Osiris

Although Crosland and Pyenson are polar opposites when it comes to judging the value of examining science from a national perspective, they are also both unusual in that they self-consciously do it. Most historians of science have taken both national and transnational perspectives for granted, or kept them in the background. A vehicle is needed for a feasible metahistorical investigation of national versus transnational science, a limited body of literature that is occasionally, but not always, aware of the national and transnational dimensions of science.

This essay will discuss seven volumes of Osiris, spanning the period from 1986 to 2009. The first volume, edited by Sally Gregory Kohlstedt and Margaret Rossiter in 1986, on American science, grew out of the activities of a group of junior historians of American science in the late 1970s. They first established a newsletter, History of Science in America: News and Views, and took advantage of the revival of Osiris by the American History of Science Society.Footnote ²⁰ The third volume of Osiris, published in 1989, was an analogous study of German science. As the editor, Kathryn Olesko, noted, historical work on German science, including both an increasing number of studies and a greater variety of topics, had reached a ‘turning point’. The subjects, sources and strategies employed by historians differed from those of only a decade and a half ago, with a particular emphasis on institutional studies.Footnote ²¹ In 1993, the eighth volume was devoted not to a national science, but rather to research schools. Most of the chapters in this collection, edited by Gerald Geison and Frederic Holmes, were case studies of science within a single national context. The one exception, from Mary Jo Nye, explicitly dealt with the concept of ‘national styles’ in science.Footnote ²²

There then follows a twelve-year gap in Osiris volumes that deal with ‘national’ or ‘international’ issues in science.Footnote ²³ The twentieth volume of Osiris, edited by Carola Sachse and this author, uses comparative case studies, each including an example from the German Kaiser Wilhelm Society, one of the leading scientific institutions of its day, and other national counterparts. This transnational comparative approach, whereby German examples were compared with those from other countries and regimes, was designed first and foremost in order to try and illuminate the particular influence of National Socialism on science.Footnote ²⁴ The following year John Krige and Kai-Henrik Barth edited an Osiris collection devoted to the significant role played by science and technology in international affairs, as well as investigating science and technology as an instrument of state power. Although the ‘postwar intersection between science, technology, and foreign policy’ has been extensively studied, the editors note that these historians of science and technology have been reluctant to place their work in a broader historical context or to build bridges with other disciplines – a deficit addressed by this volume.Footnote ²⁵

Finally, two recent Osiris volumes return to ‘national’ science, but in forms very different from the first few collections. Michael Gordin, Karl Hall and Alexei Kojevnikov edit a collection of essays that deals with Russian science, but uses the theme of ‘intelligentsia science’ to investigate the assimilation of science and technology into Russian culture during the ‘Russian century’. This is the period from 1860, when Russian science rose to international prominence, to the 1960s, when it arguably began to decline along with the Soviet Union.Footnote ²⁶ Carol Harrison and Ann Johnson's Osiris volume investigates the role of science and technology in the formation of national identity. They argue that the modern and the national states ‘grew up together’, with nations celebrating their modernity by displaying their scientific prowess.Footnote ²⁷

Our interest in these essay collections is not the specific details of the various case studies, although some are relevant and will be used, but rather the relatively few points where authors deal explicitly with the issue of national versus international or transnational science. In fact none of these collections address this directly, and most of the essays do not at all. The volumes on American and German science take for granted that a national focus is appropriate. The collection of essays on research schools deals with this issue only indirectly, although most of the examples can be interpreted in the national context. In contrast to the studies of American and German science, the more recent volume on Russian science uses a different unifying theme, ‘intelligentsia science’, but is nevertheless focused on one nation. The most recent issue studied here explicitly addresses the national issue in the context of national identity, and appears to have been conceived and composed with multiculturalism in mind. Even the volume with the title Global Power and Knowledge emphasizes the projection of national power and science. Finally, the Osiris volume that the author of this essay co-edited uses international comparisons first and foremost to illuminate a particular national example – science during National Socialism in Germany. Thus the ‘national’ plays a much more significant role than the ‘international’ or ‘transnational’ in these collections.

