2000 HSS/PSA Program 1 - History of Science Society

HSS Abstracts
Columbian history previously done by several countries and institutions.
Although the Mexican government belonged to the undersigned of the statute
of the EIAEA, this enterprise faced some opposition from Mexican
anthropologists and archaeologists who feared scientific imperialism by their
American and European colleagues. Whereas this controversy over the
protection of Mexican antiquities and the scientific status of their own
disciplines was mostly confined to the Mexicans, the changing international
context—with the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution and the European Great
War—greatly effected the scientific cooperation. Nationalist resentments led
to changing and unstable alliances between the scientists depending on the
foreign politics of their countries. The lack of governmental cooperation in
funding and supporting the institute on the one hand, together with the intention
of Mexican scientists to take over the scientific exploration of their own country
as a national task led finally to the collapse of the EIAEA.
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Mary␣ O. Furner University of California, Santa Barbara
The Enlightenment Ideal, the Social Sciences, and Governance, 1880s-
1940s
As the current vogue of the Enlightenment so forcefully reminds us, the modern
“sciences of man and society” arose as part of a revolutionary epistemology
that shifted the grounds of authority in policy making from “dead” tradition to
active reason. In relation to feudal/monarchial states of the premodern past,
the modal Enlightenment form of governance was, in fact if not in form, a
republic, as Voltaire judged England to be, despite its monarchy, in light of the
freedom of discourse there. Yet, within this Enlightenment frame of reference,
the total and rapidly growing stock of social knowledge was taken as in some
sense the possession and “voice” of civil society, to be intoned critically, in
judgment of the actions of “rule” by a sovereignty of any type, even a virtuous
republic. If the proper institutional settings for the rational, critical deliberations
that judged the actions of states were voluntary associations of citizens in
civil society, how would this expectation be altered when states, seeking
improvement, competitive advantage, and a wider legitimacy, became
increasingly dependent upon social knowledge and social science? How would
the Enlightenment tradition of critical distance from power be maintained when
states, and public officials in the rising numbers of statistical agencies, were
increasingly the actual producers of social knowledge, and when governments
drew upon and subsidized the development of social science expertise? How
would expectations about this state/social knowledge relationship shift within
the various social sciences, as various strands of professionalization and
academicization proceeded from the late nineteenth century forward? Did a
gendered access to work in social science (exclusively male in the universities
a female preponderance in the social settlements and social welfare) produce