called "the free world") were covalent in their value base. Popper made a somewhat similar point in his book on the "open society and its enemies", where gradual evolution in science was said to have its counterpart in a reformist process of piecemeal engineering in society.

This viewpoint, which verges on scientism, was challenged by Thomas Kuhn who introduced the idea of abrupt changes or revolutions in the growth of science. His own viewpoint re-introduced a romantic image, emphasizing personal knowledge and psychological factors in paradigm shift - gestalt switches.

The interesting thing is, I believe, to see how epistemologies of science reinforce and reflect central ideas in social philosophy. Both Merton and Popper developed internalist evaluation schemes, in part projecting liberal social philosophies into the discourse over scientific progress. Academic science and its ideals of self-regulation are found to be a natural repository for the democratic ideal, because for its functioning science is assumed to be dependent on norms similar to those of liberal democracy in civil society. Needham and Zilsel, from the externalist viewpoint have stressed this latter connection between science and their own ideal of democracy which is a Marxist one.

Zilsel reinforces his argument by pointing out how the concept of progress actually was constituted in an anti-authoritarian struggle for freedom of thought and belief, against the letter of the Scriptures, against the Church fathers, against the dogmatized learning of Aristotle and the scholastics—science in its progress meant a dissolution of subservience also to classical antiquity in Europe generally. Indeed by 1675 we actually find a debate, in France under the regime of the self-styled "Sun King" Louis XIV, where those who still looked to antiquity as superior in art, poetics, rhetoric and methods of science were dubbed the "Ancients". The protagonists, "the Moderns", propelled by self-reliance of the Age, propounded the superiority of their own period and the necessity to make a break with the ways of antiquity to stand on one's own feet. In this debate of the Ancients and the Moderns, which mostly dealt with poetics, art and architecture, the idea of progress regarding science was also touched upon. Thus one of the brothers Perrault came to use the term verisimilitude (truth-likeness) to suggest that scientific knowledge improves and moves through various degrees of increasing verisimilitude.

This was in 1688, in his Parallèle des anciens et des modernes en ce qui regarde les arts et les sciences. Here he outlined his theory of profiles both in art and science. The Dutch physicist Christian Huygens, first director of the Académie Royale Des Sciences in Paris and friend of the Perraults, also made use of the conjecturalist view in his rejection of dogmatic and absolutist modes of thinking. Otherwise his feelings with regard to the debate were probably mixed, because he preferred the certainty of Ancient geometrical and infinitesimal methods to the newly invented calculus of Newton.

By the end of the 17th century there certainly existed a fairly sophisticated conception of scientific progress. Its social and intellectual origins were varied. Apart from the impulse of an artisan-craftsman stratum, the influence of sceptical philosophy also contributed to shaping an anti-dogmatic conjecturalist view of a gradually growing fund of knowledge. At the same time the new dogmatism of exaggerated claims for science was always around the corner, and it was easy to slip into a reification of the concept of scientific progress. This is what happened in the centuries which followed, with scientism perhaps reaching an apex in the latter part of the 19th century, prior to the fin de siécle attack on science and scientism, and prior also to the Einsteinian revolution in physics. In general the ideological content in the Moderns� claims was to glorify the present, the era of Louis XIV. In a sense we find a parallel situation during the period of industrial expansion 1865-1895.

Spokesmen for scientism

In the 19th century the belief in progress through science meant not only an affirmation of science, but also the promotion of a scientification of all other realms of human endeavour. In the words of Franklin Baumer, it promoted the attempt, "in marked contrast to the romantic disposition to answer all questions scientifically, to turn everything possible into science, including in some respect even the humanities, and to apply the principles of science to the world of action. Thus Comte aimed to create a new science of society, or �social physics�. Similarly there was to be a new �religion of science� (Ernest Renan), a �scientific socialism� (Marx), a �science of human nature� (John Mill). . . ., and, in an essay entitled �The Experimental Novel�, Emile Zola proposed �a literature governed by science', along the lines laid down for science by the physiologist Claude Bernard" (Baumer 1977, p. 306).