National science

Arnold Thackray, himself an emigrant to the United States, strikes an enthusiastic, if not chauvinistic, note in the foreword to the first volume of the second series of Osiris, dated ‘Independence Day, 1986’:

In her survey of American science and public policy after the Second World War in the same volume, Margaret Rossiter casts this in the national context, echoing Thackray's tone. During the post-war period, the number of scientists increased rapidly in the United States. The large quantity and ‘high (“world class”) quality of American science’ in this period is demonstrated by the ‘large number of Nobel Prizes going to Americans (whether immigrants or native born) during 1945–1970’. According to Rossiter, there were several reasons for this increase. European science collapsed suddenly in the 1930s. Moreover, there was a ‘new and highly visible stress on science and technology in the United States in the postwar era, as both became the basis of international competition and even national survival’.Footnote ²⁸ From this American perspective, and in sharp contrast to Crosland's analysis, ‘national’ science appears to be a zero-sum game with winners and losers.

The Osiris volumes devoted to other ‘major’ scientific nations like Germany and Russia tell a similar story. When Kathryn Olesko, the editor of the collection of essays on German science, discusses where this field should go in the future, the suggested foci are local studies and the twentieth century, both of which remain within the boundaries of Germany (and both of which have since been done).Footnote ²⁹ The more recent Osiris volume on science in Russia uses the concept of ‘intelligentsia’ as a surrogate for national science. Michael Gordin and Karl Hall, two of the three editors of the volume on Russian science, define ‘intelligentsia’ in their introduction ‘not as a single concept or group but as a heterogeneous and evolving social institution’. A closer study of the scientific and technical intelligentsia can ‘do a great deal more than transcend tired realist/constructivist or internalist/externalist dichotomies in the field’.Footnote ³⁰ However, since ‘intelligentsia’ is associated so strongly with Russian culture, it is not clear that this is significantly different from studying a national science.

Jane Maienschein, writing in the first Osiris collection on the history of American biology, reminds us that, at some point in the past, scholars had to defend the idea that social, political, and cultural context mattered. In other words, if you go back far enough, taking into account the ‘setting’, including the national focus, was itself innovative. During the 1960s the relatively new field of history of science had ‘emphasized intellectual history and scientific ideas’. Even Thomas Kuhn's influential The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which argues that the scientific community, and not just the individual scientist, determines science, deals with scientific ideas, the interplay of theory and experiment, but took ‘for granted the setting in which these developments were unfolding’. Maienschein notes that when scientists have considered that the setting might affect science – for example when professional biological institutions, including Johns Hopkins University, the University of Chicago, and the Marine Biological Laboratory – were founded in the nineteenth century, the result was discussion ‘about what biology in the United States would be like’, and the recognition that the result might be a ‘self-consciously American biology’. However, the question of how a particular setting would influence science was not explicitly addressed.

Twenty-two years after Maienschein's analysis, Gordin and Hall made clear how orthodox, if not conservative, the national perspective had become. Referring to Crosland's address, they argue, ‘Even raising the issue may strike the contemporary reader as a bit old-fashioned. Defences of national categories in the sciences do, in fact, tend to be rather dated.’ Historians are ‘accustomed to perusing histories of American biology, Brazilian physics, French chemistry, and so on – but often without any explicit attempt to argue why this is a fruitful way to analyze each of those different fields’. In a sense agreeing with Pyenson, they ask why the history of science should be carved up into ‘segments whose traditional boundary lines have been set by the vagaries of nineteenth- and twentieth-century politics?’Footnote ³¹

This raises the question: what is the purpose of a national focus? Is it used to help illuminate the development of science, or to demonstrate the scientific performance of a nation? Pyenson put it this way: ‘Can there be such a thing as American science, or is this simply a short way of saying, “Science in the United States of America”? That is to say, is science universal, or does it have a special character in one or another national setting?’Footnote ³² Should one merely study the science that takes place within given national boundaries, or instead investigate science as tied to a particular nationality, if not arising as a consequence of it? Several authors in different Osiris collections suggest that ‘science in a given nation’ is different from that ‘nation's science’. Albert Moyer, writing on the history of physics in the volume on American science, admonishes historians to ‘remain cognizant of the delicate distinction between physics in the United States, which merely happens to be done by Americans, and American physics, which is peculiarly American’.Footnote ³³ It is not clear how alien physicists working in the United States fit into this picture.

