Key Points
- An instrumentalist understanding of science has become dominant in American political discourse in recent decades, making science policy harder to distinguish from industrial policy. Yet crafting sound policies requires that policymakers be attentive to the particular contexts and goals of proposed interventions. From this perspective, the conflation of science and industrial policy is unfortunate, and the former ought to be reclaimed as its own distinctive area of public concern.
- Historically, the tension between reformers who sought to link science and the state and those who resisted such efforts played an important role in shaping the character of modern scientific institutions—and their diverse and sometimes conflicting self-understandings, constituencies, and aims.
- Before and after World War II, pioneers of science policy such as Vannevar Bush, Michael Polanyi, and Edward Shils developed the idea of scientific autonomy as an alternative to policies to “plan” science and a normative standpoint from which to defend a politically liberal conception of science and its place in society at a moment of growing extremism at home and abroad. This vision offers important insights for science policy today.
- We need the instrumental goods of science—to protect the environment and public health and for military preparedness, geopolitical competitiveness, and economic growth. But recovering science policy requires recognizing science as a tradition with its own distinctive norms, goals, and standards of excellence valuable in their own right. The cultivation and maintenance of this tradition is essential to not just scientific and technological progress but also the institutional pluralism at the heart of free society.
Executive Summary
The aftermath of a global public health crisis, combined with the rise of populism at home and growing economic and security threats abroad, has persuaded a wide swath of Americans that a more interventionist state is needed to shore up, promote, or protect particular sectors of the economy. This has led commentators to declare the “return of industrial policy.” These changes in the politics of industrial policy have been accompanied by distinctive and underappreciated changes in the politics of the related area of science policy. In effect, science policy—the sets of questions concerning how and to what degree the government should fund, conduct, or direct scientific research—has been eclipsed by, or, perhaps more accurately put, absorbed into, industrial policy.
This is illustrated most clearly by one of the most significant pieces of industrial policy in recent years, the CHIPS and Science Act. Passed by Congress and signed into law by President Joe Biden in 2022, the centerpiece of this law—the CHIPS part—is an effort to “re-shore” advanced manufacturing of semiconductors. Yet fused to this effort is another—the Science part—derived from a distinct legislative proposal known as the Endless Frontier Act, which sought to transform the National Science Foundation (NSF) into a massive technology directorate intended to boost American competitiveness in prespecified areas of development.
Implicit in this policy package is an instrumentalist conception of science. According to this idea, science is the raw material for technological innovation—an “input” in a process of production that begins with knowledge discovery, leads to invention, and culminates in innovation and commercialization. The state’s role, accordingly, is to intervene in the “pipeline” of innovation—in the production of knowledge (science policy) or the production of the goods and services the knowledge enables (industrial policy).
The CHIPS and Science Act illustrates a broader instrumentalist trend in political discourse about science. Many recent policy proposals from across the political spectrum share a similar outlook, treating science as if it were simply an instrument among many for achieving national goals—whether competing with China, combating disease, solving climate change, or boosting gross domestic product.
Science and innovation are of course intimately linked. For this reason, the conflation of science and industrial policy might appear perfectly understandable, even desirable. Yet though related, science, technology, and industry are distinct areas of policy; they raise their own questions and concerns, and they implicate different domains of expertise, institutions, constituencies, and stakeholders—often with divergent priorities and goals. Crafting sound policy requires that policymakers be attentive to the particular contexts and goals of proposed interventions. From this perspective, the conflation of science policy and industrial policy is unfortunate, and the former ought to be reclaimed as its own distinctive area of public concern.
In fact, it was not so long ago that a non-instrumentalist idea—that the pursuit of knowledge is valuable in and of itself—still informed public discourse about science. Before and after World War II, pioneers of science policy such as Vannevar Bush, Michael Polanyi, and Edward Shils articulated the concept of scientific autonomy as an alternative to policies to “plan” science as part of a larger political project to “plan” or “rationalize” the economy and society overall. For Bush, Polanyi, and Shils, scientific autonomy was about much more than science per se or even economic policy; it provided a normative standpoint from which to defend a politically liberal conception of scientific institutions and their place in society at a moment of growing extremism at home and abroad.
This vision has much to teach us today. But to recover its insights, we need a better understanding of how and why it came to be eclipsed in the first place. This, in turn, requires grappling with our culture’s underlying assumptions about the nature of science and its relationship to technological and political power—and the ways those assumptions have been contested and transformed over time.
The instrumentalist conception of science is an Enlightenment inheritance, closely connected, conceptually and historically, to the political project of planning. Its roots are in the writings of the English jurist and philosopher Francis Bacon, often considered the father of modern science. He argued that science did not consist in the pursuit of knowledge for the sake of understanding, as the ancients and medievals had thought, but instead enabled practical power—mastery over nature. In the 19th century, thinkers such as Henri de Saint-Simon and Auguste Comte extended the Baconian goal of mastery beyond nature to society. They argued that a new social class of scientists and engineers could steer society toward rational ends.
In the American context, the most systematic expression of these ideas came in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with the Progressive ideals of social control and economic planning. Following Saint-Simon and Comte, Progressives argued that political decisions should be delegated to technical experts who could use their knowledge to direct social and economic forces that, left to themselves, would tend toward disorder and conflict. Perhaps surprisingly, the idea of using such expertise to rationally plan science itself arose later. And ironically, it also met resistance from within the scientific community.