The early forerunner of today's notion of an information society, Saint Simon, made an analysis of society where he distinguished three major classes of people: an intellectual elite, a power elite based on ownership of property, and thirdly the rest of humanity, whose objective interest he said, lay in supporting the intellectuals. His positivist programme claimed two conditions necessary to advancing civilization: discovery of facts, and widespread introduction of machines. By this combination of positive knowledge and industry, all social problems would be solved, because discovery of facts meant enlightenment and machines meant material welfare. To implement his programme, Saint Simon insisted that those with the knowledge should also be the ones to have political power—the bourgeoisie had incited the popular masses to revolution in 1789, to put down the nobles, but only to install themselves as a new aristocracy. They had betrayed or else failed in their cause, so now let the experts rule. "You then say that we want to see only one class in society, the industrials. You are mistaken: what we want, or rather what progress of civilization wants is to see the industrial class made the first class, with all the other classes subordinate to it". When saying this Saint Simon subsumed under the industrial class all those with modern ideas, scientific intellectuals as well as men of industry. [3]

Fully consistent with his philosophy, Saint Simon insisted that science should be a political institution, designed to steer social affairs and raise the standard of living by increasing efficiency and economic production. This idea of scientification essentially has roots that go back to Francis Bacon�s two central posits: advance in science is a progressive liquidation of prejudice, thus it is enlightenment; and secondly, knowledge is power—an increasing power of domination over nature which is to the benefit of mankind. Saint Simon explicitly linked the epistemological with the political criterion, saying: "It is well known that the progress of the sciences has contributed greatly to the progress of industry and the whole of civilization. What has not been so well noticed hitherto is that the relations between science and industry have only been individual and often very indirect. Now, it seems that scientists today are destined to play a loftier role, to establish general relations between the whole of science and the whole of industry. In short the Academy of Sciences must become a political institution. . . . Once that happens, scientists will demonstrate a great political truth in the scientific field: that studies of high abstraction in each particular science, which have hitherto been regarded by them as the most important studies, must now give way to general studies, sufficiently prepared by the particular studies in each branch of knowledge".

To fulfill this programme, he wanted two scientific academies, one for physical and mathematical sciences, including economics, and another, the Academy of Moral Sciences, consisting of moralists, theologians, lawyers, poets, painters, sculptors and musicians. The first academy was to establish the code of interests and the second the code of sentiments, using positive inductive method. On top of this there was to be a supreme body of scientists to coordinate the work of the two academies and bring together the results in a single doctrine to guide the life and education of "all classes of society, from the lowest proletarian to the richest citizens".

It is striking how this technocratic utopia in a sense makes more substantial in a later social context some of the ideas of Francis Bacon and his model of a House of Wisdom or learning as an institution with political import. It is also striking to see here some basic notion presupposed by social movements in our own time, both reformist and revolutionary social democracy.

With George Orwell�s year 1984 coming up soon, it is also tempting to speculate to what extent our own century has brought us nearer this vision, at least in essence if not in form, either as utopia or dystopia. However I shall leave off further comment, and proceed instead to consider briefly the romantic counter-image and its social roots.

The Romantic counter-image

Romanticism marks a concern more with the inner world of the mind. Its enemy has been variously defined: the Baconian-Cartesian ideal of positive objective knowledge, reductionism, soulless mechanism, etc. Historically, several periods of Western society have been marked by waves of romanticist protest of scientific and industrial advance. One such period followed upon the French revolution, which acted as a cultural and political shock in Europe, later on aggravated by rapid industrialization. A second period appears during the fin de siécle decade of the 1890s when philosophers like Henri Bergson and William James were determined to reveal the limitations of scientific reason, and disrespectful scientific attitude tended to be counterposed to the subjective warmth and elusiveness of experience caught in the modes of art, poetry and literature. [4] A third period was when obscurantism flourished for a while in especially concentrated form in the interwar years of the 1930s, propelled by the Great Depression, and in Germany the preparation for expansive war. In parts of Europe it meant an erosion of democratic traditions. In response many scientists and scholars joined the wider movement in defence of reason and democracy, and in doing so came to attach to various earlier anti-romantic traditions, empiricism, rationalism, Marxism and also scientism. Finally we have had the resurgence of a romantic trend in the 1970s, which in some respects swung over into anti-science. An attack on bureaucracy and established political authority became an attack on science as an authoritative institution of knowledge as such.

Romantic ideology cam be understood as a response to cultural crisis, when individuals become uprooted, isolated, anxious and alienated, confronted by a world of rapid change and social turmoil and economic crisis. It may also be seen as a response to a perceived or actual dissolution of traditional values and institutions. In the 19th century when industrialization divided human society into the social classes of industrial capital and labour, the intelligentsia was also split and polarized into a natural scientific/technical and a humanistic part. Each carried their own image of science, the one based on the natural, the other on the cultural or geisteswissenschaften. The clearest expression of these images are found in the positivist and hermeneutic theories of science respectively. The latter as a theory of science was put forth by Dilthey who sought to develop the Romantic theologian Schleiermacher�s hermeneutics into a viable alternative to positivism, while transcending the subjectivism of the romantic tradition. Since his time the debate between advocates of these two images of science has continued in various forms. As Paul Ricoeur has noted in a history of the debate, hermeneutics is forever marked by what he calls a double filiation—Romantic and critical, critical and Romantic—because it proposes on the one hand to struggle against misunderstanding, on the other to understand an author (or tradition) as well and even better than he understands himself. The debate between Thomas Kuhn and Karl Popper too has been seen in this light, the manifestation of a controversy between sociological and epistemological (rationalist) accounts of the growth of knowledge, at bottom a conflict between romantic and enlightenment (technocratic) images of science. The one emphasizes tradition and personal enculturation as well as radical breaks in tradition and perception/cognition: the other focuses, as already noted, on the stepwise evolution and melioration of objective knowledge. Popper, recall, also speaks of his own view as a theory of knowledge without a knowing subject. Imre Lakatos on the other hand has referred to Kuhn�s as a theory of science as mob psychology. The differences of emphasis I think are clear, one in the direction of the objective, the other insisting on the importance of the subjective.

