ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Science and Europe’s Others: Robert Merton and Michael Polanyi on the Place of Authoritarianism

• In Event: Sciences and the Ideas of Europe: Geographies, Temporalities and Actors

English Abstract

Although the notion that science somehow ‘came from Europe’ seems widespread through much of the twentieth century, it is rare to find historical actors literally defining it as such. One way of getting a better handle on the idea can be to look for identifications of ‘Others’. Who was indicated as clearly not European and as unscientific? And how did science and Europe meet each other in being defined against this common enemy?
This paper adopts such a perspective by analyzing how the sociologists Robert Merton and Michael Polayni identified science’s ‘Others’. For Merton, these were to be found in the totalitarianism associated with Nazi and later Soviet rule. For Polanyi they were equally located in the centralized authority of the Roman-Catholic Church. How did they theorize these oppositions and what (geo)political circumstances informed their analyses? I will try to answer these questions, drawing on Joep Leerssen’s indication of two traditional ‘Others’ of the (Western and Northern) idea of Europe: ‘oriental despotism’ and ‘Catholic authoritarianism’.

Author

• Geert Somsen, Maastricht University