In a recent book on The Publics of Science; Experts and Laymen Through History, Agustí Nieto-Galan introduced his subject of a (mostly Western) history of public science, covering the times from the Scientific Revolution to the twenty-first century, with reference to Sigmund Freud. In one of his essays of cultural critique, Freud had, so to speak, put culture itself on his couch, and this session also featured talk about science and technological application. Civilization and Its Discontents identified a factor of disillusionment in the progress of science and technology, which gave rise to “The Uneasiness in Culture” (the literal translation of the title of Freud's German essay Das Unbehagen in der Kultur), and this uneasiness tainted a great deal of the happiness science and technology were intended to cultivate (Nieto-Galán Reference Nieto-Galan2011; Freud Reference Freud1930). New technology and inventions like telephones, ocean liners, or drugs, Freud argued, were mostly remedies for negative developments technology had just created; for instance, without modern transportation people would stay close to each other and not need any telephone. (However, he did not address the issue of whether scientific knowledge itself may have provided some satisfaction.) The modern individual, as analyzed by Freud, was therefore constantly ill at ease with modern scientific and technological culture.
Roughly the same line of thought is found by Nieto-Galán in Eric Hobsbawm's The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914–1991.Footnote 1 In this book history is told through processes of failure, in particular of communism, capitalism, and nationalism, and in a chapter on the natural sciences he describes “a background glow of suspicion and fear” that accompanied progress in this sphere. Here it is the twentieth century which “was not at ease with the science which was its most extraordinary achievement, and on which it depended.” Four “feelings” dominated the perception of the modern world: “that science was incomprehensible; that both its practical and moral consequences were unpredictable . . ., that it underlined the helplessness of the individual,” and that “it was inherently dangerous” since it “interfered with the natural order of things” (Hobsbawm Reference Hobsbawm1994, 530). As a consequence, a characteristic (and essentially Anglo-American) phenomenon emerged particularly in the second half of the twentieth century: science fiction. Apparently, it transformed the bad feelings towards modern life into pleasure in technological tales of the future.
Regardless of how widespread such feelings and dispositions that Freud had already diagnosed in Vienna back in 1930 actually were throughout the world during the twentieth century, and whatever effects they may have entailed with respect to the role of science and the popular discussion about science, the obvious flaw – at least in Hobsbawm's attempt at a twentieth-century “history of the world” – is probably due to his reliance on too narrow a basis of research. With John C. Burnham's How Superstition Won and Science Lost: Popularizing Science and Health in the United States, a narrative of the “victory of superstition” was introduced, one that relied on the American case and which seems to have found its way into more global historiography. The narrative included the claim that “Americans willingly capitulated to the new superstition” and that a process was at work, that followed, despite “the chaos of history,” a clear pattern: “in the United States, the popularization of health, psychology, and the natural sciences all followed courses that in basic outline were parallel.” “Diffusion,” “popularization,” “dilution,” and “trivialization” were the four stages of this pattern (Burnham Reference Burnham1987, 8 and 226).
This upshot, however, is not corroborated by newer research; neither in the British case (Broks Reference Broks2006, with discussion of Burnham 59–63; Bowler Reference Bowler2006 and Reference Bowler2009; Boon Reference Boon2008; cf. also Tobey Reference Tobey1971), nor in the American one, a result that also extends to popularizers from media other than print (Lewenstein Reference Lewenstein1987 and Reference Lewenstein1992; LaFollette Reference LaFollette1989 and Reference LaFollette2008). Rather, twisted versions of the pattern have been put forward that show instances of scientists themselves creating superstition – clearly, for selfish reasons and in ways not ethically justifiable – and that hint at political and commercial interests seizing power over popularization discourses (cf. e.g. Oreskes and Conway Reference Oreskes and Conway2010). In any case, the generalization of Burnham's findings for the United States cannot be taken for granted; in Germany, for instance, it was not the public, but the scientists themselves who were found to have “capitulated” to popular and philosophical currents fostering acceptance of indeterminism and Lebensphilosophie (philosophy of life) during the 1920s (Forman Reference Forman1971; Carson et al. Reference Carson, Kojevnikov and Trischler2011). Therefore, influencing, reasoning, or even bringing about “capitulations” can work either way in the relationship between science and the public, and it appears reasonable to speak of science communication as a two-way process,Footnote 2 keeping in mind that this notion requires the same kind of clarification and historicizing as “popularization.” Certainly, as long as one understands the communication between science and its publics as “popularization” and then identifies the “fight against superstition” as a core issue of this “popularization,” Bunham's conclusions may be consistent; in the last twenty years, however, scholars have increasingly reached agreement that this issue is no longer at the center of the historical studies of “popular science,” as the relationship between science and the public has emerged as a more complex one.
