THIS paper discusses the relationship between science and the state as the former moves from the practices of gifted amateurs to an expensive and technologically complex entity that it has become, requiring the latter’s support and funding as it is co-opted into nationalist projects, and must demonstrate its loyalties and instrumentality. This discussion connects with James Scott’s strictures on ‘seeing like a state’,¹ though it does not entirely centre on that discussion.

This is a story that could, if told for another context, be centred on the Curie family, with Marie Curie at the beginning of her career a Polish nationalist, then somebody who attained legendary status to a large extent as part of a French academic establishment and, of course, a world stature which was not in contradiction with the national specificities of her story. Incidentally, her daughter Irene Joliot-Curie and son-in-law Frederic, were central figures in the international peace movement and the movement which we might vaguely now refer to as an international communist movement that is no longer with us.² And, of course, it would benefit from another Polish woman’s anti-nationalism as a perspective: Rosa Luxemburg.³ 

Nevertheless, my paper is really about the politics of scientific practice, and about practitioners of science as (attempted) agents of political change. I think that the importance of looking at this in particular draws on the work that I did earlier on the space of science in what I would broadly call a developmental imagination.⁴ This developmental imagination casts science as an essential agent of progress, of progressive thinking more widely, and of an ability to change the world, or as a scientist I know, who prefers to remain anonymous, said to me, science is against ‘nature’ – the whole point of being human is we are able to transform and control the apparently natural world. This is something that might bear repetition in an environment that since the 1980s has been conditioned by a kind of romantic anti-science discourse that casts science as a sort of arch-villain which damages the supposedly organic nature of the world and of social relations.⁵ 

We need to be a little careful about this because ever since Jacques Lyotard declaimed that we no longer believe in the narratives of progress (or of liberation), and that science has proved not to be progressive because of its use in the hands in particular of the Nazis, science has received a bad press.⁶ Science’s importance to an earlier period where it wasn’t quite considered the beast that it was made out to be after the 1980s, is far too easily forgotten today.

 

Another point should perhaps be made at the outset by one who is not so much an historian of science as an historian of the sign ‘science’, in its metahistorical dimension. That is to say, the legitimating role of the Begriff (a German expression meaning both term and concept)⁷ ‘science’ is a legitimate and indeed important aspect for study, but that study might have little to do with the practices of science that its practitioners were involved in. If we study that which was called ‘science’ by contemporaries, we encounter another question: why, then, was it necessary to claim scientificity for a wide variety of things?⁸ 

 

So it remains for me, before I get into a few examples, to loosely define the terms upon which I am about to centre my discussion. We are so used to the abbreviation ‘the nation state’ today that we may be in danger of forgetting that the two categories are not identical: nationalism is a solution to the problem of sovereignty faced by states when they do the logical thing and behead the sovereign. In the absence of the sovereign as ‘head’ of state, a new sovereign must be found in the abstraction of the nation that places the people as a whole where the individual sovereign once was – so the ‘nation’ idea legitimates the headless state, or at least tries to. And we can reserve judgement for the purposes of this argument on exactly how and on what basis different ‘nations’ are invented.⁹ 

The state, on the other hand, is regarded as organized violence. In the German sociologist Max Weber’s terms, the state is ‘the legitimate monopoly of violence’.¹⁰ I have always thought of this as a somewhat circular definition: which comes first, the monopoly of violence or the legitimacy? The Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci would probably have asked questions about hegemony and implicit coercion here.¹¹ 

 

The third category in my attempted set of reflections here concerns science as legitimator, not necessarily recognized as science to any practitioner of science, as opposed to (but not always separate from) science recognized as science by scientists or by historians or sociologists of science – ‘science’ is always both more and less than ‘science’, in that its semiotic range and connotative potential surpasses the narrow set of practices it describes, rather in the manner Roland Barthes had in mind when he said that hamburgers and caviar were understood as much more than two forms of food.¹² We can further add to this set of understandings of science by also noting that science easily slips into an instrumental view of science as technology in the service of particular goals and, therefore, of technology and technocracy and directing expertise, which then becomes an essential part of what I have broadly called the developmental imagination.¹³ 

The relationship of science to nationalism is a counter-intuitive one: science after all has tended in an age of confidence in progress to denote internationalism and universalism (though there are, of course, many readings of these terms and ideas). And even nationalist movements have sought to mobilize science precisely for reasons of internationalism, universalism and progress, which some later readers seem to miss out on: the scientist from a ‘nation’ not yet liberated, subject to racist taunts, imperial control or oppression, by achieving legitimation through the universally valid practices of science, emerges from the specifics of his disempowerment into a field where s/he is no longer a Pole without a country, an Indian under imperialism.¹⁴ The juxtaposition therefore of the universal claims of science and the more specific nature of scientific practice should not necessarily be seen as one of opposition, but of a tension that is constantly being negotiated.

