Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-fscjk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-23T12:45:06.670Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Service Intellectuals and the Politics of “Science”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

Edward A. Purcell Jr.*
Affiliation:
University of Missouri-Columbia

Abstract

Image of the first page of this content. For PDF version, please use the ‘Save PDF’ preceeding this image.'
Type
Essay Review III
Copyright
Copyright © 1975 by New York University 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Notes

1. For treatments of the term “intellectual” as well as of the activities of such individuals see: Hofstadter, Richard, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (New York, 1962); Veysey, Laurence R., The Emergence of the American University (Chicago, 1965); Williams, Raymond, Culture and Society, 1780–1950 (New York, 1958); Lasch, Christopher, The New Radicalism in America, 1889–1963: The Intellectual as a Social Type (New York, 1965); Coser, Lewis A., Men of Ideas: A Sociologist's View (New York, 1965); Philip Rieff, ed., On Intellectuals: Theoretical Studies / Case Studies (Garden City, N. Y., 1970).Google Scholar

2. Charles Sumner Slichter apparently claimed that he wanted to have $50,000 by the time he was fifty years old. By 1914, when he was fifty, he had succeeded. Charles Kenneth Leith left an estate of almost $1,700,000 at his death. By 1928, Harry L. Russell's yearly income was over $50,000.Google Scholar

3. Ingraham, Mark H., Charles Sumner Slichter: The Golden Vector (Madison, Wisconsin, 1972, pp. 34.Google Scholar

4. Ibid., 176.Google Scholar

5. McGrath, Sylvia Wallace, Charles Kenneth Leith: Scientific Advisor (Madison, Wisconsin, 1971), p. 224.Google Scholar

6. Ibid., p. 65.Google Scholar

7. Ibid., p. 229.Google Scholar

8. Ibid., p. 165.Google Scholar

9. Ibid., p. 172.Google Scholar

10. Ibid., p. 106.Google Scholar

11. Ibid., p. xi.Google Scholar

12. Beardsley, Edward H., Harry L. Russell and Agricultural Science in Wisconsin (Madison, Wisconsin, 1969), p. 119.Google Scholar

13. Ibid., p. 115.Google Scholar

14. See, for example, Kuhn, Thomas S., The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd ed. (Chicago, 1970); Friedrichs, Robert W., A Sociology of Sociology (New York, 1970); Roszak, Theodore, The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition (Garden City, N. Y., 1969); Chomsky, Noam, Problems of Knowledge and Freedom (New York, 1971); Chomsky, Noam, Language and Mind, enlarged ed. (New York, 1972); Gouldner, Alvin W., The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology (New York, 1970); Michael Polanyi Personal Knowledge: Toward a Post-Critical Philosophy (Chicago, 1958); Wright Mills, C., The Sociological Imagination (New York, 1959); Lynd, Robert S., Knowledge for What? The Place of Social Science in American Culture (Princeton, New Jersey, 1939); Hudson, Liam, The Cult of the Fact: A Psychologist's Autobiographical Critique of His Discipline (New York, 1972); Marcuse, Herbert, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (Boston, 1964); and Obler, Paul C. and Estrin, Herman A., eds., The New Scientist: Essays on the Methods and Values of Modern Science (Garden City, N. Y., 1962).Google Scholar

15. Shils, Edward, The Intellectuals and the Powers and Other Essays (Chicago, 1972), pp. vii, x.Google Scholar

16. Ibid., p. 116.Google Scholar

17. Ibid., p. 195, xii.Google Scholar

18. Ibid., p. 47 Google Scholar

19. Ibid., p. 176.Google Scholar

20. Ibid., p. 154.Google Scholar

21. Ibid., p. 192.Google Scholar

22. Labedz, Leopold, “The Structure of the Soviet Intelligentsia.Daedalus, 89 (Summer, 1960), 504; Malia, Martin, “What is the Intelligentsia?” Ibid., 443.Google Scholar

23. Shils, , 27.Google Scholar

24. Ibid., 29.Google Scholar

25. Purcell, Edward A. Jr., The Crisis of Democratic Theory: Scientific Naturalism and the Problem of Value (Lexington, Kentucky, 1973).Google Scholar

26. Ideology, in Shils sense, is perhaps most relevant in dealing with communism and Stalinism. Even here, however, it tends to simplify complex historical phenomena. See, for example, such diverse perspectives as Deutschler, Isaac, Stalin: A Political Biography (London, 1949); Djilas, Milovan, The Unperfect Society: Beyond the New Class (New York, 1969); and Von Laue, Theodore H., Why Lenin? Why Stalin? (Philadelphia, 1971; Gardner, Lloyd, Schlessinger, Arthur Jr., and Morgenthau, Hans, The Origins of the Cold War (Waltham, Mass., 1970), pp. 79–102. Recent work on Nazism emphasizes the significance of complex social and economic roots: see especially, Hildebrand, Klaus, Hitlers ort in Der Geschichte Des Preussisch-Deutschen Nationalstaates,” Historische Zeitschrift (December, 1973), 584–632; and “The Coming of the Nazis,” Times Literary Supplement, (February 1, 1974), 93–96. Contrary to Shils implications, most American intellectuals kept a considerable distance between themselves and the Communist Party: Alexander, Charles C., Nationalism in American Thought, 1930–1945 (Chicago, 1969); Aaron, Daniel, Writers on the Left: Episodes in American Literary Communism (New York, 1961); and Warren, Frank, Liberals and Communism (Bloomington, Indiana, 1966). Pells', Richard H. thoughtful and comprehensive Radical Visions and American Dreams: Culture and Social Thought in the Depression Years (New York, 1973) clearly shows the inadequacy of “ideological attitudes” as an explanation for the beliefs and behavior of intellectuals in the thirties. For both a broad treatment of the structural causes of political change, and an appraisal of the harshness of “liberal” societies, see Moore, Barrington Jr., Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in thte Making of the Modern World (Boston, 1966).Google Scholar

27. Shils, , The Intellectuals and the Powers and Other Essays, p. 39.Google Scholar

28. Ibid., p. 38.Google Scholar