From the beginning to the end of these pages, whether we read of the wilful destruction of the products and productivity of the soil, the aerial destruction of wealth by the thousand million pounds’ worth, created by somebody’s labour, the embarrassing fecundity of modern technology resulting only in every conceivable form of sabotage, the anomalous position of the conscientious medical practitioner. The refusal of women to bring children into such a world, the development of the art of spreading bacterial infection as a new war technique, or the frank abandonment by modern political movements of the hope of social progress that science renders possible – from the beginning to the end of these pages the reader will find elegant examples of the sort of ruling mentality now dominating the world. Bitter, and justifiably so, as many of the critics of science are, surely nothing bitterer could be said of it than this, that its abundance has but enthroned the wastrel. Not is the solution exactly what one of the contributors rather naively suggests, that science should look for a new master. The solution is for the public to acknowledge its real master, and, for its own safety, insist on being ruled not by the reflection of a reflection, but direct by those who are concerned with the creation of its weather rather than of its debts. It should require that its universities and learned societies should no longer evade their responsibilities and hide under the guise of false humility as the hired servants of the world their work has made possible, but do that for which they are supposed in cultured release from routine occupations, and speak the truth though the heavens fall.

A comprehensive survey of how scientific disciplines have always been informed by politics and ideology on the basis of the Gramscian views in historical materialism, hegemony and civil society.

The aim of this book is to give a general idea of the way in which Modern Science looks out on the world. By selecting a few salient illustrations, it seeks to show how the various sciences are disclosing the Order of Nature. It is hoped that it may be of service to the able minded reader who wishes an introduction of an informal type to the chief scientific problems of today. The book is meant to be suggestive as well as informative; and two characteristic features may be noted, for they are deliberate: the illustrations of scientific progress that have been selected are taken from all the great orders of facts – from astronomy to anthropology; and they deal not with easy things, but with the big problems that matter most.

This book has a practical purpose. It seeks to help the reader to understand himself and his problems, that he may increase his successes, his fruit, and his satisfactions. The discussion centers about the conditions that shape personality, but the attempt of the book is not to rehearse the findings and theories of science but to provide the means by which the reader can come to a better understanding of himself.

The Corporate Rich and the Power Elite in the Twentieth Century demonstrates exactly how the corporate rich developed and implemented the policies and created the government structures that allowed them to dominate the United States. The book is framed within three historical developments that have made this domination possible: the rise and fall of the union movement, the initiation and subsequent limitation of government social-benefit programs, and the postwar expansion of international trade. The book’s deep exploration into the various methods the corporate rich used to centralize power corrects major empirical misunderstandings concerning all three issue-areas. Further, it explains why the three ascendant theories of power in the early twenty-first century—interest-group pluralism, organizational state theory, and historical institutionalism—cannot account for the complexity of events that established the power elite’s supremacy and led to labor’s fall. More generally, and convincingly, the analysis reveals how a corporate-financed policy-planning network, consisting of foundations, think tanks, and policy-discussion groups, gradually developed in the twentieth century and played a pivotal role in all three issue-areas. Filled with new archival findings and commanding detail, this book offers readers a remarkable look into the nature of power in America during the twentieth century, and provides a starting point for future in-depth analyses of corporate power in the current century.