A Radical Trajectory in Science Studies: Interview with Gary Werskey

Gary Werskey has been one of the main animators of the debates around science and Marxism in the United Kingdom. He especially played the role of mediator between two generation of Marxist scientists: the old generation active during the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s and the new one close to the new left who animated the debates between the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s (see Werskey 1978; 2007)

A History of Universalism: Conceptions of the Internationality of Science from the Enlightenment to the Cold War

That science is fundamentally universal has been proclaimed innumerable times. But the precise geographical meaning of this universality has changed historically. This article examines conceptions of scientific internationalism from the Enlightenment to the Cold War, and their varying relations to cosmopolitanism, nationalism, socialism, and 'the West'. These views are confronted with recent tendencies to cast science as a uniquely European product

Merton\u27s `Norms\u27 in Political and Intellectual Context

Merton\u27s two papers on the norms of science were written in a period of intense political activity in science, and responded to this context, using conceptual tools from classical sociology and Harvard thinking of the time. The basic reasoning was Weberian: science and politics each had a different ethos. One target was the Left view of science as a model for society. Another was the view of the American Left that complex societies required regulation, but that science should be free of control. Merton pictured science as already intensely policed, but threatened by the conflict between its special ethos and potential democratic demands, and requiring protection. This was a `liberal\u27 argument, but Merton used the language of the Left to present it