The Alkali Acts Administration, 1863–84: The Emergence of the Civil Scientist

Abstract

ONE OF THE PRESSING TASKS awaiting the social historian is that of studying the growth of science and its applications to industry under the stimulating and regulatory auspices of the State. * This task is given added importance by the growing need, widely felt among constitutional and administrative historians, to re-analyse the traditional view of the nineteenth century “Revolution in Government” embodied in A. V. Dicey’s classic Law and Opinion , 1 and by the need to refine our sometimes myopic conceptions of the morphogenesis of the modern State. Fortunately, it is in the applications of science to the purposes of the State, as these purposes become recognized by the public and codified by Parliament, that we find the most penetrating examples of technical regulation and control, coordination of national interest and public welfare, and incipient tendencies towards the systematic use of administrative and scientific expertise that has become so characteristic of contemporary society.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 97 citations exist upstream.