Legitimizing Science

Acknowledgments
This collection of essays emerged from a workshop organized by the editors at Eberhard-Karls-Universität Tübingen (Germany) in September 2013, except for Fabian Link's contribution on the Frankfurt School of Sociology, which we subsequently asked him for. The arrangement of papers on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and their focus on the natural sciences as well as the social sciences reflect our overall approach, first, to retain an investigation of science within general sociology and history, and second, to retain a comprehensive view of curious investigation that is represented by the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities together.
The workshop at Universität Tübingen on "Science and the Public in the Nation-State: Historic and Current Configurations in Global Perspective, 1800-2010" took place in the context of a research project by Andreas Franzmann and Axel Jansen on "Professionalization and Deprofessionalization in the Public Context of Science since 1970." The project is co-hosted by the Department of History at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and we would like to thank our colleagues in both institutions for their kind support. We thank the Volkswagen Foundation for sponsoring the research project that provides the intellectual backdrop for this book, and we also thank the sponsor of our conference and of the publication of this book, the Vereinigung der Freunde der Universität Tübingen (Universitätsbund) e.V., and our second sponsor for this publication, the Dr. Bodo Sponholz Stiftung für Wissen, Kunst und Wohlfahrt. Lars Weitbrecht provided organizational support at the conference and Ian Copestake of slovos.com helped proofread manuscripts. We thank both of them, and also Jürgen Hotz at the Campus Verlag for facilitating this book.


Section I:
Approaches

Legitimizing Science: Introductory Essay
Andreas Franzmann, Axel Jansen and Peter Münte
1. The Continuing Dependence of Science on a Plurality of Political Communities
The pursuit of science requires legitimacy that science itself cannot pro-vide. The most obvious reason why such legitimacy is required today is that science costs a lot of money. At an accelerating pace during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, scientists have had to raise funds to cover salaries and apparatus at institutions such as academies, universities or research institutes. But science has needed legitimacy, even at times when science was run by experimental scientists not employed to do research but pursue such interests on the side. Then as now, investigating nature by asking unfamiliar questions requires resources but also protection, freedom from political or religious constraints, the leisure to tackle fundamental problems without obvious practical value, and authorization through cultural and political affirmation. All of these matters point to the issue of legitimacy, and in the context of the modern nation-state such legitimacy relates to a political public and its endorsement. At a time of increased global interdependencies, furthermore, this raises the issue of whether the legitimacy of science is shifting to a transnational and global plane.
The need for a legitimacy of science has been particularly evident in times of conflict. In the past, opponents of an experimental approach to testing truth claims have represented the church, cultural Weltanschauungen, or political ideologies. Conflicts have tended to unfold when the results of research questioned conventional explanations. Galileo, Kepler, Darwin, and Freud are prominent examples in the history of science. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, debates on cloning and on stem cells are a reminder that science continues to be associated with provocations to world views and ethical convictions. Such debates challenge politics to balance the demands arising from such beliefs with competing demands for scientific freedom and economic opportunities. While we have come to accept and demand from science technological innovation relevant for the economy and for society's other needs, science has remained a potential source of cultural, political, and economic instability. Hence this particular mode of truth-seeking continues to require the kind of protection, promotion, and authorization for which science has sought the political sovereign's patronage since early modern times. Science claims to work out a collectively binding understanding of the world. This presupposes a general acceptance of science as the source of such knowledge and the continuous integration of such knowledge in general education and political decision-making.
From the Renaissance and into our own time, political, cultural, and economic elites have played a key role in shielding the experimental sciences from religious or cultural attack and in supporting and transferring authority to them. Such protection, promotion and authorization has been granted by elites in the emerging context of the modern state, but also through private philanthropy or foundations that have provided essential support. Their decision to support research often reflected a broader national commitment to the role of science in society. By supporting re-search financially or by endorsing such work symbolically, they bestowed public affirmation and significance on the larger scientific enterprise. To-day, the principles of this approach have become relevant in all areas of political leadership and administration that touch on scientific knowledge. The relationship between the state and science has not merely served to protect science but also to endorse its particular commitment to establishing truth-claims on behalf of a wider community. Such an endorsement of science has become an important element in national cultures and their self-perception. For scientists, public affirmation of their work has translated into cultural prestige and leverage.
