i I ! ! 2 The Social Study of Science before Kuhn Stephen Turner The controversy over Thomas Kuhn's astonishingly successful Structure of Scientific Rev- olutions ([1962)1996), which denied the possibility of a rational account of conceptual revolutions and characterized them in the language of collective psychology, created the conditions for producing the field that became "science studies." The book was the immediate product of an existing tradition of writing about science, exemplified by the works of James Bryant Conant and Michael Polanyi, and the distal product of a literature on the social character of science that reaches back centuries. This litera- ture was closely connected to practical problems of the organization of science and also to social theory debates on the political meaning of science. The basic story line is simple: a conflict between two views of science, one of which treats science as dis- tinguished by a method that can be extended to social and political life, and a respond- ing view that treats science as a distinctive form of activity with its own special problems and does not provide a model for social and political life. Interlaced with this story is a puzzle over the relationship between science and culture that flour- ished especially in the twenties and thirties. In this chapter I briefly reconstruct this history. BACON, CONDORCET, AND THE BEGINNINGS OF AN EXPLANATORY INTEREST IN SCIENCE The fans et origo of this discussion is Francis Bacon's vision of a political order in which the class of scientists is given power by an enlightened ruler in his House of Solomon in "The New Atlantis" ([1627)1860-62, vol. 5: 347-413). This vision had a practical effect on the attempts by the Royal Society in London to distinguish itself by its methodological practices and internal governance as a type of political body in rela- tion to the Crown (Sprat, [1667)1958: 321-438; Lynch, 2001: 177-96; Shapin, 1994) and to do the same with parallel institutions elsewhere in Europe (Hahn, 1971: 1-34; Gillispie, 2004). The Victorians assured that Bacon would be best known for his ideas about induction as a method (cf. Peltonen, 1996: 321-24) and, as his major German expositor put it, "how his whole 11ature was, in every way, instinctively opposed to verbal discussions" (Fischer, 185 7: 307). But Bacon's extensive body of writ-