Civilization and the Culture of Science: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1795-1935

How does science come to have such a central place in Western culture? How do cognitive values--and subsequently moral, political, and social ones--come to be modelled around scientific values? Stephen Gaukroger explores how these values were shaped and how they began, in turn, to shape those of society. The core nineteenth- and twentieth-century development is that in which science comes to take centre stage in determining ideas of civilization, displacingChristianity in this role. Where Christianity had provided a unifying thread in the study of the world, the standing of science came to rest or fall on the question of the unity of the sciences. This booksets out to show that this is essentially ideological and not something that arose from developments within the sciences, which remained pluralistic and modular. A crucial ingredient in this process was a fundamental rethinking of the relations between science and ethics, economics, philosophy, and engineering. In his engaging description of this transition to a scientific modernity, Gaukroger examines five key issues which underpinned this shift: changes in the understanding of civilization;the push to unify the sciences; the rise of the idea of the limits of scientific understanding; the concepts of 'applied' and 'popular' science; and the way in which the public was shaped in ascientific image.