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L'Etat entrepreneur de science
SCIENCE AND THE STATE 1914-2014
(for D. Pestre et al (eds), Histoire de la Science Moderne vol III
DAVID EDGERTON
In recent years many state research policy agencies appear to have come to believe that
aggressively-focused national research policies will produce rapid and spectacular economic returns.
They hope, it seems, to create new Googles, or Microsofts, though usually from the life sciences
rather than information technology: some estimate a $100bn synthetic biology industry could be
created within a decade. Such fantasies are novel – never before have state research agencies
pretended they could achieve such results, nor, needless to say, have they ever achieved them.
Such claims need to be understood as the product of a particular politics of state-funded academic
research, having little relationship to the actual pursuit of research, much less the creation of new
industries. For the primary context for research policies is a political-budgetary one, not real
interaction with the economy. ‘In wartime’ said Winston Churchill, ‘truth is so precious that she
should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies’ in research we might say, state funding is so
precious that the complex truth about is protected not just by extravagant futurology, but also by
serious category errors and invented histories.
In the world of research policy nothing is quite what it seems. For example terms of art like ‘science
policy’, or discussions of the relations of ‘science and society’ or ‘science and the state’ are of far
from self-evident meaning, and carry hidden assumptions of great significance. For example in the
dominant Anglo-Saxon model, it is assumed that science and the state are separate categories, that
‘science’ is research in elite universities, and that ‘science policy’ is policy for such research, that
science-state relations are the relations between such elite academics and the state, and so on.
Such assumptions are profoundly misleading if we are interested in all research, all forms of
knowledge we might want to call science, and all the relevant relations with state and society.
Similarly historical stories are told whereby single inventions usher in whole new historical epochs,
succeeding each other through ‘revolutions’, of which there are, strangely, rarely more than three of
four in human history.1
We need to start our discussion of science and the state not from the discourses associated with
‘science policy’ and the like, from what we know about the ways of states and the historical role of
new knowledge. For the sake of clarity we can define two contrasting models of interaction
between states and knowledge, and its creation, stating straight away that neither corresponds well
to reality, but which both exemplify powerful and common assumptions. The first is that good,
independent and powerful knowledge has been created in civil society, not by the state. It is the
product of civilians with cosmopolitan leanings, not the military or the bureaucracy. This knowledge
and its practitioners came into necessary contact with the state, and especially with the military,
1
For a critique see Edgerton 2013.
both conceived of as dangerous, corrupting, and conservative entities. But given the power of
knowledge the state and the military were of necessity transformed by this interaction, for good
and ill, raising questions about ‘science and the state’, ‘science and the military’, concerns which
continue to shape discussion, not least a moralising one. ‘Science policy’ was the term for the
management of these relations, or at least what was taken to be the most significant – the relations
of the state to elite academic researchers outside the state. Indeed such discussions are all notable
for their lack of realism.
There is a second, much less common and influential model, which sees nations and states as
creative agencies, and sees them in competition with each other. In this model states are
themselves key inventors and knowledge creators, and there is no worthwhile distinction to be
made between science and the state, or between knowledge and the state. It recognises that
academics and researchers are often not merely funded or employed by the state, but are
functionaries of the state, that states have corps of technical experts and researchers, which it
would be absurd to think of as existing outside the state. In such a model one would expect the
military needs of the state to have a primary place in research and knowledge creation and
maintenance given the centrality of the military functions of the state. Furthermore states have
enormous power over society and thus knowledge creation in general.
We have then, one model in which all states are reacting to a global, cosmopolitan set of inventive
institutions and knowledge creators in civil society; and another in states and state officials
dominate, and aim to control, knowledge in competition with other states.
