Science and Politics: An Essay on the Scientific Situation in the Modern World

From the beginning, science has nourished the political ideal that its knowledge and applications should liberate men from magic, fear, and oppression. Salomon traces this ideal from its origin through the early nineteenth-century French laissez-faire attitude, which tolerated but did not yet underwrite scientific research, to the time when American scientists put the atom at the disposition of the military, Roosevelt asked American researchers to help effect the New Deal, and Leon Blum made Irene Joliot-Curie and Jean Perrin undersecretaries for scientific research.

"This book is about politics—about political decision and action on issues which affect science," writes Salomon. He deals with basic rather than social science and focuses on research subsidized by governments for military and defense purposes. He is concerned equally with an empirical investigation of the scientist's condition in modern society and with a philosophical examination of the moral questions involved in the scientist's relations with political authority and in the changed nature of science itself.

Science and Politics poses precisely those questions about values, science, and politics that lie at the heart of the contemporary American debate about the moral and political implications of technology. The book presents its issues in a comparative perspective. Most of the cases are drawn from American experiences "because this relation [of science to power] assumed the institutionalized form which it now has in all industrialized countries earlier and on a larger scale in the United States, with more acute problems, greater awareness and a richer effort of reflection than elsewhere..."

The speculative conclusion of the book is that against the idea of "pure" science and the idea of "applied" science will rise up the notion of the realm of "science, period," where scientific man will not only engage in pure and applied research but will also consider science more carefully in its problematic relation to humanity.

Text: English, French (translation)