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

Science expanded rapidly from the second half of the nineteenth century onwards. This expansion was closely linked with the expansion and transformation of the university system. Especially within the US, science gained solid institutional footing in a period in which a series of reforms in higher education placed the scientific disciplines at the center of an emerging system of modern universities. The scientific university became a hallmark of the modern era.

The expansion of science came with its differentiation. Within the system of science, an increasing number of disciplines could emerge and crystallize. Scientific work also increasingly distinguished itself from its social and cultural environment. It developed practices (e.g., theoretical models and empirical methods) that distinguished it from other cultural practices, such as art and religion, while the ‘professionalization’ of scientific work also led to the creation of specialized scientific associations, communication media, meetings, etc. But differentiation (or difference) does not have to imply indifference. A range of interactions between science and its social environment also seemed to become possible. In the US, much of science’s attraction came from its apparent potential to solve some festering problems of governance—not just by creating a particular body of technical knowledge that the American state could use to better understand the population, but also by making ethical citizens and mobilizing science as a resource for strengthening American democratic practices. In the book under review, Andrew Jewett aims to offer a ‘broadly political reading of the push to make America scientific’ (p. 1). He looks at the origins of the campaign to bring science to bear on public culture, to turn the university into a tool for building a new American culture.

More particularly, Jewett focuses attention on a relatively large and varied group of American thinkers whom he labels as ‘scientific democrats’, i.e. American thinkers who contended that science, as they understood it, offered the basis for a cohesive and fulfilling modern culture. The ‘scientific democrats’, according to Jewett, claimed that science could dramatically improve democratic practice not only by fostering technological growth, improving administrative techniques (both inside and outside of government), and giving citizens the technical information needed to participate constructively in policy debates, but also, and more importantly, by shaping their moral character, normative commitments, and discursive practices. For a period of about a full century, from the 1860s to the 1960s, roughly from the Civil War to the Cold War, Jewett reconstructs the leitmotifs in the writings of American thinkers who sought to expand science’s authority, because they believed it offered moral as well as cognitive resources to the citizens and officials of a modern democracy.

Jewett first sketches how, in the years after the Civil War, many advocates of science began to claim that science offered not only practical techniques, but also the cultural and political benefits that flowed from mainstream Protestantism, without the divisive theological claims and metaphysical baggage. These advocates deemed science sufficiently robust ethically to take over from religious authorities the crucial political role of forming democratic citizens. In a number of different ways, these advocates argued that science embodied and inculcated a set of personal virtues, skills, beliefs, and values that could ground a modern, democratic public culture. The first generation of scientific democrats even promised their fellow citizens that adopting the scientific spirit in all realms of human activity would produce an ever-widening sphere of social cohesion and agreement. Yet as the disciplines became more specialized and generated a growing body of empirical knowledge in the late nineteenth century, this differentiation also challenged the underlying assumption of latent mental and social harmony.

This kind of challenge led some scientific democrats to examine more closely the nature of scientific reasoning and its relationship to ethical commitments. The early scientific democrats carried forward from the antebellum period a common-sense theory of knowledge holding that properly constituted evidence and argumentation would...