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Science, Jews, and Secular Culture
This remarkable group of essays describes the "culture wars" that consolidated a new, secular ethos in mid-twentieth-century American academia and generated the fresh energies needed for a wide range of scientific and cultural enterprises. Focusing on the decades from the 1930s through the 1960s, David Hollinger discusses the scientists, social scientists, philosophers, and historians who fought the Christian biases that had kept Jews from fully participating in American intellectual life. Today social critics take for granted the comparatively open outlook developed by these men (and men they were, mostly), and charge that their cosmopolitanism was not sufficiently multicultural. Yet Hollinger shows that the liberal cosmopolitans of the mid-century generation defined themselves against the realities of their own McCarthyism, Nazi and Communist doctrines, a legacy of anti-Semitic quotas, and both Protestant and Catholic versions of the notion of a "Christian America." The victory of liberal cosmopolitans was so sweeping by the 1960s that it has become easy to forget the strength of the enemies they fought.
Most books addressing the emergence of Jewish intellectuals celebrate an illustrious cohort of literary figures based in New York City. But the pieces collected here explore the long-postponed acceptance of Jewish immigrants in a variety of settings, especially the social science and humanities faculties of major universities scattered across the country. Hollinger acknowledges the limited, rather parochial sense of "mankind" that informed some mid-century thinking, but he also inspires in the reader an appreciation for the integrationist aspirations of a society truly striving toward equality. His cast of characters includes Vannevar Bush, James B. Conant, Richard Hofstadter, Robert K. Merton, Lionel Trilling, and J. Robert Oppenheimer.
Most books addressing the emergence of Jewish intellectuals celebrate an illustrious cohort of literary figures based in New York City. But the pieces collected here explore the long-postponed acceptance of Jewish immigrants in a variety of settings, especially the social science and humanities faculties of major universities scattered across the country. Hollinger acknowledges the limited, rather parochial sense of "mankind" that informed some mid-century thinking, but he also inspires in the reader an appreciation for the integrationist aspirations of a society truly striving toward equality. His cast of characters includes Vannevar Bush, James B. Conant, Richard Hofstadter, Robert K. Merton, Lionel Trilling, and J. Robert Oppenheimer.
190 pages, Paperback
First published June 1, 1996
42 people want to read
About the author
David A. Hollinger
34 books10 followersPreston Hotchkis Professor of History (Emeritus)
University of California at Berkeley
One of the pre-eminent intellectual historians in and of the United States.
Past President of the Organization of American Historians (2010-2011); Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; former Guggenheim Fellow, Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, a Member of the Institute for Advanced Study, and Harmsworth Professor of the University of Oxford.
University of California at Berkeley
One of the pre-eminent intellectual historians in and of the United States.
Past President of the Organization of American Historians (2010-2011); Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; former Guggenheim Fellow, Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, a Member of the Institute for Advanced Study, and Harmsworth Professor of the University of Oxford.
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June 24, 2016
In June of 2010, as Elena Kagan's confirmation hearings for the U.S. Supreme Court got under way, I read an article by Noah Feldman from the New York Times. (Probably it had been reprinted in my local paper.) The article opined on the implications of her appointment, which if successful would result in a Supreme Court composed of six Catholics and three Jews:
At the time I had been regularly attending a local Methodist church with my husband, where in Sunday School a friend had happened to bemoan via a slip of the tongue that now there were "no Christians" on the Supreme Court. In general I did not read the attitude toward whatever the appointment signified as celebratory. So I googled to see if I could find anything else along the lines of the Feldman article. I found this May 2010 Atlantic article, asking whether Jews were the new WASPS. I also found a 1996 review of this book, Science, Jews, and Secular Culture, in a Bay Area Jewish publication. That is how I came across this now twenty-year-old book of even older lectures from the 1980s and '90s.
I made a mental note of the book but overwhelmed by unread books as usual, I did not hurry to get it. In 2012, the author had an interview in The Christian Century. He was encouraging the interviewer to accept that ecumenical Protestants ("ecumenical" being the term he prefers to "liberal" or "mainstream") had contributed wonderfully to the opening up of American society. It wasn't clear whether he was advocating the phasing out of ecumenical Protestantism in favor of secularism.
