Summary[]
Jewett’s book explores the cultural and political hopes that many American scholars invested in science from the 1860s to the 1950s. It reinterprets the rise of the natural and social sciences as sources of political authority in modern America and looks at the persistence of a belief that the scientific enterprise carried with it a set of ethical values capable of grounding a democratic culture – a political function widely assigned to religion. The book traces the shifting formulations of this belief from the creation of the research universities in the Civil War era to the early Cold War years. It examines hundreds of leading scholars (what he calls “scientific democrats”) who viewed science not merely as a source of technical knowledge, but also as a resource for fostering cultural change. After the civil war, “many advocates of science began to claim that it offered not only practical techniques, and thus material plenty, but also the cultural and political benefits that flowed from mainline Protestantism.”(3) These advocates believed that being scientific “meant much more than simply using empirical methods; it meant behaving in accordance with specific ethical tenets or exhibiting particular ethical virtues.” (10) From the Civil War to the Cold War, a diverse group of scientific democrats emerged: those who thought science provided the cultural resources needed to restore democracy in the wake of industrialization; those who toiled in the universities and thought about engaging and remaking the public through American higher education; those who saw the development and popularization of human sciences as a means to turn Americans away from competitive capitalism (“progressive theorists” – Youmans, Dewey, James, etc.); and those who sought to drive cultural change by developing the human or cultural sciences.