Even in the otherwise optimistic Marxist tradition, we find the tension between populist/romantic and technocratic/scientistic images. Leszek Kolakowski (1970) and Alvin Gouldner (1980), each in a comprehensive study of the evolution of Marxist thought, have taken this theme as a key issue, to show the continuous struggles between technocratic and romantic or humanist interpretations of Marx. It also appears in Marxist assessments of the progress of science. On the one side we have the view of a Kautsky, a Bucharin and of Boris Hessen the historian of science who influenced John Bernal. On the other side there are the romanticists, Lukacs, Korsch and the Frankfurt school interpretation carrying through to Habermas. And, in socialist societies too the contrary interpretations have led to both technocratic and romantic approaches to science policy�sometimes there is a mixture of both (as in the case of Lysenkoism), at other times there appears a pendular movement from the one to the other, as for example in China, which has gone through a cultural revolution with a strong anti-science ingredient, a movement Mao Tsetung initiated in the mid-sixties in fear of technocracy and capitalist restoration after fifteen years of socialist revolution. There one had the tension embodied in the controversies over red and expert. Three different approaches to the combination of political consciousness and professional competence existed: viz., those who stressed the first, those who emphasized the second and Mao�s own view, which claimed that there had to be a balance between political consciousness and professional competence, otherwise one would fall into either ultra-leftist subjectivism or into right opportunism and technocratic policy approaches.

Indeed then, it appears that the technocratic and romantic images are very deeply entrenched in our cultures. The one, as I have said before, identified progress in science with progress in society; the other, on the contrary, tends to identify science with scientism, and in attacking scientism comes to anti-science positions, and in the extreme rejects scientific progress altogether as social regress. The Marxist viewpoint seems to offer a third standpoint, a dialectical one, in which one makes a distinction between science and its social function. However, even here, we find the tensions and the tendency to slip into an absolutization of one or other of the two counterposing images.

Science industrialized

In the science we meet today we can see established the organic relationship between science, industry and politics that Saint Simon felt should replace his day�s individual social relationships. What we have is science itself industrialized. The social conditions of modern science are quite different from those of its counterpart of one hundred years ago.

Some of the features central to the transition of science from the era of craftsmanship to the era of industry have been studied by historians and sociologists of science, as well as philosophers. Derek de Solla Price has made it the theme of a book, Little Science, Big Science. Jerome Ravetz deals with it in his study of Scientific Knowledge and Its Social Problems, where he calls for an alternative to industrialized science and its technocratic ethos. Shigeru Nakayama and others have gone on to indicate what the alternative might be like.

Nakayama (1981) speaks of three distinct systems of science, each with its own specific mechanisms of reputational control, assessment, norms and ideals. The first is academic science, involving peer review and self-regulation. It typically embodies the ideals of progress associated with the emergence of science in the 17th century. The second is the system of "industrialized science". It is subject to external assessment by high level administrators and sponsors, and has organic ties with the realms of business, politics and state administration. We might say that it corresponds more closely to the ideal Saint Simon tried to formulate in his technocratic utopia.

The third system, Nakayama calls "service science". It corresponds to Ravetz�s ideal of a critical alternative to industrialized science, regulated as it is by a system of external assessments from local residents and the general public.

The first type of science, academic science, says Nakayama, belongs to the past. The second belongs to the contemporary world, and the third is the kind of science he expects should develop more extensively in the future—service science is the science of the future.

Of the three systems, academic science typically perpetuates internalist norms and ideals of evaluating progress. The other two, in their different ways, are subordinated to externalist norms of relevance, power or warfare. I would venture to suggest furthermore that academic science in their different ways probably tend to reinforce scientistic and technocratic images, while service science with its ideal of strong public involvement may easily slip into the neo-romantic mould.