Still, I wasn't moved to purchase the book. The impulse finally struck last October (2015), at which point the book was only available used. When it came, over half was so grossly marked up and underlined (even though it was supposed to be in "very good" shape) that I boycotted it for several more months. Then finally I read it.
David A. Hollinger is Preston Hotchkis Professor of History Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, and a former president of the Organization of American Historians. He is an intellectual historian specializing in American history. Also, he is the secular descendant of Protestant clergymen. The present book focuses largely on academia: on the narrative of the academic intelligentsia in the middle of the last century about the desirable culture for America.
The book blurb and the 1996 JWeekly review give the basics and will allow me to concentrate on what I found most striking. Moreover, the blurb and that review concentrate on Jews and on the introduction and first essay in the book. The later essays focus on the sociology of science and on the idea of science as a cultural ideal.
The time period under examination culminates in the early 1960s as distinct from what we would later call "the '60s." In the novel Submission, there is a snide reference to the current loss of respect suffered by academicians, but in the middle of the twentieth century, respect for academic intellectuals was at its zenith. U.S. citizens were emancipated and liberated from religious mystification; neither church nor government were their proper teachers. That role fell to university scholars. "A faith in the unique importance of secular inquiry to the making of a good society," which had contributed to the establishment of American universities in the first place, flowered after WWII, culminating in the undisguised attitudes of hopefulness and optimism of the early to mid '60s--after the '50s but before what we consider the "'60s" proper.
The early '60s was a period not long after Hitler had been vanquished and when American institutions, profiled against the backdrop of totalitarian regimes, looked damn good in comparison, a period before the cynicism about academic authority that arose later. And now Jews were included in the ranks of college professors in all areas. Nobody thought anything of it, or, at least, nobody was talking about it. Nobody seemed to be aware of anybody else' religion. This period was also when I started college, so I was unaware that anything had changed--which is why I love and appreciate this book on the intellectual history of those times.
The title of the JWeekly review, "Jews Dethroned Protestant Culture, Says U.C. Scholar," is rather more provocative than what the author says in the book, in which he is clear that a segment of the erstwhile Protestant power structure or its descendants also sought to move away from parochialism and provincialism. We're talking the culture wars of that day over what sort of culture America should have: the strategies of those in favor of modernity, cosmopolitanism, universalism, and science, and freedom from religious domination. They were certainly not all Jews, but Jewish intellectuals had added incentive to find an inclusive intellectual space.
Why Jews? In part because, in the early part of the 20th century, including people of color and women wasn't yet on the horizon. The Civil Rights era and the feminist movement were yet to come. Immigration had been limited for Latinos and Asians. After JFK was elected, distrust of Catholics was declining, but they had barely begun to enter American intellectual life. Catholics were of course Christian but they designed their own educational system as part of a network responsible to the Vatican, while Jews in contrast plunged headlong into American life. Early in the 20th century Jews had higher class position, higher capital holdings and a history of stronger technical skills than Catholics of that day. Jews also tended to have a stronger political base. Eventually there was all that Jewish talent escaping from Europe.
The powers that be couldn't fit Jews into the usual niches. They couldn't consider them just another weird religious sect since some Jews became free thinkers who wouldn't stay in their designated religious place.
It's quite helpful for me to have the reality of "the Protestant power structure" laid out in this way, to see in all its gory details the Protestant hegemony and how it was wrestled down in those years. That way I won't have to have "my brain blow up," as a Goodreads friend expressed his experience in a similar sort of situation, every time I read of what Saul Bellow heard, or what happened to Nathaniel West, or Bernard Berenson, or James Salter, etc. etc. ad nauseam. Knowledge is the way I "get over it," so thank you very much, Dr. Hollinger.
When Jews began to be allowed into the halls of academia they could be technicians or physicians, which wasn't thought as likely to disturb the desirable cultural landscape. Or economists. Economics was a field considered appropriate for Jews and into which they were counseled. The ramparts of the humanities--literature, history, and philosophy--were the last to be scaled, for then Jews would have their hands on the cultural controls. And that did happen, and Jews eventually had a secularizing influence on the culture. If that's what you happened to want, so much the better. If you wanted for America a Christian culture of the Protestant sort, not so much.
Basically, that's what the first two chapters are about, complete with names and details. After the introduction, there's "Jewish Intellectuals and the De-Christianization of American Public Culture in the Twentieth Century."
