Die Globalisierung gilt als eine Leitthese der Gegenwart und auch für die Wissenschaften wird ein Bedeutungsverlust nationalstaatlicher Politik und Kultur diagnostiziert. Dagegen zeigen konkrete Analysen, dass die Einbettung der Forschung in einen schützenden Rahmen politischer Gemeinwesen historisch wichtig war und nach wie vor von Bedeutung ist. Der Band analysiert das komplexe Wechselverhältnis zwischen wissenschaftlichem Universalismus und nationalstaatlicher Verankerung anhand von Beispielen aus dem 19. Jahrhundert bis in unsere Zeit.

Andreas Franzmann, PD. Dr., und Axel Jansen, PD Dr., arbeiten am Lehrstuhl für Zeitgeschichte an der Universität Tübingen. Peter Münte, Dr. phil., arbeitet am Seminar für Rechtssoziologie an der Universität Bielefeld.

Acknowledgments This collection of essays emerged from a workshop organized by the editors at Eberhard-Karls-Universität Tübingen (Germany) in September 2013, except for Fabian Link's contribution on the Frankfurt School of Sociology, which we subsequently asked him for. The arrangement of papers on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and their focus on the natural sciences as well as the social sciences reflect our overall approach, first, to retain an investigation of science within general sociology and history, and second, to retain a comprehensive view of curious investigation that is represented by the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities together. The workshop at Universität Tübingen on "Science and the Public in the Nation-State: Historic and Current Configurations in Global Perspective, 1800-2010" took place in the context of a research project by Andreas Franzmann and Axel Jansen on "Professionalization and Deprofessionalization in the Public Context of Science since 1970." The project is co-hosted by the Department of History at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and we would like to thank our colleagues in both institutions for their kind support. We thank the Volkswagen Foundation for sponsoring the research project that provides the intellectual backdrop for this book, and we also thank the sponsor of our conference and of the publication of this book, the Vereinigung der Freunde der Universität Tübingen (Universitätsbund) e.V., and our second sponsor for this publication, the Dr. Bodo Sponholz Stiftung für Wissen, Kunst und Wohlfahrt. Lars Weitbrecht provided organizational support at the conference and Ian Copestake of slovos.com helped proofread manuscripts. We thank both of them, and also Jürgen Hotz at the Campus Verlag for facilitating this book. Section I: Approaches Legitimizing Science: Introductory Essay Andreas Franzmann, Axel Jansen and Peter Münte 1. The Continuing Dependence of Science on a Plurality of Political Communities The pursuit of science requires legitimacy that science itself cannot pro-vide. The most obvious reason why such legitimacy is required today is that science costs a lot of money. At an accelerating pace during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, scientists have had to raise funds to cover salaries and apparatus at institutions such as academies, universities or research institutes. But science has needed legitimacy, even at times when science was run by experimental scientists not employed to do research but pursue such interests on the side. Then as now, investigating nature by asking unfamiliar questions requires resources but also protection, freedom from political or religious constraints, the leisure to tackle fundamental problems without obvious practical value, and authorization through cultural and political affirmation. All of these matters point to the issue of legitimacy, and in the context of the modern nation-state such legitimacy relates to a political public and its endorsement. At a time of increased global interdependencies, furthermore, this raises the issue of whether the legitimacy of science is shifting to a transnational and global plane. The need for a legitimacy of science has been particularly evident in times of conflict. In the past, opponents of an experimental approach to testing truth claims have represented the church, cultural Weltanschauungen, or political ideologies. Conflicts have tended to unfold when the results of research questioned conventional explanations. Galileo, Kepler, Darwin, and Freud are prominent examples in the history of science. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, debates on cloning and on stem cells are a reminder that science continues to be associated with provocations to world views and ethical convictions. Such debates challenge politics to balance the demands arising from such beliefs with competing demands for scientific freedom and economic opportunities. While we have come to accept and demand from science technological innovation relevant for the economy and for society's other needs, science has remained a potential source of cultural, political, and economic instability. Hence this particular mode of truth-seeking continues to require the kind of protection, promotion, and authorization for which science has sought the political sovereign's patronage since early modern times. Science claims to work out a collectively binding understanding of the world. This presupposes a general acceptance of science as the source of such knowledge and the continuous integration of such knowledge in general education and political decision-making. From the Renaissance and into our own time, political, cultural, and economic elites have played a key role in shielding the experimental sciences from religious or cultural attack and in supporting and transferring authority to them. Such protection, promotion and authorization has been granted by elites in the emerging context of the modern state, but also through private philanthropy or foundations that have provided essential support. Their decision to support research often reflected a broader national commitment to the role of science in society. By supporting re-search financially or by endorsing such work symbolically, they bestowed public affirmation and significance on the larger scientific enterprise. To-day, the principles of this approach have become relevant in all areas of political leadership and administration that touch on scientific knowledge. The relationship between the state and science has not merely served to protect science but also to endorse its particular commitment to establishing truth-claims on behalf of a wider community. Such an endorsement of science has become an important element in national cultures and their self-perception. For scientists, public affirmation of their work has translated into cultural prestige and leverage. The emerging legitimacy of science may be studied with particular effectiveness by focusing on a period when its social and political position remained unsettled. The founding of the Royal Society in seventeenth-century England provides a well-known case in point. After the Puritan interregnum, a small group of natural philosophers including Robert Boyle was able to commit the returning king to provide patronage and his seal for the founding of a scientific organization. The king's protection and endorsement of the Royal Society implied that after its founding period in the 1660s, no one else could lay claim to discovering the laws of nature in the name of the king and of the nation he represented. But Charles II had to leave it to the Royal Society's active nucleus to define experimental philosophy because the king himself could not provide that definition. The Royal Society used this privilege to establish principles of scientific activity, among them the rule that claims to findings had to be established through experiments among witnesses, that experiments had to be recorded, and that results were to be transferred to the Society's records. While a general endorsement of such principles would not take place for decades or even centuries, important norms of modern science had been recognized by an official institution representing the king, norms that otherwise would not have had the standing that they came to have. Without official endorsement such principles would have remained subject to fundamental questions concerning their relevance, validity, and authorship. Science would not have been protected against philosophical and theological attacks on experimental methods, and demands that they be replaced by other methods such as philosophical introspection or revelation. Charles II had delegated the power to define science as a mode of truth-seeking through experiment-based philosophy, and the Royal Society assumed responsibility for this particul...