Abstract

This essay argues that taking the economy seriously in histories of science could not only extend the range of activities studied but also change—often quite radically—our understanding of well-known cases and instances in twentieth-century science. It shows how scientific intellectuals and historians of science have followed the money as a means of critique of particular forms of science and of particular conceptions of science. It suggests the need to go further, to a much broader implicit definition of what constitutes science—one that implies a criticism of much history of twentieth-century science for defining it implicitly and inappropriately in very restrictive ways