Pursuing the Unity of Science

Ideology and Scientific Practice from the Great War to the Cold War

Harmke Kamminga, Geert Somsen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780815366805
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317073055
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

From 1918 to the late 1940s, a host of influential scientists and intellectuals in Europe and North America were engaged in a number of far-reaching unity of science projects. In this period of deep social and political divisions, scientists collaborated to unify sciences across disciplinary boundaries and to set up the international scientific community as a model for global political co-operation. They strove to align scientific and social objectives through rational planning and to promote unified science as the driving force of human civilization and progress. This volume explores the unity of science movement, providing a synthetic view of its pursuits and placing it in its historical context as a scientific and political force. Through a coherent set of original case studies looking at the significance of various projects and strategies of unification, the book highlights the great variety of manifestations of this endeavour. These range from unifying nuclear physics to the evolutionary synthesis, and from the democratization of scientific planning to the utopianism of H.G. Wells's world state. At the same time, the collection brings out the substantive links between these different pursuits, especially in the form of interconnected networks of unification and the alignment of objectives among them. Notably, it shows that opposition to fascism, using the instrument of unified science, became the most urgent common goal in the 1930s and 1940s. In addressing these issues, the book makes visible important historical developments, showing how scientists participated in, and actively helped to create, an interwar ideology of unification, and bringing to light the cultural and political significance of this enterprise.

1 Introduction

Harmke Kamminga and Geert Somsen

DOI: 10.4324/9781315603094-1

‘Are the sciences one or many?’, Thomas Kuhn asked in an essay in 1976. ¹ Kuhn himself did not answer the question definitively, but since then scholars have increasingly stressed the second of his options. Myriad studies have highlighted the diversity of scientific practices and their contingency on specific circumstances. A whole body of work has revealed the local, the particular and the culturally variable contexts that constitute science in its various branches. ² Recently a number of philosophers have begun to try to turn the tide and seek new common ground beneath the differences. ³ But whether they will succeed or not, it is unlikely that the notions of universal scientific method and the fundamental sameness of all things scientific will return in an unqualified manner. In this volume, we do not deplore that state of affairs or reject the insights that have been gained. On the contrary, we suggest that they raise a major historical issue: if some kind of disunity now seems the normal state of science, why did scientists and philosophers in the past hold so strongly to its unity? More specifically, why did ‘unity of science’ become such a potent ideal and widely used slogan in the interwar period?

¹ Thomas S. Kuhn, ‘Mathematical vs. Experimental Traditions in the Development of Physical Science’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History 7 (1976), 1–21. ² Localist and contextualist historiography is by now too large to summarise. For overviews see David Livingstone, Putting Science in its Place: Geographies of Scientific Knowledge (Chicago, 2003) and Jan Golinski, Making Natural Knowledge: Constructivism and the History of Science (Cambridge, 1998). For systematic discussions of issues of place and disunity see Peter Galison, ‘Introduction: The Context of Disunity’, in Peter Galison and David J. Stump (eds), The Disunity of Science: Boundaries, Contexts, and Power (Stanford, 1996), 1–33; and Adi Ophir and Steven Shapin, ‘The Place of Knowledge: A Methodological Survey’, in Adi Ophir, Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer (eds), The Place of Knowledge: The Spatial Setting and Its Relation to the Production of Knowledge, special issue of Science in Context 4 (1991), 3–21. The disunifying effect of this historiography has been accompanied by expressions of concern about loss of coherence, for instance in James Secord (ed.), The Big Picture, special issue of British Journal for the History of Science 26 (1993), 387–483; and Robert E. Kohler et al., ‘Focus: The Generalist Vision in the History of Science’, Isis 96 (2005), 224–51. ³ See Jan Faye, Rethinking Science: A Philosophical Introduction to the Unity of Science (Aldershot, 2002); Shahid Rahman, John Symons, Dov M. Gabbay and Jean Paul van Bendegem (eds), Logic, Epistemology, and the Unity of Science (Dordrecht etc., 2004); and John Symons, Olga Pombo and Juan Manuel Torres (eds), Otto Neurath and the Unity of Science (Dordrecht, 2011). In the 1990s philosophers of science had also moved away from the assumption of a fundamental unity of science. See John Dupré, The Disorder of Things: Metaphysical Foundations of the Disunity of Science (Cambridge, MA, 1993) and Alexander Rosenberg, Instrumental Biology or the Disunity of Science (Chicago, 1994) presented normative arguments for the disunity of science.

