Rivals: How Scientists Learned to Cooperate by Lorraine Daston

Author:Lorraine Daston [Daston, Lorraine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science, History
ISBN: 9798987053560
Google: bBirzwEACAAJ
Amazon: B0BW65GGLD
Barnesnoble: B0BW65GGLD
Goodreads: 123138458
Publisher: Columbia Global Reports
Published: 2023-10-17T05:00:00+00:00

3.2. The Academy of Academies: Top-Down Governance

This group photo of glum-looking gentlemen in their beards and bowlers could have been taken at almost any of the many international congresses held in the late nineteenth century: the chemists who gathered in Geneva in 1892, the astronomers who met in Paris in 1887, the mathematicians who assembled in Chicago in 1893—in short, any of the many gatherings of disciplinary elites who met in person to thrash out controversial disciplinary issues such as standardizing chemical nomenclature or cloud classification (figure 10). The worthies who posed for this photo in Wiesbaden in October 1899 certainly belonged to the most distinguished representatives of their various disciplines, but the aim of their meeting was explicitly anti-disciplinary. They were representatives of the most prestigious academies of science and letters in what they would have called “the civilized world,” namely Europe and—just barely—the United States. They had been summoned to Wiesbaden in order to create their own international association of academies with the aim of combating disciplinary specialization and disciplinary autarchy—both viewed as a threat to the universalism and authority of the academies. The new organization that held its constitutive meeting in Wiesbaden in 1899 was intended to unite the sciences and the humanities in an age of splintering specialization and oversee international initiatives in all disciplines. Both the legitimacy and the efficacy of the International Association of Academies derived not only from the eminence of its member academies, representing the crème de la crème of each nation’s scholars and scientists, but also from the personal reputations of its individual members—the crème de la crème de la crème.

Figure 10

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.