Next comes a chapter called "The 'Tough-Minded' Justice Holmes, Jewish Intellectuals, and the Making of an American Icon." The theme is that Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. became an icon of American liberalism, even though in many ways he did not fit that mold. He was a blue-blood who unlike most of his peers, wasn't prejudiced against Jews, and in fact in his old age befriended a number of rising Jewish intellectuals, not caring one way or the other. He identified himself with "the scientific way of looking at the world" but had a particular scientific philosophy that also impacted his viewpoint, a philosophy termed "scientific naturalism," said to be more characteristic of Victorian England. He considered all spiritual or religious thinking as representing "soft-mindedness" or sentimentality. I think scientific naturalism is a sort of "what you see is what you get" attitude toward the natural world that ignored even such basics as the faculties of the viewer. justice Holmes' long life stretched all the way from 1841 to 1935, allowing him to have acquired such views as a younger man. He also had certain ideas about war and obedience to orders that weren't all that liberal or progressive, but, nevertheless, he filled the desired role and so furthered the development of an open and secular American culture.
"Two NYUs and 'The Obligation of Universities to the Social Order' in the Great Depression" concerns the 1932 centennial of the NYU graduate school. The Great Depression was on, and the university had to find the right tone for their big bash, hence "The obligation..." theme. The main import of that paper is the self-consciously reactionary nature of the Centennial presentations, which harked back to rural Christian college ideal of the prior century in avoidance of the impinging city. According to those views, science had potential but could not provide culture, for which was needed church-like colleges that could provide for spiritual needs. In NYU's not-too-distant history, student leaders and alumni had complained that the university was "being overrun by aliens," as in the 1910s, Jewish enrollment shot up to 50%, and the administration had gotten it back down to 30% by the institution of "personal and psychological evaluations." But market forces had necessitated that the school accept Jewish students from the city, so that by the time of the centennial, Jewish enrollment had returned to its higher level. Hence the "two NYUs" of the title: the exclusivist ideal of the administration vs the actuality, as driven by the need for support by tuition. 1932 turned out to be the last gasp for the attitudes described; after that, the city, not the administration, determined its social obligations.
The next two essays are distinct from the foregoing. The first of them focuses on the apologetic conceptualizations of science and scientists that were articulated as the scientific community positioned itself in the early 2oth century. That doesn't mean scientists manipulatively set out to manage their image in some sort of stage-villain maneuver, but that they were actively thinking about their relationship to society. "The Defense of Democracy and Robert K. Merton's Formulation of the Scientific Ethos" focuses on what the author says was the best such conceptualization of the day. For Merton, the scientific ethos had four norms: universalism, disinterestedness, communism (meaning "communitarianism," about which, more, later), and organized skepticism. I think Hollinger is saying Merton's 1942 formulation actually had some later applicability for the development of the sociology of science as a discipline and, at any rate, is less floridly apologetic than similar writing of his peers in that day and time. Such formulations served to posit science as part and parcel of democracy, as opposed to fascism and totalitarianism in general. The formulations also figured in the contemporaneous culture wars of wresting a secular and inclusive society from the grasp of earlier genteel society and hegemonic Protestantism. Of note, the formulations of the scientific ethos also stood against a Catholic form of antifascism, "the movement of neo-Thomist and other conservative thinkers for 'fixed principles, inflexible rules of morality, and unquestioned acceptance of a supernatural interpretation of human experience,'" which movement sounds awfully reminiscent of After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, my current object of philosophical study.
The other science-focused essay, "Free Enterprise and Free Inquiry: The Emergence of Laissez-Faire Communitarianism in the Ideology of Science in the United States," describes the evolution in the cultural picture of the scientist from a lonely and heroic individualist to a disciplined member of the scientific community. Hollinger doesn't mean that scientists changed but that their image in the public eye did. Basically, the original image was not so distinguishable from that of the intrepid free-market entrepreneur. Why, then, should scientists be recipients of public largess to fund capital-intensive research? If, on the other hand, they were subject to oversight by their own community, funding for them to study whatever they wanted might be in order. Back in the '40s and '50s, little good was seen in the prospect of government's shaping the direction of research, which sounded too much like the totalitarianism against which the scientific community was positioning itself. The American scientific community was held up as an "estate" like the clergy, nobility, and bourgeoisie.