In Moyer's analysis, most authors concerned with American physics were explicitly or implicitly concerned ‘with the issue of the United States’ rise to world leadership in physics', the ‘dramatic transition’ from ‘international scientific subservience to dominance’, which was apparently demonstrated by the atomic bomb. Moyer notes that ‘the implicit assumption here is that there is something distinctive about how American physicists, both individually and collectively, responded to the heightened politicization of physics that occurred through the advent of atomic bombs', and that this reflects a broader concern among historians with the overall nature of physics in a democracy.Footnote ³⁴ This theme of American exceptionalism can be found throughout the historiography of American history.

Of course, Moyer leaves the émigrés out of this analysis. If we recognize their contribution, the picture becomes more complex. They were not American when they worked on the first atomic bombs, even though many of them subsequently became citizens of the United States, and after being persecuted in Nazi Germany they hardly had the same perception of democracy as did native-born physicists. If the scientists who fled Hitler played an important role in both the construction of nuclear weapons and the subsequent post-war developments, then, following Crosland, perhaps it was not exclusively an ‘American’ story, rather a composite of many different nationalities.

National styles and characters

In the volume on Russian science, Gordin and Hall refer to

Here, in contrast to Moyer, an explanation is given of the difference between ‘science in a nation’ and a ‘national science’. Although Gordin and Hall do not use this term, their approach appears similar to the concept of different ‘national styles’ in science. This is arguably a step more refined than just ‘national science’, because it assumes that there are different styles in science and argues that some of these can be seen at the national level. But this raises a similar question: are these differences are caused by the national culture? In other words, is German science the style of science Germans do, or does it have a particular ‘Germanness’ about it?

The relationship between ‘national style’ and ‘national character’ is problematic.Footnote ³⁶ Pyenson cautions, ‘The enormity of racism cautions anyone who seeks to characterize national styles in science. Yet a search for the parts of science that transcend the discoverers naturally leads to a discussion of group characteristics, national and otherwise.’Footnote ³⁷ Statements about the French or British national character, for example, are no longer considered particularly useful, or in some cases perhaps even appropriate – although such judgements were quite common in the not-too-distant past. Jeffrey Johnson, in his study of chemistry in Germany, argues that the historian should avoid ‘the pitfalls of ill-founded ethnic stereotypes and vaguely defined “national character.”’Footnote ³⁸ If we cringe at discussions of ‘Germanness' in general, then how can we apply this concept to German science or scientists?

This does not mean that we cannot critically examine a particular national scientific community. Peter Weingart points out that, although eugenics flourished in many countries in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it was only in Germany that ‘the small community of race hygienists (as eugenicists called themselves there), seeking status and recognition, formed a coalition with politicians of the conservative and radical right’.Footnote ³⁹ However, this example is clearly overdetermined – there are many factors one can summon up to explain why eugenics took this path in this particular country. Current historians probably would not give priority to ‘German character’ when explaining it.

Mary Jo Nye, writing in the Osiris volume on national styles, is one of the very few Osiris authors to address the issue of differing national styles directly with a comparison of French and English chemistry. She in turn cites Dominique Pestre's argument that the American style in physics, ‘getting the numbers out’, became an international style in cooperative big physics ventures like CERN and displaced ‘Copenhagen physics’ during the 1950s. Nye argues that this transformation of a national style into an international one

Differences in style can result from formal education, informal apprenticeship, tacit understanding and emulation of a mentor. Moreover, the passing on of such ‘style’ is not accidental:

Nye's analysis is more satisfying than merely positing a particular ‘national’ character for science, because she demonstrates how such a distinctive national style could develop out of the practice of science. In other words, national styles are not automatic consequences of a shared biology, rather they are social constructions.

So far, only the ‘great’ scientific nations have been mentioned in this essay, and indeed treated in most of the Osiris volumes, but they were not the only source of science. More recent studies of science and national identity include some classic examples, but go beyond these to study smaller European and Third World nations. Here the focus can no longer always be the ‘best’ science, rather how science develops and works in a variety of social and cultural contexts. The ‘winners-and-losers’ rhetoric can be translated into appreciating hitherto underrepresented science and scientists, or emphasizing examples that, while perhaps not world-class, are worthy of study because their relative inferiority can be explained by the disadvantaged context.

