Overview

First published in 2006. The ambitious role cast for scientists in public affairs has been matched by an equal coyness on the part of scientists to play it. Yet in spite of themselves, they have been virtually dragged on to the political stage because of their 'collectivities' - groups formed over the last four centuries often more fugitive than institutional - which have helped modify the human environment, thereby enabling men to emancipate themselves from the tyranny of the present and plan for the future. The byproducts of such plans, from the great botanical gardens to the seed beds of physical scientists like the Ecole Polytechnique, have also incubated further ideas about the relation of science and society that are ecumenical in scope. Indeed the positivist overtones of the Polytechnique herald the transition from platocracy to technocracy, for the technical intelligentsia trained its German, Russian and American counterparts have effected a quasi-religious synthesis of physics and politics. In this 'planning' was the central theme. The social history of such planning (with the concomitant views on the social organisation of science) is the subject of the book Pressurising it is the conviction that we can identify a particular thing only by pointing to the various things it successively was before it became that particular thing that it will presently cease to be, and the story, which begins four hundred years ago and ends in 1964.

Full Product Details

Author:   W.H.G. Armytage
Publisher:   Taylor & Francis Ltd
Imprint:   Routledge
Weight:   0.453kg
ISBN:  

9780415853828

ISBN 10:   0415853826
Pages:   458
Publication Date:   12 April 2013
Audience:   College/higher education ,  General/trade ,  Tertiary & Higher Education ,  General
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   In Print  
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Table of Contents

Part 1 Seed–Beds of Science; Chapter 1 Garden Economies; Chapter 2 The Beat of the Imagination; Chapter 3 Academic Honeycombs; Chapter 4 Glands of the Plantocracy; Part 2 The Epiphany of the Technocracy; Chapter 5 From Physiocracy to Physicism; Chapter 6 Materialists and Monists; Chapter 7 Emergent Operationalism in England 1815–61; Chapter 8 The Laws and the Prophets; Part 3 Frontier Problems; Chapter 9 Improvised Europeans; Chapter 10 The Zapadniki; Chapter 11 Science and the American Frontier 1862–1918; Chapter 12 The Rise of the Russian Technical Intelligentsia; Chapter 13 The New Political Arithmetic; Part 4 The Politics of Science; Chapter 14 Amerikanski Tempo; Chapter 15 Technocrats and the Politics of Power; Chapter 16 Science and Social Recuperation in Britain; Chapter 17 The Two Leviathans; Part 5 The Diaspora of Technology; Chapter 18 The Conversion of the Mandarins; Chapter 19 Science and the Samurai; Chapter 20 Mao's model: The Red Expert for Export; Chapter 21 An Operational World?;

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