Academia was in that time entrepreneurial, as federal funding flowed and "'small company-like groups of faculty...creat(ed) institutes, centers, bureaus, and other essentially capitalistic enterprises within the academic community....'" (quoted by Hollinger from Robert Nisbet, The Degradation of Academic Dogma: The University in America, 1945-1970, 1970). Schools had to stay competitive; Georgia State, my university, snagged two up-and-coming Gestalt psychologists and a high-powered department head in order to attract psychology graduate students.
Parenthetically, I've heard it said that the subsequent drying up of federal funds for research was a factor in driving the brightest, most competitive young men into the field of finance, thus contributing indirectly to various shenanigans and, ultimately, the Great Recession.
"Academic Culture at the University of Michigan, 1938-1988" focuses on two aspects: the high degree of entrepreneurialism that led to the U. of Michigan at Ann Arbor becoming a social-sciences powerhouse, and, second, the handling of professors caught up in McCarthyism. Regarding the latter, everyone of course was in favor of academic freedom, but a new quality, intellectual integrity, was posited. Only if you had intellectual integrity were you due academic freedom, and being a communist showed you lacked intellectual integrity. The essay delineates how determinations were made. Upon reading, I reflected that the more things change, the more they remain the same--including that, whatever the conclusions of one's peers, Administration held the trump card. (Of note is that Hollinger says McCarthy wasn't antisemitic. Anyone could be a communist.)
The last essay, "Science as a Weapon in Kulturkämpfe in the United States during and after World War II," is a suitable cap for the whole book, but I'm running out of space and steam. Suffice it to say that the author here is talking, not about science proper, but about an ideology of science as a fitting guide to what U.S. culture should be. Here he returns to Merton's norms, about which he says there is still debate about whether those norms are useful for understanding how science works. He suggests that instead of looking on them as empirical claims about science, we should see in them "...the witness they bear to the moral aspirations of the speaker." He is talking about the adjective "scientific" as a modifier for such nouns as approach, spirit, method, ethic, ethos, values, and culture.
Hollinger likens American efforts in the mid-20th century to those of intellectuals post-Enlightenment, and in conclusion he acknowledges a basic sympathy with those efforts.
In looking through his more recent writings that are available online, I didn't see any obvious description of "what happened next" in our cultural story.
David Hollinger does seem somewhat triumphal about the cultural wars and how they've been won, while I remain in doubt about the triumphalism of the first two articles I read that led me to this book.
Here is one more link to a 2013 New York Times article on the subject. It contains further links: http://nyti.ms/17Ugwt1
It is cause for celebration that no one much cares about the nominee’s religion. We are fortunate to have left behind the days when there was a so-called “Catholic seat” on the court, or when prominent Jews (including the publisher of this newspaper) urged President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1939 not to nominate Felix Frankfurter because they worried that having “too many” Jews on the court might fuel anti-Semitism.
But satisfaction with our national progress should not make us forget its authors: the very Protestant elite that founded and long dominated our nation’s institutions of higher education and government, including the Supreme Court. Unlike almost every other dominant ethnic, racial or religious group in world history, white Protestants have ceded their socioeconomic power by hewing voluntarily to the values of merit and inclusion, values now shared broadly by Americans of different backgrounds. The decline of the Protestant elite is actually its greatest triumph.
At the time I had been regularly attending a local Methodist church with my husband, where in Sunday School a friend had happened to bemoan via a slip of the tongue that now there were "no Christians" on the Supreme Court. In general I did not read the attitude toward whatever the appointment signified as celebratory. So I googled to see if I could find anything else along the lines of the Feldman article. I found this May 2010 Atlantic article, asking whether Jews were the new WASPS. I also found a 1996 review of this book, Science, Jews, and Secular Culture, in a Bay Area Jewish publication. That is how I came across this now twenty-year-old book of even older lectures from the 1980s and '90s.
I made a mental note of the book but overwhelmed by unread books as usual, I did not hurry to get it. In 2012, the author had an interview in The Christian Century. He was encouraging the interviewer to accept that ecumenical Protestants ("ecumenical" being the term he prefers to "liberal" or "mainstream") had contributed wonderfully to the opening up of American society. It wasn't clear whether he was advocating the phasing out of ecumenical Protestantism in favor of secularism.