It should be added here that ��industrialized science" in Nakayama�s sense does not mean simply industrial science. It means a system more generally "patterned on the formulas employed by the production of commercial commodities": team work, interdisciplinarity, organization in the form of projects, and goals determined by social needs and demands. The role of state intervention and science administrators acting as brokers between the realms of science and politics/administration has also led to the coining of concepts like the "political direction of science" and "hybrid research communities" to describe new social realities.

Also, "in contrast to academic science, industrialized science is reviewed by a sponsor, who stands outside the scientific community and tends to have little or no interest in or respect for science for its own sake. The result is a science that cannot be sharply distinguished from technology" (p. 88). Modern science for its part too is very much dependent on technology for its development. There is not only a scientification of technology but also a technification of science, whereby for example astronomers and cosmologists require large sociotechnical infrastructures around radio-telescopes, and high energy physics cannot do without the large scale social organisation and technology that goes into nuclear accelerators.

We could go on to consider further features of modern science, but I think it is clear how at least large parts of the real world of modern science now are quite different from that assumed in the Mertonian and Popperian schemes—we have technification, hybridization and political dirigism to wit. At the same time, because of the strong relevance pressure on science, the traditional internalist conceptions gain a new significance, in that they provide a basis for arguing for autonomy and integrity of independent research, and for upholding the belief in the university science system as a repository for critical thought.

Spokesmen for "industrialized science" include industrialists, technocrats as well as some scientists—an example of the latter is John Bernal, who from a Marxist point of view close to Needham�s and Zilsel�s argued for introducing a special policy for science, what has later in fact come to take shape in the post Second World War period—science policy. Indeed most nations today do have a science policy—even though it may not be a policy for science as such, but rather an innovation policy, technology policy or policy for industrialized science, not for academic or service science. When Bernal in his book The Social Function of Science in 1939 advocated planning, it sparked off the classical externalism/internalism debate between socialists and liberals (in the US between democrats and republicans) in the scientific community. Today, almost forty-five years later, it is still an issue very much alive, even if the ground has somewhat shifted in a direction more favourable to the utilitarian conception of science, and even if there now exist alliances between externalists and internalists vis a vis the pressures of relevance and accountability which are brought to bear hard upon the scientific community by administrators, politicians and other external sponsors.

Some social problems of modern science

I can best indicate some of the social problems of modern science by making reference to the Swedish situation, a country where the policy of central control over science has expanded gradually in the decade of the 1970s under the doctrine of sectorialization. Sectorialization simply means allocating funds on the basis of a division of society into sectors corresponding to the lines of departmental jurisdiction at the level of government. In this perspective R&D is seen as a resource�among others—that a government ministry has at its disposal to deal with the problems within its sector. To make it work there have grown up about seventy or more so-called sectorial funding agencies to seed science and steer it politically in accordance with strong applied sectorial interests, e.g. defence, housing, health, energy, transport, environment, etc.

This development has had several consequences which have been the subject of heated debates. For one, the funding through these agencies grew disproportionately in comparison to the resources that have gone to basic or independent research—thus impoverishing Sweden�s basic research potential. Secondly the form of funding was often on the basis of projects, renewable by annual re-application only. This created a number of instabilities: younger researchers had an uncertain future, and job insecurity might also foster forms of opportunism, since researchers put their heads where the money is. Thus too many research activities become tied to the fluctuating destinies of changing economic and political conjunctures, and also continuity within research fields is hard to maintain. The critical social function of science is also in jeopardy under such a system. When applied to the national R&D system as a whole, sectorialization as a policy engenders fragmentation in the sphere of knowledge production (Elzinga 1979).

At the level of the granting agencies problems also occur. In a recent discussion concerning the activities of the Building Research Council in Sweden, one of the sore points brought up in a critical review was the lack of adequate accountability on the part of certain committees in the granting body, and the rather arbitrary powers of the research secretaries—the hybrid research functionaries—who play a key role in selection of projects for grants.

Now measures have been taken to rectify the Situation in this particular case—among other things a reemphasis of peer advice as a regulatory mechanism to assure quality control prior to relevance control. The interesting general point that emerges however is how conflicts and tensions build up between external and internal modes of assessment of scientific progress.

The present government in Sweden has also introduced some new measures in effort to counteract the fragmentation of knowledge. Thus there is now a junior minister for coordination of science policy at the inter-ministerial level—however this minister lacks her own budget for science; the budgets are still sectorially accounted.

The government has also inherited the responsibility of making five year overviews to be tabled for parliament once every three years on a running basis. This is also meant to afford better coordination at the national policy level.

