Home
»
Savant and the State
A01=Robert Fox
Author_Robert Fox
Category=NHD
Category=PDX
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_science
French politics
French society
History of technology
religion
Product details
- ISBN 9781421405223
- Weight: 771g
- Dimensions: 156 x 235mm
- Publication Date: 27 Oct 2012
- Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
Delivery/Collection within 10-20 working days
Our Delivery Time Frames Explained
2-4 Working Days: Available in-stock
10-20 Working Days: On Backorder
Will Deliver When Available: On Pre-Order or Reprinting
We ship your order once all items have arrived at our warehouse and are processed. Need those 2-4 day shipping items sooner? Just place a separate order for them!
There has been a tendency to view science in nineteenth-century France as the exclusive territory of the nation's leading academic centers and the powerful Paris-based administrators who controlled them. Ministries and the great savants and institutions of the capital seem to have defined the field, while historians have ignored or glossed over traditions on the periphery of science. In "The Savant and the State", Robert Fox charts new historiographical territory by synthesizing the practices and thought of state-sanctioned scientists and those of independent communities of savants and commentators with very different political, religious, and cultural priorities. Fox provides a comprehensive history of the public face of French science from the Bourbon Restoration to the outbreak of the Great War. Following the Enlightenment, many different interests competed to define the role of science and technology in French society. Political and religious conservatives tended to blame the scientific community for upsetting traditional values and, implicitly, delivering France into the hands of revolutionary extremists and Napoleonic bureaucrats.
Scientists, for their part, embraced the belief that observation and experimentation offered the surest way to the knowledge and wisdom on which the welfare of society depended. This debate, Fox argues, became a contest for the hearts and minds of the French citizenry.
Robert Fox is professor emeritus of history of science at the University of Oxford. He was awarded the History of Science Society's 2015 Sarton Medal for lifetime scholarly achievement. He is the editor of Technological Change: Methods and Themes in the History of Technology.
Qty: