American Hegemony and the Postwar Reconstruction of Science in Europe (Transformations: Studies in the History of Science and Technology) [Paperback]

John Krige (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 29, 2008 | ISBN-10: 0262612259 | ISBN-13: 978-0262612258

In 1945, the United States was not only the strongest economic and military power in the world; it was also the world's leader in science and technology. In American Hegemony and the Postwar Reconstruction of Science in Europe, John Krige describes the efforts of influential figures in the United States to model postwar scientific practices and institutions in Western Europe on those in America. They mobilized political and financial support to promote not just America's scientific and technological agendas in Western Europe but its Cold War political and ideological agendas as well.Drawing on the work of diplomatic and cultural historians, Krige argues that this attempt at scientific dominance by the United States can be seen as a form of "consensual hegemony," involving the collaboration of influential local elites who shared American values. He uses this notion to analyze a series of case studies that describe how the U.S. administration, senior officers in the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, the NATO Science Committee, and influential members of the scientific establishment--notably Isidor I. Rabi of Columbia University and Vannevar Bush of MIT--tried to Americanize scientific practices in such fields as physics, molecular biology, and operations research. He details U.S. support for institutions including CERN, the Niels Bohr Institute, the French CNRS and its laboratories at Gif near Paris, and the never-established "European MIT." Krige's study shows how consensual hegemony in science not only served the interests of postwar European reconstruction but became another way of maintaining American leadership and "making the world safe for democracy."

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About the Author

John Krige is Kranzberg Professor in the School of History, Technology, and Society at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Product Details

• Paperback: 392 pages
• Publisher: The MIT Press (August 29, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0262612259
• ISBN-13: 978-0262612258
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 5.7 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #450,573 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

My first PhD degree was in Physical Chemistry. I left the South African Atomic Energy Board when I was effectively asked to contribute to their nuclear weapons project, now discontinued. I got a second PhD at the University of Sussex in England, and became an historian working at the intersection between the history of science and technology and the foreign policy of governments. I concentrate on knowledge that is 'dual-use', i.e. civil and military, above all in the nuclear and space sectors. My time period is the Cold war. In the initial stages of my career I wrote about the place of this knowledge in relationships between major European powers. For the last decade my focus has shifted to U.S. - European relationships. I am interested in how the United States uses its scientific and technological pre-eminence in these sensitive domains as an instrument of soft power, and as a tool to shape the research agendas of its allies.