The Osiris volume edited by Carol Harrison and Ann Johnson makes the case for science in the creation of national identity, that science ‘became a marker of national character’.Footnote ⁴² Here the meaning of ‘national science’ is inverted: it is not the nation or national character that determines science, rather science and technology mould the nation. Since the Enlightenment, Harrison and Johnson argue, science and engineering have become ‘“proof” that the nation can improve the living conditions of citizens, “proof” that the nation and its citizens are modern, and “proof” that they are economically and militarily competitive in a global world.’ Thus, they argue, the capacity to produce science has become an ‘indicator of national superiority’.Footnote ⁴³ After nations like France, Britain, Germany and the United States had become globally dominant thanks, in part, to the power produced by the nexus between a ‘mathematized modern science and the bureaucratized national state’, other nations sought to imitate them and therefore to become less dependent on them, or perhaps even to compete with them.

Michael Gordin's chapter in Harrison and Johnson's volume compares two examples of ‘science at the boundary’ in different nations, Russia and Ireland. Gordin sees two senses in which national identity can be applied to science: first of all, as demonstrating that ‘individual scientists approach the study of nature in ways strongly correlated with a frame of mind set by their national origins'; second, as a rhetorical device used in specific nations by public figures, including scientists, to ‘define the political and economic contours of their nation-state as being “scientific.”’ The nation as a whole acquires the identity of a ‘scientific nation’, without having to ‘project that political strategy – for it is a political strategy – into the minds of its citizens’.Footnote ⁴⁴

Scientific internationalism

Gerald Geison, one of the editors of the volume on research schools and a major proponent of the concept of ‘national styles’, notes that these have become less prominent in an ‘ever-more-interconnected international scientific community’.Footnote ⁴⁵ But a collection of essays on the global reach of science, which at first sight might appear to be an international focus, is in fact first and foremost about the projection of national power, with science playing an important role.Footnote ⁴⁶ Here scientific internationalism, with reference to Paul Forman,Footnote ⁴⁷ was ‘sacrificed on the altars of nationalism and patriotism’ after the Second World War as governments in the Western industrialized countries matched science with national priorities.Footnote ⁴⁸ Science and technology became ‘an affair of the state’,Footnote ⁴⁹ and ‘the military, economic, and cultural destinies of nations were perceived to rest on advances in science and technology’.Footnote ⁵⁰

Internationalism in science has a long history, for certain problems in fields like astronomy, meteorology and oceanography transcended national borders and required a coordinated international effort. Before the Second World War, scientists themselves conducted much of that international effort as individuals or through scientific societies. Because of this ‘preestablished platform for the integration of science and scientists into foreign affairs’, scientists could be used by national states for this purpose after the war.Footnote ⁵¹

But the influence of state patronage undermined the ideology of scientific internationalism, whereby ‘the participation of the nation in the scientist's fame spares the scientist any conflict between advancing his science and advancing the interests of his nation’.Footnote ⁵² Ron Doel, Dieter Hoffmann and Nikolai Krementsov, writing in the comparative Osiris volume, use some examples of state-sponsored international conferences in Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Soviet Union and the Cold War United States to illustrate the conflicts. For ideological reasons, international scientific meetings became a concern at the highest levels of the state. Scientists keenly wanted to hold international scientific conferences in their home countries, for several reasons. Failing to do so would cede the advantages the conferences entailed to other national scientific communities. Scientists used arguments of national prestige and other non-scientific rationales for holding meetings. Most scientists involved with these conferences ‘fell in a tragic middle ground, needing sustained ties with elite colleagues in other nations to keep their research programs competitive, even as they struggled with state demands’.Footnote ⁵³

Some scientists feared state-sponsored international cooperation because of its potential loss of scientific autonomy and credibility, but government involvement also brought financial and other advantages with it.Footnote ⁵⁴ John Krige provides a compelling example of such entanglement with the American ‘Atoms for Peace’ programme, a ‘fusion between the invocation of internationalism and the pursuit of national interest [that] was achieved in the nuclear field in the early cold war’. A researcher who participated in this programme, which wove ‘surveillance and security into the fabric of openness and internationalism’, could be both a good scientist and a good patriot.Footnote ⁵⁵

Itty Abraham uses the subject of nuclear science and its applications to argue that the national character of science and technology can be misleading. The close relation between nuclear power and national power has led to the assumption that nuclear programmes must be uniquely identified with particular countries. However, no atomic programme has ever been purely indigenous, and the science leading to nuclear fission took place in several different nations.Footnote ⁵⁶ Here Abraham turns Crosland's analysis on its head. Instead of a transnational phenomenon really being a combination of national cases, what looks national is in fact only a part of a transnational development.

