Science in Social PerspectiveThe Scientist's Role in Society: A Comparative Study by Joseph Ben-DavidReview by: Norman W. StorerIsis, Vol. 63, No. 2 (Jun., 1972), pp. 249-251Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The History of Science SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/229051 .

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BOOK REVIEWS-ISIS, 63 * 2 * 217 (1972) 249

ng the w arning caveat emptor, even in the case of old and distinguished publishing houses). Daniels undertook a task which he recognized as important but for which he was ill-

prepared; in the process he has victimized himself and others. He has inadvertently also done us a service. He has held up a mirror, and we must now look at ourselves and our work. The history of science has developed rapidly in the United States since World War II. Many of the projects which we regarded as pioneering a decade ago are today upon publication conven- tional and even in a degree old-fashioned. For those of us who would lay claim to Mt. Pamassus and who wish to do a synthesis of American scientific development, it must be recognized that analyses of such external phenomena as the establishment of scientific chairs, societies, publications, and science-government relations no longer suffice. We must also be familiar with the problems of the internal development of specific sciences and be able to chart their relationships to society as well.

Young scholars have already undertaken such tasks and will in a brief time modify and even destroy our work. It is the young that concern me: they must understand that without professional standards work in the history of science is meaningless. We, for our part, must recognize the corrosive force of the pressure on the young for almost continuous publication. It is a harsh pressure and must be mitigated. These words are not said in defense of George Daniels. He has left us with a cruel dilemma: on the one hand is the necessity of defending the standards and purpose of our work; on the other is the need of facing and caring for the pain we cause ourselves and others by our all too human failings.

SAUL BENISON Department of History

University of Cincinnati Cincinnati, Ohio 45221

Science in Social Perspective

Joseph Ben-David. The Scientist's Role in Society: A Comparative Study. (Foundations of Modern Sociology Series.) xi + 207 pp., app., index. Englewood Cliffs, N.J. :Prentice-Hall, 1971. $6.95 (cloth); $2.95 (paper).

This book may suffer unfairly on two counts, if they are not explained at the outset. First, despite the implications of its title, it is by no means a hortatory essay on the moral or social responsibilities of the scientist. Second, it does not really belong with the other volumes that make up the publisher's excellent Foundations of Modern Sociology series. Joseph Ben-David's work is, rather, the first genuinely sociological history of science we have had; it is essentially a learned monograph rather than an "introduction" to a specialty within the discipline.

It should be added further that the book is distinctly sociological in its perspective and thus may not at first sit comfortably with the historian of science. The author specifies in the Preface that "The subject matter is the social conditions, and, to some extent, the effects of scientific activities, and not the sociology of the contents of scientific knowledge," and he undertakes the monumental task of answering the question, "How did scientific activity grow and assume its present-day structure ?"

After a compact and sophisticated review of the sociology of science and a consideration of the general problem of the origins and growth of science, Ben-David sets out to examine the social conditions that have influenced the fitful growth of science since about 400 B.C.

In turn, he examines Greek science, medieval Italian science, and then the successive periods

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250 BOOK REVIEWS-ISIS, 63 * 2 * 217 (1972)

during which England, France, Germany, and the United States have been the dominant centers of scientific activity. In the ninth and concluding chapter he considers the implications of his analysis for our understanding of science in society and for some current science-policy issues.

Despite his statement that "What needs explanation is the fact that science ever emerged at all" (p. 31), the author's strategy throughout the book depends on the assumption that science will grow wherever possible, so that analysis can be directed to the particular social problems that must be solved if this growth is to flower. Indeed, in the very last sentence of the text he observes that "Social conditions do not generate intellectual ability and moral re- sponsibility; they only provide the conditions for their exercise."

The intriguing paradox of science is highlighted by the additional assumption that society does not "need" science as it needs technological services, moral philosophy, religion, or even as a necessary means to understanding man's place in nature. Ben-David's analysis must thus revolve about the problem of how this "unnecessary" social activity has been able to achieve institutionalization. He identifies three critical problems that must be solved in sequence if a scientific community is to flourish, and he suggests that the relative success or failure of science at different points in history has depended on whether these problems were properly resolved.

In Greece and later in medieval Italy it was the ultimate inability to establish the separate role of the scientist (i.e., a recognized social position in society, or even a career, characterized by concern with empirical fact and neutrality toward moral and political issues) that cut off the growth of science. (The scientific knowledge remaining to us from those periods was appar- ently produced under circumstances that were coincidental and relatively short-lived, which points up the distinction between science as knowledge and science as an ongoing social activity.)

