Free Enterprise and Free Inquiry: The Emergence of Laissez-Faire Communitarianism in the Ideology of Science in the United States

Abstract

- WO WEEKS AFTER Albert took up residence in Princeton at the new Institute Advanced Study in 1933, and his wife were invited to the White House by President and Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt. The invitation was intercepted by the Director of the Institute, Abraham Flexner, who took it upon himself to respond on Einstein's behalf. With the patience becoming a person of great responsibility and wisdom, Flexner explained the imperatives of pure science to the well-meaning Roosevelts. Professor Einstein had come to Princeton for the purpose of carrying on his scientific work in seclusion, Flexner wrote. Invitations from politicians and even from learned societies were being declined him. There was no need the great scientist even to see such mail. It was absolutely impossible to make any exception, lest the progress of science be retarded by an unending sequence of political and journalistic interruptions.' himself was a very political person, and was of course eager to see the President. The country's most distinguished emigre scientist was miffed when he found out what Flexner had done. Neither nor his wife was satisfied when Flexner explained that he had only been performing the Einsteins the same humble task Flexner's own secretary routinely performed him: the screening out of bothersome and trivial inquiries from newspapers and the like. But managed eventually to sneak away from the Institute in order to meet the Roosevelts, and to thereby depart, momentarily at least, from the role in which Flexner had sought to install him on Einstein's very first day in Princeton. As early as