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For much of the twentieth century scientists sought to explain objects and processes by reducing them to their components—nuclei into protons and neutrons, proteins into amino acids, and so on—but over the past forty years there has been a marked turn toward explaining phenomena by building them up rather than breaking them down. This collection reflects on the history and significance of this turn toward “growing explanations” from the bottom up. The essays show how this strategy—based on a widespread appreciation for complexity even in apparently simple processes and on the capacity of computers to simulate such complexity—has played out in a broad array of sciences. They describe how scientists are reordering knowledge to emphasize growth, change, and contingency and, in so doing, are revealing even phenomena long considered elementary—like particles and genes—as emergent properties of dynamic processes. Written by leading historians and philosophers of science, these essays examine the range of subjects, people, and goals involved in changing the character of scientific analysis over the last several decades. They highlight the alternatives that fields as diverse as string theory, fuzzy logic, artificial life, and immunology bring to the forms of explanation that have traditionally defined scientific modernity. A number of the essays deal with the mathematical and physical sciences, addressing concerns with hybridity and the materials of the everyday world. Other essays focus on the life sciences, where questions such as “What is life?” and “What is an organism?” are undergoing radical re-evaluation. Together these essays mark the contours of an ongoing revolution in scientific explanation. Contributors. David Aubin, Amy Dahan Dalmedico, Richard Doyle, Claus Emmeche, Peter Galison, Stefan Helmreich, Ann Johnson, Evelyn Fox Keller, Ilana Löwy, Claude Rosental, Alfred Tauber
Fortifying China explores the titanic struggle to turn China into an aspiring world-class military technological power. The defense economy is leveraging the country's vibrant civilian economy and gaining access to foreign sources of technology and know-how. Drawing on extensive Chinese-language sources, Tai Ming Cheung explains that this transformation has two key dimensions. The defense economy is being reengineered to break down bureaucratic barriers and reduce the role of the state, fostering a more competitive and entrepreneurial culture to facilitate the rapid diffusion and absorption of technology and knowledge. At the same time, the civilian and defense economies are being integrated to form a dual-use technological and industrial base. In Cheung's view, the Chinese authorities believe this strategy will play a key role in supporting long-term defense modernization. For China's neighbors and the United States, understanding China's technological, industrial, and military capabilities is critical to the formulation of economic and security policies. Fortifying China provides crucial insight into the impact of China's dual-use technology strategy. Cheung's "systems of innovation" framework considers the structure, dynamics, and performance of the defense economy from a systems-level perspective.
The Puritans condemned war profiteering as a "Provoking Evil," George Washington feared that it would ruin the Revolution, and Franklin D. Roosevelt promised many times that he would never permit the rise of another crop of "war millionaires." Yet on every occasion that American soldiers and sailors served and sacrificed in the field and on the sea, other Americans cheerfully enhanced their personal wealth by exploiting every opportunity that wartime circumstances presented. In Warhogs, Stuart D. Brandes masterfully blends intellectual, economic, and military history into a fascinating discussion of a great moral question for generations of Americans: Can some individuals rightly profit during wartime while others sacrifice their lives to protect the nation? Drawing upon a wealth of manuscript sources, newspapers, contemporary periodicals, government reports, and other relevant literature, Brandes traces how each generation in financing its wars has endeavored to assemble resources equitably, to define the ethical questions of economic mobilization, and to manage economic sacrifice responsibly. He defines profiteering to include such topics as price gouging, quality degradation, trading with the enemy, plunder, and fraud, in order to examine the different guises of war profits and the degree to which they have existed from one era to the next. This far-reaching discussion moves beyond a linear narrative of the financial schemes that have shaped this nation's capacity to make war to an in-depth analysis of American thought and culture. Those scholars, students, and general readers interested in the interaction of legislative, economic, social, and technological events with the military establishment will find no other study that so thoroughly surveys the story of war profits in America.
In this thought-provoking book, David Hart challenges the creation myth of post--World War II federal science and technology policy. According to this myth, the postwar policy sprang full-blown from the mind of Vannevar Bush in the form of Science, the Endless Frontier (1945). Hart puts Bush's efforts in a larger historical and political context, demonstrating in the process that Bush was but one of many contributors to this complex policy and not necessarily the most successful one. Herbert Hoover, Karl Compton, Thurman Arnold, Henry Wallace, Robert Taft, and Curtis LeMay--along with more familiar figures like Bush--are among those whose endeavors he traces. Hart places these policy entrepreneurs in the broad scheme of American political development, connecting each one's vision of the state in this apparently esoteric policy area to the central issues, events, and figures of mid-century America and to key theoretical debates. Hart's work reveals the wide range of ideas, often in conflict with one another, that underlay what later observers interpreted as a "postwar consensus." In Hart's view, these visions--and the interests and institutions that shape their translation into public policy--form the enduring basis of American politics in this important area. Policymakers today are still grappling with the legacies of the forged consensus.
With more than 60 essays, A Companion to American MilitaryHistory presents a comprehensive analysis of the historiographyof United States military history from the colonial era to thepresent. Covers the entire spectrum of US history from the Indian andimperial conflicts of the seventeenth century to the battles inAfghanistan and Iraq Features an unprecedented breadth of coverage from eminentmilitary historians and emerging scholars, including little studiedtopics such as the military and music, military ethics, care of thedead, and sports Surveys and evaluates the best scholarship on every importantera and topic Summarizes current debates and identifies areas whereconflicting interpretations are in need of further study
"Most valuable to students and general readers who have not given World War II serious study but who are interested in achieving a better understanding of America's experience in what Dwight D. Eisenhower called 'the Great Crusade.'" -- Register of the Kentucky Historical Society
The huge complex of Soviet institutions and enterprises specialised in military production powerfully influenced the course of the twentieth century through resistance to imperial Japan, the defeat of Nazi Germany, and nuclear stalemate with America in the Cold War. Based on collaborative research by Russian and British scholars in the hitherto secret archives of the Soviet government, party, and armed forces, this book is a pioneering investigation of the economic dynamics and social and political significance of Soviet defence.