In 1945, the United States was not only the strongest economic and                  military power in the world; it was also the world's leader in science and                  technology. In American Hegemony and the Postwar Reconstruction of Science in                  Europe, John Krige describes the efforts of influential figures in the United States                  to model postwar scientific practices and institutions in Western Europe on those in                  America. They mobilized political and financial support to promote not just                  America's scientific and technological agendas in Western Europe but its Cold War                  political and ideological agendas as well.Drawing on the work of diplomatic and                  cultural historians, Krige argues that this attempt at scientific dominance by the                  United States can be seen as a form of "consensual hegemony," involving the                  collaboration of influential local elites who shared American values. He uses this                  notion to analyze a series of case studies that describe how the U.S.                  administration, senior officers in the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, the NATO                  Science Committee, and influential members of the scientific establishment--notably                  Isidor I. Rabi of Columbia University and Vannevar Bush of MIT--tried to Americanize                  scientific practices in such fields as physics, molecular biology, and operations                  research. He details U.S. support for institutions including CERN, the Niels Bohr                  Institute, the French CNRS and its laboratories at Gif near Paris, and the                  never-established "European MIT." Krige's study shows how consensual hegemony in                  science not only served the interests of postwar European reconstruction but became                  another way of maintaining American leadership and "making the world safe for                  democracy."

American Hegemony and the Postwar Reconstruction of Science in Europe (Transformations: Studies in the History of Science and Technology) PDF

The list of books you might like