We need to note that simplistic versions of both though deeply embedded in our understanding,
don’t work. For example the idea that there are ‘national systems of innovation’ encompassing both
state and civil society, is a techno-nationalist fantasy, one which ignores the obvious but barely
recognised empirical result that there is no positive relationship between the rate of growth of
national economies and national innovative activity. The reason is simple – nations draw more on
innovations from abroad than from within their own borders – there is a fundamentally important
global, non-state dimension to knowledge and technical practice. This is not to say that we should
accept the naïve techno-globalism which assumes that nation states have been forced to wither
away under the impact of global, civil and globalising machines, an old and very persistent idea. For
this idea may be challenged by the fact that most of the machines that are supposedly global and
globalising were created by national states for national purposes, from the radio to aeroplanes and
indeed the internet too.1
The role of the state, as was pointed out long ago, varied not only with time, but with what
particular states wanted to do, and their position with respect to other states, whether they were a
leading or an aspirant power. There was, for example, a great difference between the immensely
rich USA, with until the Second World War had a weak central state apparatus, and the poor USSR
trying to catch up. We also need to note the role of state power in the generation of novelty has
tended to be confined to particular areas, above all the military, but also communications, and some
large scale projects and structures. Nevertheless there has been enough coordination between
states for similar things to happen at similar times, so that to some extent generalise across
countries in particular periods, and across periods, for similar countries. I will argue that the
twentieth century has seen a powerful trend towards nationalisation of research agendas, followed
by a significant denationalisation.
THE GREAT WARS AND THE YEARS BETWEEN
It would be a mistake to see the world before 1914 as a laissez-faire, globalised one, given
the significance of state action, economic protectionism and of course Empire. Yet we need
to recognise that the Great War led to new state- and nation-centred initiatives which were
to be influential in the interwar years and beyond. After the war world trade was not to
return to belle époque levels, and everywhere national and imperial economic barriers
would become relatively more significant than before the war. There were more
independent states each protecting their economies, more imperial protection too, and of
course there was a new non-capitalist continent, the USSR.
During the war the great belligerent states not only intervened to secure more weapons, to
design new ones, but also to increase supplies of materials considered part of the civil
economy, but needed for war. With trade disrupted, self-sufficiency was the order of the
day, and remained so to a considerable extent after the war. A famous case is synthetic
dyestuffs, an industry with particularly high research intensity. Germany had dominated
world markets before the war, and during it belligerents created state-backed national
enterprises and research programmes, for example in Britain and France. After the war
German industry was still the strongest in synthetic dyes, but there was now serious
competition from US, British, French firms, and of course Swiss ones too.
There is no doubt that regimes of all sorts looked to science, rationality, experts to forge
new nations and new vehicles for socio-economic development. Although critics of some
regimes would denounce them as anti-scientific and anti-modern, no nation, except perhaps
the Vatican, presented itself this way. Nazi Germany saw itself as modern and scientific, so
did the USSR, so did Britain and France and the United States. Republican China, Ataturk’s
Turkey, also saw themselves as modern, scientising regimes that were leaving behind the
obscurantism of the past. Emperor Hirohito of Japan, for all his godlike nature wore
western civilian and military dress and was a marine biologist. Indeed most critics of
modernity were modern, and indeed critics of empire were typically modern nationalists,
who if they invoked a pre-imperial past, did not do so to present a model for the future.
AUTARKY
The economic crisis of the early 1930s gave a powerful new impetus to the search for
autarky. So too did the search for national military security. The key case is Germany, which
in the 1930s build up its research and development effort specifically to provide an ever
greater amount of synthetic substitutes for imported goods. The key projects were various
petrol-from-coal processes, the development of synthetic rubber and of fibre production. In
fact many countries which could be potentially cut off from cotton or wool producing
regions invested in processes to make fibres made from local resources ranging from wood
to milk protein. Autarky was central to the policy of all fascist and semi-fascist states, even
in cases where one could hardly imagine it working, such as in Greece. And it applied not
just to industry but to agriculture, and everywhere it led to the development of new
national agricultural research.2 Such policies continued as long as fascism did, even when it
outlived the second world war. We might note for example that Francoist Spain spent a lot
on research and development in the 1950s, not least on oil from coal processes.
Not all nations turned to autarky decisively. The USA, as an essentially continental power,
could supply itself with nearly everything it needed, with the exception of tropical products.
Britain, the greatest trading nation in the world could not hope to be autarchic given the
scale of its needs and its small size. Yet even traditionally free-trading Britain brought in
first selective and the general import controls and developed industries behind them. As
well as creating a dyestuffs industry, it developed oil-from-coal processes, and generally
shifted research policies toward national and imperial supply, through for example research
in refrigeration which allowed for the transportation of fresh meat and fruit from its
Australasia imperial territories. Indeed imperialism was an important element in state
backing for long-range communication ventures in this period.
