ABSTRACT OF PAPER
Title: Taming Maxwell’s demon: Economists, Historians of science, and the Bush Report on American Science Policy
Author: Backhouse Roger, Maas Harro
On September 20, 1944, when victory for the allied forced on the Axis powers was coming near, Rupert Maclaurin (1907-1959), professor of Industrial Relations at MIT, sent a letter to Henry Guerlac (1910-1975) to sound him out about possibilities for post-war collaboration. Noting that “the history of science has very promising opportunities” at MIT, he wrote he would like “to explore with you the possibilities of your ultimately joining our group here.” Maclaurin hoped Guerlac would exchange his position as an assistant professor in the recently established history of science department at Wisconsin for a career at MIT, if he would be willing to switch his field to “history of modern science and engineering.”But even if Guerlac would not accept a permanent position at MIT, Maclaurin hoped he would be interested in collaborating in a new graduate program in which the “skills and the background of the economist and the historian of science would be combined in some way or would at least benefit by cross fertilization of ideas.” Guerlac did not take up the MIT offer and Maclaurin’s hopes of setting up an interdisciplinary graduate program in which historians of science and economists would collaborate to study the intricate historical relations between science and industry came to nothing. However, before he left MIT for Cornell, Guerlac collaborated with Maclaurin on another project–one that was to set the terms, at least rhetorically, for post-war science policy in the United States. From December 1944 to May 1945, Maclaurin served as Secretary to the Bowman Committee, one of the committees Vannevar Bush set up to answer the four questions in the letter Franklin Roosevelt wrote to Bush on November 17, 1944, asking for a report on the organization of post-war science so as to ensure America’s safety and welfare, with Guerlac as director of the committee’s secretariat, which included amongst others another young historian of science, I. Bernard Cohen and Maclaurin’s younger colleague in the economics department Paul Samuelson. The central question the Bowman committee was asked to consider was the Federal Government’s role in supporting scientific research after the war. The Bowman committee served as the arena in which two opposing positions were played out, one in favor of planned science, the other in favor in science left free to scientists. The outcome was — at least rhetorically — a defeat for those in favor of planned science. As will be argued in this paper, this high profile collaboration would contribute to the marginalization of Maclaurin in the economics department of MIT, but also to Guerlac's decision to move to Ithaca, abandoning his original ideas about the road the history of science in the United States should take. Thus, the collaboration between economists and historians of science not only had consequences for US science policy in the post-war era, but also for the directions history of science and economics would take.
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