Jewett, Andrew. Science, Democracy, and the American University: From the Civil War to the Cold War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.

== Summary ==
Jewett’s
book explores the cultural and political hopes that many American scholars
invested in science from the 1860s to the 1950s. It reinterprets the rise of
the natural and social sciences as sources of political authority in modern
America and looks at the persistence of a belief that the scientific enterprise
carried with it a set of ethical values capable of grounding a democratic
culture – a political function widely assigned to religion. The book traces the shifting formulations of this belief from the
creation of the research universities in the Civil War era to the early Cold
War years. It examines hundreds of leading scholars (what he calls “scientific
democrats”) who viewed science not merely as a source of technical knowledge,
but also as a resource for fostering cultural change. After the civil war,
“many advocates of science began to claim that it offered not only practical
techniques, and thus material plenty, but also the cultural and political
benefits that flowed from mainline Protestantism.”(3) These advocates believed
that being scientific “meant much more than simply using empirical methods; it
meant behaving in accordance with specific ethical tenets or exhibiting
particular ethical virtues.” (10) From the Civil War to the Cold War, a diverse
group of scientific democrats emerged: those who thought science provided the
cultural resources needed to restore democracy in the wake of industrialization;
those who toiled in the universities and thought about engaging and remaking
the public through American higher education; those who saw the development and
popularization of human sciences as a means to turn Americans away from
competitive capitalism (“progressive theorists” – Youmans, Dewey, James, etc.);
and those who sought to drive cultural change by developing the human or
cultural sciences.