2000 HSS/PSA Program 1 - History of Science Society

HSS Abstracts
a gendered conception of the state/social science relationship that approximated
gendered legal conceptions of individual rights, or has this difference been
unduly exaggerated, masking other, more important lines of difference in this
regard? Can we argue that a “bureaucratic ideal,” developed (quite different
from what Weber expected) within the liberal social sciences from the 1880s
through 1940s, that this ideal bridged or transcended concerns about
maintaining boundaries between knowledge and reform to create a distinctively
American vision of planning, linking the social sciences (especially economics
and public administration), public social investigation, and the state? Then
how did changes in the meaning(s) of planning undermine this vision, both in
the post-World War II reversion to technocratic management, first widely
posited in the 1920s, and in the post-1970s ideological wars? Why, in the
current, post-liberal, post-modern climate, is there so much nostalgia for an
Enlightenment vision of reasoned deliberation based on good theory, and yet
so little success in imagining how our highly quantitative, model-oriented
social sciences could serve as “that noble science of politics?” I hope to explore
conceptions of the relations of social science and governance, as they have
changed over time, mainly in the New Liberal era, 1880s through 1940s, but
with some comments about implications for the location and role of the social
sciences in more recent period of heightened relativism, identity politics and
“hyper-democracy.” I will also offer some comments on the papers of
Professors Porter and Ross.
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Aileen Fyfe University of Cambridge
Industrialised Conversion:
Publishing Popular Science and Religion in Victorian Britain
In the middle decades of the nineteenth century, questions of scientific expertise
and authority were highly controversial. During this time, changes in the
publishing trade created a new genre of cheap popular science books, whose
publishers had to address such issues in deciding who to ask to write the books,
and what style should be used. They also had to balance the commercial
pressure to sell books, with their own religious or philanthropic ambitions
about whom they should sell books to, and for what purpose. The publishers I
examine in this paper focused their activities around their desire to convert
their readers to evangelical Christianity, in part by relating science to revealed
theology. I consider their methods of reaching their audience, from the material
processes of printing and distributing, to the textual strategies that came into
play once the book found a reader. In so doing, I argue that studies like this
provide an alternative perspective in a field which has remained dominated
by nineteenth-century narratives of secularisation and professionalisation.
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