By the seventeenth century the first problem had been solved in England, where scientific activity was able to take root in organized fashion. But the thrust of advance there was then weakened by the failure of science to achieve adequate intellectual autonomy; doing science became confused with appreciating science (as in the Royal Society during parts of the eighteenth century), and support of science became too closely linked with opinions on other social issues.

A higher degree of intellectual autonomy for science was achieved in France and protected by the way the Academie des Sciences was insulated from the rest of the social institutions. This enabled French scientists to dominate the latter half of the eighteenth century. But it was their failure to solve the third problem-that of achieving organizational autonomy-which led to a decline in their eminence by 1840, while the peculiar social conditions in Germany at the same time facilitated a more effective insulation from society's practical concerns and thus the acceleration of scientific growth in that region.

The alliance of science with the German university system, which afforded a pluralistic organizational base, was the key to Germany's success during most of the nineteenth century; the development of formal research training under Liebig and Muller of course greatly en- hanced the content of German science, but it was the broader social conditions that made possible its sujstained growth. And it was only as the university structure became more rigid, limiting both career opportunities in science and opportunities to adjust the social organiza- tion of science to the changing organization of its bodies of knowledge, that scientific pre- eminence shifted to the United States early in the twentieth century. Ben-David remarks on the broad base of university support and on the sprawling decentralization of higher educa- tion as factors that have been especially important in facilitating the growth of science in America, and he suggests that increasing dependence on a single source of funds (the govern- ment) will in the long run reduce the flexibility of the system and thus its ability to take ad- vantage of new opportunities as they arise.

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BOOK REVIEWS-ISIS, 63 * 2 * 217 (1972) 251

This brief interpretation of the core of Ben-David's analysis is of course vastly oversimpli- fied and cannot do justice to the breadth and intricacy of his argument. He takes proper account of such factors as a society's changing class structure, the philosophical trends which have characterized it at various periods, and its changing political climate. But the conditions under which the three critical problems were faced and solved (or not) form the bare bones of his work. The sequential importance of establishing the scientist's role, then the intellectual autonomy of science, and finally adequate organizational autonomy for its practitioners, gives us a powerful model against which to assess the historical record. It will certainly be referred to for a long time to come, both because it sets a high standard for future work in this vein and because it goes far in establishing the relevance of the sociological perspective to the historical study of science.

It should be remarked, in terms of this as a book, that while it is almost entirely free of typographical errors, it suffers grievously from a relatively incomplete index and the absence of any bibliography at all. In terms of intellectual content, though, The Scientist's Role in Society deserves the widest possible readership in both sociology and the history of science; this reviewer is prepared to bet that it will have a major impact upon work in both fields.

NORMAN W. STORER Department of Sociology and Anthropology

Bernard M. Baruch College of the City University of New York New York, N. Y. 10010

Toward Enlightenment III Jurgen Mittelstrass. Neuzeit und Aufklarung. Studien zur Entstehung der neuzeitlichen Wissen- schaft und Philosophie. xvi + 651 pp., bibl., index. Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1970. DM 68.

Jtirgen Mittelstrass is a knowledgable, wide-ranging, and ambitious contemporary philo- sopher, here engaged in a "dialogue" with his philosophical and scientific predecessors, partly in preparation for his future work, which hopefully could lead to a "Third Enlighten- ment." He is writing neither history nor philosophy of science but a philosophizing (judg- mental rather than explanatory) study of the origins of modern rational thought, specifically (following Kant) theoretical reason. His subtitle must be taken seriously: the book is not an ordinary monograph, but neither is it a mere series of discrete studies linked only by the common theme of reason. The book's basic unity lies in Mittelstrass' methodical critique of those thinkers who have claims to represent autonomous reason or enlightenment. Both the latter are, for Mittelstrass, identical to philosophy as such, and so for him the origin of modern scientific thought corresponds to the origin of the "Second Enlightenment." The latter begins with Galileo and proceeds, by a somewhat erratic course, to Kant (at least), with whom autonomous critical reason becomes a reality.

Mittelstrass' critique, full of valuable ideas and insights, amounts to a sophisticated and selective discussion of the successes and failures of theoretical reason in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe. A second volume, dealing with practical reason (i.e., ethical and political as well as historical thought), is promised. When finished, the two volumes will have prepared the author for what I take to be his ultimate philosophical task: a critique of his- torical reason and a critique of linguistic reason. Mittelstrass believes that Kant's two ques- tions-what can I know, and what should I do-are not only still relevant, but possibly

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