You have called ecumenical Protestantism a halfway house, if not an actual slippery slope, to secularism. Are you saying American culture is fated to be post-Protestant?
I don’t think the future is clear. I am not saying that everyone who comes out of the ecumenical tradition is doomed to be post-Protestant. I am saying that if that happens to a significant number of people, that doesn’t seem like such a bad thing. You could argue that a lot of post-Protestants are closer to the ecumenical tradition than the highly visible evangelical Protestants in the United States.
What does it mean to be post-Protestant? If it means that you are advancing in culture and politics a series of values for which ecumenical Protestantism has been a historical vehicle—well, there are a lot more vehicles than there used to be. Ecumenical Protestantism can reconstitute itself as a prophetic minority rather than measuring itself in terms of how many Americans sign up.
I am speaking from a secular perspective that has a lot of respect for religious believers. I don’t think that all religion is headed for history’s dustbin. But it is not for me to say.
Still, I wasn't moved to purchase the book. The impulse finally struck last October (2015), at which point the book was only available used. When it came, over half was so grossly marked up and underlined (even though it was supposed to be in "very good" shape) that I boycotted it for several more months. Then finally I read it.
David A. Hollinger is Preston Hotchkis Professor of History Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, and a former president of the Organization of American Historians. He is an intellectual historian specializing in American history. Also, he is the secular descendant of Protestant clergymen. The present book focuses largely on academia: on the narrative of the academic intelligentsia in the middle of the last century about the desirable culture for America.
The book blurb and the 1996 JWeekly review give the basics and will allow me to concentrate on what I found most striking. Moreover, the blurb and that review concentrate on Jews and on the introduction and first essay in the book. The later essays focus on the sociology of science and on the idea of science as a cultural ideal.
The time period under examination culminates in the early 1960s as distinct from what we would later call "the '60s." In the novel Submission, there is a snide reference to the current loss of respect suffered by academicians, but in the middle of the twentieth century, respect for academic intellectuals was at its zenith. U.S. citizens were emancipated and liberated from religious mystification; neither church nor government were their proper teachers. That role fell to university scholars. "A faith in the unique importance of secular inquiry to the making of a good society," which had contributed to the establishment of American universities in the first place, flowered after WWII, culminating in the undisguised attitudes of hopefulness and optimism of the early to mid '60s--after the '50s but before what we consider the "'60s" proper.
The early '60s was a period not long after Hitler had been vanquished and when American institutions, profiled against the backdrop of totalitarian regimes, looked damn good in comparison, a period before the cynicism about academic authority that arose later. And now Jews were included in the ranks of college professors in all areas. Nobody thought anything of it, or, at least, nobody was talking about it. Nobody seemed to be aware of anybody else' religion. This period was also when I started college, so I was unaware that anything had changed--which is why I love and appreciate this book on the intellectual history of those times.
The title of the JWeekly review, "Jews Dethroned Protestant Culture, Says U.C. Scholar," is rather more provocative than what the author says in the book, in which he is clear that a segment of the erstwhile Protestant power structure or its descendants also sought to move away from parochialism and provincialism. We're talking the culture wars of that day over what sort of culture America should have: the strategies of those in favor of modernity, cosmopolitanism, universalism, and science, and freedom from religious domination. They were certainly not all Jews, but Jewish intellectuals had added incentive to find an inclusive intellectual space.
Why Jews? In part because, in the early part of the 20th century, including people of color and women wasn't yet on the horizon. The Civil Rights era and the feminist movement were yet to come. Immigration had been limited for Latinos and Asians. After JFK was elected, distrust of Catholics was declining, but they had barely begun to enter American intellectual life. Catholics were of course Christian but they designed their own educational system as part of a network responsible to the Vatican, while Jews in contrast plunged headlong into American life. Early in the 20th century Jews had higher class position, higher capital holdings and a history of stronger technical skills than Catholics of that day. Jews also tended to have a stronger political base. Eventually there was all that Jewish talent escaping from Europe.
The powers that be couldn't fit Jews into the usual niches. They couldn't consider them just another weird religious sect since some Jews became free thinkers who wouldn't stay in their designated religious place.
