This comment, it turned out, was someone pretending to be another scholar. I checked with that scholar, who was appalled that such a statement appeared under her name (and whoever it was even used her email address to post the comment), and so it has of course been erased. Whoever posted it clearly had good knowledge of historians of 20th-century Britain, so this was really a pretty foul move by some other scholar out there. Pathetic. My apologies that this blog was used in such a way, and I hope very much I won’t have to start monitoring comments.

First off, re: Niels Bohr, I missed the key point that Bohr agreed not to host physicists from communist countries (at least without permission). The degree of significance of the episode remains unclear for me: when contextualized against the politics of restrictions on travel and the staged politics of east-west exchange in the ’50s, how does the situation at the Bohr Institute fit in? Does it seem particularly unsavory on account of the second-hand CIA association? Alternatively, am I among those who are prepossessed to “save” the Niels Bohr phenomenon?

Second, Krige wanted to emphasize the widespread acceptance in political history circles of American “hegemony”, seeing it as a toning down from an alternative language of “empire”. As noted above, I do think the overarching picture of hegemony, defined in the way it is, is correct (though apparently others have questioned it). The question that sticks out to me is how individual incidents can serve as evidence of this hegemony.

Krige agreed that there is nothing innately American about suggestions made by Americans as there is nothing innately European about positions taken by those questioning those suggestions. He noted that the terms of American-European tension appears in the archive; suggestions by Americans become “American” by virtue of the fact that they are presented by American representatives. I can be convinced of this point, but I also feel it would place the meaning of the incident in the hands of those who invoked this tension as a rhetorical resource to support or resist certain suggestions. To me, the details of support or resistance seem at least as pertinent a context as the overarching context of national and international narratives, and are too important to leave their meaning to those with a stake in imbuing the suggestions with the significance of a national narrative.

Taking this perspective, how is the “hegemonic” situation produced (or co-produced, to stick to the book’s terminology) if individual incidents cannot so clearly be read as evidence of its formation? To take a shot at answering the question, it seems to me to be a way of describing a coincidence of a few phenomena: American scientific models exerting a strong influence in the development of European science, the more-or-less successful alignment of American and Western European postwar politics, and certain patterns of a rhetoric of influence and resistance used by certain actors.

I don’t think this position and Krige’s are so different—it turns out he loves a good historiographical debate as much as I do, and he wanted to make sure I wasn’t backing down when I emphasized this point. So, if I were to encapsulate the differences in the positions, I think that while we would both view hegemony, as defined, as a kind of emergent phenomenon, I would tend to view it as purely (or at least mainly) emergent, meaning that when considering any individual event, that event will more meaningfully be understood in terms of much more local contexts that do not identify a certain position on a certain issue (except for obvious bits like not having a nuclear reactor at CERN or the Bohr episode) as being a clear episode in the advancement of an American hegemonic project.

The issue I was trying to deal with in the post is why historians of science don’t take the kind of thinking we see in scientists such as Geddes more seriously. Whilst it isn’t uncommon to see writing on a scientist who is, say, concerned about the possible applications of some technological artefact that they’ve been involved in developing, it is uncommon to see history of science work that recognises a scientist who thought a scientific idea of their time was, say, a product of the dominant economic and cultural form of the period. Why is that?

As Will suggested, it seems important that a profession be able to stake a claim to a particular form of knowledge./way of thinking about something. It’s therefore likely that historians of science want to say that they developed the sophisticated ways of udnerstanding science that they now specialise in. To return to an earlier point, the party line for historians of science is usually that scientists’ history of science is whiggish and lacks the kind of sophistication, objectivity, etc that you get from a professional historian writing about the subject. In some cases, that’s true but (a) it doesn’t have to be and (b) it hasn’t been the case in the past.

In many ways, this point is more to do with the knowledge that historians of science have about the history of their own discipline and its relationship with science than it is to do with science itself. That said, it’s interesting to look at the question from the other side of the equation and ask why history (and, for that matter philosophy) of science often don’t enjoy the same relationship with the sciences as they did in the past. But that, no doubt, is the matter for another day — though I’m more than willing to air my thoughts if asked.

Many scientists wondered about eh consequences of their own thoughts. Famously Darwin fretted endlessly on what the implications of his own ideas were in both personal and society contexts. Einstein wrote to the US president of the dangers of Axis powers gaining nuclear weapons. Many on the Manhattan Project questioned their role in history – several changed subjects away from physics.

There are not many physicists that I can think of who are not aware of the emergence of modern western science through the twin effects of the enlightment and the reformation. The reaction of the Catholic church to these new ideas that were perceived by it a force theat threatened it’s own authority. On the reformation side, the great role played by clerics in natural science in the belief that it would expose God’s working. Then there was the sacking of Priestley’s laboratories by a Birmingham mob. Franklin’s role in the founding of the USA.

Of course it goes back far further than that – to the Babylonians, the ancient Greeks, to the early centuries of the Islamic Empire under which many scholars worked, until clerical rule brought the golden age to an end.

I think the big mistake that many in the humanities make in assessing scientists is that many of the latter are not terribly interested in the day-to-day machinations of the political process. For many of a scientific outlook, these sort of activities are often awkward or even distasteful. That should never be mistaken for being uninterested in the history of their own subjects. Whatever their academic interests, the different schools of thought in the natural sciences have vastly more in common than do the equivalent schools of thought in the humanities.

Watch Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man if you think scientists neglect their own history. It just might not be the way you view history.