The problem of accountability pressure and the growth of a hybrid researcher network of coordinators, planners and research administrators is not a problem peculiar to Sweden alone even if the centralization and prominence of it is more accentuated here. Even in the U.S. where laissez faire and individualism have long been household words, the last two decades of intertwining of research and decision making structures has led to the emergence of a bureaucratic system which, some critics claim, stifles innovation: "An advisory committee system that has quietly grown up over the past decades to help government agencies assign R&D funds tends to be more concerned with ensuring that particular institutions and investigations are well funded than with the quality or innovative nature of the work being done" (Cranberg, 1983). This system of advisory committees functions as a mediational network linking the interests of consumers and performers of research. It replaces earlier direct links of the earlier period. "These committees, myriads in number, are associated with different divisions of vast bureaucracies in energy, health, and much of the rest of the federal establishment. These advisory committees collectively make up especially a new arm of government: a Fifth Estate, in effect of �experts�". According to critics, both inside and outside science, these committees and agencies, of which there are many, various countries having different models for their function and arrangement, these committees themselves often lack in accountability, while they push more and more burdens of accountability on the R&D performers, on those actually doing the research. This hybrid network of experts undoubtedly exerts a powerful influence on decision-making both inside and outside science. Its philosophy sometimes reminds of a species of pragmatism that places social utility before truth value and quality control of research. Not surprisingly, within the sociology of science today we find relativist schools of thought emerging which view science and even facts as socially constructed, the product of negotiation and power struggles, between rival paradigms and struggles in the wider social arena.

For the scientist, facing these relevance and accountability pressures which accompany the proliferation of government sponsored targeted and mission-oriented research, as well as new pressures at the industry-university interface, the situation calls for conscious strategies as to what kind of work to take on contract, what degrees of targeting to allow, and where to draw the line. Also it calls for continual efforts in lobbying for basic infrastructural funding. At the institutional level it requires universities to consciously develop their own research strategies and cultivate particular knowledge profiles. It also raises research ethical questions.

The ideal of an alternative type of science

The third type of science mentioned was service science, embodying an ideal which also seeks to link research with extrascientific interests, but this time from the point of view of grass roots public controls that challenge the power structure and monopoly of industrialized science. We see it in citizens� energy committees, environmental activist groups' pollution probes, and various local control groups that perform a whistle blowing or watch-dog function. Action research is a term sometimes used to describe this type of science which is to be firmly anchored in the value-systems of local communities and quite different from both academic and industrialized science. It grows in unity and polar opposition with industrial science. It grows in unity because it shares the same territorial aims of application and the ideal of direct linkage between science and values, it grows in opposition because the values it seeks to attach to differ from those incorporated in much of industrialized science. In both cases too, there is a retreat from certainty to uncertainty, from demand for absolute objectivity to a certain element of subjectivism, as politics creeps into the arena of science. The interweaving of science and society blurs distinction and brings in stronger polarization of images along ideological lines. It has also been called a process of de-institutionalization. Service-science represents an attempt at reinstitutionalization in a different direction. According to Mendelsohn, Weingart and Nelking we meet a peculiar dialectic between science and society. The more science becomes a frame of reference for juridical, economic and political decision-making, the more obvious becomes the relativity and ambiguity of presuppositions in science. Paradigm conflicts and value conflicts become visible to the outsider. A consequence is that scientific debates become political issues and political debates are incorporated into the scientific sphere—we have seen this in the case of controversies over hybrid-DNA research and high risk laboratories, the debate concerning nuclear technology, and discussion concerning alternative forms of energy and energy utilization, not to mention various issues concerning pollution and toxic risks. And in these debates we have also seen polarizations of images along technocratic and romantic lines.

Thanks to its success, science loses its earlier position of relative isolation bemoaned by Saint Simon, and it loses also its earlier identity as autonomous institution. The social evaluation of science, then, is a double-edged process of, on the one hand a politicization of science, and on the other hand a scientification of the policy process (in the broadest sense). In this de-institutionalization both of science and politics from traditional forms and norms, definite institutional identities of a new kind have not yet been struck. And as I said, ideological elements and images have become more prominent. "Service science" represents one type of response in this direction. In its more moderate forms it involves the conscious effort to link an ethical discussion to research activity, without necessarily controverting traditional or established institutional forms. In this case there is an attempt to infuse existing institutional arrangements with a different value component, one that is critical and humanitarian rather than scientistjc. In the more radical form the ideal of service science manifests itself in attempts to establish a different kind of institutional arrangement altogether, because, it is felt, that the existing institutions in themselves embody an ideological imperative which is constantly reproduced—a scientistic, hierarchical, anti-humanitarian bias.