The emerging legitimacy of science may be studied with particular effectiveness by focusing on a period when its social and political position remained unsettled. The founding of the Royal Society in seventeenth-century England provides a well-known case in point. After the Puritan interregnum, a small group of natural philosophers including Robert Boyle was able to commit the returning king to provide patronage and his seal for the founding of a scientific organization. The king's protection and endorsement of the Royal Society implied that after its founding period in the 1660s, no one else could lay claim to discovering the laws of nature in the name of the king and of the nation he represented. But Charles II had to leave it to the Royal Society's active nucleus to define experimental philosophy because the king himself could not provide that definition. The Royal Society used this privilege to establish principles of scientific activity, among them the rule that claims to findings had to be established through experiments among witnesses, that experiments had to be recorded, and that results were to be transferred to the Society's records. While a general endorsement of such principles would not take place for decades or even centuries, important norms of modern science had been recognized by an official institution representing the king, norms that otherwise would not have had the standing that they came to have. Without official endorsement such principles would have remained subject to fundamental questions concerning their relevance, validity, and authorship. Science would not have been protected against philosophical and theological attacks on experimental methods, and demands that they be replaced by other methods such as philosophical introspection or revelation. Charles II had delegated the power to define science as a mode of truth-seeking through experiment-based philosophy, and the Royal Society assumed responsibility for this particular set of universalistic principles shared by those committing themselves to the scientific project.
While the Royal Society's founding context was distinctly British, it re-mains of significance well beyond this particular state. The Royal Society raised a standard of aspiration for experimental philosophers in other countries and they soon sought to emulate that model. The Académie royale des sciences established similar principles for France, effectively adopting the aspirations for scientific achievement and the responsibility for protecting and enhancing this particular mode of investigating nature. The Paris academy served this role even though the state kept it on a much shorter leash, paying researchers a salary and charging them with official state business. The British and the French institutions have provided a template for other countries and their histories suggest that the institutionalization of experiment-based science took place by association with a political sovereign.
For science to unfold, it had to be embedded in a particular community through political representatives who bestowed legitimacy on this particular mode of testing ideas. Such a community, of course, is always particular and not universal, because it is bound to a concrete country with its own territory and history. An essential tension exists, therefore, between the universalistic endeavor of science (a generalized methodology aiming at a universal validity of research results), on the one hand, and political communities, on the other.
The rise of science in the wake of its empowerment by the political sovereign since the seventeenth century opens up two key questions. The first concerns the impact on science of significant changes in the legitimacy of political power. How has the role of science shifted during and after political revolutions? What has the role of science been as it carried over from a monarchic or aristocratic state into a democratic nation-state, and what has been the impact of such momentous transformations as the emergence of the public sphere and the rise of mass media in modern democracy? Different assumptions about the role of subjects or citizens within a state's political sphere, for example, surely must have had an effect on the role assumed by science. All of this, of course, points to the more general question of how the history of science relates to political history.
The other question concerns the national and global history of science as different states chose to empower it from the seventeenth century: How has science derived legitimacy from endorsement in some countries while being stifled in others, and how has the legitimacy of science evolved from an association with key supporters such as national political elites, intellectuals, occupations, and industries? Much like China, Brazil, and India in recent decades, France, Britain, Germany, and the United States in previous centuries have all created specific traditions of science funding, lobbying structures, and legitimizing discourses that have impacted public agendas, expectations, and controversies about science policy and the development of science disciplines. While each country's tradition is unique, global dynamics of science emerge on their basis. Among transnational effects of national patterns of science organization are shifts in centers of science, with researchers looking to particular countries or regions for the development and validation of important work.
