Abstract
The study of the Mechanics' Institute movement of Great Britain has always been marginal to three academic communities - the history of education, the history of science and the history of technology. The greatest quantity of empirical historical work on the Institutes, and some of the most relevant general orientations, comes from historians of education. Some of these scholars have made convincing cases for approaching the movement, alike with other early nineteenthcentury educational interventions, by setting it against the social and political context of an industrializing s0ciety.l However, while the approach via the social history of education has been rewarding, many of its practitioners have felt that the scientific and technical curricula of the Mechanics' Institutes somehow made them 'special cases', immune from contextual analysis in the same terms as non-scientific institutions. Interpreting the purposes of Mechanics' Institutes would be the work of historians of science. In fact, the history of the Institutes has been no more than a peripheral concern for the history of science. Its individualistic epistemology has suggested that 'what people believe' can only be either a simplification of scientific truth or a corruption of it; hence the diffusion of scientific knowledge to 'popular' audiences has been considered only in terms of 'filtration' or 'adulteration'. Viewed from this perspective, instead of as collective representations needing understanding in their own right, popular beliefs about nature have been only of marginal interest. Exalted above the scope of their contextual
Highlights
The study of the Mechanics' Institute movement of Great Britain has always been marginal to three academic communities - the history of education, the history of science and the history of technology
Interpreting the purposes of Mechanics' Institutes would be the work of historians of science
Our purpose in this paper is to show h o w the founders of British Mechanics' Institutes thought a scientific education would aid in the social control of those artisans who were their designated target
Summary
Shapin, Steven and Barry Barnes. 1977. Science, nature and control: Interpreting mechanics' institutes. Social Studies Of Science 7(1): 31-74. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/030631277700700109 http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:3353819 This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-ofuse#LAA
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