This radical critique of both academic and industrialized science may be found in journals like Science for the People and Radical Science Journal. One of its most articulate spokesmen on the left is André Gorz, who claims that science is ideological and class-bound, reflecting the values of the ruling economic elite. This view of a value-laden science emerges from an analysis which sees science as part and parcel of a labour process, and itself a labour process. Similar views flow from corresponding analyses which depict science as a cultural resource reflecting the dominant culture and interest structure in society. Within the radical environmentalist movement and amongst feminists, there appear similar critiques wherein science as social relations tends to be relativized—as a part of an historical apparatus evolved to dominate nature, or as part of a male chauvinist, sexist, racist institution of domination.

It should be evident how the foregoing standpoints easily become totalized and transformed into romanticist positions and images. This tendency in the radical science movement some years ago prompted two long-standing associates of the movement in Britain, Hilary Rose and Steven Rose, to warn against the dangers of what they call "hyper-reflexivity". [5] Hyper-reflexivity refers to the tendency to blur the distinction between science and society, due to a too strong focus on the interconnections. It tends to reduce science to a mere reflection of the society in which it develops. There are parallels to this in the sociology of science literature I have already mentioned, with its focus on science as negotiation. The notion of ethnoscience in the debate on alternative science and technology for third world countries also reveals a touch of hyper-reflexivity, tending towards sociological or epistemological relativism which puts contextual utility above claims to objectivity and veracity.

The point made by the science criticism movement is well taken: instrumental rationality by itself is anti-social. It tends to become one-dimensional, contributing to a technocratic deformation in perspective. Neither can instrumental and social rationality be equated: what may be rational from the point of view of science or of technological advance—a technological fix—or limited cost/benefit in economic terms�is not necessarily the most rational from the vantage point of social responsibility and social progress.

But, still I think we have to maintain a necessary distinction, between internal and external conditions of scientific progress and evaluate these each in their own way. In other words the question of autonomy and freedom of scientific enquiry as well as its internal reputational control on the basis of veracity and quality remains a relevant question: all the more so in the face of externalist relevance pressures coming from two sides�from advocates of industrialized science and from those wishing to see an alternative science system. Confounding internal and external assessments tends to confound social utility with veracity and equity with excellence, an equation which does not necessarily hold. Veracity and excellence usually are important preconditions for utility and equity, and they require their own specific mode of evaluation or assessment.

The integrity of science

The question that is raised here concerns the integrity of scientific research, and it should be high on any science policy discussion agenda. Under what circumstances can for example targeted and mission-oriented research contribute to epistemic drift and a lowering of the quality of research. [6]

Another question of interest is the response evoked by bureaucratization and dirigism as they erode the authority of the scientific community and contribute to an identity crisis in university-based research systems. In all brevity I would like to suggest that corresponding to the three types of science we may recognize three different strategies researchers elect in their response to present day relevance and accountability pressures. I should like to call these three strategies:

a) the adaptation strategy;

b) the disciplinary strategy;

c) the action-research strategy.

The adaptation strategy corresponds to an identification with the value system of industrialized science. It means adaptation to and sometimes incorporation into the social and political decision-making structure. External criteria set by bureaucracies and/or private sponsors are allowed to determine the direction and content of research to the fullest degree. Sometimes this implies a transformation of science into a technique, e.g., environmental studies into a technique for restoration of fresh water bodies, or pedagogy into a technique for curricular evaluation in schools. In extreme cases, particularly in the social sciences, it also means a colonization of the research field by the perspective of the sponsor.

The disciplinary strategy corresponds most nearly to the norms system of academic science. In this case the researcher meets external pressures by re-translating problems given him/her into problems of one or another disciplinary science. It means a retrenchment of internalist mechanisms of reputational control and problem choice. In the case of new specialties such as human ecology, the response signifies an attempt to root the inter-disciplinary field into one of the basic theoretical disciplines and develop it along those lines—another example is science policy studies which becomes absorbed as a part of the traditional discipline of political science.

The action-research strategy response is one that corresponds to the ideal of establishing a service science. In this case the researcher associated him/herself closely with a local community or population, and research is done in part as a form of participant observation in a movement or for a particular cause.

I shall not go on to elaborate further upon these three strategies. I think considerable effort might be given to study them in some detail in different national cultural and administrative contexts. My purpose here has been to consider the changing social relationships of science, and to suggest that these even today give rise to two counterposing tendencies, a technocratic and a romanticist one, each with its historical legacy and that the resulting images of science accompanying these tendencies each in its peculiar way tends to deform our perspective of the growth of science and therewith the assessment of its social conditions. My own viewpoint is to balance the two perspectives off against each other, maintaining certain essential distinctions, and arguing for the ever present actuality of the issues of autonomy and integrity of scientific knowledge production processes.

