Purges in Comparative Perspective: Rules for Exclusion and Inclusion in the Scientific Community under Political Pressure

During the intense political upheaval that dominated the middle decades of the twentieth century, modern states intensified their drives to discipline broad sectors of society and ensure their political reliability. Subjected to such pressures, scientific institutions faced the challenge of admittin...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Osiris (Bruges) 2005-01, Vol.20 (20), p.23-48
Main Authors: Beyler, Richard, Kojevnikov, Alexei, Wang, Jessica
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Academies and Institutes - history
Archives
Cold wars
Committees
Communism
Communism - history
Communities
Discipline
General points
Germany
Government
History of medicine and histology
History of science and technology
History of social organization of science and scientific research
History, 20th Century
Homicide
Institutions
National Socialism - history
Nazism
Personal Autonomy
Political Systems - history
Political Violence
Science - history
Science - organization & administration
Sciences
Socialism
Societies, Scientific - history
Societies, Scientific - organization & administration
Stalinism
The Scientific Community
Treaties
United States
USSR
World wars
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Summary:During the intense political upheaval that dominated the middle decades of the twentieth century, modern states intensified their drives to discipline broad sectors of society and ensure their political reliability. Subjected to such pressures, scientific institutions faced the challenge of admitting new, officially mandated criteria into the regulation of scientific life. We examine the effects of these policies on the Kaiser Wilhelm Society in National Socialist Germany, the Max Planck Society in occupied Germany after 1945, the USSR Academy of Sciences throughout the Stalin era, and the National Academy of Sciences in early cold war America. In all these cases, while academic elites largely accepted the required radical changes in the rules for membership in the scientific community, they also sought to manipulate the process to their own institutional advantage.
ISSN:0369-7827
1933-8287
DOI:10.1086/649412