Science, Democracy, and the American University: From the Civil War to the Cold War by Andrew Jewett (review)

Consequential political debates—about everything from regulating genetically modified foods to reining in climate change—often pivot on competing claims to scientific authority and expertise. According to Jewett, grappling with such debates requires a more thorough historical examination of the relations between science and politics. Drawing primarily on the published remarks of selected American intellectuals from the 1860s through the 1950s, Jewett’s sweeping account focuses on the history of a single tenacious idea—that the practice of science somehow conveys the personal virtues and ethical values requisite for democratic citizenship. This belief, which Jewett labels “scientific democracy,” views science less as a source of technical knowledge than as a resource for intervening in the cultural substrate of the nation.

The “scientific democrats,” historical proponents of this belief, did not necessarily favor direct participation by citizens in decision making. Jewett’s introduction explains that the use of the term democracy in this context is “colloquial” rather than technical (9). Indeed, although the scientific democrats sought to cultivate any number of civic virtues, they appear collectively to have ignored the actual procedural work of “empowering citizens to voice their will effectively” (370). Nor are these scientific democrats drawn from the familiar roster of eminent figures. Louis Agassiz, Asa Gray, and Clarence King, for example, are conspicuously absent from Jewett’s study, and the eugenics movement is briskly dismissed (169). Instead, Jewett discusses thinkers not commonly included in histories of American science, such as William Graham Sumner, Richard T. Ely, and Charles Ellwood. In this account, literary criticism, moral philosophy, and linguistics are as central to the history of science and democracy in America as are physics, engineering, or biology.

Jewetts’ novel reading of the history of science in American thought is organized into three parts, each marked with an epigraph from Alexis de Tocqueville (none include Democracy in America’s famous reflections on science and American culture). Part I, “The Scientific Spirit,” suggests that the “twin shocks of civil war and pell-mell industrial expansion” led academicians to rethink “the cultural effects of their knowledge practices” (22), providing the impetus for scientific democracy. Part II, “The Scientific Attitude,” addresses the first three decades of the twentieth century—when scientific democrats like John Dewey stressed the “constructed, contextual, and dialogic character of scientific knowledge” (110). This section of the book convincingly challenges received histories of the human sciences, which instead generally emphasize the period’s deepening commitments to scientism. Part III, “Science and Politics,” which centers on mid-twentieth century conflicts about value neutrality, describes how long-running visions of democratic engagement fell subject to narrower conventions after World War II, with widespread consequences.

The book’s conclusion rebukes twenty-first century thinkers, whether positivist scientists or their post-positivist critics, who continue to ratify the “narrow, value-neutral conception of science” crafted in the postwar period (367). Jewett writes, “[W]e could, if we desired, adopt a more expansive meaning” of science “than has prevailed in recent decades” (369). His book certainly helps to expand conceptions of scientific expertise, while cataloging remarkably conflicting ideas about the place of science in democratic culture.