Originally published on October 16, 2023 (Episode 338)
Introduction
“The scientific community is by any measure a very strange kind of community,” writes Lorraine Daston. “For starters, no one knows who exactly belongs to it… Its members are a miscellany of individuals but also of disparate institutions… Nor does it have a fixed location. …the village conjured up by the term ‘scientific community’ is scattered all over the globe and its inhabitants meet only occasionally, if at all. Far from living in neighborly harmony or even collegial mutual tolerance, the members of this uncommunal community compete ferociously and engage in notoriously vitriolic polemics … Although modern science has been called the locomotive of all modernity, the scientific community more closely resembles a medieval guild…”
How, then, does such a scattered, contentious, and stratified “community” persist—let alone cooperate? Yet cooperation has always been a continuous strand uniting modern science. In her new book Rivals: How Scientists Learned to Cooperate, Daston traces how rivalry and collaboration have intertwined across centuries, shaping the norms, practices, and institutions of modern science.
About the Guest
Lorraine Daston is Director Emerita of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, Visiting Professor in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, and a permanent fellow at the Berlin Institute of Advanced Study.
For Further Investigation
Lorraine Daston, Rivals: How Scientists Learned to Cooperate (Columbia Global Reports, 2023)
—, Rules: A Short History of What We Live By (Princeton, 2022)
Conversation with Lorraine Daston about Rules (not on Historically Thinking)
List of Historically Thinking conversations on the history of science
💬 Listen & Discuss
Can competition and cooperation truly coexist at the heart of science? What lessons can policymakers, educators, or even businesses draw from the “uncommunal community” of modern science? Share your reflections in the comments, and pass this episode along to someone who cares about science, knowledge, and collaboration.
