Neoliberalism and the Privatized Science Regime

Viridiana Jones is a fictional academic scientist. Intelligent and politically liberal, “in the awkward American sense” [of the term], she is increasingly disillusioned with the global, privatized funding regime that has come to shape her experiences as a teacher and researcher (p. 3). Endowed with what the author clearly believes are laudable instincts and motives—for example, “she knows that money has always been needed to make science, but whoever anticipated that her colleagues would come to take it as axiomatic that science was just another way to make money?” (p. 2)—Viridiana serves as a vehicle for structuring an extended critical examination of the current state of academic science. But much more than a guidebook and primer for concerned, if economically and politically naïve, researchers like Viridiana, Philip Mirowski’s Science-Mart provides even well-read historians (and, it might be hoped, receptive social scientists, economists, and science policy experts) with an extremely pointed and closely argued account of the agents and forces responsible for the current state of affairs, as well as the disquieting implications of the transformations that have taken place over the past thirty-some years in the legal framework, the funding mechanisms, and the institutions within which scientific research and education are conducted in the United States (and increasingly throughout the world).

Engaging a wide range of scholarly and polemical writing on the economics, philosophy, sociology, politics, and history of twentieth-century science, Science-Mart is a challenging and important book. And while activists and more policy-oriented readers may be disappointed that, even in his concluding remarks, the author consciously refrains from suggesting a specific list of corrective actions or an “ambitious program of reforms” (p. 315), at least the ideologically open may welcome, as a first step, this attempt “to enumerate the relevant range of economic and social phenomena that should factor into any assessment of the modern politics of knowledge. . . ” (p. 7).

Mirowski’s most withering criticism is directed to what he sees as the now dominant, but morally and empirically suspect, vision that considers science (and disciplined research more broadly) as just another commercial undertaking—one that, like all other forms of information processing, can be usefully directed and efficiently regulated only within a corporate-dominated “marketplace of ideas.” He later writes: “The dogma that no one would think, or at least be bothered to convey their thoughts to others unless they somehow receive market recompense for their labors is a tremendous slander on the history of science and culture, but nevertheless it has carried the day to become folk wisdom in the modern academic order” (p. 33).

In the text, notes, and extraordinary useful bibliography, the author provides an overview of a large sampling of economic and political arguments about science that he finds erroneous, misguided, or worse. And on an only slightly more positive note (don’t look here, if a silver lining is your primary interest), he cites some promising critical commentary and scholarship as well as references to much of his own prolific twenty-plus–year output of articles, chapters, and edited volumes, for which this book can serve as a useful guide.

Science-Mart is organized into seven chapters, divided into an introduction and three major sections. (Although, as will be evident from the following summary, the narrative tends to weave in and out, with numerous jumps and cross-references.) Historical analysis is presented in the introduction and the first two sections, which will receive the bulk of this review’s attention. Commentary on what Mirowski views as the severely degraded state of the supporting structure for the socially useful production of new knowledge is in section three.

Chapter one introduces us to Viridiana, preparing her [and us] for what follows, first by identifying six trends that Mirowski sees as central context for the emergence of the present commercialized science regime. First and foremost among the identified trends is the currently much-discussed decline in the West of its industrial/manufacturing...