The explicit promotion of the unity of science in the interwar years is best known from the Unity of Science Movement set up by the philosophers of the Vienna Circle. Otto Neurath, Rudolph Carnap and their fellows strove to unify all science into a single body of knowledge, stripped of any ‘dogmatic’, ‘metaphysical’ and otherwise unscientific contaminations. Their ideas and activities have been studied extensively, and we now know a great deal about the goals, contexts and political dimensions of these philosophical pursuits of unification. ⁴ This kind of attention has not been paid, however, to a host of related, simultaneous projects that took place within the natural sciences. For at the same time that Neurath et al. developed their epistemological ventures, physicists launched reductionist programmes linking the understanding of all phenomena to the behaviour of subatomic particles, biologists advanced the evolutionary synthesis in an effort to unify disciplines inside and beyond the life sciences, and scientists from several backgrounds campaigned for unified science as a basis for planning and social reform. ⁵ Unity of science pursuits were widespread and manifold and by no means the monopoly of the Viennese philosophers.

As with the Vienna Circle, whose project extended beyond logical positivist philosophy to include larger social and political goals, there are many indications that the undertakings by scientists in the same period embraced much more than the unification of knowledge. The principles that they thought unified science – whether a form of knowledge, a common method or a general attitude – were deemed to have wider applications as well, which would exert their own unifying effects. Scientific approaches, for example, were viewed as potential instruments for government that could cut through political divisions. Scientific values were taken to define modern culture and connect the past, present and future of human civilisation. And the unity of the scientific community was projected as a model for international relations, sounding a rallying cry against the divisive forces of nationalism and war. Specific instances of these developments have received historical attention, but there has been no systematic scrutiny of the diverse efforts of scientific unification. ⁶ This collection makes a start with that.

⁴ Nancy Cartwright, Jordi Cat, Lola Fleck and Thomas Uebel, Otto Neurath: Philosophy Between Science and Politics (Cambridge, 1996); Jordi Cat, Nancy Cartwright and Hasok Chang, ‘Otto Neurath: Unification as the Way to Socialism’, in J. Mittelstrass (ed.), Einheit der Wissenschaften (Berlin, 1991); George Reisch, ‘Planning Science: Otto Neurath and the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science’, British Journal for the History of Science 27 (1994), 153–75; Symons, Pombo and Torres, Neurath and the Unity of Science (n. 3); A.W. Richardson, Carnap’s Construction of the World: The Aufbau and the Emergence of Logical Empiricism (Cambridge, 1998); Michael Friedman and Richard Creath (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Carnap (Cambridge, 2007); Thomas Uebel, Empiricism at the Crossroads: The Vienna Circle’s Protocol-Sentence Debate (Chicago, 2007); Friedrich Stadler, The Vienna Circle: Studies in the Origins, Development, and Influence of Logical Empiricism (Vienna, 2001). The latter and other volumes on the manifold activities of the Vienna Circle are issued regularly under the auspices of the Institute Vienna Circle in Vienna. ⁵ On particle physics and reductionism see Chapter 4, this volume; and J. Hughes, The Manhattan Project: Big Science and the Atom Bomb (Cambridge, 2003); P. Galison, Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics (Chicago, 1997); Daniel J. Kevles, The Physicists: The History of a Scientific Community in Modern America (New York, 2001 [1977]); E.F. Keller, ‘Physics and the Emergence of Molecular Biology: A History of Cognitive and Political Synergy’, Journal of the History of Biology 23 (1990), 389–409. On the evolutionary synthesis see Chapter 3, this volume; and Vassiliki Betty Smocovitis, Unifying Biology: The Evolutionary Synthesis and Evolutionary Biology (Princeton, 1995); Ernst Mayr and William B. Provine (eds), The Evolutionary Synthesis: Perspectives on the Unification of Biology (Cambridge, MA, 1980). On science and social reform see Chapters 6, 7 and 8, this volume; and Gary Werskey, The Visible College: A Collective Biography of British Scientists and Socialists of the 1930s (London, 1988 [1978]); William McGucken, Scientists, Society, and State: The Social Relations of Science Movement in Great Britain 1931–1945 (Columbus, 1984); Patrick Petitjean (ed.), Politically Engaged Scientists, 1920–1950: Science, Politics, Philosophy and History, special issue of Minerva 46 (2008), 175–270. ⁶ On the belief in impartial scientific government see e.g. William E. Akin, Technocracy and the American Dream_ The Technocrat Movement, 1900–1941 (Berkeley, 1977); Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (New York, 2005) 67–77; Robert N. Proctor, Value-Free Science? Purity and Power in Modern Knowledge (Cambridge, MA, 1991). On modernism and science see e.g. Bruce Clarke and Linda Dalrymple Henderson (eds), From Energy to Information: Representation in Science and Technology, Art, and Literature (Stanford, 2002). On science as a model for internationalism see e.g. Waqar Zaidi, ‘Technology and the Reconstruction of International Relations: Liberal Internationalist Proposals for the Internationalisation of Aviation and the International Control of Atomic Energy in Britain, USA and France, 1920–1950’ (PhD diss., Imperial College, London, 2008) and Rebecka Lettevall, Geert Somsen and Sven Widmalm (eds), Neutrality in Twentieth-Century Europe: Intersections of Science, Culture, and Politics after the First World War (New York, 2012). Excellent, and rare, studies of cultural meanings of science are Andrew Jewett, Science, Democracy, and the American University (Cambridge, 2012) and David A. Hollinger, Science, Jews, and Secular Culture: Studies in Mid-Twentieth-Century American Intellectual History (Princeton, 1996).

