FOCUS: APPLIED SCIENCE
Introduction
By Robert Bud*
ABSTRACT
Such categories as applied science and pure science can be thought of as “ideological.” They
have been contested in the public sphere, exposing long-term intellectual commitments,
assumptions, balances of power, and material interests. This group of essays explores the contest
over applied science in Britain and the United States during the nineteenth century. The essays
look at the concept in the context of a variety of neighbors, including pure science, technology,
and art. They are closely related and connected to contemporary historiographic debate. Jennifer
Alexander links the issues raised to a recent paper by Paul Forman. Paul Lucier and Graeme
Gooday deal with the debates in the last quarter of the century in the United States and Britain,
respectively. Robert Bud deals with the earlier part of the nineteenth century, with an eye
specifically on the variety of concepts hybridized under the heading of “applied science.” Eric
Schatzberg looks at the erosion of the earlier concept of art. As a whole, the essays illuminate
both long-term changes and nuanced debate and are themselves intended to provoke further
reflection on science in the public sphere.
SCIENCE MAY NOT RESEMBLE what is conventionally described as “ideology,” but talk about
science often does. This Focus section is concerned with the processes by which such terms as “art,”
“technology,” and “applied science” have been used and their meanings contested and changed. Such
categories by which societies manage science are contested in the public sphere, exposing long-term
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intellectual commitments, assumptions, balances of power, and material interests. Proponents have
communicated through the media of politics and the public sphere: the press, official and after-dinner
speeches, popular and semipopular books, official inquiries and debates.1 Frequently, they have made
their claims appear timeless and necessary. In recent years, however, there has been a sense among
policy makers that there has been a sea change in the relations between science and practice. In the
past, historians have contributed but a handful of articles to such issues, a rule to which the
controversial recent article by Paul Forman, “The Primacy of Science in Modernity, of Technology in
Postmodernity, and of Ideology in the History of Technology,” was a rare exception. As a discipline,
however, we are increasingly aware that exploring the contestation of such issues is not merely the
observation of linguistic fashion.2 The historicity of the category of applied science was explored at a
well-attended session at the History of Science Society’s 2009 annual meeting, of which this Focus
section is an outcome. The contributors—the authors represented here—suggested that for two hundred
years such categories have served in the public sphere to facilitate real debate about the boundaries of
knowledge and action and, by both tacit and explicit implication, about the deployment of resources,
cultural and economic.
The pieces presented here are, true to our discipline’s traditions, empirical and richly supported
by detailed understanding. At the same time, historians of science have the opportunity to draw on the
work of historians of political concepts whose contributions have not been widely noticed in our field.
In a career coincident with the rise of modern history of science since the late 1960s, the political
philosopher Quentin Skinner has explored how the use of words sustains ideologies, although his work
as a whole has been poorly cited within history of science. Largely in parallel, in German-speaking
lands proponents of Begriffsgeschichte, such as Reinhart Koselleck, have explored the special quality
of that set of words that function as concepts. Koselleck argues that concepts acquire layers of meaning
that imply an essential ambiguity and also change over time. The richer and international developments
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of this work, particularly by Melvin Richter and, more recently, by Kari Palonen, are suggestive and
will surely provoke further exploration beyond the tracks traced in the five short essays in this
symposium. Fundamental questions this literature addresses are the changing nature of phenomena, the
historicity of concepts that attempt to capture these phenomena, and the ambiguity in the accumulating
meaning of the words used to express those concepts.3
A key concept of Begriffsgeschichte is the need to locate concepts within the map of
neighboring ideas. This challenge has been met by the authors here, who have located the concepts of
“applied science,” “pure science,” “art,” and “technology” relative to each other in particular historical
circumstances. The essays therefore explore these competing and continually reinterpreted concepts in
Britain and the United States from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. Each term is illuminated
by, but not reducible to, etymology.
The context of urgent contemporary interest is set by Jennifer Alexander’s opening essay,
which addresses Forman’s recent article. Alexander’s paper frames the problem and the eras addressed
by the whole symposium. For a previous generation the issue was raised, in the United States, by Henry
Rowland’s 1883 “Plea for Pure Science.” Paul Lucier contextualizes Rowland’s famous talk and
explores the meaning of “pure” and “applied” for his scientific audiences. In Britain, in 1880, Thomas
Huxley expressed his alarm at the use of “applied science.” My own essay shows how the phrase and
concept had come to Britain through processes of translation from both French and German and were
hybridized in the course of ideological cooption. I deal with concepts encapsulated in words whose
apparently obvious meaning and familiarity helped promote radical innovation, above all in technical
education. Taking the story forward from Huxley’s 1880 talk on “Science and Culture,” Graeme
Gooday looks at the contemporary promotion of the terms “pure science” and “applied science” in late
nineteenth-century and into early twentieth-century Britain as part of a process of self-aggrandizement
by the newly professionalizing scientists. He too deals with a lecture entitled “Plea for Pure Science,”
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though his British version was given in 1870 by the chemist Alexander Williamson. Eric Schatzberg
deals with the longer term. He addresses the problem of how the discourse of “art” and “science” gave
way to “pure science” and “applied science” and, of course, “technology.” While he looks at the big
picture, his paper intersects with the others: the contentious and voluble figure of Andrew Ure appears
as a key character both in his paper and in my own contribution.
These essays are based on careful scholarship but are intended themselves to contribute to the
public sphere of the history of science. If they promote informed and vigorous debate, they will have
achieved their end.
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* Science Museum, Exhibition Road, London SW7 2DD, United Kingdom;
Robert.bud@sciencemuseum.org.uk.
This Focus section was organized by Robert Bud.
1
The importance of such contexts for thinking about science was recently explored in Cathryn
Carson, Heisenberg in the Atomic Age: Science and the Public Sphere (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ.
Press, 2010).
2
Paul Forman, “The Primacy of Science in Modernity, of Technology in Postmodernity, and of
Ideology in the History of Technology,” History and Technology, 2007, 23:1–152. For the prevailing
sense of a change in the relations between science and practice see Michael Gibbons, The New
Production of Knowledge (London: Sage, 1994); Helga Nowotny, Peter Scott, and Gibbons, Rethinking Science: Knowledge and the Public in an Age of Uncertainty (Cambridge: Polity, 2001); and
J. M. Ziman, “The Bernal Lecture, 1983: The Collectivization of Science,” Proceedings of the Royal
Society of London, Series B: Biological Sciences, 1983, 219:1–19.
3
As an introduction to a huge literature see the papers assembled in James Tully, ed., Meaning
and Context: Quentin Skinner and His Critics (Cambridge: Polity, 1989); Kari Palonen, Quentin
Skinner: History, Politics, Rhetoric (Cambridge: Polity, 2003); Iain Hampsher-Monk, Karin Tilmans,
and Frank van Vree, eds., History of Concepts: Comparative Perspectives (Amsterdam: Amsterdam
Univ. Press, 1998); and Melvin Richter, The History of Political and Social Concepts: A Critical
Introduction (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1995).
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