2000 HSS/PSA Program 1 - History of Science Society

HSS Abstracts
fundamental characteristics of an individual’s nature and to allow social decisions
about that person to be made according to seemingly objective and neutral criteria.
To its critics, the vogue of intelligence threatened to undercut the very premise
of American democracy by naturalizing a social hierarchy and substituting the
norms of a particular group for those of the whole. By investigating how this
new technology for ranking and sorting the population was constructed, what
effects it had when appropriated by schools, industry, and government, and what
reactions it elicited, I hope to illuminate how ways of doing science and ways of
doing governance intersected and informed one another. In the process, I will
also examine how the dual visibilities produced by intelligence tests-the visibility
of the individual to decision-making authorities and the visibility of the decisionmaking
process to the citizenry-intertwined, and how both forms of visibility
came to seem unmediated and trustworthy.
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Cristina Chimisso Open University, United Kingdom
Hélène Metzger:
The History of Science between the History of Mentalities and Total History
This paper investigates the contribution of the historian of science Hélène
Metzger (Chatou en Seine-et-Oise, France, 1889—en route to Auschwitz 1944)
to the debates on the writing of history of science which took place in France
in the period between the two world wars. My evaluation of her ideas results
from an analysis of the discussions held at the Centre de synthèse the courses
she gave at the Institute for history of the sciences and technology of the
Sorbonne and at the École pratique des Hautes Études, where she replaced
Alexandre Koyré her work for the International committee for history of science
her correspondence with George Sarton and her own historiographical writings
and her works on history of chemistry. The examination of Metzger’s point of
view is a way to investigate the contemporary conception of history of science
as the study of the mind and as total history. The former conception
institutionally derived from French history of science having its roots in
Philosophy Departments, theoretically implied a conception of science as
cultural production and an emphasis on the study of ‘mentalities’ behind that
production. The conception of history of science as total history likewise
recognised science as a cultural production. Moreover, it implied the necessity,
as Metzger often stressed, of studying any aspects of cultural and social history
in order to understand past science. Metzger’s point of view on the ideas
expressed in these institutions and circles are particularly interesting because
of her peculiar position as a Jewish woman trying to ‘conquer a real post’ in
academia, as she put it. Jews were only then starting pursuing academic careers
in France but this applied to men, who often married Jewish wealthy women
apart from a handful of illustrious exceptions, women had no positions in
French universities of the time.