In conclusion, I do not have any detailed explanation for the apparent pendulum swing between technocratic and romantic phases. Stephen Brush has suggested the hypothesis that it is because when the pendulum swings too far, it becomes self-correcting. The absurdity becomes evident to its proponents, and there is a reversal, a rethinking sets in. This is a subjectivist theory, I maintain that it is important to try and localize historical and sociological origins of the pendular movement, if there is one. Generally I have indicated that the basic explanation will have to refer to fluctuating economy, social and political conjunctures, where romanticism appears in time of crisis. It is a curious coincidence that looking at for example Kondratiev�s sketch of long economic waves (40-50 year period), romanticism intensifies at times corresponding to about one-third of the way down the Kondratiev wave�.e., in times of evident intensification of economic crisis.

It will also be noted that I have only spoken of science and science policy perspectives generally, and not about romantic perspectives inside single disciplines or families of disciplines. Stephen Brush for example does the opposite—he recognizes alternating periods of realism and romanticism in quantum mechanics.

My point however has been to make a plea for moving in the direction of a social philosophy of science and a political sociology of science. If anything I consider my speculations to fall within the realm of social or political philosophy of science.

Notes

1. The theme of romantic and technocratic images of science has been taken up by several scholars in the history and social studies of science in recent years. See e.g., Steven Cotgrove, "Styles of thought, science, romanticism and modernization", British Journal of Sociology, vol. 29 (Sept. 1978, pp. 358-371; Stephen Brush, "The Chimerical Cat: Philosophy of Quantum Mechanics in Historical Perspective", Social Studies of Science, vol. 10 (1980), pp. 393-447; Roy McLeod, "The Bankruptcy of Science Debate: The Creed of Science and its Critics, 1885-1900", Science Technology and Human Values (MIT), vol. 7 (No. 41, Fall 1982), pp. 2-15. [—>main text]

2. The term "romanticism" has been defined in various ways. For a useful characterization of romantic thought see e.g., Arthur O. Lovejoy, "The Meaning of Romanticism", Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 2 (1941), pp. 257-278; in the same issue of this journal there is a discussion of the connection between romanticism and cultural crisis—Eugene A. Anderson, "German Romanticism and the Ideology of Cultural Crisis", ibid, pp. 301-317. [—>main text]

3. The quotations are from Keith Taylor�s edition (London 1975) of Cathechisme Des industriels Bk I 1823, in Saint Simon, Selected Writings on Science, Industry and Social Organization, pp. 251-252; the long quotation on the progress of science and the need to establish it as a political institution is from L�Artiste, le savant et l�industril: dialogue. Opin. Litt. 1825, Taylor edn, p. 286. The essay by Daniel Bell, "Technocracy and Politics", Survey, vol. 17 (1-1971), pp. 2 ff. may also be consulted. [—>main text]

4. Apart from Franklin L. Baumer, there are many others who have studied this epoch of the late 19th century. A classical study is H. Stuart Hughes, Consciousness and Society (New York, Vintage 1961); also see Leo Marx, "Reflections On the Neo-Romantic Critique of Science", Daedalus, vol. 107 (Spring 1978), pp. 61-74. J.L. Heilbron took up the theme at the Nobel Symposium 52: Science, Technology and Society in the theme of Alfred Nobel�see his paper "Fin-de-Siècle Physics", publ. in the proceedings from that Symposium, eds. E.G. Bernhard, E. Crawford, P. Sörbom, Oxford-Pergamon Press 1982, pp. 51-73. A classic treatment of the crisis in the concept of progress in the period of the fin de siècle is to be found in Georges Friedmann, La Crise du Progres. Eguisse d�Histoire Des Idees 1895-1935 (Paris, Gallimard, 1936). Friedmann also touches upon the cultural crisis of his own time, in the 1930s. An attempt to develop a romantic science in this third period has been analysed by Alan Beyerchen, Scientists under Hitler. Politics in the Physics Community in the Third Reich (Yale, University Press 1977). Fritz Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair (1974, Berkley Univ. of Cal., Campus: 211) is relevant for tracing the roots of early romanticism. Likewise F.A. Hayek, The Counter-Revolution of Science (1952) provides an interesting review of the technocratic counterpoint. Terry Shinn, Savoir scientifique et pouvoir sociale. Ecole Polytechnique 1794-1914 (1980) gives some of the French background history. Spencer Weart, Scientists in Power (Harvard University Press 1980) deals with the later period in France. A perceptive study of the influx of scientism into a third world country, viz., China, is provided by D.W.Y. Kwok, Scientism in Chinese Thought 1900-1950 (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1965). Kwok notes how scientism had an empiricist and a materialist wing. Peter Buck, "Science and Modern Chinese Culture", in E. Mendelsohn & Y. Elkana eds. Sciences and Cultures (Dordrecht, Reidel 1981) pp. 133-160 argues that scientism propagated by a fraction of the Chinese intelligentsia coincided well with American imperial interests in that country. [—>main text]