The present volume provides an opportunity to explore the legitimacy of science historically by taking as a point of departure an assessment of present challenges and problems. Hence this collection of essays does not seek to identify and trace "origins" of modern experimental science-transformations that precede the nineteenth century. This book provides a platform for looking back from the early twenty-first century to identify, chart, and compare developments that have turned out to be important or representative in legitimizing science since 1800. If the authority of science has rested on its endorsement by the political sovereign, what has been the history of that relationship in the age of the modern nation-state?
In this introductory essay, we will proceed by first taking a step back to explain how we became interested in the science-politics nexus. We will then turn to a trend that has come to characterize the relationship between science and the public during the past two centuries: the growing emphasis on the utility of research. A presentation of select historical tokens to illustrate this point will then help prepare the ground for concluding questions on the role and integrity of science in a globalized world.
2. Legitimizing Science as a Profession
In recent years, the editors of this volume have been involved, with Ulrich Oevermann, in helping develop in the history and the sociology of science a revised concept of professionalization. While sociologists of science have focused their investigation on institutions of knowledge production and the cultural formation of scientific knowledge, our interest in the vocation's political legitimacy relates to the pragmatic requirements, the prerequisites, and the specific demands arising from the essence of scientific activity: research.
We begin by asking what goes on when empirical scientists try to make sense of uncharted realities. While this focus to us seems central in identifying the "unnatural nature of science," it has been absent from the recent "practical turn" towards the situational realities of science. In our work, we have come to assume that scientists engaged in research are not involved in solving established puzzles with established tools but that they engage with their curiosity in trying to identify new questions so as to advance their field through resolving them. The demands of their work leads them to develop a particular habitus, a habitus that is shaped by and informs a self-sufficient investigative perspective on a reality that will never conform to evolving theories about it.
This approach offers an alternative to the main paradigms in the soci-ology of science and an answer to a key question in the sociology of the professions. The classical sociology of the professions could not explain particularly well what distinguishes science and other professions from vocations that are not professionalized. Any explanation that goes be-yond an institutional description of vocations claiming professional status would need to show, after all, how such claims are justified (or unwarranted) by pragmatically serving specific needs and responsibilities.
Work on this question has come to conclude that professions are distinct from other vocations in that they engage, not in solving problems by only using technical standards derived from the established knowledge in their field, but in coping with crises for which no solution is at hand. Professions deal with crises that cannot be reduced to well-defined problems, and they try to resolve them on behalf of others, such as a patient, a client, or (in the case of science) on behalf of humanity at large. In the case of science, researchers deal with crises of explanation and validity, crises they identify in the explanatory power of their field's theory when confronting that theory with unexplained observations. And they do so as part of a community of investigators that has come to develop and share convictions on how to do science, and on how to identify sound answers to scientific questions.
The specific nature of the activity in which empirical scientists are engaged explains why an assessment of their work through an evaluation in a market or through an assessment by administrators would be inadequate. An evaluation will have to turn to autonomous collegiate cooperation and critique rather than outside control and standards. Professional autonomy has evolved on different levels: (1) As part of a professionalized habitus, it includes the individual researcher's internalized standards of critique and refinement; (2) Professional autonomy involves criticism in a universe of discourses through colleagues and collegial control elicited through procedures of peer-review and evaluation; (3) Professional autonomy is made possible through institutions such as academies, associations, university departments and research institutes, all of which provide the field with a platform for its ongoing work, with the jurisdiction required to enforce adherence to its standards among colleagues, and procedures to raise and distribute budgets and to codify rules and standards for scientific work.
