Roy MacLeod

Toward a New Synthesis

Half a century ago, economic historians and historians of technology saw the Western world entering a “Second” Industrial Revolution. This was ostensibly based on the recent application of large science-based industrial systems, featuring laboratory-based “technoscience”; fed by close relations among industry, the universities, and the state; and reaching into a wide range of disciplines, from biology to electronics and material sciences. The outcome was characterized by the diffusion of science-based clusters of innovations that powered the expansion of international corporate capitalism. In the early postwar period, the reception accorded to these dramatic transformations—in part anticipating what is now fashionably called “Mode 2 knowledge production”—reflected the triumph of optimistic forecasts over longer memories of economic unease. Size was celebrated in science, and the chemical, pharmaceutical, and radioelectrical industries, in their magnitude and plenitude, were the dominant sectors. Their names lent inscriptions to the temples of modernity. Within the last decade, historians have begun to revisit the sites of these interpretations. Their work has had several consequences. First, the origins of the government-industryuniversity relationship have been shown to lie far earlier and to be more complex than popular accounts of “scientific progress” have suggested. Different patterns of industrialization emerging in Germany and France, Britain and the United States, Scandinavia and Australasia, all had significant implications for the rate and direction of this development. Second, a long tradition of debating differences between science and technology has given way to a recognition that their relationship is symbiotic and interdependent and is shaped as much by commercial, political, and social factors as by any simple logic of discovery and application. Third, historians have grown skeptical of the interpretative reliability of the so-called “linear model” of “science-push” innovation, which, as popularized by Van-