The cycle of Grandes Conférences des Archives Henri Poincaré is conceived as a meeting place for researchers and the general public. It covers many disciplinary fields: philosophy, epistemology, ethics, history of science and technology, history of institutions, sociology of science and organizations, etc.
In this context, we invite you to listen to the presentation by
Lorrane DASTON
Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG)
The Origins of International Governance in Science
When?
May 11, 2022, Wednesday
18h-19h30 CEST
Online
Please register here: https://forms.gle/PaGq5xkjayS3PCLz7
ABSTRACT
Faced with two crises of planetary dimensions, climate change and the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, politicians responded nationally and scientists responded internationally. Why?
Science has been cosmopolitan and collective since at least the seventeenth century, but there’s big difference between exchanging letters, publications, and occasional visits among citizens of the Republic of Letters, on the one hand, and, on the other, subordination of individual and national research traditions, priorities, and practices to binding agreements reached by international disciplinary bodies empowered by no one but themselves. Yet starting in the late nineteenth century, such international governance efforts arise in the sciences (and some of the humanities): chemists meet to decide on rules of nomenclature for new compounds; botanists and zoologists meet to define plant and animal species; astronomers meet to make an astrophotographic map of all stars visible from earth c. 1900; meteorologists meet to agree on a global classification of clouds. Much was at stake: professional reputations, commercial interests in the manufacture of compounds and instruments, institutional interests in the management of specimen collections, research agendas for years or even generations to come.
Yet in the end, resolutions were passed and, more significantly, honored for decades, despite the disruptions of war, revolution, decolonialization, and the complete remaking of the geopolitical order in the course of the twentieth century. No diplomatic treaty achieved as much. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, some scientific disciplines, including astronomy and meteorology, created a template for how international scientific co-operations that laid the groundwork for future international governance.
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