There were national/imperial sea lines, and air lines, and each were supplied with new
national machines. States were involved in both, subsidising the building of the great
passenger liners of the era, the Bremen and the Europa, the Rex and the Conte di Savoia,
and largest of all, the Normandie, Queen Mary, and Queen Elizabeth. These ships were
comparable in cost to a gigantic dam like the Hoover dam, or the largest warships, or the
most colossal skyscrapers like the Empire State building. Each country also had a national
airline and national aeroplanes – Imperial Airways, Air France and Lufthansa were
showcases for national machines which cost governments money and research effort. The
Dutch KLM was exceptional in switching from a national to a US supplier in the 1930s.
Similarly, there were close contacts between states and national radio firms, for example
RCA in the USA, Marconi in Britain, and Compagnie Générale de Télégraphie sans fil (CSF) in
France. The national emphasis in the case of aviation, steamships and the radio is a matter
of some ideological significance. They were seen, by liberals, in a trope reproduced ad
nauseam, as international and internationalising machines, which would help bring world
peace by breaking down national barriers. They were however, the product of such barriers,
and were meant to make them higher.
BUILDING SOCIALISM
In the interwar years no state was more emphatic in its support of research, of novel
knowledge, and of a philosophy taken to be based in natural science, than the Soviet Union.
It presented itself as the inheritor of all that was best in the bourgeois world, the one state
where the contradictions which undermined capitalist technical progress were absent.
Generous support for research, the planning of research and the planned application of
research would increase the rate of human progress; this was a vision which found many
enthusiasts outside the USSR, among then the science studies pioneer JD Bernal. There
were of course many contradictions in actually existing socialism. At once profoundly
internationalist, it was also deeply nationalist, especially in the 1940s; although committed
to the view of the superiority of Soviet planning in research, in innovation and in use of
machines, it was to be a massive purchaser of new machines and factories to make them,
and of foreign experts to set them up, mostly from the USA. It developed an extraordinary
capacity to learn and to copy and to improve, such that it could autonomously develop,
from the 1930s, the best of previously imported machines. Yet, the post-1945 Soviet Union
was able to claim notable firsts in nuclear weapons, and in rocketry, to the extent that the
idea that it would overtake the capitalist world was not regarded as an absurd idea.
THE SECOND WORLD WAR
At the beginning of the Second World War many quite reasonably expected research and
development activity to slow down, and a redeployment of research experts to more urgent
tasks. That did happen, but in many of the belligerents there were in fact large increases in
research and development effort. The most striking case is the United States, which while it
was a great power in 1939, was not in a leading position in military research and
development. Building on its immense productive capacity and wealth it built up its
research, taking ideas from Europe and developing them rapidly and on a huge scale. It
ended with war with the most powerful piston engines, the biggest aeroplanes, mass
production of synthetic rubber, the ability to produce vast quantities of aviation spirit, and
with dominance in new weapons like radar, proximity fuzes, and of course with the atomic
bomb. The great wartime projects were run by a variety of agencies, the army, the navy, the
petroleum warfare authorities. Only a small part was run by specialised research agencies,
notably the Office of Scientific Research and Development (among whose projects were
radar) which was the main source of military funding for research and development in
universities.
The United States’s war effort left it with a capacity for research utterly transformed,
emerging as the world leader in 1945, in the military sector, and in most civil sectors it did
not already dominate. Its universities, in a new dispensation, would continue to be major
centres of research closely tied to the state. The US could and did look confidently to a
world in which rapid innovation would be more important than ever for it was in a position
to dominate in such a world.
THE LONG BOOM AND COLD WAR
The years after the Second World War, especially from 1949/50, saw historically
exceptional levels of warlike expenditure, much of which was devoted to procuring
weapons and researching new ones. A technical edge was seen as ever more vital to
warfare, and in the years after the war not only did military R&D rise very considerably, but
more and more was spent on fewer and fewer projects. In many countries military agencies
dominated state funding of research and development and this accounted in the 1950s for
up to one half of total R&D even in capitalist nations. Most such money went to the
development of rockets, jet engines and aircraft, atomic weapons, electronics and so on, in
industry and in government laboratories. In some countries, above all the USA, the military
became the main funder of ‘basic’ physical science research in the universities. After the
war the US armed services and new Atomic Energy Commission dominated funding of
academic research in the USA – only in 1952 did a purely civilian agency, the National
Science Foundation, establish itself, only very much later did it rival military funding on
campus. In the particular context of the USA the war saw an important and permanent
change – for the first time the federal government provided large scale funds for research in
universities. Of course such a move had been made decades before in other major nations.