Unification in context

The world in which interwar pursuits of the unity of science emerged was one of deep division and splintering antagonism. Fragmentation not only seemed to characterise the academic realm of ongoing specialisation, but also, all too obviously, the world of international relations and social strife. Amidst the First World War, Bolshevik Revolution, nationalist agitation and the threat of another global conflict, the claim that any part of human endeavour was fundamentally united was bound to have broader import. It was precisely because science seemed to transcend these many oppositions that it carried a message to them. If the world was divided, science could unite it, and pursuing scientific unity inevitably had political and cultural as well as epistemological implications.

To be sure, this had also been true for other times – for unity of science was not a singularity of the interwar period, as Peter Galison makes clear in Chapter 2. The famous ‘school of 1847’ scientists around Hermann Helmholtz and Emil du Bois-Reymond, for example, strove for a unification of physiology with Newtonian physics at the same time that they tried to establish a unified German state. Knowledge and liberal nationalism were here closely intertwined. Similarly, in mid-twentieth century America, different views of unity in physics coincided with different visions of democracy: a pyramidal reductionism being associated with the rule of law, a quilt-like map of science with the protection of diversity. Interwar unity of science pursuits, however, were distinguished by their enormous scope and their often overt political commitment. Unifying science was strongly (but not exclusively) associated with left-wing orientations; it was a distinctly international undertaking, often with internationalist intentions; and it was deemed to be meaningful for an extraordinarily wide range of human endeavours.

Both the broad scope and the intensity of these pursuits were a response to the perception of profound political and cultural crisis that was rife after 1918. The promotion of unified science as a rational basis for social planning and international cooperation formed a collective answer to the feeling of general devastation that followed the Great War. It thus presented a counterweight to the fast-spreading cultural pessimism that foresaw the downfall of Western civilisation rather than new opportunities for progress. As such, unity pursuits were part of a greater modernist project, both as regards their rationalism and their forward-looking mentality. Indeed, associations with functionalist architecture and abstract painting were explicitly made. ⁷ Important strands of modernism regarded science as possessing uniquely progressive, unifying powers, and scientists simultaneously drew upon and contributed to these perceptions.