The present issue acknowledges this complexity while at the same time it looks out into the world. The authors contributing to the present collection, however, take a European perspective, which combines a wide variety of societies with a number of stark political ruptures, on the one hand, with some shared historical and cultural traditions these European nations entertained, on the other. As in any other cultural field, the popular understanding of science was subject to national developments within Europe, yet attention was still paid to what was happening in the neighboring countries, particularly in those countries on the periphery. Studying Britain, France, Germany, and Russia, all nations with strong national identities, as well as Italy and Spain, which despite regional conflicts had at least a strong core in this regard, we do not expect a single pattern of science communication to emerge. Rather, we hope to exhibit the dimensions along which a comparative account will bear fruit. From this European perspective, lines of development that seem strong in the American case emerge relatively late in the game. There has been a lot of “Americanization” of popular science over the world in recent decades – just recall the 18 foreign-language (and “localized”) editions of Scientific American, including Romanian, Brazilian Portuguese, and Arabic ones –, but there were also national approaches to communicating science for most of the twentieth century.
In the following I will briefly introduce, first, what concepts have been replacing the rather schematic models and mechanisms that are usually referred to as “popularization”; second, why studying “national approaches” is a fruitful route to a comparative (and analytical) history of science in culture and society; and third, what perspectives are worth following when studying national approaches to science communication.
Communicating Science
The question as to whether one can still speak of “popularization” when looking at the role of science in the “Age of Extremes,” which produced both subtle cultural critique and rough propaganda, or whether one should better frame all analysis in terms of the transformation, transfer, and “transit” of knowledge that can be of different kinds and origins – from scientific institutions, just as from any other places of discourse in society relating to science – has not yet been answered conclusively. The historiographical considerations on this are copious, however;Footnote 3 bibliographies of secondary literature have been gathered,Footnote 4 and at the same time a small canon of seminal papers has emerged that exhibits the key problems.Footnote 5 Anyone in need of orientation in this ongoing discourse finds in Andreas Daum's “short review” a concise and thorough point of entry as well as a bridge leading from the rich scholarship on nineteenth-century popular science (of the central nations) to the still only vaguely charted stocks, roles, and uses of scientific knowledge in modern societies (all over the globe) (Daum Reference Daum2009, 320).