The US was copying not only research programmes, but ways of funding too, though on a
much more lavish scale, and with an unusual emphasis on military research. But what
happened on campus was only part of the story.
How should we think about this dominant role of the state after the war? By far the most
important element was in the support of projects, firms and industries supplying machinery
for national enterprises, above all national armed services, but also such things as airlines,
national infrastructures and industries. This was mission-oriented research, driven by
demands for very particular new machines. In this context it makes no sense to think of
‘linear models of innovation’ and other misleading concepts derived from partial analyses of
institutions of limited importance like the US National Science Foundation. [4] We need to
find a new language to capture both the important continuities, and the radical changes
brought about by massive increases in scale and complexity of technical projects, bringing as
they did new managerial requirements, new forms of analysis, but we will only do so if we
recognise the centrality of military and corporate bureaucracies.
NATIONS
One remarkable effect of the second world war, though it was fought on one side by the
United Nations from 1942, and involved a great deal of sharing of equipment, was that after
the war nations sought to develop the newest technologies, principally military ones. A
humiliated France sought power and prestige in the post-war world in part by seeking
technological independence. For example Thomson-Houston, becomes Thomson and free of
its licensing agreement with GE in 1953; France developed an atomic programme, a force de
frappe, becoming the fourth atomic power in 1960, as well as new jet engines and aircraft,
especially in the Fifth Republic.3 The degree to which countries across the world tried to get
into the nuclear and jet ages is astonishing. Argentina had a jet fighter aircraft and a nuclear
programme (indeed it was announced in 1951 that Argentina had achieved nuclear fusion –
this before the explosion of any thermonuclear device). So did Sweden and Spain. Newly
independent states launched new post-imperial techno-nationalisms, with for example,
India and Egypt developing jet fighters.
Of course these projects turned out to be really very difficult. Most powers left the nuclear
business – though some remained, and some are still trying to enter. While for a while jet
aircraft were made by a number of powers, by the 1960s and 1970s only a handful of
powers were still in the game. The manufacture of aero-engines never spread beyond the
key powers, and remains very highly concentrated indeed. Large civil aircraft provide an
even more startling case. In 1960 there were six types of jet airliners operating, one was
French, though with British engines (the Caravelle), one was British, one Soviet (the Tupolev
104) and three came from the USA. There remain only two significant producers in the
world: the USA and one European consortium. Russia produces a mere handful, China has
failed to break into this market, as has Japan. The exception that proves the rule is the
Brazilian firm Embraer.4 In the nuclear field – indigenous or semi-indigenous bomb
programmes developed and continued later, with major steps being taken in South Africa,
Israel, India and Pakistan. In nuclear energy the number of nations or firms capable of
producing reactors has remained very small indeed.
The enormous barriers to entry in these fields were one important reason for collaboration.
In Europe already from the late 1950s it was clear that major projects in competition with
the US were beyond the reasonable expectation of individual powers – thus the AngloFrench Concorde, Anglo French military aircraft, and European military and civil aircraft and
engines. Similarly in civil space we had ELDO and ESA, the former based on a semiindependent British missile that had no independent future.
THE CHALLENGE OF ACTUALLY EXISTING SOCIALISM
Khrushchev famously said that the USSR would overtake the capitalist nations, and did so at
a time when many in the capitalist world believed it was possible. Remarkable as it must
now seem, the Soviet bloc presented a serious challenge to the capitalist powers, militarily
and ideologically. Their economies grew fast after the war, industrialising, urbanising,
training vast numbers of scientists and engineers. By the end of the 1960s the USSR had
more scientists and engineers in R&D than even the USA. Some successes were known of
around the world – the Soviet atomic bomb (1949), the Sputnik satellite (1957) and Yuri
Gagarin’s voyage into space (1961). Less well known were the first application of nuclear
power for electricity generation (beating the British), and the second jet airliner (following
the British). Many propagandists in the capitalist countries played up Soviet success in order
to stimulate investment in education, in space research, belief in planning and in state-led
projects. The apparent success of the Soviet model helped legitimate such policies even for
opponents of communism. And yet Soviet success was short-lived. Soon the USSR was not
even catching up any longer, but falling behind, as became evident in the 1970s. The USSR
was referred to, inaccurately but with a grain of truth, as Upper Volta with rockets. Much
the same could be said of communist China into the 1980s, and of North Korea to this day.
