Oppenheimer: The Tragic Intellect (review)

The year 2004 was the centennial of the birth of the American physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, father of the atomic bomb and the most recognizable scientist of the twentieth-century after Einstein. During the years centered around 2004, Oppenheimer scholarship moved to a remarkably high level. One immediately thinks of the Pulizer Prize-winning biography of Oppenheimer, American Prometheus, by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin. But there are other outstanding books and Thorpe's Oppenheimer: The Tragic Intellect is definitely one of them. In a review, historian Richard Polenberg (Cornell) wrote that Thorpe's book "is one of the finest books I have ever read." The journal Metascience devoted a 37-page symposium to Thorpe's book with reviews by Sheila Jasonoff (Harvard), Michael Gordin (Princeton), and Andrew Jewett (Harvard) along with Thorpe's response.

Thorpe is a sociologist of science at the University of California, San Diego, and his book "grew out of [his] doctoral dissertation" done under the supervision of historian and sociologist of science Steven Shapin. Thorpe's book is unique in Oppenheimer scholarship since his aim is "to provide a biography that draws together individual character structure and social structure, looking at the social processes and collective work though which individual identity is constituted."(xv) In other words, it is "a sociological biography." One is reminded here of C. Wright Mills and "the sociological imagination" which enables us "to understand the larger historical scene in terms of its meaning for the inner life and the external career of a variety of individuals." Thorpe's choice is ideal for Oppenheimer was uniquely placed—shaping, as well as being shaped by, the historic forces and violence of his times.

Though Thorpe covers Oppenheimer's youth, his becoming a theoretical physicist, and his early years as a Berkeley professor, Thorpe's main focus is on Oppenheimer's later life—his leadership at Los Alamos during WWII, the loss of his security clearance in 1954, and Oppenheimer as a public intellectual especially after 1954. Magnificently researched with wonderful detail, the book develops several themes in the spirit of Max Weber—Oppenheimer's charismatic leadership at Los Alamos as "a collective accomplishment," Oppenheimer's security hearing as epitomizing the public "disciplining [of] experts" and the bureaucratization of science into the national security state, and Oppenheimer's conception of science as vocation and a resulting vocational ethics. The moral crisis of the atomic bomb and responsibility is addressed through the actions and inner contradictions of Oppenheimer himself. In the end for Thorpe, Oppenheimer is personally tragic—a fragmented self who "accommodated himself to and internalized the culture and mentality of the national security state." (xv) Moreover, the alliance of science with the national security state appears sociologically tragic by leading to a sacrifice of the independent cultural authority of science.

While a central and defining work in Oppenheimer scholarship, Thorpe's book is very accessible and should be of interest to all readers especially those interested in Cold War America.