One historiographical insight, however, appears to be rather widespread in most of the newer discussions, a kind of communicative turn. James Secord observed a shift of focus towards “science as a form of communicative action” in general, and suggests putting knowledge in the center of considerations. Expanding on this, Jonathan Topham has phrased the program of an integrative framework as follows:
My argument was that the category “popular science” carries so much historical baggage as to be seriously compromised for use of a term of historical analysis. In particular, it does not define a topic of study in a way that is either intellectually rigorous or heuristically rewarding. In its place, I have suggested the need to develop an approach in which all scientific knowledge is understood as part of a communicative process, involving appropriation, resistance and cultural contestation. This has the benefit of reintegrating “science popularization” with other forms of communication in science, including education and international communication, and it also provides a range of new historiographical resources, drawn from, among other places, the cultural history of the book, translation studies and the history of education. (Topham Reference Topham, Papanelopoupou, Nieto-Galan and Perdriguero2009, 19–20)
By the time these lines were published within an introduction to an edited volume on Popularizing Science and Technology in the European Periphery, 1800–2000 (Papanelopoulou et al. Reference Papanelopoulou, Nieto-Galan and Perdriguero2009), which provided a wide survey of the roles and uses of popular science in those European nations that were not among the few big players in science and technology, other collective efforts in this direction were already under way by various other groups, some of which had already produced collections of essays. A volume on Science and the Public as Mutual Resources propelled the analysis into the twentieth century; science communication now had its pushes and pulls and did not happen without a “transaction cost” (viz. loss of scientific reputation); pseudoscience and science fiction had to be integrated; new fields of science either needed the public as an object and a resource to become established, like ethnology in Germany, or took shape in different ways due to the public attention they received, like knowledge on eugenics in Britain and Austria (Nikolow and Schirrmacher Reference Nikolow and Schirrmacher2007). The volume Beyond Borders: Fresh Perspectives in History of Science, although it showed a wide sweep of transnational studies through many centuries, also emphasized questions of comparison, communication, and appropriation (Simon and Herran Reference Simon and Herran2008). The emergent mass media, too, made a difference in the processes of communicating about science and public knowledge. This was discussed in two topical issues of different journals, first Making the Paper: Science and Technology in Spanish, Greek and Danish Newspapers Around 1900, and, with the addition of popular science magazines and broadcasting, Popular Science Between News and Education: A European Perspective (Centaurus 51:2, edited by Peter Kjaergaard, 2009; Science and Education 21:2, edited by Arne Schirrmacher, 2012). Finally, the Isis Focus Section “Historicizing ‘Popular Science’” complemented strong historiographical reflections (Isis 100:2, edited by JonathanTopham, Reference Topham, Papanelopoupou, Nieto-Galan and Perdriguero2009).
The last of these publications included Daum's historical reflections in “Varieties of Popular Science and the Transformations of Public Knowledge,” which pointed out three imbalances in the current scholarship. Apart from focusing too much attention on purely scientific knowledge and (secondary) literature in English, there is in particular “the chronological focus on the nineteenth century, which has not sought to distinguish more precisely how the goals, rhetoric, and practices of popular science changed during that century as well as on their way into the ‘Age of the Extremes’ and today's knowledge society” (Daum Reference Daum2009, 322–323). The key question with regard to the vicissitudes of the twentieth century hence remains: how can we come to grips with popular science “after popularization”? This question arises, first, because “popularization” as an actor's category increasingly disappeared in a number of European nations around 1900, and second, because it turns out that “popularization” is no longer a proper analytical category in this period (Schirrmacher Reference Schirrmacher2008).
National Approaches
In twentieth-century cultural history as well, the natural arena of discourse remained the nation, particularly since many European countries had just consolidated during the preceding decades. Unification, as in the cases of Germany or Italy, transformed geographic regions into nation states and created national cultures. And in so doing, science and technology played important roles that invited reflection on a national, rather than global scale, as had been characteristic for earlier centuries.Footnote 6 Media for influencing public opinion, and above all the mass media, were – if not local undertakings – restricted to the nation state; therefore science communication in newspapers and on the air, which aimed at a broad public, represented national approaches toward communicating science.
First in the present issue, Paola Govoni's case study tells a story of “The Building of a Scientific Community in Italy, 1860s-1930s,” delineating the particular national aspects of the Italian story of institutionalization, (gendered) competition and discourse on scienza popolare. This is done in comparison with the British example, which served as a model and yet relied on very different (national) conditions. A particular characteristic of Italy's history of unification, at least in the field of education, was an “anomalous trend” of openness towards women, which broke off after World War I, a phenomenon that Govoni traces in the development of popular science. But the British history of popular science in the twentieth century also requires further elaboration and the debunking of certain myths, an agenda Peter Bowler continues to pursue in his contribution to the present collection (also cf. Bowler Reference Bowler2006 and Reference Bowler2009). Focusing on the interwar years and three popular science magazines, he demonstrates that while there is no room for Burnham's superstition thesis in the British case, on the other hand, a close nexus of popular science and (self-)education was distinctive for the British nation; however, the body of female writers in this field, which was so strong in Victorian times, had largely disappeared. In contrast, the French developments around the same period showed strongly coordinated activities by the scientific community and the state on the dissemination of science. Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent shows that these joint projects often produced paradoxical results. The project of a national encyclopedia, an Encyclopédie française, and the opening of the Palais de la découverte with its novel hands-on approach, addressing a general public and younger audiences, respectively, ran into symptomatic troubles. Eventually these contributed, paradoxically, to establishing the “cliché of the increasing gap” between science and the public.
