The Savant and the State

Name: The Savant and the State
Brand: JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS
SKU: 9781421405223
Price: 141.0 AUD
Availability: InStock

JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESSISBN: 9781421405223

Science and Cultural Politics in Nineteenth-Century France

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By Robert Fox
Imprint: JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS
Release Date: November 14, 2012
Format: HARDBACK
Pages: 408

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There has been a tendency to view science in nineteenth-century France as the exclusive territory of the nations leading academic centers and the powerful Paris-based administrators who controlled them. Ministries and the great savants and institutions of the capital seem to have defined the field, while historians have ignored or glossed over traditions on the periphery of science. In The Savant and the State, Robert Fox charts new historiographical territory by synthesizing the practices and thought of state-sanctioned scientists and those of independent communities of savants and commentators with very different political, religious, and cultural priorities.Fox provides a comprehensive history of the public face of French science from the Bourbon Restoration to the outbreak of the Great War. Following the Enlightenment, many different interests competed to define the role of science and technology in French society. Political and religious conservatives tended to blame the scientific community for upsetting traditional values and, implicitly, delivering France into the hands of revolutionary extremists and Napoleonic bureaucrats. Scientists, for their part, embraced the belief that observation and experimentation offered the surest way to the knowledge and wisdom on which the welfare of society depended. This debate, Fox argues, became a contest for the hearts and minds of the French citizenry.

Preface
Introduction
1. Science and the New Order
The Return of the Bourbons
Patronage, Authority, and the Profession of Science
Science and the Industrial Age
A Philosophy for the Times: The Roots of Positivism
2. Voices on the Periphery
Academies and Societies
The Devotee: Nature, Learning, and Locality
Science and Decentralization
The Triumph of the Center
3. Science, Bureaucracy, and the Empire
The Trials of Academic Science
Education, Industry, and the Imperial State
The Bureaucracy of Learning
The Roots of Academic Reform
4. Science, Philosophy, and the Culture of Secularism
The Midcentury: Conformity and Dissent in French Philosophy
The Nature of Life: PasteurPouchet Revisited
The Radical Synthesis and Its Enemies
A Faith for the Age: The Religion of Humanity
5. Science for All
Fashioning the Audience
Masters of the Mass Market: Flammarion and Figuier
The Spoken Word
Broader Audiences, Bigger Stakes
6. The Public Face of Republican Science
The Savant at War and Peace
Countercurrents: Science in the Catholic Tradition
The Republic of the Savants
Fin de Siècle: From Inspiration to Anxiety
Conclusion
Appendix A: The French System of Education and Research
Appendix B: Exchange Rates and Incomes in Nineteenth-Century France
Abbreviations
Notes
Bibliographical Note
Index

""A valuable synthesis of the variety of political and cultural roles played by the scientific enterprise in France from the end of the First Empire to the outbreak of World War I... A broad-ranging, balanced survey of the state of the field... In The Savant and the State, Fox has written what is likely to remain the definitive survey of public science in nineteenth-century France for some time to come.""

The Savant and the State

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