5. See e.g., Hilary Rose�s article in Helga Nowotny & Hilary Rose, eds. Countermovements in the Sciences. Sociology of Sciences Yearbook 1979 (Dordrecht, Reidel 1979). A good review of the debate from the point of view of a partisan defending some of the newer social studies of science is in Donald MacKenzie, "Notes on the Science and Social Relations Debate", Capital and Class, vol. 14 (Summer 1981), pp. 47-60. An idea of the various recent developments in the sociology of science literature may be gleaned by a reading of the anthology of Karin Knorr-Cetina & Michael Mulkay, eds. Science Observed. Perspectives in the Sociology of Science (London, Sage 1983). [—>main text]

6. The theme of the integrity of science is developed further in Aant Elzinga, The Man of Science in a World of Crisis: a plea for a two-pronged attack on positivism and irrationalism (University of Göteborg, report no. 118 in series 1, Göteborg Theory of Science Department 1980). The notion of different images of science and their cultural embeddedness is also considered in Aant Elzinga & Andrew Jamison, Cultural Components in the Scientific Attitude to Nature: Eastern and Western Modes? Research Policy Discussion Paper no. 146 (May 1981), Research Policy Institute, University of Lund, Lund 1981. [—>main text]

Bibliography

This covers literature not taken up in the notes (see foregoing pages).

Alvares, Claude. 1979: Homo Faber. Technology and Culture in India, China and the West 1500 to Present Day. The Hague - Martin Nijhoff.

Baumer, Franklin, L. 1977: Modern European Thought. New York - MacMillan.

Bleicher, Josef. 1982: The Hermeneutic Imagination. Outline of a Positive Critique of Scientism and Sociology. London - Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Cranberg, Lawrence. 1983: "Federal R&D. Time for Reform", High Technology, vol. 3 (no. 3 March 1983).

Elzinga, Aant. 1982: On a Research Program in Early Modern Physics, Göteborg � Adademieforlaget.

Gouldner, Alvin. 1980: The Two Marxisms. Contradictions in the Development of Theory. New York � Seabury Press.

Nasr, S.H. 1968 (1976): Man and Nature. The Spiritual Critique of Modern Man. London - Mandala Books, George Allan and Unwin.

Kolakowski, Leszek. 1978: Main Currents of Marxism. Oxford - Clarendon. 3 volumes.

Mendelsohn, E., et. al. eds. 1978: The Social Assessment of Science. Proceedings. Wissenschaftsforschung. Report no. 13 Univ. of Bielefeld, Bielefeld, esp. pp. 3-21.

Nakayama, Shigeru. 1981: "The Future of Research—A Call for a Service Science", Fundamenta Scientiae, vol. 2 (no. 1 1981) pp. 85-97.

Needham, Joseph., et. al. 1954 - : Science and Civilization in China. Cambridge - University Press. (esp. vol. V, Foreword.)

Ricoeur, Paul. 1981: Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences. ed. & transl. by John B. Thompson. Cambridge University Press.

Zilsel, Edgar. 1945: "The Genesis of the Concept of Scientific Progress" Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 6 (June 1945), pp. 323-349.


SOURCE: Elzinga, Aant. "The Growth of Science: Romantic and Technocratic Images" [Nobel symposium "Progress in Science and its Social Conditions" (15-19) Aug. 1983, Lidingö, Sweden], in: Essays on Scientism, Romanticism and Social Realist Images of Science (Göteborg, Sweden: Göteborg University, Institutionen for Vetenskapsteori, June 1984), Report No. 143, Chapter 2, pp. 51-90.

©1984, 2002 Aant Elzinga. All rights reserved. Published by The Autodidact Project with permission of author. Edited by Ralph Dumain for this site.

Aant Elzinga, Professor, Department of History of Ideas and Theory of Science,
Göteborg University, Box 200 SE 405 30 Göteborg, Sweden
Visiting address: Lundgrensgatan 7, Göteborg
Tel.+46 (31) 773 1931, Fax.+46 (31) 773 4548
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Information as of 13 August 2023:


Scientism, Romanticism and Social Realist Images of Science
by Aant Elzinga

The Man of Science in a World of Crisis:
A Plea for a Two-Pronged Attack on Positivism and Irrationalism
by Aant Elzinga

Objectivity & Partisanship in Science
by Aant Elzinga

Positivism vs Life Philosophy (Lebensphilosophie) Study Guide

Ideology Study Guide


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