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SCIENCE AND DEMOCRACY A Fundamental Correlation Joseph Needham Perhaps it is a commonplace to say that science is only possible in a democratic medium. But commonplaces may be quite erroneous when carefully examined, and if this one be true, it cannot be thought of as established in the absence of detailed consideration. I believe, however, that there is a fundamental correlation between science and democracy.... In the first place, it is quite clear, and the fact is not contested by any scholars , Marxist or otherWise, that historically science and democracy grew up in Western Civilization together. I refer here, of course, not to primitive science, nor to medieval empirical technology, but to modern science, with its characteristic combination of the rational and the empirical and its systematization of hypotheses about the external universe which stand the test of controlled experiment. To the English Civil War and Commonwealth period we have already referred, but this was only part of that great movement lasting from the fifteenth, perhaps, till the eighteenth century, in which feudalism was destroyed and capitalism took its place. Other aspects of the same change were the Protestant Reformation, the literary Renaissance, and the rise of modern science. Exactly why modem science should have been associated with these changes still remains to be fully elucidated. Here it may suffice to say that the early merchant-venturers, extremely farseeing men, and the princes who supported them and based their power on them, were interested in the properties of things because on such properties alone could mercantile and quantitative economics develop. At no time in history has scientific research been possible without financial support. In antiquity the aid of princes had to be obtained; Babylonian astronomy was a department of state; Greek physics and mathematics relied on the support of the sovereign city-states; and Alexandrian biology depended on the Ptolemies. In the first beginnings of capitalism the merchants and embryonic industrialists provided the essential funds for the experiments of a Boyle or a Lavoisier, however indirect might be the channels. In the Restoration Court, after the victories of the Commonwealth, scientific and technical experiments were performed under the very auspices of King Charles II; "the noise of mechanick SCIENCE AND DEMOCRACY / 435 instruments resounded in Whitehall itself." Business had, in fact, become respectable , and science with it. The younger sons of the aristocracy hastened to apprentice themselves to thriving mercantile, mining, and industrial enterprises. Waning shadows of the former feudal exclusiveness appear in the attractive story of John Graunt, the founder of vital statistics and the first man to apply mathematical methods to the "Bills of Mortality." The Royal Society were uncertain whether to admit him of their number, since he was some kind of small tradesman in the City, and they sought the opinion of the King on the matter, who replied that "they should certainly admit Mr Graunt, and if they found any more such tradesmen, they should be sure to admit them also without delay." This judgment was what we could call the affirmation of a democratic principle , namely that in matters of science and learning birth or descent is a thing indifferent. And indeed it is obvious that if the rising merchant class encouraged the sciences to develop, their slogan on the political side was precisely democracy in all its forms. Everyone knows, of course, that democracy, sensu stricto, took its origin in ancient Greece, but it was always based there on a helot or slave population, and it seems extremely unlikely that it would ever have developed as it did if it had not been for Christian theology, with its emphasis on the importance of the individual soul before God. Those who took the individual soul seriously were bound to end, as authoritarian thinkers had always realized, by taking seriously the opinions of its owner, not only on spiritual matters, but ultimately on temporal ones too. • There can be no doubt that capitalism, democracy, and modem science grew up together. The question arises whether the two latter are essentially dependent upon the former. Many observers today consider that capitalism has ceased to be the matrix for the other two which once it was.... But let us tum now to the philosophical, rather than the historical, connections between science and democracy. In the first place, Nature is no respecter of persons. If someone takes the floor before an audience of scientific men and women, wishing to speak of observations made, experiments carried out, hypotheses formed, or...

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