 

Historians have talked much about the question of technological determinism, of science as the sign of an advanced civilization, of science again as imperial civilizing mission, and I would like to suggest that the term ‘science’ in a number of these formulations functions as an empty signifier, as a normative without agreed-upon descriptive content. And one can then reverse the normative or play around with the normativity of the term without being at all sure what one is attempting to describe, or indeed, as perhaps in some of the work of Ashis Nandy, often not defining or describing anything at all.¹⁵ But using the evocative and poetic aspects of the word ‘science’ cannot, of course, be separated from its normative content.

 

For a national movement in search of a state, or a nationalism in possession of a state, it is quite obvious that a certain instrumentalization of science – for an avowed and specific purpose such as the building of nuclear weapons, but also for purposes of national prestige that will not necessarily be separate at all – is a well-known tendency. Science as self-strengthening is again something that is evoked by many nationalist movements, including many nationalist movements that proclaim themselves to be ‘backward’ and seek to overcome this backwardness either through the practice of science or something that is more widely known and was known certainly in the Indian nationalist movement as ‘the scientific temperament’.

But then again one has the problem of science and culture – the two sometimes being used as complementary and sometimes as oppositional. One can have science as culture or have science versus culture, and in a nationalist movement that is being precious about a certain allegedly ‘indigenous’ way of doing things, it is quite easy to denounce some forms of science or all forms of science as alien intrusions into an untouched national culture.¹⁶ And obviously a claim to indigenism is not well suited to a science which is claiming an internationalism and an international validity at the same time. But these debates must be resolved to accommodate, or to ‘domesticate’, in Raina and Habib’s terms, science.¹⁷ 

The anticipation of a state, or of service to the state, is implicit or explicit in many claims to or invocations of ‘science’. A strong state has a scientific establishment that serves the interests of the state, and the larger the science it practices the more intricately intertwined with the state that science is. This is in part simply for reasons of organization and funding: we are now no longer dealing with the worlds of the early Indian pioneers of science financing backroom laboratories in private residences, or small and rather basic laboratories in places like Presidency College in Calcutta.¹⁸ There was, of course, large science before the modern nation state: what are we to make, for instance, of Jai Singh’s laboratories or the Jesuit observatories in China?¹⁹ But a mode of production, in science as in economic life, to borrow from the Marxists, is not necessarily a dominant mode of production, even if it already exists before its era of dominance.

 

What becomes of scientific internationalism in an era of large science? Historians of science would probably answer this question differently from historians of the developmental imagination, of nationalism, or of the state. And if we think for a moment, and only for a moment, of a German use of the term ‘science’, not separating the so-called natural sciences from the so-called human sciences, as Wissenschaft, as an organized form of knowledge, the idea represented by this is that a systematic exchange of knowledge actually happens across spaces and increases progressively with time. We know, of course, (and perhaps more so in the non-‘natural’ sciences) that specific so-called ‘national traditions’ develop very quickly, by which we mean more specifically that certain groups of people form cliques that exclude other people, and that certain people prefer to work together and others do not.

 

In general, however, the nation state has been seen as an indispensable player in scientific politics and in the politics of science. And it has, of course, been noted that a great many scientists are less than willing to be instrumentalized for a greater national cause (and some would see this as a service to a higher cause, while others would see it simply as an unwillingness to be dragged down to the petty level of politics). At the same time a great number of scientific practitioners, certainly in the twentieth century, have themselves been political activists.

A Rosa Luxemburg, an opponent of nationalism for nationalism’s sake, would have made the argument that not all national claims are worth supporting. Who, for instance – what classes – would a particular national claim serve? (Her view of Polish nationalism was that the national claim was made by Polish aristocrats who sought to restore their own privileges, and so she saw no particular reason to support Polish nationalism.)²⁰ A James Scott, from a very anti-statist position, would lump together a scientific establishment with other forms of state control, with the developmental imagination as a whole, as ways of enforcing a sort of state-led discipline which forces us all, in his words, to ‘see like the state’.²¹ 

 

Scott outlines four factors that make for ‘most tragic incidents’ of state initiated social engineering: ‘All four are necessary for a full-fledged disaster.’ The first: administrative ordering of nature and society, ‘a state’s attempt to make a society legible’, by various means of measuring, standardizing, and even the imposition of permanent surnames.²² This is all by way of arranging the population to make taxation, conscription, and prevention of rebellion easier. This is necessary for ‘welfare and freedom’ as well as despotism. The second: a ‘high modernist ideology.’ Strong self-confidence about scientific and technological progress, the expansion of production, the growing satisfaction of human needs, the mastery of nature (including human nature), above all the rational design of social order in accordance with a scientific understanding of natural laws. Huge dams, large factories, grid cities make up this component.

