Science and the Scientific Disciplines
OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Tue Jul 07 2015, NEWGEN Chapter 35 Science and the Scientific Disciplines Benjamin Dawson Introduction European Romanticism coincided with a period of profound reorganization in the sci- ences, and in particular with the genesis of the modern scientific discipline. In contrast to earlier and other orders of discourse in which disciplines operated largely as archives, that is, as repositories of knowledge, by the early nineteenth century the scientific disci- pline had begun to play an internal, essential, and active role in epistemic production.1 Processes of specialization, professionalization, and role differentiation in the sciences were central to this transition, and were supported by the establishment of the earli- est research universities (in Göttingen, Leipzig, and elsewhere).2 Likewise important were changes in the form of scientific communication. Notably, as supplements to the general organs of the scientific institutions established in the seventeenth century, such as the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society and the proceedings of the Paris Académie, the late eighteenth century saw a proliferation of specialist scientific journals which served both to accelerate the generation of empirical observations and to regu- late these communications, governing this great new wealth of fact.3 Beginning around 1 On the development of the scientific discipline as the primary unit of internal differentiation and structure formation in the social system of science, see Rudolf Stichweh, Zur Entstehung des modernen Systems wissenschaftlicher Disziplinen: Physik in Deutschland, 1740–1890 (Frankfurt/ Main: Suhrkamp, 1984). 2 ‘Scientific factories wissenschaftliche( Fabriken)’ was how one commentator described these new institutions. Friedrich Böll, Das Universitätswesen in Briefen (1782), cited in Andre Wakefield,The Disordered Police State: German Cameralism as Science and Practice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 49.
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