Unlike Britain and France in the twentieth century, Germany had to cope with two stark changes of political regime after two lost wars; strangely enough, the relationship between science and the German public was a rather close one. National standing and pride, which could no longer be found in the state or its military power, was defined through German culture, in which science played a central role. In my own contribution to this collection of essays, I try to explain these surprising continuities in popular demand for digestible science communication from the 1900s to the 1980s – and thus after 1949 in two German states – in terms of an underlying cultural dispositif, viz. a machinery in which an ensemble of actors and agencies, common philosophical or moral propositions and legal conditions, as well as state interference or non-interference, acquired a momentum that allowed specific forms of science communication to survive the two German catastrophes. Scarcely less dramatic were the political events in Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union, but again the focus on popular science allows aspects of cultural history to be discerned which are otherwise left in the dark. First of all, James Andrews demonstrates in his essay that it was not the 1917 revolution in Russia that directly transformed popularization activities, but rather Stalin's “great break” of 1928. As such, Andrews advances the concept of a “contiguous communicative ‘public sphere’” that existed between 1861 and 1928, which was then replaced by the promotion of applied science and technology for the masses. Like the contributions on Germany and Russia, the final essay by Agustí Nieto-Galan on the role of science popularization under the Franco regime in Spain also carries the discussion far into the second half of the twentieth century. On the basis of a single individual, physical chemist turned popular science writer Miguel Masriera, the impact of the Spanish dictatorship on science communication is traced. Wavering between “soft” cultural resistance and critical collaboration, Masriera embodies a type of “citizen-scientist” (a term that was initially coined for German Nazi scientists, cf. Walker Reference Walker1989), who during the Cold War both served to legitimize the regime domestically but could still enjoy international recognition abroad.
This small collection of essays can hardly be called exhaustive, yet it allows the reader to travel through the twentieth century while visiting a good selection of places, and thus may claim to provide a rough portrait of Europe. It is fleshed out and complemented by additional work published elsewhere and will hopefully stimulate further attempts to paint a larger and more detailed picture. Further pieces of the picture have emerged, partly in exchange and collaboration with authors of this issue: some of the Polish organs and uses of popular science (Zasztowt Reference Zasztowt and Schirrmacher2009; Włodarczyk Reference Włodarczyk and Schirrmacher2009; Zasztowt et al. Reference Zasztowt, Włodarczyk and Jabłońska2012), some of particularly French kinds of popular and public science like song and cabaret (Raichvarg Reference Raichvarg and Schirrmacher2009), and some of Spanish popular paleontology, which analyzed the remains of the oldest Homo sapiens and declared him a “Spanish national” (Hochadel Reference Hochadel and Schirrmacher2009 and Reference Hochadel2013). Another fascinating case study combining a truly European understanding of scientific culture with a peripheral geographic location and a host of efforts to communicate science to a diverse people is Israel, which established two different popular science programs on TV, one in Hebrew and one in Arabic, thus representing a rather different national approach to science communication (Katz-Kimchi Reference Katz-Kimchi2012 and Reference Katz-Kimchi, Chakars and Anderson2013).
Dimensions of Science Communication
This European survey would be rather unrewarding, however, without some historiographical insights both from the individual contributions and from its synopsis. It appears to me that there are a number of dimensions of science communication along which the different cases can be measured, some of them probably with a wider and others with a more restricted range. There are political, cultural, religious, and epistemological dimensions as well as dimensions pertaining to the medium and to the question of who can speak for science, which is at the same time a question of power and also of gender.
