Abstract
THE twenty-eighth Moncure Conway Memorial lecture was delivered on May 20 by Prof. Lancelot Hogben, who dealt especially with the impact of scientific knowledge on contemporary social organisation. The democracies of Western civilisation, Prof. Hogben said, have reached a crisis with which a social personnel of government trained in a humanism without roots in scientific technology are not equipped to deal. Current political thought is permeated with a body of economic doctrine which includes within its scope no conspectus of emergent technological forces reshaping national policy and international relations. The result is a growing distrust of the powers of education and rational persuasion. In the long run, the stability of Western democracy must depend on whether we can devise an education adapted to the conditions of a society which makes increasing demands on technical knowledge. The necessary reorientation of cultural values and of research in social studies can only be brought about by enlisting to the task a new personnel with naturalistic training and the executive competence which laboratory experience calls forth. The primary business of social inquiry should be devising the social machinery to make available for human welfare the plenty which science offers. The lecture is published by Messrs. Watts and Co., 5 and 6 Johnson's Court, Fleet Street, London, B.C.4 (price 2s. net; by post, 2s. 2d.).
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The Impact of Science on Social Organisation. Nature 137, 897 (1936). https://doi.org/10.1038/137897a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/137897a0