The third factor, potentially making the combination lethal: ‘an authoritarian state that is willing and able to use the full weight of its coercive power to bring these high-modernist designs into being.’ The fourth, linked to the third: ‘a prostrate civil society’ that is unable to resist these plans. These state-led plans are, according to Scott, unlinked to the local, and therefore usually fail, though not without producing large-scale disasters – the Great Leap Forward, Soviet collectivization, forced villagization in Tanzania, Mozambique, Ethiopia.²³ 

I’d like to suggest that this somewhat linear view, coming as it does to some extent from the crisis of development theory in the 1990s, doesn’t entirely work in this way.²⁴ Dissenters exist, and although they are aware that the state proceeds according to an inexorable logic, they attempt forms of resistance. The physicist Meghnad Saha, a man who worked and studied in Calcutta, in London and in Germany, and in Allahabad, was among the first politically active scientists who objected to the conflation of science with technology as required by the instrumental needs of the state. He defended a pure and disinterested science unfettered by the demands of capitalism – these are his terms²⁵ – and perhaps idealistically so, because no really existing socialism has succeeded in unfettering science either.

 

But Saha, engaged as he was in a polemic with anti-scientists and anti-technologists, who for him were represented by the Indian political leader Mahatma Gandhi, made the argument that no truly modern society can afford to ignore the technological demands made upon it, not least in terms of defence and the ability to exist; and Saha spoke of this as a national need.²⁶ He was nonetheless clearly anticipating a state, and a strong state, which perhaps makes it especially paradoxical that Saha at the same time was a socialist, an internationalist, and an active anti-fascist. So perhaps we are in a situation to suggest that a nationalism might be supported by scientists in an era of attempted state formation and thereafter rejected or partially resisted in an era after the formation of the state.

Or perhaps this is too linear and we might suggest that it is possible to simultaneously try and do both: Saha clearly supported a strong state for reasons of the continued existence of violence and the existence of threats, especially to young states emerging from colonialism. And he did this on national grounds despite being aware that a national project was not necessarily progressive, conducive to social justice, or to the use of science for the betterment of humanity. In effect, he lent the legitimacy of nationalism to that monopoly of violence, the state. He was also central to resisting some of its practices, both before and after the independent Indian state came into being.²⁷ 

 

Let us invoke another figure in this discussion: the chemist, social activist and pharmaceutical entrepreneur Prafulla Chandra Ray. Prafulla Chandra Ray was a great enthusiast for and practitioner of what he considered as science for national self-strengthening. He was also a very determined believer in the universality of science.²⁸ It seems, then, peculiar that for a time in his career he was a very unlikely Gandhian.²⁹ His arguments on science were intrinsically different from the mysticism of a Gandhi.

Prafulla Chandra Ray also wrote a celebrated history of chemistry which appeared in two volumes in 1902 and 1908, called A History of Hindu Chemistry. But although many people who simply read the title see this as an apology for a Hindu nationalism that defines the unity of the Indian ‘nation’ as based on ‘Hindu’ tradition, defined in various ways, this text is specifically not an attempt in that direction, as Prafulla Ray made clear himself: he said that his book stops where it did because he could not read Arabic or Persian, although he could read Sanskrit and Pali.³⁰ He was also (elsewhere) proud to say that had he been his father he would have been able to read these languages.³¹ (One could argue that had he been his father he would not have been able to understand chemistry.)

 

Ray wrote A History of Hindu Chemistry at the request of the French chemist Monsieur Berthelot, a historian of chemistry. Berthelot had written a history of Arab chemistry and requested somebody to do the Indian side, but the word would have been ‘Hindu’ or ‘Hindi’ in Arabic sources, and again in another problem of translation ‘les Hindous’ in French. The national project that one might discern in Prafulla Ray is in fact not as nationalist as it might seem. Far from glorifying an ancient indigenous practice of ‘Indian’ science or defending a spiritual core against the depredations of ‘western’ science, he resorted to what anthropologists would now consider a very scientistic view of the world: separating very clearly what he considered alchemy and magic from what he would still consider compatible with modern chemical practice.³² 

And Ray was aware, as he said himself and as one of his collaborators, Brajendranath Seal, later said, that what was required was to methodologically appropriate aspects of the past that were assimilable to the present,³³ in a very presentist and instrumental mining of the past; and he seemed to be able to do this without writing a kind of retrospective history of non-science in a contemptuous way, but nonetheless recording with a great degree of detail and respect the practices of the alchemists.³⁴ For Prafulla Ray, science was a matter of making a contribution to human knowledge generally, but also a means of contributing as a colonized people to freedom, which involved imagining an independent state.

