The Production of Science in Advanced Capitalist Society

Abstract

The dominant faith in the automatically progressive character of scientific work has diminished in many sectors of society, and even partly within the scientific community, since the 1960s, giving way to a growing scepticism concerning the liberatory power of science and the very worth of scientific knowledge itself. This situation is related to the pessimism over the possibility of redirecting towards human ends the enormous growth in productive forces that has emerged with the so-called scientific and technological revolution, and to the identification — empirically justifiable — of the roots of this development in the increasing integration of science and technology into the productive structure of mature capitalism.