10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17179
application/pdf
2038-3460
17179
1
en
Massimo Mazzotti
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/
Tecnoscienza – Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
Jon Agar, Science in the Twentieth Century and Beyond, Polity Press, 2012
Text.Serial.Journal
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/
5
Book Reviews
2014-07-14
2023-06-13
2014-07-14
2023-07-24
214-216
TS
Massimo Mazzotti
2014/07/14
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17179
214
University of California Berkeley
2038-3460
1
en
216
Jon Agar, Science in the Twentieth Century and Beyond, Polity Press, 2012
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/article/download/17179/16081
5
214                                                             Tecnoscienza 5 (1)

Jon Agar
Science in the Twentieth Century and Beyond
Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012, pp. 614

Massimo Mazzotti University of California Berkeley

     Jon Agar’s latest book is ambitious, thought provoking, and a verita-
ble tour de force. For one thing, it far exceeds what is currently consid-
ered the standard scope for a study in the history of science. Since the fe-
licitous interaction with science studies and the practice turn, historians
of science have indeed tended to concentrate their attention on relatively
narrow settings, steering away from grand narratives and great heroes.
This move, among other things, facilitated the control of relevant parame-
ters and the empirical reconstruction of scientific knowledge as the out-
come of social processes. Hence the wealth of microhistorical narratives,
and their paradigmatic status for the history of science of the last three
decades. Well-crafted microhistories have certainly brought delight, but
also raised some important issues. Has the field become too specialized
and less open to interdisciplinary dialogue? Is the fragmentation of the
historiographical landscape irreversible? Does it mean that we have lost
the ability to discern and write about large-scale features of scientific life?
For example: does it still make sense to talk about the “scientific revolu-
tion” as if it were some kind of unitary phenomenon? In short, historians
of science have found themselves wrangling with a version of the micro-
macro problem. We need to leave behind the comfort zone of small-scale
case studies, some have argued, and search for larger patterns, especially
if we want to open up conversations with emerging fields such as the his-
tory of capitalism and globalization.
     Agar’s book addresses the question head-on: how can one write about
“science in the twentieth century and beyond” in our post-Kuhnian
world? The logical structure of scientific theories has long lost its appeal
as an analytic tool set, while narratives of major ruptures and revolutions
have always been too otherworldly for historians. Steven Shapin offered
an intriguing model of large-scale social constructivist narrative in his
concise history of the scientific revolution, a book about something that,
as he says, didn’t quite happen – and yet is worth writing about. Shapin’s
anti-essentialist approach looks explicitly at microsociology (e.g.,
Barnesian performativity) for strategies to write about the changes in the
way knowledge was produced and legitimated between the sixteenth and
eighteenth centuries. Agar, by contrast, filters the rich social constructiv-
ist repertoire through the interpretive notion of “working worlds”. Draw-
ing on authors such as Thomas Hughes – who certainly did not shy away
from tackling large-scale systems – Agar uses the notion of working
worlds to refer to: “arenas of human projects that generate problems” (p.
3). These problems can hardly be solved directly but, once they are fully
Book Reviews                                                             215
articulated, they can be treated scientifically. That is to say, science can
build simplified, abstract models that can be represented and manipulat-
ed through an array of techniques. The outcomes of these manipulations
are possible solutions to the original problems. Such is the sophistication
of the techniques involved that, in the course of this process, the very ac-
tors might become oblivious to the fact that the models and theories they
are manipulating and deploying originated from concrete working
worlds. This notion is thus designed to do some heavy lifting, including
connecting the most esoteric theoretical knowledge to the material di-
mension of scientific practice. Yet Agar leaves his own articulation of so-
cial constructivism via working worlds rather open and flexible, more of a
gesture in a certain direction than a fully developed analytic concept.
Note, for example, how he does not elaborate it further in the concluding
section.
    The working worlds give Agar a handle on crafting a narrative of the
history of twentieth-century science. He recognizes four partially over-
lapping working worlds that have dominated the century: the construc-
tion and maintenance of technological systems, the mobilization of
fighting forces, civil administration, and the maintenance of the human
body. The book, however, is not organized around a thematic structure,
but follows a fairly traditional chronological one. The first part focuses on
continuities and discontinuities between nineteenth- and twentieth-
century science, focusing on the emergence of the new physics and the
new life sciences. The laboratory is introduced as the distinctive site of
these news sciences, while their practices are related to the modes of
emerging mass production industry. Here Agar deals also with the new
sciences of the self. In this case the relevant working world is the admin-
istration of institutions such as the asylum, the school, and the army. The
second part of the book examines what we might call the co-production
of science and warfare, a well-trodden area in the historiography of recent
science. Agar discusses the effects of mass mobilization in the First World
War, the American scientist-entrepreneurs of the interwar period, Wei-
mar science and the Forman thesis, Nazi science, and science in the Sovi-
et Union. This part ends with the dawn of a new generation of large-scale
scientific instruments, especially in California. The third part is indeed
devoted to Big Science, from its emergence and institutionalization dur-
ing the Second World War to the ways in which it transformed the sci-
ences during the Cold War period. Typical Cold War sciences such as
electronic computing, cybernetics, particle physics, information theory,
systems ecology, and molecular biology are examined in some detail. Fi-
nally, in part four, Agar focuses on “our world”, identifying the forces
and factors that are re-shaping scientific life at the opening of the twenty-
first century. De-regulated markets, social movements, informatization
processes, and the Internet are the main protagonists of these last few
chapters. In his concluding remarks Agar fleshes out four main cross-
cutting themes that run through the book: the extraordinary importance
216                                                               Tecnoscienza 5 (1)

of warfare, the rise of the United States as scientific superpower, the shift
of funding from physics to biology in the second half of the century, and
what Agar calls the “missing stories”. This term refers to the historio-
graphical gaps that characterize the existing historiography, from the
many connections that are not pursued, to the scientific ideas that are not
mentioned because they died out quickly, to neglected analytical tools
such as those that reveal the specificities of national research systems. But
missing are also those stories that did not break through post-war regimes
of secrecy, what Peter Galison called the: “classified universe…[which]
very probably is much larger than…[the] unclassified one” (p. 508).
    While always effective and highly readable, Agar’s narrative is, per-
haps inevitably, uneven in terms of originality and depth. This has to do
with expertise as well as the current status of historiography – which is
very sketchy for some areas, e.g., the most recent trends. Agar is at his
best when discussing post-war digital computing and the many paths not
taken – which is hardly surprisingly given his own groundbreaking work
in this area. But the specialist reader will find other insightful and though
provoking sections, such as the discussion on science and social move-
ments in the 1960s.
    Agar has produced a truly impressive piece of scholarship, synthetiz-
ing a vast amount of secondary literature – this alone would make for an
invaluable contribution to the history of science. But this book is not just
interesting and useful as a survey. Most intriguing is the way it provokes
the reader into reflecting on the possible modes and implications of scal-
ing up the level of our analyses to identify larger patterns in contemporary
scientific life.

References
Shapin, S. (1996) The Scientific Revolution, Chicago University Press, Chicago.



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