From planning to entrepreneurship: On the political economy of scientific pursuit

Abstract

This paper examines debates about the “planning of science” that took place in the 1930s and 1940s in the United States and Britain and argues for their enduring relevance to today's philosophical literature on scientific pursuitworthiness. In addition to proposing desiderata for scientific pursuit that retain philosophical interest, such as social utility, coordination between branches of science, and the comprehensive development of science as a whole, advocates of the planning of science shared a sense of the inextricable relationship between the philosophy of scientific pursuit and the political economy of science, including the structure of science funding and scientific institutions. Critics of the planning of science were alarmed by the movement's socialist political orientation and developed a rival account of scientific pursuit framed by the economic metaphor of the independent businessman or entrepreneur. Taking advantage of the red scare in the United States in the early years of the Cold War, advocates of scientific entrepreneurship seized the upper hand over advocates of science planning during the shaping of the postwar American science policy regime. According to the science-as-entrepreneurship view, the role of science policy was only to make judgments about which individuals seemed best equipped, due to their personal intellectual or moral virtues, to make decisions about pursuitworthiness. The ultimate triumph of this view over the planning of science opened up a gap between the philosophy of pursuit and the political economy of science that persists to the present day.