Jacob Bronowski
A humanist intellectual for an atomic age, 1946–1956
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 8395453 |
|---|---|
| Authors | RALPH DESMARAIS, Ralph John Desmarais (Imperial College London, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2012 |
| Volume | 45 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 573-589 |
| Publication date | 2012-12-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The British Journal for the History of Science (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0007-0874 • E-ISSN: 1474-001X |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1017/s0007087412001069 |
| OpenAlex | W2164480904 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 4 |
| References cited | 10 |
Jacob (‘Bruno’) Bronowski (1908–1974), on the basis of having examined the effects of the atomic bombing of Japan in late 1945, became one of Britain's most vocal and best-known scientific intellectuals engaged in the cultural politics of the early atomic era. Witnessing Hiroshima helped transform him from pure mathematician–poet to scientific administrator; from obscurity to fame on the BBC airwaves and in print; and, crucially, from literary intellectual who promoted the superior truthfulness of poetry and poets to scientific humanist insisting that science and scientists were the standard-bearers of truth. A cornerstone of Bronowski's humanist ideology was that Hiroshima and the bomb had become symbols of the public's distrust of science, whereas, in reality, science was merely a scapegoat for society's loss of moral compass; more correctly, he stressed, science and scientists epitomized positive moral values. When discussing atomic energy, especially after 1949, Bronowski not only downplayed the bomb's significance but was deliberately vague regarding Britain's atomic weapon development programme; this lack of candour was compounded by Bronowski's evasiveness regarding his own prior involvement with wartime bombing. The net effect was a substantial contribution to British scientific intellectuals' influential yet frequently misleading accounts of the relations between science and war in the early atomic era
Art · Atomic energy · Distrust · Humanism · Ideology · Literature · Nuclear weapon · Poetry · Political science · Politics · Scapegoat · Social science · Sociology · History and Developments in Astronomy · Law · Philosophy · Twentieth Century Scientific Developments
| Unique citing works | 4 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,33 |
| Citation span | 2014 - 2026 (13) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 4 |