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4 - Scientific Institutions and the Organization of Science

from Part I - Science and Society

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2008

By
James McClellan III
Edited by
Roy Porter
Roy Porter
Affiliation:
Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, University College London
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Summary

The eighteenth century represents a distinct era in the organizational and institutional history of European science. Growing out of an “organizational revolution” that accompanied the intellectual transformations of science in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the scientific enterprise became newly solidified in the eighteenth century. Indicative of this solidification, European governments increasingly supported and structured novel social and institutional forms for eighteenth-century science. Governments moved to support science for the perceived usefulness of expert knowledge of nature.

Science reorganized in the eighteenth century centered on national academies of science modeled after the Royal Society of London (1662) and the French Académie Royale des Sciences (1666). It also involved observatories, botanical gardens, and new forms of publication and scientific communication. This characteristic Old-Regime style of organized and institutionalized science matured over the course of the eighteenth century and was replaced in the nineteenth century by an equally distinct form for organized science that came to involve specialized societies, disciplinary journals, and a revived university system.

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The Cambridge History of Science , pp. 87 - 106
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2003

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