From the social to the moral to the spiritual: the postmodern exaltation of the history of science

Abstract

The history of science, insofar as it remains a scholarly discipline, must inevitably share the fate common to all scientific and scholarly disciplines in our postmodern era, viz., disintegration and dissolution. Disciplinarity and the disciplines are inventions of modernity. Disciplinarity as constructed social-cultural ideal, and the disciplines as institutional realizations of it, are collective implementations of the enlightenment project utilizing a specifically modern personality structure – take it as governed by Weber’s Protestant ethic or by Freud’s superego. It was the disciplines that, ostensibly, conducted and directed the huge enterprise of knowledge-for-its-own-sake research and publication that grew up in the first two thirds of the 20th century. But what modernity gave to the production of knowledge, postmodernity is taking away. Disciplinarity enters the 21st century deprived of much of its material and all of its ideological supports. Such support, however qualified, as disciplinarity received from governmental and commercial research establishments peaked in the third quarter of the 20th century, and has now almost disappeared. Meanwhile, in institutions of higher learning, the unqualified support that disciplinarity formerly received has deteriorated to bare toleration by administrators who confidently anticipate the disciplines’ future extinction. With hardly anyone anywhere willing to say a good word about disciplinarity or defend it against the ubiquitous deprecations of the disciplines as institutions for knowledge production, there is no plausible prospect for arresting, let alone reversing, our, or any other, discipline’s slide toward extinction. 1 The demise of the discipline ‘history of science’ does not, of course, equate to disappearance of the subject ‘history of science’. The subject is far older, and will continue far longer. For some while the discipline of the history of science will itself continue in its present postmodern mode as a continually renovated – but hardly cumulative – body of representations of science past, even as we aged bearers of the discipline will continue to find those representations on the whole ever more arbitrary and insufficient. Meanwhile, we have already begun to see a revival of that genre against which our discipline in its formation so largely defined itself, the history of science written by scientists – written now by scientists in a commendable though inevitably futile endeavor to buttress their disciplinary 1 P. Forman, “In the Era of the Earmark: The Recent Pejoration of Meritocracy – and of Peer