It is one thing to develop an interest in the particular mode of investigation that empirical science has come to stand for, but quite another to claim to speak for it and to enforce professional standards with the authority of a wider community. This is where authority comes into play. The political sovereign provides empirical scientists with protection and sometimes with financial support, but also with the authority to deal with the profession's affairs. In early modern times, the court provided patronage for individual scientists, bestowing "social and cognitive legitimation" on such individualists as Galileo. With the founding of institutions such as the Royal Society, the Académies royale and subsequent national academies in other counties, the practice of science received a continuous institutional foundation empowering not just one scientist, but the general logic of research represented by the academy. The king's endorsement entrusted scientists with organizing the profession so as to effectively safeguard on behalf of the sovereign the advancement of science. With the advent of the democratic nation-state, such institutional support and endorsement of science then took place on behalf of the people. The nation-state came to assume the role of client and supporter of science as it began to dedicate itself to the protection and support of the freedom of scientific inquiry and education. In this sense, nation-states through their endorsement of scientific institutions such as academies, universities, scientific associations, or research institutes entered a "contract" with experimental science by accepting, in principle, that science would challenge and test ideas about how the world works even if science came up with new explanations that undermined established beliefs or world views. This development resulted in a system of institutionalized training at universities where students internalized the scientist's role and its logic of inquiry. Eventually, this mindset would be directed at a growing number of subjects outside the natural sciences even if its proper adjustment to an investigation of culture, society, politics, and economies remains disputed. In this volume, such a broadened conception of science (in line with a German conception of Wissenschaft) is reflected in contributions on the history of sociology and philosophy by Fabian Link and on the history of Islamic studies by Andreas Franzmann.
So this is how the autonomy of science as a profession played out and how it was institutionalized. But the legitimacy of science has always had to go well beyond this framework. Science has never been self-referential in establishing the foci of its work, and questions researchers have chosen to pursue have not been provided by curiosity or the state of research alone. The legitimacy of science in public and in politics has drawn on a variety of motives, including cultural and utilitarian promises and competitive struggles for funding within and among disciplines. From the inception of institutionalized research science in the seventeenth century, utilitarian promises have played an important role in bolstering research, among them prospects for developing useful technology in such areas as agriculture, navigation, and medicine. But the significance of such utilitarian prospects grew stronger and became dominant as science turned into a successful enterprise. In countries supporting science, administrations, the military, and industries became dependent on technological applications derived from investigating their underlying principles. When curiosity-driven research translated into spectacular technological solutions, furthermore, the success of science through technology has led to the demand that science should assume a more significant role in education. The growth of universities in many countries in the late twentieth century has had the effect of associating larger segments of the population with institutions dedicated to science (the Massenuniversität in Germany) while engaging a smaller percentage of university students in "real" research. Significant investments by nation-states in research and education have gone hand in hand with the growth of management structures, and this has also further changed the relationship of science to the public.
While these developments during the past two centuries may be understood within the context of individual states, they have taken place at a time of accelerating globalization since 1970. In our next and somewhat longer section we will focus on challenges to professionalized science in the context of technology-oriented states since 1800. We will close our introduction with a brief section on issues arising from globalization.
3. Legitimizing Science: The Challenge of Utility
3.1. Science and Technology
While technology is much older than science, science and technology have been associated ever since modern science was institutionalized in the seventeenth century. Because of this link, matters related to technology-development have influenced the justification and support of curiosity-driven research.
Prior to World War II, science and technology had had a long interactive history in weapons technology, chemicals and pharmaceuticals. Francis Bacon considered the discovery of nature's secrets and the production of useful knowledge two sides of the same coin. The founding of the Royal Society took place on the utilitarian assumption that science and technology were tightly intertwined. During the eighteenth century, France had taken the lead in associating the interests of the state with the elite Ecole d'Artillerie or the Corps des Mines and the Corps des Ponts et Chausées. Such developments carried on and expanded during the nineteenth century. But World War II provided a singular opportunity for science administrators to lay claim to authority well beyond the core functions of exploring nature. Physicists came to rely and depend on massive government funds legitimized by the Manhattan Project and national security. Their success in developing technology provided them with political leverage as they assumed influential roles in policy-making. Political scientist Donald K. Price argued that scientists constituted a "fifth estate" and the scientific community a model of democracy.
