Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-fbnjt Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-08T10:30:22.985Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

8 - The politics of Wissenschaftspolitik in Weimar Germany: a prelude to the dilemmas of twentieth-century science policy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2012

Gerald D. Feldman
Affiliation:
University of California
Charles S. Maier
Affiliation:
Harvard University, Massachusetts
Get access

Summary

Science policy in crisis

It is difficult to think of a realm in which the boundaries of the political have been more ambiguous and changing in recent times than that of science and scholarship in the advanced industrial societies of the West. On the face of it, this is rather surprising. The search for truth is constitutionally protected in such societies, and the legitimacy of the quest for knowledge for its own sake, insofar as it is the subject of much thought, is seldom questioned. Formally, science and scholarship have been viewed as realms of private enterprise and activity in the sense that the choice of subjects for investigation has been left to the investigators and the problems of personnel selection and accountability have been left to internal regulation through the mechanisms of co-optation and peer review, both presumably informed by accepted and reasonably rigorous codes of methodology and evidence. Indeed, as Sir Alan Bullock has pointed out, “the core of the enterprise is a methodology and the commitment to it. The real scientists are those who add to knowledge, not their auxiliaries. This is what brought them into the business and this is what still seems to them the sacred duty.” Herein rests the claim for the autonomy of science, its self-legitimation and self-sanctification.

In practical terms, of course, there have been very material constraints on science and scholarship which have necessarily affected their autonomy, just as there is a long and often ghastly record of religious and ideological barriers to the unrestrained pursuit of knowledge.

Type
Chapter
Information
Changing Boundaries of the Political
Essays on the Evolving Balance between the State and Society, Public and Private in Europe
, pp. 255 - 286
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1987

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×