It's quite helpful for me to have the reality of "the Protestant power structure" laid out in this way, to see in all its gory details the Protestant hegemony and how it was wrestled down in those years. That way I won't have to have "my brain blow up," as a Goodreads friend expressed his experience in a similar sort of situation, every time I read of what Saul Bellow heard, or what happened to Nathaniel West, or Bernard Berenson, or James Salter, etc. etc. ad nauseam. Knowledge is the way I "get over it," so thank you very much, Dr. Hollinger.
When Jews began to be allowed into the halls of academia they could be technicians or physicians, which wasn't thought as likely to disturb the desirable cultural landscape. Or economists. Economics was a field considered appropriate for Jews and into which they were counseled. The ramparts of the humanities--literature, history, and philosophy--were the last to be scaled, for then Jews would have their hands on the cultural controls. And that did happen, and Jews eventually had a secularizing influence on the culture. If that's what you happened to want, so much the better. If you wanted for America a Christian culture of the Protestant sort, not so much.
Basically, that's what the first two chapters are about, complete with names and details. After the introduction, there's "Jewish Intellectuals and the De-Christianization of American Public Culture in the Twentieth Century."
Next comes a chapter called "The 'Tough-Minded' Justice Holmes, Jewish Intellectuals, and the Making of an American Icon." The theme is that Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. became an icon of American liberalism, even though in many ways he did not fit that mold. He was a blue-blood who unlike most of his peers, wasn't prejudiced against Jews, and in fact in his old age befriended a number of rising Jewish intellectuals, not caring one way or the other. He identified himself with "the scientific way of looking at the world" but had a particular scientific philosophy that also impacted his viewpoint, a philosophy termed "scientific naturalism," said to be more characteristic of Victorian England. He considered all spiritual or religious thinking as representing "soft-mindedness" or sentimentality. I think scientific naturalism is a sort of "what you see is what you get" attitude toward the natural world that ignored even such basics as the faculties of the viewer. justice Holmes' long life stretched all the way from 1841 to 1935, allowing him to have acquired such views as a younger man. He also had certain ideas about war and obedience to orders that weren't all that liberal or progressive, but, nevertheless, he filled the desired role and so furthered the development of an open and secular American culture.
"Two NYUs and 'The Obligation of Universities to the Social Order' in the Great Depression" concerns the 1932 centennial of the NYU graduate school. The Great Depression was on, and the university had to find the right tone for their big bash, hence "The obligation..." theme. The main import of that paper is the self-consciously reactionary nature of the Centennial presentations, which harked back to rural Christian college ideal of the prior century in avoidance of the impinging city. According to those views, science had potential but could not provide culture, for which was needed church-like colleges that could provide for spiritual needs. In NYU's not-too-distant history, student leaders and alumni had complained that the university was "being overrun by aliens," as in the 1910s, Jewish enrollment shot up to 50%, and the administration had gotten it back down to 30% by the institution of "personal and psychological evaluations." But market forces had necessitated that the school accept Jewish students from the city, so that by the time of the centennial, Jewish enrollment had returned to its higher level. Hence the "two NYUs" of the title: the exclusivist ideal of the administration vs the actuality, as driven by the need for support by tuition. 1932 turned out to be the last gasp for the attitudes described; after that, the city, not the administration, determined its social obligations.
The next two essays are distinct from the foregoing. The first of them focuses on the apologetic conceptualizations of science and scientists that were articulated as the scientific community positioned itself in the early 2oth century. That doesn't mean scientists manipulatively set out to manage their image in some sort of stage-villain maneuver, but that they were actively thinking about their relationship to society. "The Defense of Democracy and Robert K. Merton's Formulation of the Scientific Ethos" focuses on what the author says was the best such conceptualization of the day. For Merton, the scientific ethos had four norms: universalism, disinterestedness, communism (meaning "communitarianism," about which, more, later), and organized skepticism. I think Hollinger is saying Merton's 1942 formulation actually had some later applicability for the development of the sociology of science as a discipline and, at any rate, is less floridly apologetic than similar writing of his peers in that day and time. Such formulations served to posit science as part and parcel of democracy, as opposed to fascism and totalitarianism in general. The formulations also figured in the contemporaneous culture wars of wresting a secular and inclusive society from the grasp of earlier genteel society and hegemonic Protestantism. Of note, the formulations of the scientific ethos also stood against a Catholic form of antifascism, "the movement of neo-Thomist and other conservative thinkers for 'fixed principles, inflexible rules of morality, and unquestioned acceptance of a supernatural interpretation of human experience,'" which movement sounds awfully reminiscent of After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, my current object of philosophical study.