 

We could contrast Prafulla Chandra Ray briefly with another supposedly ‘Indian’ practitioner of science, his colleague at Presidency College, Jagadish Chandra Bose, who at some point in his career – having discovered that plants are sentient – started to talk in pantheistic terms, which he claimed as ‘Hindu’, about the living nature of all matter, apparently already known to the ancients from Hindu philosophy. This philosophy came to him from the Irishwoman Margaret Noble – at that point living under the name of Sister Nivedita – a neo-Hindu and a follower of the first really international guru, Swami Vivekananda, who presented ‘Hinduism’ to the World Congress of Religions at Chicago in 1893, to great acclaim and admiration.³⁵ 

To return to the figure of Meghnad Saha, we can talk about a scientific internationalism that goes hand in hand with state building, and then a scientific internationalism that seeks to establish a strong state but nonetheless, once that state is established, challenges the monopoly of the state over science and the instrumentalization of science for the purposes of the state. Saha was to become a major opponent of Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru on issues of politics and equally on issues of scientific practice in an independent Indian state. Unsurprisingly, he swiftly became marginalized, both personally due to disagreements with his rival physicist Homi Jehangir Bhabha, and politically due to his own socialist views.³⁶ And in particular – this from a man who on a trip to the United States in 1944 greatly disturbed a number of his fellow scientists by asking how close the United States was to a nuclear bomb – he disagreed that India’s future should be as nuclear as it seemed to be – even though, officially there was no Indian nuclear policy that was intended to have gone anywhere near weapons.³⁷

 

In the 1950s when the Chilean poet and socialist Pablo Neruda came to India at the behest of Irene and Frederic Joliot-Curie to recruit Jawaharlal Nehru for the international peace movement, he found Nehru unresponsive. Reasons of state had taken over from nationalist idealism and a nuclear weapons based future had not been ruled out by India, despite public proclamations to the contrary.³⁸ Robert Anderson has for the early Cold War been able to map an interesting tension between state interests, which allegedly do not share nuclear secrets, and a scientific brotherhood, which of course meets at conferences and does exactly that: share secrets, believing that this information should not be entrusted entirely to states because states misuse these things; and the interests of commerce which require states and companies to buy, sell and trade technologies as much as possible.³⁹ 

 

Does this suggest that in an era of big science, the scientist must accept the state, and the state must accept the scientist only to the extent that the scientist accepts the state? The so-called ‘Haldane Principle’ – that the state would fund academic research, but the agenda would be set by academics – is now routinely broken by governments, who openly articulate the need for research to meet the state’s requirements.

At the best of times, however, there appears to have been a compromise in which the scientist would serve his or her state in exchange for being allowed to serve the interests of the abstraction, ‘humanity’. Generations of espionage charges and spy stories are based upon this premise. And if the principles of the Nuremberg trials also apply to scientists and scientific practice, it is the duty of scientists to resist their states when the demands of their consciences are in conflict with reasons of state. But it is also dangerous to believe that one can do so without incurring the wrath of the state, on a large scale on terms of charges of treason, and on a smaller and less heroic scale of simply finding oneself unemployed. At the highest level of this scientific social contract, that of nuclear science and the politics of the Cold War, this is perhaps most obvious. But it is a drama played out at various levels.

 

Footnotes:

1. James Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. Yale University Press, New Haven, 1998.

2. Eve Curie, Madame Curie (transl: Victor Sheean). William Heinemann, London, 1947 (1938); Denis Brian, The Curies: A Biography of the Most Controversial Family in Science. John Wiley and Sons, New York, 2005; Pablo Neruda, Memoirs. Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1978, pp. 202-203.

3. A series of articles on the national question and autonomy which appeared in 1908-1909 under the general title, ‘The Problem of Nationality and Autonomy’, in Luxemburg’s theoretical journal, Przeglad Sozialdemokratyczny (Krakow). http://www.marxists. org/archive/luxemburg/1909/national-question/index.htm

4. Benjamin Zachariah, Developing India: An Intellectual and Social History, c. 1930-1950. Oxford University Press, Delhi, 2005.

5. See for instance, Claude Alvarez, Science, Development and Violence: The Revolt Against Modernity. Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1992.