Science seemed to provide the tools that made or broke a state's international influence and power in the contested terrain of the Cold War. Following claims by scientists to cultural leadership in the US during the Cold War, and through a representation of science as a tool to solve all sorts of societal problems, the public came to associate science ever more closely with technology. References to "pure research" had begun to be replaced in the 1960s with terms such as "basic" or "fundamental" research, suggesting that science was merely a first step in developing technology. At the same time, sociologists supplied keywords such as "postindustrial" or "knowledge" society, setting the stage for what Ben-David a few years later called a "scientific utopia." Resources for knowledge came to be considered essential components of economic growth. The close association of science and technology in many countries blurred an understanding of the distinct and limited capabilities of scientific research. It helped produce a technocratic ideology that reduced society to an apparatus. The rise of scientism eventually prompted a reaction.
The context for science and for technology-development shifted dramatically in all Western countries during the sixties when the very idea of scientific progress met growing academic criticism, and the legitimacy for scientific work and for its institutions began to be reviewed by an increasingly discerning public. Following periods shaped by world wars and political and social crises, national publics in Europe and in the United States established or reestablished a self-assured role vis-à-vis science that encouraged a critical view of promises associated with science. Ben-David has argued that this was the period when an overly optimistic assessment of science ("scientism") faced a critical reevaluation but also the rise of an "anti-scientific" movement. A critique of science addressed scientists' "complicity" with the military-industrial complex, nuclear power, chemical disasters, and environmental pollution. It also aimed at the role of scientists in colonial affairs, in producing social inequality, and in developing psychological methods for assessing and dealing with minorities and deviant behavior by administrations and in schools. A shift towards a more critical public reception of science usually took place when issues arose from prominent fields of research that came to stand for the scientific project at large. Their resolution came to shape the subsequent public and academic discourse on science. In his contribution to this volume, Shiju Sam Varughese sketches such developments for India.
In the US after 1945, the field of physics had become the "public face" of science. Physics represented technological achievements relevant for the military and consumers. The secrecy of nuclear facilities added to the field's aura but also shielded from public scrutiny work attributed to it. The sixties, however, witnessed the transformation of the public sphere in the transatlantic region that brought about a reassessment of the state's role and responsibilities towards its citizens as well as a reconsideration of science and technology in modern democracies. In the US, polls indicated that Americans, despite successes such as the 1969 moon landing, considered quality-of-life issues to be more relevant than the space race.
The torch symbolizing science to the public was passed from physics to biology during a controversy about the safety of recombining (altering) the DNA of a living organism, a debate that was considered by some contemporaries as helping provide the critical public assessment that nuclear technology had not received. The decade witnessed a "swing from the physical to the life sciences" as public critique and public hopes came to focus on biology. This shift also led to a transfer of focus from federal to private funding. Physics during the Cold War had stood for federal support within the wider political atmosphere concerned with national security but biotech came to be associated with markets and opportunities. The growth of biotech drew global attention and established a new competitive arena for scientific, technological, and economic leadership. Industry continued to rely on universities for basic research and the training of scientists but public commentators both inside and outside of academia (among them historians and sociologists) differed in their assessments of what some conceived of as a privatization of science or as the emergence of "technoscience". The shift towards biology and biotechnology from the 1970s provided new opportunities and challenges for legitimizing science.
At a time when the old dream of science as a source for technological solutions finally seemed to come into its own, therefore, a cluster of transformations set in: In many countries, a critical public increasingly reflected on the societal consequences of research practices and technologies; a reassessment of the state's role included a reevaluation of the support of science where the state's role had been strong; the intellectual framework that guided the debate came to use market-models even in the case of science organization; and an academic discourse on science increasingly focused on innovative modes of knowledge production, a top-down managerial approach to innovation, and on the regulation of science and technology. While this shift towards the utility of science was most pronounced in the sphere of science studies and in science management, it played out in education as well.