Transfer

One of the most prominent strategies for illuminating the ‘national’ in science was to look for the transfer of ideas, people and institutions from one nation to another. This can be seen from the perspective of an importer, here the young United States or the reforming Russia, or an exporter, such as France in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and Germany in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. From the perspective of the importer, this is characterized not as copying, but rather as adapting and building up certain aspects of superior science in order to go beyond it. From the perspective of the exporter, the story is quite different; the superiority of a nation's science is demonstrated precisely by the eagerness of other countries to adopt it.

John Servos, writing on American chemistry, notes that while the United States has assumed leadership in many branches of chemistry in the twentieth century, ‘there is no branch of the science in which Americans enjoy a monopoly’, and indeed ‘there are significant issues to be examined that relate both to the reception of ideas or methods from abroad and to the conditions favouring the emergence or elaboration of certain traditions of thought or practice in the United States'. The growth of chemistry in America depended on the ‘transmission of ideas and institutions from one national context to another’. Comparative histories of chemistry in America and Europe can illustrate ‘how local circumstances mold national styles in science’.Footnote ⁵⁷

Michael Gordin, here writing on Russian science, is one of the few writers from the Osiris volumes who examines science as an object transferred from one national context to another. Generally speaking, Gordin argues that states have used two strategies for introducing Western science into a new cultural context, executed either individually or in combination: ‘importing the scientists as retainers from foreign lands, thus outsourcing the talent (think of Peter the Great and his academy project); or sending one's countrymen abroad to receive their training, then bringing them back, thus outsourcing the training’.Footnote ⁵⁸

Both the tsarist bureaucrats and the scientists themselves realized that it was simply not possible to ‘import a science complete from abroad, hoping that institutions would emerge without the cultural backdrop to make sense of this new form of life’. Instead, a blend between the forms of science already developed in western Europe with specific Russian forms helped make science ‘something that fit with the environment posed by Russia’.Footnote ⁵⁹ During the second half of the nineteenth century, the Russian state decided to send their talented graduate students and ‘postdocs’ abroad, with most of them ending up in one of the German states.Footnote ⁶⁰ Gordin argues that the German ‘exile’ was important for German chemistry in particular, ironically because the Russian scientists were alienated by their experiences abroad.Footnote ⁶¹

Albert Moyer describes another transfer of scientific expertise and knowledge from Germany, here the well-known emigration of scientists from Hitler's Germany to the United States. In particular, he notes that different camps of historians, those interested in ‘American science’ on one hand, or in the fate of the émigrés on the other, have interpreted the relative importance during the 1920s and 1930s of ‘native-born versus European refugee physicists’ differently when it comes to ‘advancing the American community's institutional and research capacities’, the transmission of quantum mechanics to the United States, and adding theoretical physicists to a community previously dominated by experimentalists.Footnote ⁶² Here the villain is clear: Nazism. But did the ‘muses fleeing Hitler’ transform American science, thus helping it do things that it could not have done on its own, or merely here and there enrich it or accelerate something that was already world-class?

Comparison

Comparison is often resisted when ideology or political structure is involved. The classic example of this is the debate over the concept of a ‘totalitarian’ state during the Cold War, whereby Communism in the Soviet Union was compared, and sometimes equated, with National Socialism in Germany in order to discredit it. Historians of science who study either Russia or Germany in the twentieth century have often been reluctant to embrace comparative history because of the ballast of the totalitarianism debate. But to compare two things is not necessarily to equate them. Indeed one can argue that differences can only be determined by means of comparison.

Comparative history is actually quite flexible. Almost any sort of historical comparison is possible, but comparisons between two or more nations are most common. These correspond to the ‘still dominant historiographic tradition of national history’. However, global comparisons of selected nations are relatively rare, with limited comparisons much more common. Temporal modes of comparison range from ‘diachronic comparisons of different periods within a given country to synchronic comparisons of different geographic regions’.Footnote ⁶³

Sachse and Walker argue that international comparisons between science or scientists from different political systems must bear in mind two contradictory tendencies: (a) scientific research and development tend to be ‘homogenized by common backgrounds, international communication and competition, and common needs’; (b) scientific research and development also ‘remain heterogeneous due to local conditions, including national and political constraints’. In fact, there is a ‘constant and unending tension between forces that make science the same everywhere and those that make it different’. Instead of asking whether science in a given comparison was the same, or different, or whether politics and national culture can really influence science, one can ask whether the ‘forces that tend to make science rigid and unyielding outweigh, or are outweighed by, others that tend to make science pliable and plastic’.Footnote ⁶⁴