6. Jacques Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Minnesota University Press, Minneapolis, 1984 (1979); he cites Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1962; and Paul Feyerabend, Against Method: Towards an Anarchistic Theory of Science, Humanities Press, Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey, 1975, as two texts that have contributed to the ‘condition’; and one wonders whether he does not carry the date back a little too far or imagine a general relevance for a narrower condition that can coexist with a set of beliefs that work quite unselfconsciously with prevalent ideas of progress.

7. Reinhart Koselleck, ‘Richtlinien für das Lexikon politischsozialer Begriffe der Neuzeit’, Archiv für Begriffsgeschichte, 1967, pp. 81-99.

8. A point entirely missed in Gyan Prakash, Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India. Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1999.

9. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism. Verso, London, 1983; A.D. Smith, Nations and Nationalism in a Global Era. Polity Press, Cambridge, 1995, reprint: 1996; A.D. Smith, ‘History and National Destiny: Responses and Clarifications’, Nations and Nationalism 10(1-2), 2004, pp. 195-209, for a flavour of the debates.

10. Max Weber, ‘Politik als Beruf’, lecture, Munich University, 1918; reprinted in translation as ‘Politics as a Vocation’ in H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (ed. and transl.), From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, New edition, Routledge, London, 1991, pp. 77-128; the definition appears on p. 78: ‘a state is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.’

11. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (ed. and transl. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith). Lawrence and Wishart, London, 1971.

12. Roland Barthes, Mythologies. (Trans. Annette Lavers), Hill and Wang, New York, 1972 (1957).

13. Zachariah, Developing India. Preface to paperback edition. Oxford University Press, Delhi, 2012, pp . x-xii.

14. Prafulla Chandra Ray, Life and Experiences of a Bengali Chemist (2 volumes). Chuckervertty, Chatterjee & Co, Calcutta, 1932 and 1935.

15. Ashis Nandy (ed.), Science, Hegemony and Violence: A Requiem for Modernity. Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1988; compare his earlier work, Ashis Nandy, Alternative Sciences: Creativity and Authenticity in Two Indian Scientists. Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1980 for a more nuanced set of views.

16. In India, we might suggest that this tendency is represented by Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj (1909), or by the Arya Samaj.

17. Dhruv Raina and S. Irfan Habib, Domesticating Modern Science: A Social History of Science and Culture in Colonial India. Tulika, Delhi, 2004.

18. See Ray, Life and Experiences of a Bengali Chemist, vol. 1.

19. Dhruv Raina, ‘French Jesuit Scientists in India: Historical Astronomy in the Discourse on India, 1670-1770’, Economic and Political Weekly 34(5), 30 January-5 February 1999, pp. PE30-PE38.

20. R. Luxemburg, The Problem of Nationality.

21. Scott, Seeing Like a State. p. 4ff.

22. See also James C. Scott, John Tehranian and Jeremy Mathias, ‘The Production of Legal Identities Proper to States: The Case of the Permanent Family Surname’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 44(1), 2002, pp. 4-44.

23. Scott, Seeing Like a State. p. 4ff.

24. See Colin Leys, The Rise and Fall of Developmental Theory. James Currey, London, 1996.

25. See Zachariah, Developing India, p. 273, note 137.

26. Science and Culture IV(10), April 1939, editorial, p. 533.

27. Abha Sur, ‘Scientism and Social Justice: Meghnad Saha’s Critique of the State of Science in India’, Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences 33(1), 2002, pp. 87-105.

28. Ray, Life and Experiences of a Bengali Chemist, vol. 1.

29. On his Gandhism, see Ray, Life and Experiences of a Bengali Chemist, vol. 1, pp. 387-388.

30. Prafulla Chandra Ray, A History of Hindu Chemistry (2 vols.). Chuckervertty, Chatterjee & Co, Calcutta, 1902 and 1908.

31. Ray, Life and Experiences of a Bengali Chemist, vol. 1.

32. Ray, A History of Hindu Chemistry, vol. 1.

33. Brajendranath Seal, The Positive Sciences of the Ancient Hindus. Motilal Banarsidass, Delhi, 1958 (1915), Preface.

34. Ray, A History of Hindu Chemistry, vol. 1.

35. Nandy, Alternative Sciences.

36. Abha Sur, ‘Scientism and Social Justice’, op cit.

37. Robert S. Anderson, Nucleus and Nation: Scientists, International Networks, and Power in India. Chicago University Press, Chicago, 2010, pp. 185-186, 194-196.

38. Pablo Neruda, Memoirs. Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1978, pp. 202-203.

39. Robert S Anderson, Negotiating Nuclear Power: How the Great Powers Bargained With Reactors and the Bomb in India (forthcoming).