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History – an unassuming, elbow-patched discipline, sheltered only by the right-hand half of the peculiar funding umbrella term “science and research” – matters. Long-term planning needs long-view hindsight: it’s no surprise, then, that a major public consultation on the future of “science and research” spending launched by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) is introduced by talk of past iconic achievements and national traditions (PDF). But histories can serve various ends. Many scientists use versions of the past to explain and advocate scientific claims; policymakers do the same for policies. Professional historians have the luxury of being able to focus on what happened and why.
For example: the consultation proudly affirms the Government’s commitment to the Haldane Principle. This impressive-sounding but unwritten doctrine is usually understood to dictate that politicians should not meddle in scientific decision-making, leaving project design to expert authorities. In fact, as the historian David Edgerton notes, the Haldane Principle has always been a political instrument. It was the Conservative Lord Hailsham who publicised the idea in the 1960s, as part of an attack on Harold Wilson’s creation of a Ministry of Technology. On slender evidence, Hailsham claimed a 50-year policy pedigree for his objections, giving them the aura of a fundamental ethical axiom.
Yet the fact that the Haldane Principle is an “invented tradition” does not necessarily make it a bad idea; and most of its promoters now have motives very different from Hailsham’s. So why should we care about its history at all? Because scrutinising an idea’s origins and development forces us to understand how interested parties can shape it for or against our interests.
Any practical definition of the Haldane restriction has to draw a line somewhere between “directing scientific projects” (the experts’ domain) and “directing strategic support for science” (inevitably Government-controlled, unless the experts storm the Treasury with pikestaff and halberd). It must also say who speaks for the experts (usually the Research Councils, whose ideas may in fact themselves clash dramatically with what researchers want). Distinct and conflicting “reaffirmations” of the Haldane Principle have reshaped these definitions over the years; the new consultation does likewise, cheekily framing it as a statement of where the Government can intervene.
Similarly, most science policymakers know the standard story of The Endless Frontier, Vannevar Bush’s stirring manifesto for science in the postwar USA. Bush urged giving scientists the freedom and funding to pursue “basic research”, including work “performed without thought of practical ends” (often now termed “curiosity-driven”). The advance of science on all fronts, said Bush, would crucially underpin applications needed to safeguard America’s “health, prosperity, and security as a nation in the modern world.” The BIS consultation briefing pays dutiful tribute to this vision.
Most historians of science, meanwhile, know the deeper and sadly paywalled story of how Bush created this picture to forestall a very different scheme championed by Senator Harley Kilgore, an enthusiastic Roosevelt New Dealer. Briefly, Kilgore wanted to mobilise research expertise to solve social and economic problems, with publicly responsible committees distributing funds nationwide; Bush wanted to mobilise the nation’s resources to advance science, under scientific governance insulated from public pressures. Kilgore saw a place for social science; Bush did not.
Both positions were attacked from various political and practical angles. In the anti-Kilgore camp, some smelt creeping Soviet totalitarianism in the concept of state-led science; some feared an inane version of democracy, where uninformed majorities could overrule scientific fact; others saw a licence to throw taxpayers’ money at boondoggle projects in third-rate institutions.
Among those opposing Bush, some anticipated that the measures would funnel yet more power and wealth to established, elitist universities, leaving large tracts of the country with no scientific infrastructure at all. Others were more concerned about the undemocratic implications of separating scientists from wider society and potentially insulating them from the consequences of their actions – a concern which grew as the atomic age turned sour.
The debate is usually chalked up as a victory for Bush. Yet the National Science Foundation, which emerged along the lines of his scheme, has always represented a minority strand in the US government’s spending on research and development. The country’s continuing postwar rise as a technoscientific superpower depended greatly on more direct government patronage – most obviously in defence, but also in areas including medicine. Bush’s biggest legacy, meanwhile, is perhaps his redefinition of “basic science” as a conveniently fuzzy term, accommodating both government’s appetite for useful groundwork and scientists’ desire to research whatever the hell they like.
Non-historians who are friendly to the idea of history as a useful art often think mainly of the potential for avoiding past mistakes. There is something in this (policymakers have good historical grounds to view with extreme suspicion proposals to achieve “world-leading status” in expensive fields where others have a head start; ditto any proposal to get machines to talk proper English, or humans to listen to them) but it doesn’t always work. It’s in the nature of innovation that the rules of the game change dramatically. History can, however, always do something more important. It can uncover the roads not taken, and help to map the challenges and opportunities available to those who would do things differently.
Reminder: The live Q&A to discuss the BIS capital consultation is open to all and will take place in the comments section below the launch article from 12–2 pm BST on Monday 16 June. Please create a Guardian comment account to join in.
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