The making of modern scientific personae

The scientist as a moral person? Emil Du Bois-Reymond and his friends

Bibliographic Data

ID7101281
AuthorsIrmline Veit-Brause (Deakin University, Melbourne Campus, 221 Burwood Highway, Burwood, Victoria 3125, Australia), Irmline Veit‐brause (Deakin University, corresponding author)
Year2002
Volume15
Issue4
Pages19-49
Publication date2002-10-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueHistory of the Human Sciences (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0952-6951 • E-ISSN: 1461-720X
PublisherSAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1177/0952695102015004678
PMID21038740
OpenAlexW2132275389
LanguageEN
Citations received5
References cited22

This article examines the notion of the `scientist as a moral person' in the light of the early stages of the commodification of science and the transformation of research into a big enterprise, operating on the principle of the division of labour. These processes were set in train at the end of the 19th century. The article focuses on the concomitant changes in the public persona and the habitus of scientific entrepreneurs. I begin by showing the significance of the professional networks that were built up and maintained to further a group's research ideas and the careers of its members, thus demonstrating one condition on which depended their practice of science and their ability to earn a living. This leads to a characterization of the changing styles of work, thought and life, and to a consideration of public perceptions and of the ways in which a new self-image of scholarship and science was fashioned. A critical discussion of the public role of these mandarin scientists follows in order to highlight the strains created by the commodification of science at a time of international tensions and conflicts, when shared beliefs in scholarly cosmopolitanism were subverted by appeals to science and scholarship to work in the service of one's own nation as its `courtiers'. Various considerations of peculiar analogies between national styles of research and the style of social organization are then noted. In the final section, the article queries the long-term impact of these developments on the ideal of the scientist as a `moral person'. Taking a cue from Max Weber and pursuing reflections by Zygmunt Bauman on `science moralized', I argue that the emergence of a type of `specialists without spirit' was an unintended but fatal consequence of the changes in research practices promoted by scientific entrepreneurs such as Du Bois-Reymond. I conclude that the temptation to sever the ties to a general ethos of civil virtues lay in the rationalization, specialization and potential de-humanization of the objectifying scientific outlook once advocated for its efficiency

Aesthetics · Commodification · Cosmopolitanism · Cultural capital · Epistemology · Habitus · Ideal (ethics · Political science · Power (physics · Scholarship · Social science · Sociology · Academic and Historical Perspectives in Psychology · Contemporary Sociological Theory and Practice · Historical Psychiatry and Medical Practices · Law · Philosophy