Social Research articles from December 2006

Social Research archives from December 2006

Editor's introduction.
December 22, 2006... THIS VOLUME OF SOCIAL RESEARCH FOLLOWS ON THE HEELS OF AN ISSUE that shares its focus, but with one difference. The earlier issue, "Politics and Science: How Their Interplay Results in Public Policy" (Fall 2006), contained papers delivered at...

Authority, political theology, and the politics of knowledge in the transition from nedieval to early modern Catholicism.
December 22, 2006... INTRODUCTION ON THE TWENTY-FIFTH AND LAST SESSION OF THE COUNCIL OF TRENT in 1563, the council ordered discussion of the reform of the Catholic prayer book, the Breviary and Missal. The discussion naturally drew attention to the sour...

The "imperial chancellor of the sciences": Helmholtz between science and politics.(Hermann yon Helmholtz)
December 22, 2006... INTRODUCTION By the last third of the nineteenth century, German universities were widely perceived as the world's leading institutions of higher learning, as sites where science and scholarship of the highest level flourished. * It had...

Patent republic: representing inventions, constructing rights and authors.(Essay)
December 22, 2006... COMPARED TO CASTING A VOTE, APPLYING FOR A PATENT IS SLOW, costly, and tedious. Still, both practices play out in different ways what it means to operate in a regime of political representation. In colonial America (as well as in early modern...

Big revolution, little revolution: science and politics in Bolshevik Russia.
December 22, 2006... IN A ROMANTIC WORLDVIEW, SCIENCE IS THE UNENCUMBERED PURSUIT of knowledge. It is conducted by lone white-robed geniuses inhabiting ivory towers that rise high above the ground, which is crowded by the "uninitiated," who are embroiled in their...

Public knowledge and the difficulties of democracy.(Critical essay)
December 22, 2006... I ALTHOUGH MOST PHILOSOPHY SINCE 1640 HAS BEEN OBSESSED WITH the concept of knowledge as an individual possession, our everyday talk frequently conceives of knowledge as a public good. Many people speak confidently of the growth of human...

The physics of spin: sputnik politics and American physicists in the 1950s.
December 22, 2006... NAZI RACE SCIENCE, STALINIST DENUNCIATIONS OF GENETICS: THE twentieth century provided no shortage of examples of the power of politics to corrupt science. Recoiling in horror from such perversions, many scholars argued with great fervor half a...

Thoughts on the politicization of science through commercialization.
December 22, 2006... POLITICIZATION THE CURRENT POLITICIZATION OF SCIENCE--BY WHICH I MEAN THE attempt politically to control the content of knowledge and not just the direction of research--is arguably unprecedented in history, aside from a few famous and...

Speaking precision to power: the modern political role of social science.
December 22, 2006... THE MODERN COMPACT BETWEEN SCIENCE AND THE STATE ALLOWS FOR the flow of public money to research and an expectation that politicians will generally not meddle with the scientific work--on condition that the science, reciprocally, should stay...