Contents
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Why scientific governance? Why scientific governance?
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A brief history of scientific governance in the twentieth century A brief history of scientific governance in the twentieth century
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Chapter outlines Chapter outlines
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Notes Notes
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Cite
Extract
This candid attempt to take possession of the whole world must be made in the name of and for the sake of science and creative activity. Its aim is to release science …1
Writing in the first half of the twentieth century the author, biologist and science teacher H.G. Wells conceived of an age when the governance of society would be the work of engineers. This was not simply an assertion about who should wield the power behind the machine, but a bold statement about the skills required for successful governance. Engineers had distinctive values and characters: ‘They must keep on mastering new points, new aspects; they must be intelligent and adaptable; they must get a grasp of that permanent something that lies behind the changing immediate practice.’2 Wells and his readers took his point to encompass all those who embodied the ‘spirit of science’, a much-used term of the early twentieth century that included scientists as well as engineers. Wells’s Anticipations, first published in a series of articles in the Fortnightly Review in 1901, caught the attention of a wide audience – including the Royal Institution, where he was asked to deliver a Friday evening discourse – for whom the connection between science and governance was a matter of deep importance. The economist and Fabian Sidney Webb shared with Wells his ‘feelings about the coming predominance of the man of science, the trained professional expert’, and saw a place for him in a government of experts.3 Not everyone was so impressed. A young Winston Churchill, newly elected MP for Oldham, wrote to Wells that ‘nothing would be more fatal than for the government of states to get into the hands of the experts’.4 But by 1928, in the Open conspiracy, Wells had grown only more confident about his recommendations, and though his vision of the future may not have come true, explicit debates about science and governance continued to feature in British society.
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