The US federal government began to take an active interest in science in the 19th century—and for practical, Baconian reasons. Beginning in the middle of the century and accelerating after Reconstruction, Congress created or expanded a number of science bureaus, such as the Geological and Coast Surveys, Weather Service, Army Signal Corps, and Department of Agriculture, to grapple with a variety of challenges the growing nation faced. This drew the federal government into supporting a wide array of scientific activities. But the emerging system of federal science faced resistance from the start.
Some members of Congress, the scientific community, and the broader public feared the creation of an “official clique” in Washington that would politicize science, undermine scientific freedom, and exceed the federal government’s constitutional limits. Ultimately, however, the exigencies of war and periodic outbreaks of infectious diseases, such as yellow fever, proved too powerful. The expansion of the federal scientific establishment during the late 19th and early 20th centuries institutionalized a conception of science as a tool to be wielded by the state to wage war and “combat” disease and other societal ills. From the eradication of yellow fever in the early 20th century to the development of mass-produced penicillin, radar, and the atomic bomb during World War II, this emergent system proved quite successful at grappling with practical problems. Inspired by wartime mobilization and spurred by competition with the Soviet Union, reformers of the postwar decades facilitated the creation or expansion of a range of different federal science agencies, further tightening the link between science and the state. In many respects, the new federal system redounded to scientists’ benefit.
Between 1946 and 1970, federal research funding ballooned more than fourfold relative to total US budget outlays. In addition to increasing public funds, scientists enjoyed newfound public prestige. But science’s new public role was not an unalloyed good. Science’s growing dependence on the state and its priorities precipitated a popular backlash against the “military-industrial complex” and weakened scientific freedom. Contrary to their self-image as members of a self-governing community, American scientists had become embedded in a large and bureaucratic system of state-managed research and development. It was in this context that Bush, Polanyi, and Shils articulated their visions of scientific autonomy.
Bush was President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s science adviser during World War II and oversaw the mobilization of science. After the war, however, Bush sought to disestablish the federal bureaucracy he had helped build. Unlike “reform liberals” such as Sen. Harley Kilgore (D-WV), Bush and his colleagues were skeptical that the state—or anyone else—could rationally plan science, and they feared the effort to do so would not serve the public interest but rather undermine the freedom of science and its institutions. They proposed instead to devolve the governance of science back to the institutions they believed were the appropriate custodians of its social obligations and enforcers of its professional norms.
According to the Hungarian-British polymath Polanyi, science is a social activity so intricate and successful that it appears to be the product of conscious design. In fact, however, science, like the market, is a “spontaneous order” that cannot be rationally planned in advance. For Polanyi, the case for what he called “pure science” was essentially moral. A free society, he thought, depended above all on not the progress of science per se—or the utilitarian benefits it spawns—nor the freedom of individuals simply to do as they pleased but rather the freedom of institutions such as science and law to flourish.
Shils, a sociologist and founding member of the University of Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought, agreed with Polanyi that pure science is the “heart of scientific work” and stressed its resistance to rational planning. But he also emphasized the multifaceted roles and functions science had come to acquire in modern society. Science, argued Shils, is irreducibly pluralistic, so its modes of organization and governance must be as well. In the context of the Cold War, he feared that the idea of scientific autonomy was threatened by those across the political spectrum who dismissed it as a selfish attempt to decouple knowledge from societal or economic utility or to empower unaccountable elites over and against the people.
For Bush, Polanyi, and Shils, science’s resistance to rational planning was not a problem to be solved by the state. It was instead a clue to understanding not only science but also the free society in which they believed science flourished. Securing the conditions under which science could continue to flourish was, for these thinkers, a key aspect of a broader political project: preserving the plurality of institutions on which liberal democracy itself depends. Taking up this task today would not mean simply regurgitating these thinkers’ ideas. Instead, what we need is “a reformulation,” as Shils put it, of the “traditional conception of the autonomy of intellectual life” adequate to our own instrumentalist moment.
Such a reformulation would not entail severing science from the state. The federal government can and should continue to use science for practical purposes— whether for protecting the environment and public health or for military preparedness, geopolitical competitiveness, and economic growth. Besides its overtly utilitarian needs, the state also has a unique role to play in funding “pure” science, thus nurturing the conditions for scientific institutions to flourish alongside other vital institutions of democratic society.
Lastly, some areas of scientific research—such as research on potential pandemic pathogens, human subjects, and human cloning—raise ethical issues or pose potential societal harms. Especially when it is supported by the state, such research calls for democratic deliberation about risks and benefits or for outright regulation, control, or even interdiction. This is a place in which Congress can—or even should—play a more prominent role, not just in funding science, nor as a mechanism for planning it, but as a site of democratic contestation over its uses.
Yet the tradition of scientific autonomy serves as a reminder that science is ultimately more than its practical uses, whether beneficial or harmful. Recovering science policy means recognizing science as a tradition, with its own distinctive norms, goals, and standards of excellence that are valuable in their own right. The cultivation and maintenance of this tradition are essential to not just scientific and technological progress but also the institutional pluralism at the heart of free society.