Selected bibliography

Abstract

Les sciences pour la guerre brings together several papers delivered during seminars and conferences organized by the Centre Koyre in Paris from 1998 to 2001. The book aspires to provide an account of this field of research addressing the new relationships between science, technology and society drawn from World War II. Though most of the studies deal with the situation in the United States, the book includes a discussion of the French and Soviet cases. Particularly remarkable are the two articles from Dominique Pestre, which intend on producing a general synthesis of contents which would have otherwise remained inevitably scattered. These articles advance a major thesis of which the rest of the book may be conceived as the defence and illustration. It is well known that the War considerably transformed not only the financing support for research but at a more profound level the scientist's craft, especially for the physical sciences (instrumentation's increased role, phenomenological approaches' success…). Les sciences pour la guerre sheds a new light on this period. The book does not reflect so much on the effects the new political context may have had on the hard sciences, but on the new models of administration and management which have been proposed by scientists to statesmen. It emphasizes a whole set of programs for rationalizing social action grounded on new formal approaches, with the ideal of real-time information processing. Hence the question is no longer: how did politics have an effect on science, but how did sciences get into politics? According to the authors, the 1940-1960 key distinguishing feature is a new conception of science, an almost mystical belief that science together with techniques and provided with sufficient money and time can resolve all problems, especially military ones. Most of the articles deal with these new modes of rationality, promoted by the War, with some recurrent themes: the theory of games' complex status at the Rand Corporation (Leonard), the weight of computer simulations (Galison), the new tools of information theory and cybernetics (Dahan, Edwards and Kay), operational research and linear programming (Pestre) or planning models for health state policy (Gaudillere)… Eventually, the book holds its promises and offers an extremely stimulating read. It provides us with an up-to-date and very clear account of the subject while offering pointers to new research, such as the question of resistances encountered by these new usages of sciences.