Thus Sachse and Walker's comparative analysis transcends the national versus international/transnational debate. They focused on comparisons of different political systems and ideologies, but their analysis can also be used for other situations. The other examples of comparative work, or calls for such work, in the Osiris volumes are very much expressed in national terms. Sally Gregory Kohlstedt, one of the editors of the Osiris volume on American science, recognizes the value of comparative studies because they reveal the influences of British, French and German science on the United States, often through ‘derivative organizations’: continuities reveal the ‘tenacity of values and organizational patterns’, while discontinuities ‘suggest ways in which social, economic, geographic and political forces modify initially similar objectives’.Footnote ⁶⁵ Here the comparison is designed to illuminate only American science, not what had influenced it.

Albert Moyer, commenting on a comparison by Lillian Hoddeson of high-energy physics labs in the United States and Japan that argued that different cultural norms, economic realities and social circumstances affected the two research centres, notes that ‘national differences do account for the distinctive icing on pieces of the international cake’.Footnote ⁶⁶ Indeed Moyer, writing here before the fall of the Soviet Union, and apparently still influenced by the Cold War, suggests that perhaps comparative studies of the post-war physics communities in the United States and the Soviet Union ‘would help to clarify those traits of American physics that can be attributed to American political values’.Footnote ⁶⁷

Kathryn Olesko, in her introduction to the Osiris volume on German science, praises the 1975 monograph by Paul Forman, John L. Heilbron and Spencer Weart comparing physics in Britain, Germany and France for making it clear that ‘there was much to be gained from comparing the German experience with that in other countries'. But she goes on to say that historians of French and of English science remained focused on their own national sciences.Footnote ⁶⁸ The volume on German science does not have a comparative chapter. In a critical afterword to the same volume, James Albisetti echoes the call for more comparison, and R. Steven Turner reiterates Olesko's point that historians have been more concerned with national themes when comparison would be helpful.Footnote ⁶⁹

By the twentieth century, political ideology played a role along with the nation. Here there is an obvious parallel to a question like ‘science in America’ or ‘American science’? Should we, for example, call the science done in Italy during Mussolini's reign ‘fascist’? If so, then do we mean science done in a fascist state, or that there was something ‘fascist’ about these scientists' work? Basic questions about science and political ideology – for example, what was ‘Nazi’ about science in Nazi Germany (which again reminds one of a question like what the difference is between science in Germany and German science) – can logically only be answered in context by comparing examples from Hitler's Germany to those from other regimes.

Asif Siddiqi, who investigates the role German researchers played after the Second World War in the Soviet Union, asks a similar question: ‘how much of Soviet science was “Soviet?”’Footnote ⁷⁰ German researchers came to Russia in the post-Second World War era, when the Soviet Union was locked in a dangerous competition with the United States. The Soviet Union, and its scientists, needed both to make use of German expertise – sometimes from unwilling scientists, engineers and technicians – and to deny having benefited from it. The paradoxical result was that German researchers who were trying hard to serve the Soviet state were rebuffed, redefined as ‘less useful’, and eventually sent home.Footnote ⁷¹

Alexei Kojevnikov, in a persuasive revisionist argument that almost sounds a bit ‘nationalist’, argues for a revised interpretation of Soviet science, accepting it on its own terms rather than making it the ‘alienated “other.”’ Indeed, although ‘potentially troubling to some’, some specific features of Soviet science promoted by communism have ‘contributed to, evolved into, or become part of today's generally accepted scientific practices and ostensibly anticommunist worldview’.Footnote ⁷²

Sachse's and Walker's collection of comparative case studies similarly calls into question assumptions about the role of political ideology in science by reinforcing the fairly recent rejection of the naive and self-serving, or alternatively arrogant and conceited, belief that science flourishes best, or even can only really flourish, in a Western-style liberal democracy:Footnote ⁷³

This Osiris volume, the only one explicitly ‘international’ or ‘transnational’, is so in a ‘selfish’ way. Although the international comparisons have value in their own right, this collection was intended to help illuminate science under National Socialism in Germany, very much a ‘national’ topic.