The pursuit of the unity of science acquired its greatest momentum with the economic crisis of the Great Depression and the growth of fascism in the 1930s. Belief in the general potential of science joined scientists from a broad political spectrum against the ‘irrationality’ of the free market and the purported regressiveness and barbarism of the Nazis. Scientists’ subsequent engagement in the war effort, on a scale unprecedented in material and ideological terms, also fuelled optimism about the role of science in post-war reconstruction. ⁸ Ideals of the scientific organisation of a united world informed the establishment of new international agencies such as the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) and the World Health Organization (WHO). ⁹ Global social unity through science seemed on the verge of being realised, and for many scientists these were years of unparalleled hope. Some even hailed the atomic bomb for the unifying effects it would have, as it left countries no choice but to share the new knowledge and collectively manage its applications. ¹⁰

⁷ C.H. Waddington, The Scientific Attitude (Harmondsworth, 1941); and Peter Galison, ‘Aufbau/Bauhaus: Logical Positivism and Architectural Modernism’, Critical Inquiry 16 (1990), 709–52. ⁸ By the end of the Second World War the belief in scientific planning was shared left to right. Tony Judt has called it ‘the political religion of postwar Europe’ – see Judt, Postwar (n. 6), 67–77. ⁹ G. Archibald, ‘How the S Came to Be in UNESCO’, in P. Petitjean et al. (eds), Sixty Years of Science at UNESCO (Paris, 2006), 29–34. Aant Elzinga, ‘UNESCO and the Politics of Scientific Imperialism’, in Aant Elzinga and C. Landstrom (eds), UNESCO and the Politics of Scientific Imperialism (London, 1996), 89–131. ¹⁰ Paul S. Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (New York, 1985), chs. 2–3.

Yet soon after the Second World War the ideology of unity of science began to be marginalised. Strong and explicit unions between science and politics were increasingly associated with totalitarian abuse, the Soviet Union becoming the primary example with the onset of the Cold War. By this time, many natural scientists turned away from left-wing activism, seeking instead to strengthen the autonomy of science and keep political interference at bay. As mentioned earlier, pursuits of scientific unity did continue in areas such as American physics, but their ideological connotations were both different and more hidden than during the 1930s. Similarly in the philosophy of science, the entrenchment of Cold War divisions narrowed the Unity of Science Movement down to an internalist epistemological programme, stripped from its former political dimensions. The movement had come to the US with its ideology intact, but was reduced to ‘pure’ logical empiricism in the McCarthy era, as George Reisch shows in our final chapter. The Cold War terminated the most ambitious unity pursuits. ¹¹

¹¹ For comparable developments in the history of science, see Anna-K. Mayer, ‘Setting Up a Discipline: Conflicting Agendas of the Cambridge History of Science Committee, 1936–1950’, Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science 31 (4) (2000), 665–89; and ‘Setting Up a Discipline, II: British History of Science and “the End of Ideology”, 1931–1948’, Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science 35 (1) (2004), 41–73.

Unifying issues

What happened in the interim – between the Great War and the Cold War – and how specific pursuits of the unity of science developed during this time constitutes the subject matter of this book. A number of questions guide the authors’ analyses. How was the unity of science translated into specific programmes of research as well as activities outside the laboratory? What functions did appeals to unification serve in the scientific, social, philosophical and political realm? How was the unity of science ideology situated culturally? Such issues are pertinent to particular unification programmes and to the unity of science movement as a whole. It will become apparent that there were many interconnections between the different unification endeavours, stemming from personal contact, shared circumstances and sometimes coordinated action. Links with the Unity of Science Movement of the Vienna Circle will appear frequentl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Routledge Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• Notes on contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Meanings of scientific unity: the law, the orchestra, the pyramid, the quilt and the ring
• 3 The unifying vision: Julian Huxley, evolutionary humanism and the evolutionary synthesis
• 4 Unity through experiment? Reductionism, rhetoric and the politics of nuclear science, 1918–40
• 5 Scientists of the world unite: socialist internationalism and the unity of science
• 6 Government as scientific process in H.G. Wells’s world state
• 7 Unifying science against fascism: neuropsychiatry and medical education in the Spanish Civil War
• 8 ‘To formulate a plan for better living’: visual communication and scientific planning in Paul Rotha’s documentary films, 1935–45
• 9 Unifying science and human culture: the promotion of the history of science by George Sarton and Frans Verdoorn
• 10 The unity of knowledge and the diversity of knowers: science as an agent of cultural integration in the United States between the two world wars
• 11 McCarthyism in philosophy and the end of the unity of science ideology
• Index