That actually existing socialism could not compete was an issue of world historical
significance, as might be assessed by imagining what the position might have been had the
Soviet Union been good at innovation.
Did actually existing socialism ever produce a distinctive science or technology? The answer
must be that it did, but in response to dire shortages. The GDR produced cars with resin
bodies; the Soviet Union relied on valves longer that than the USA, but these were not
positive choices. China might be an example, through its distinctive policy of walking on two
legs, the first, large scale machines of Soviet provenance, the other small machines for use
in the country side. But these machines were not distinctive, they were usually old
technologies from the west.
By the late 1960s and 1970s and from a variety of ideological perspectives, the centralised
authoritarian central planning of the Soviet Union was coming in for criticism, not merely as
communism but as ‘high modernism’. 5 The arrogance of the narrow expert and the
unconstrained bureaucrat was the butt of a vital critique in the capitalist countries. It was
central to the Chinese cultural revolution too, a revolution in part against bureaucratic
Stalinism and experts. An emergent new right also criticised technocracy and planning, as
did an emergent green movement. For many critics nuclear power whether capitalist or
socialist, implied hierarchy, secrecy, a police state, and vast cost.
AGRICULTURE
One of the great elements of modernity was a certain rhetorical disdain and indifference to
peasant and small scale agriculture. Food production needed to be organised on a modern
factory basis, on a large scale, with machines. In the interwar years the Soviet Union
destroyed peasant farming through the forcible establishment of huge collective and state
farms. They did eventually produce productivity gains but, and here is a profound irony, not
as much as those in capitalist small-scale agriculture, especially after the Second World War.
Indeed post-second world war agriculture saw one of the most remarkable but least
commented on transformations in world history. With national protection, subsidies,
investment in research and development, many farmers were able to raise yields at
historically unprecedented rates. Increasing inputs of fertiliser, water, pesticides, herbicides
and so on, made possible by new varieties, combined with mechanisation, effected a
profound revolution. Labour productivity increased as never before, indeed it increased
more in European agriculture than in European industry. The British case is exemplary –
from importing half its food in mid-century it became self-sufficient by the 1980s, with a
significantly lower percentage of the population working the land.
For the poor countries of the capitalist world the stagnation of agricultural productivity was
met by a policy, led by international organisations, to increase the yield of land without
displacing labour – the keys were irrigation and fertiliser, and these demanded new
varieties, varieties derived from older ones from eastern high-intensity agriculture. This socalled green revolution started an as yet incomplete process of transformation of
agriculture to levels of productivity approaching that of the rich countries. One hugely
important change was to come in China from the 1980s, where the reversal of
collectivisation, in new circumstances, led to massive increases in land productivity.
Without such changes in agriculture, obviously, the great industrialisation and urbanisation
of the world would not have been possible.
THE NEO-LIBERAL REVOLUTION
The neo-liberal revolution which got into its stride with the Thatcher and Reagan
governments in the UK and the USA in the 1980s, followed the pioneering case of Chile in
the 1970s; also notable in retrospect was the Chinese ‘Four Modernisations’ of 1978.
Although it was far from generally the case that the state pulled out of the economy, or
indeed out of research and the creation of new industries, it was true in some important
cases. A crucial component was not simply the privatisation of state monopolies, but the
freeing them of obligations to buy national products, and indeed to open up monopolies to
varying degrees of competition. De-nationalisation was a central element of this revolution.
There was a shift away from an activist national industrial policy, with profound implications
for the centralised efforts to generate new national technologies to service national
industries. In the British case liberalisation and privatisation of electricity supply and other
utilities severely weakened British nuclear, telephone, electronics, computing and railway
industries. The French case is different of course, with new state projects in both these
areas, like Minitel, the high speed trains, and massive investments in nuclear power.
France stands out as a case where types of policy previously abandoned in an increasingly
neo-liberal world continued longest.