The national approaches sketched above differentiate between those that are more defined by political power, as in the Soviet and Spanish cases, and those more deeply defined with reference to (national) culture, most strongly so in Germany (even in the German Democratic Republic things changed only slowly towards the Soviet model), but to a great extent in Italy and Britain as well. The political dimension is particularly apparent in the cases of legitimization of regimes like Francoism in Spain. On this scale France occupies a kind of middle position, as its culture scientifique was very much a “state affair,” equally cultural and political, given its state support and associated agenda (Bergeron Reference Bergeron2000).
The religious dimension turns out to be very instructive for comparing dictatorial regimes like Stalin's anti-religious Soviet Union, where, as Andrews explains, popularizers were seen as “godless activists” (bezbozhniki), and Franco's Spain, which in Nieto-Galan's analysis exhibited a “strong religious-laden scientific culture of Francoism” that was able to dwell on a rich Jesuit tradition of (popular) science (Herran Reference Herran2012). (This insight points to Poland as a most interesting case to be studied in the comparative perspective.)
The epistemological dimension was strongest in France, where a necessary divorce of science and opinion was postulated, for example, in Bachelard's epistemology of rupture, which declared a (necessary) scientification of life and called for a scientific organization of society or even a “scientific consciousness” as a major guiding principle (Bachelard Reference Bachelard1938). In the second half of the twentieth century a good number of activities followed this rationale, with the French state spending a great deal on actions promoting a culture scientifique et technique (CST) and establishing local centers for this (CCSTs, cf. Knuth Reference Knuth1992; Crozon and Maitte Reference Crozon and Maitte2001). More generally, this dimension pertains to questions of knowledge and the fabrication of meaning, and, as such, the co-creation of facts and meaning through the interaction of esoteric and exoteric circles (Fleck Reference Fleck1979), the process that is at the very heart of science communication.
There is one dimension we know rather little about so far: the media dimension. This is because it was not until the twentieth century that different media such as print, radio, television, and recently also the Internet, began competing with each other, while in the nineteenth century we find only the scientific theater coexisting with printed material (Pallo Reference Pallo, Papanelopoupou, Nieto-Galan and Perdriguero2009; Molvig Reference Molvig, Aubin, Bigg and Sibum2010). It remains to be asked what roles the different qualities and possibilities of print, audio, and audiovisual media played; how popular representations of science in writing, illustration, and motion pictures or newsreels created a new understanding of science and scientific practice (or even became part of knowledge production);Footnote 7 and whether media choice, media change, and media competition served to improve science communication or led to its deliberate use for extra-scientific purposes. In the following, we touch upon such questions only occasionally: when looking at the British example for the range of genres in popular science journals – from armchair fare to self-education material, juxtaposing encyclopedias and exhibitions in the French case, and extending the patterns established about the different levels of popularity of science communication in Germany, as provided by the various journals, magazines, and newspapers, to the new medium of radio.
The final dimension in my list concerns authorship and authority and addresses the question: Who can speak for science? There are the scientists themselves, or delegated representatives, who communicate directly out of the scientific community; and there are professional science writers, or even hack writers, who try to monopolize the field of popular science. Professional science journalism generally emerged rather late, and the more science was seen as a part of (high) culture, the more scientific qualifications were expected of the authors (Bauer and Bucchi Reference Bauer and Bucchi2007; Förster Reference Förster2007; Daum Reference Daum, Hettwer, Lehmkuhl, Wormer and Zotta2008). Clearly, there were interactions between groups of authors, and characteristic paths individuals took, one leading “from academic prestige to popular science,” as Nieto-Galan exemplifies in his case study; another the result of excluding women scientists from Italian universities, which made them become popular science writers, as Govoni discusses. Still another mechanism was Socialist collectivism, which forced all science communicators to join the programs of state organizations: in the Soviet Union the All-Union Society for the Dissemination of Political and Scientific Knowledge, and in the Soviet satellite states, which included East Germany, the respective sister organizations, allowing them to monopolize and control the discourses of popular science.
All six of these dimensions provide a perspective on science communication that elucidates the history of popular science. They can be understood as “tracers” that make visible both the historical evolution of science and the concurrent developments within the different national public spheres.
