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5 - Science and Government

from Part I - Science and Society

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2008

By
Robert Fox
Edited by
Roy Porter
Roy Porter
Affiliation:
Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, University College London
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Summary

The engagement of eighteenth-century governments and monarchs in the patronage of science had predominantly utilitarian motives. It was inspired, to very different degrees in different countries, both by a belief in the value of scientific knowledge for manufacturing, agriculture, medical improvement, public works, and warfare and by a perception of science as a form of culture whose promotion would lend luster to any regime seeking to parade its adjustment, however cautious, to the beneficent forces of enlightenment and modernity. Some of these motives had already borne scientific fruit in the seventeenth century, tentatively in England, where Charles II’s patronage of the Royal Society had been no more than nominal, and in a far more concrete fashion in France in the new and existing institutions that were supported under the influence of Louis XIV’s minister Colbert. From its foundation in 1666, the Académie Royale des Sciences was an instrument of the state: its members received material support, in the form of salaries and facilities, and in return the monarchy looked for a source of glory that would outshine the Royal Society in London and for services and expert advice of the kind it requested and received on the water supply to Versailles and on the inventions and machines that were routinely submitted to the Académie for judgment. It was with a similar aspiration to bind the interests of science to those of the state that Colbert commissioned Claude Perrault to design the Observatory of Paris in the late 1660s.

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The Cambridge History of Science , pp. 107 - 128
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2003

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  • Science and Government
  • Edited by Roy Porter, Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, University College London
  • Book: The Cambridge History of Science
  • Online publication: 28 March 2008
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521572439.006
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  • Science and Government
  • Edited by Roy Porter, Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, University College London
  • Book: The Cambridge History of Science
  • Online publication: 28 March 2008
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521572439.006
Available formats
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  • Science and Government
  • Edited by Roy Porter, Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, University College London
  • Book: The Cambridge History of Science
  • Online publication: 28 March 2008
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521572439.006
Available formats
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