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Summary
It would be misleading to suggest that the Nazi government has completely repudiated science and intellect. The official attitudes towards science are clearly ambivalent and unstable. (For this reason, any statements concerning science in Nazi Germany are made under correction.) On the one hand, the challenging skepticism of science interferes with the imposition of a new set of values which demand an unquestioning acquiescence. But the new dictatorships must recognize, as did Hobbes who also argued that the State must be all or nothing, that science is power. For military, economic, and political reasons, theoretical science - to say nothing of its more respectable sibling, technology - cannot be safely discarded. Experience has shown that the most esoteric researches have found important applications.
Robert Merton (1938)This book investigates science and knowledge as power. But what is power? Power can subsume economic, industrial, military, political, and social forces and refer to the transfer of energy as well. Moreover, it is important to examine how power is wielded and controlled, and by whom. A study of science as power falls into the category of science policy in the broadest sense, and the relationships between scientists and various parts of the modern state will be investigated in this context. This book examines what was an extreme case, the German attempt to exploit the economic and military potential of nuclear fission during the last six years of National Socialist rule, from the perspective of the scientists involved in this research.
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- Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1989