Yet the most important, even if partial, neo-liberal revolution, is the Chinese one. From the Four
Modernisations of 1978 , it transformed agriculture and industry, with output growing at historically
unprecedented rates – this was the fastest industrial and agricultural revolution in world history.
China has imported technology and in contrast to the earlier Soviet case, foreign capital too, above
all Japanese and Taiwanese and overseas Chinese. Thus the Taiwanese firm Foxconn, the largest
private manufacturing enterprise in the world , has in mainland China, the largest factory the world
has ever seen: the Shenzen factory has 400,000 workers. It makes Apple products for the whole
world. Neo-liberalism and globalisation are intimately linked.
Yet in this neo-liberal world state-funded research remained very important, with increasing
proportions going to universities. This financing was justified by claims that new industries of the
future would arise rapidly and spectacularly from academic research. The image that drove such
ideas was a very particular one – the success of spin-outs from US universities in electronics and
more recently in computing and the internet – Microsoft, Google, Apple …. The expectation has
been that one could repeat the same story with a successor technology – biotech. In terms of
visibility the Human Genome Project of the late 1990s and early 21st century stands out – the US
spend over $5bn on this (in 2010 dollars) and continues to spend at a similar rate. But results have
been modest. There has been a very rapid spread of GM varieties of maize, soybean and cotton,
from the USA to other parts of the world from the mid-1990s, when plantings grew at up to a
remarkable 10 percent per annum. But this essentially US led private sector development, has been
nothing like as revolutionary in its effects as the increase in inputs of previous decades. In the case
of pharmaceuticals biotechnological novelties have made a very small impact, and the industry
continues to be characterised by exceptionally slow and even more exceptionally expensive
innovation, giving low or sometimes negative impacts on human health.6 What this is expenditure
has produced is not at all clear; it may well be that the neo-liberal era has been one of relatively low
technical development, with the exception, for that it seems to be of computing/internet.7 There
was also a deep continuity in state activity in relation to the military which casts doubt on the notion
(popular in studies of history of science, though not history of technology) that we live in a post-Cold
War world. While there was a dramatic collapse of the Soviet military scientific complex, there was
nothing remotely comparable in the case of the NATO countries, or Japan or China. For example, in
the USA, Department of Defense R&D expenditure was higher in every year after the cold war, than
it had been in the 1970s.
For all the talk of the Triple helix, the entrepreneurial university, of a new mode of (academic
research), characterised by links to business and business opportunities, the income to universities
from intellectual property remains very modest. Even the most inventive universities remain utterly
dependent on fees, endowments, and state funding, especially for research. One is tempted to say
that the claims for a radically new kind of universities have been a way of getting money from
government. It is telling too that research assessment, by publication and citation counts, of
researchers, universities, and countries are now routine. This is not neo-liberalism, but neobureaucratism; tellingly measures of actual effectiveness or even economic impact of research are
typically absent. But of course there has been a profound cultural change within universities and
among students, and this has been very much in tune with the neo-liberal turn.
A generation ago the scientifically trained neo-liberal Margaret Thatcher made a great deal of the
threat of global warming (for reasons not yet clear), an issue which has received a great deal of
attention from state-funders, and a remarkable degree of unanimity among researchers. Yet
research on new energy sources, and more importantly action to mitigate climate change has been
slow in developing – indeed the twenty-first century sees continued increasing emissions of CO2,
indeed increased burning of coal. This is a reminder of something that we have not touched on –
that the world in which the majority of human kind lives is far removed from the world we think of
when we are thinking of states and science – that is not to say that these worlds are not concerned
with knowledge, and machines derived from modern science, far from it, but they are outside our
purview of analysts of science. In fact that point is a more general one – the concepts, ideas and
examples which have pride of place in most accounts of science and the state have only a passing
grasp on the multiplicity of agencies, policies and practices involved.
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1
Edgerton, 2007.
Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences (2010) vol 40 no 4.
[4]
Edgerton, 2005.; Godin 2006; Scranton, 2006, 2011.
3
Jacq 1995.
4
I am grateful to Richard Aboulafia for this startling point.
5
John Scott, 1998 is a late example.
6
Le Fanu 2011
7
Edgerton, 2006, Cohen 2011, Le Fanu 2011, Mirowski 2011.
2