Science Studies during the Cold War and Beyond: Paradigms Defected (Palgrave Studies in the History of Science and Technology)

This book examines the ways in which studies of science intertwined with Cold War politics, in both familiar and less familiar "battlefields" of the Cold War. Taken together, the essays highlight two primary roles for science studies as a new field of expertise institutionalized during the Cold War in different political regimes. Firstly, science studies played a political role in cultural Cold War in sustaining as well as destabilizing political ideologies in different political and national contexts. Secondly, it was an instrument of science policies in the early Cold War: the studies of science were promoted as the underpinning for the national policies framed with regard to both global geopolitics and local national priorities. As this book demonstrates, however, the wider we cast our net, extending our histories beyond the more researched developments in the Anglophone West, the more complex and ambivalent both the "science studies" and "the Cold War" become outside these more familiar spaces. The national stories collected in this book may appear incommensurable with what we know as science studies today, but these stories present a vantage point from which to pluralize some of the visions that were constitutive to the construction of "Cold War" as a juxtaposition of the liberal democracies in the "West" and the communist "East." In the past two decades, scholars in the cross-disciplinary field known as 'science studies, ' or STS (Science and Technology Studies), have illuminated the ways in which the social, political, and conceptual developments of science and technology in the 20th century were shaped by the symbiotic relationships of science with the state and politics, demonstrating that political ambitions and intellectual/scientific production are inseparable. But this kind of analysis has hardly ever led to the self-reflexive effort to understand science studies as it was informed and shaped by political tensions. As a professional community, science studies scholars themselves are, of course, no exception to dynamics of interaction between experts, politicians and the state. However, so far few existing accounts have examined the social, political, and intellectual developments that laid its foundation. This volume seeks to add historical depth to the existing historiographic reflections on the post-WWII developments in history, philosophy and sociology of science, reconsidering conceptual and political origins of science studies as an academic discipline. In particular, it illuminates the ways in which the confrontation between superpowers informed significant transitions in this field in different national contexts. Since the Cold War defined a bipolar regime founded on opposing ideologies, it created the circumstances for designing different, alternative and at times conflicting interpretations of what science was or should be. Front Matter....Pages i-xiii Introduction: Science Studies in East and West—Incommensurable Paradigms?....Pages 1-20 Front Matter....Pages 21-21 Telegrams and Paradigms: On Cold War Geopolitics and The Structure of Scientific Revolutions ....Pages 23-53 “What’s So Great About Science?” Feyerabend on Science, Ideology, and the Cold War....Pages 55-76 Looking for the Bad Teachers: The Radical Science Movement and Its Transnational History....Pages 77-101 Thomas Kuhn’s Structure: An “Exemplary Document of the Cold War Era”?....Pages 103-125 Front Matter....Pages 127-127 Blind Isolation: History of Science Behind the Iron Curtain....Pages 129-148 The Science of Science (naukoznawstwo) in Poland: Defending and Removing the Past in the Cold War....Pages 149-176 Scientists of the World, Unite! Radovan Richta’s Theory of Scientific and Technological Revolution....Pages 177-204 Front Matter....Pages 205-205 The Cold War, Political Neutrality, and Academic Boundaries: Imprints on the Origins and Early Development of Science Studies in Sweden....Pages 207-240 What does a “National Science” Mean? Science Policy, Politics and Philosophy in Latin America....Pages 241-265 From Dialectics of Nature to STS: The Historical Evolution of Science Studies in China....Pages 267-288 Back Matter....Pages 289-328 This book recounts how during the Cold War the study of science moved to the centre of academic through the creation of the new discipline of science studies. In this way the volume charts the importance of these studies for the trajectory of Cold War nations through the elaboration of new national science policies and the transnational dialogue, even across the Iron Curtain, between key scholars involved in shaping their trajectory. By examining how a new group of intellectuals was mobilized by state administrators to convincingly set up a discipline deemed to have major repercussions on the advancement of science in developed and undeveloped nations. Secondly, by putting the study of science at the centre of the dialogue (as well as the confrontation) between nations and Cold War blocs. The volume thus shows how an often considered arcane field of enquiring had in fact major implications for the understanding and fostering of Cold War science-- Source other than the Library of Congress