Andrew Jewett, UC Berkeley
"Science and Consensus: The Emergence of an American Sociology of Knowledge"

It could be argued that nothing was more central to American intellectual culture between 1938 and 1973 than science. This was the period of science's greatest ascendancy as a cultural force, a period when science and democracy were frequently identified as one and the same. If postwar American
intellectuals were able to bracket their longstanding resistance to capitalism, this was in large part due to their belief that science offered a reliable defense against its destabilizing cultural effects. For the threat of capitalism, as perceived by many generations of intellectuals committed to the democratic project, lay primarily in its ability to tear apart the nation's tenuously united polity. A lifetime of market
exchange, they feared, would create individuals who were more committed to their own narrowly conceived interests than to maintaining the political nation. Traditional fears that capitalism would turn engaged citizens into crass egoists could finally be put to rest in a polity oriented toward the
institutionalized humility of scientific discourse. Slowly abandoning their sense that Christianity could adequately temper self-seeking behavior, some intellectuals had turned to science as an alternative basis for democratic culture after 1900. The values and practices of science, they thought, could sustain the minimal level of self-transcendence required for participation in democratic decision-making. This position became more and more attractive in the 1930s, as economic divides deepened and the external threat of fascism grew. American intellectuals' turn from politics to culture during this crucial decadev was deeply shaped by their desire to build a scientific polity. Postwar resistance to communism, bureaucracy, and mass culture drew in large part on their perceived threats to this new polity; American thinkers interpreted all three as dangers to the public's hard-won intellectual freedom.

My paper will examine Robert K. Merton's seminal articles in the sociology of scientific knowledge production, written between 1938 and 1942. These articles gave theoretical cache to a view which underlay the entire scientific civic project: that science was a communal practice, embodying a set of minimally invasive discursive commitments that also characterized democratic public life. Less explicitly, they drew upon a closely related assumption: that in the realms of both science and politics, adherence to discursive rules allowed participants to maintain a working consensus on a program of action without sacrificing responsiveness to changing conditions. Believing that the scientific method allowed intensely homogeneous disciplinary communities to represent the interests of the larger polity, postwar intellectuals were led to justify political leaders' subordination of public participation in the interests of national defense and economic productivity.

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