The Unity of Knowledge and the Diversity of Knowers: Science as an Agent of Cultural Integration in the United States Between the Two World Wars

• Published in: Pacific Historical Review
• Main Author: Hollinger, David A.
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: University of California Press 2011
• Subjects: History; Dewey; Sinclair; North Atlantic
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/phr.2011.80.2.211; https://online.ucpress.edu/phr/article-pdf/80/2/211/612440/phr_2011_80_2_211.pdf

During the 1930s the émigré philosophers of the Vienna Circle launched an ambitious program to create a more scientific culture, but they proved to be largely blind to indigenous American efforts along similar lines. Those scholars who study the Vienna Circle have too often ignored the intellectual power and broad appeal of these American efforts as led by John Dewey, Thorstein Veblen, Morris Cohen, and Sinclair Lewis. The émigrés developed as their chief enterprise The International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, which was dwarfed in size, appeal, and longterm historical significance by The International Encyclopedia of Unified Science brought out at the same historical moment by followers of Dewey. Both encyclopedias and the circles of intellectuals who sustained them illustrate the special appeal of scientific culture for The Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences intellectuals of Jewish origin throughout the North Atlantic West between the two World Wars.