The other science-focused essay, "Free Enterprise and Free Inquiry: The Emergence of Laissez-Faire Communitarianism in the Ideology of Science in the United States," describes the evolution in the cultural picture of the scientist from a lonely and heroic individualist to a disciplined member of the scientific community. Hollinger doesn't mean that scientists changed but that their image in the public eye did. Basically, the original image was not so distinguishable from that of the intrepid free-market entrepreneur. Why, then, should scientists be recipients of public largess to fund capital-intensive research? If, on the other hand, they were subject to oversight by their own community, funding for them to study whatever they wanted might be in order. Back in the '40s and '50s, little good was seen in the prospect of government's shaping the direction of research, which sounded too much like the totalitarianism against which the scientific community was positioning itself. The American scientific community was held up as an "estate" like the clergy, nobility, and bourgeoisie.
The idea that scientists constituted a peculiarly virtuous community possessed of distinctive interests in the context of the American political order was advanced with increasing frequency during the Eisenhower era, especially by the community's "political arm," the American Association for the Advancement of Science. By the time of the "scientific studies renaissance" of the early 1960s, the concept of the "scientific community" was taken for granted....
Academia was in that time entrepreneurial, as federal funding flowed and "'small company-like groups of faculty...creat(ed) institutes, centers, bureaus, and other essentially capitalistic enterprises within the academic community....'" (quoted by Hollinger from Robert Nisbet, The Degradation of Academic Dogma: The University in America, 1945-1970, 1970). Schools had to stay competitive; Georgia State, my university, snagged two up-and-coming Gestalt psychologists and a high-powered department head in order to attract psychology graduate students.
Parenthetically, I've heard it said that the subsequent drying up of federal funds for research was a factor in driving the brightest, most competitive young men into the field of finance, thus contributing indirectly to various shenanigans and, ultimately, the Great Recession.
"Academic Culture at the University of Michigan, 1938-1988" focuses on two aspects: the high degree of entrepreneurialism that led to the U. of Michigan at Ann Arbor becoming a social-sciences powerhouse, and, second, the handling of professors caught up in McCarthyism. Regarding the latter, everyone of course was in favor of academic freedom, but a new quality, intellectual integrity, was posited. Only if you had intellectual integrity were you due academic freedom, and being a communist showed you lacked intellectual integrity. The essay delineates how determinations were made. Upon reading, I reflected that the more things change, the more they remain the same--including that, whatever the conclusions of one's peers, Administration held the trump card. (Of note is that Hollinger says McCarthy wasn't antisemitic. Anyone could be a communist.)
The last essay, "Science as a Weapon in Kulturkämpfe in the United States during and after World War II," is a suitable cap for the whole book, but I'm running out of space and steam. Suffice it to say that the author here is talking, not about science proper, but about an ideology of science as a fitting guide to what U.S. culture should be. Here he returns to Merton's norms, about which he says there is still debate about whether those norms are useful for understanding how science works. He suggests that instead of looking on them as empirical claims about science, we should see in them "...the witness they bear to the moral aspirations of the speaker." He is talking about the adjective "scientific" as a modifier for such nouns as approach, spirit, method, ethic, ethos, values, and culture.
When the ideal of being somehow more scientific is upheld as appropriate for voters in a democratic polity, for believers in a religious fellowship, for practitioners of the arts, for actors in a set of economic relationships, and for others far removed from laboratories, it follows that this language teaches us less about how science works than about the cultural conflicts in society at large.
Hollinger likens American efforts in the mid-20th century to those of intellectuals post-Enlightenment, and in conclusion he acknowledges a basic sympathy with those efforts.
In looking through his more recent writings that are available online, I didn't see any obvious description of "what happened next" in our cultural story.
David Hollinger does seem somewhat triumphal about the cultural wars and how they've been won, while I remain in doubt about the triumphalism of the first two articles I read that led me to this book.
Here is one more link to a 2013 New York Times article on the subject. It contains further links: http://nyti.ms/17Ugwt1
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