Rawls offers what might be seen as three ideas of justification: the method of reflective equilibrium, the derivation of principles in the original position, and the idea of public reason. These can appear to be in some tension with one another. Reflective equilibrium seems to be an intuitive and “inductive” method. On one natural interpretation, it holds that principles are justified by their ability to explain those judgments in which we feel the highest degree of confidence. By contrast, the original position argument is more theoretical and more “deductive”: principles of justice are justified if they could be derived in the right way, institutions are just if they conform to these principles, and particular distributions are just if they are the products of just institutions. Justifications that meet the requirements of public reason need not have this particular form, but they are limited in a way that an individual's search for reflective equilibrium is not. The idea of public reason holds that questions of constitutional essentials and basic justice are to be settled by appeal to political values that everyone in the society, regardless of their comprehensive view, has reason to care about. This is more restrictive than the idea of reflective equilibrium, since not all of an individual's considered judgments, or even all of his or her considered judgments about justice, need meet this test.

Rawls and his critics agree on at least this: his theory is liberal. This essay asks, To what extent is it also democratic? Does Rawlsian liberalism denigrate democracy as some critics charge? Despite the enormous literature on Rawls, remarkably little has been written on the relationship between liberalism and democracy in the theory. Critics over the years have suggested that the theory denigrates democracy in one of three ways, which I consider by posing three critical questions about the theory. First, does it devalue the equal political liberty of adults (at any one of three levels of theory formation)? Second, does it devalue the political process of majority rule? Third, does it devalue the kind of civic discourse that relies on more comprehensive philosophies – both religious and secular – rather than on the free-standing political philosophy that Rawls's theory distinctively defends?

In interpreting Rawls’s understanding of democracy, I draw upon both A Theory of Justice (Justice) and Political Liberalism (Liberalism). The two works diverge at points, which I discuss when the differences bear on Rawls’s understanding of the relationship between liberalism and democracy. But together they have more to say about the relationship than either work alone.

The amount of literature written on Rawls is at least equal to that of any other twentieth-century philosopher. The following bibliography is necessarily selective. Rawls's complete works are first cited. Then follows a list of books and anthologies on Rawls. Most of the bibliography consists of citations of articles in philosophy and other journals. I have not attempted to locate and cite the many important discussions of Rawls that appear in others' books. The two largest divisions of the bibliography list articles on A Theory of Justice and Political Liberalism. Other divisions reflect topics of special interest which have stimulated discussions of parts of Rawls's work or its implications. Most of the articles listed are in English. (John Rawls and His Critics: An Annotated Bibliography by J.H.Wellbank, Denis Snook, and David T. Mason (New York: Garland, 1982) provides abstracts for most of the secondary literature on Rawls prior to 1982. See the bibliography to Thomas W. Pogge's John Rawls (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1994) for many works in German.)

“Liberalism” means different things to different people. The term is currently used in Europe by the left to castigate the right for blind faith in the value of an unfettered market economy and insufficient attention to the importance of state action in realizing the values of equality and social justice. (Sometimes this usage is marked by the variants “neoliberalism” or “ultraliberalism.”) In the United States, on the other hand, the term is used by the right to castigate the left for unrealistic attachment to the values of social and economic equality and the too ready use of government power to pursue those ends at the cost of individual freedom and initiative. Thus, American Republicans who condemn the Democrats as bleeding-heart liberals are precisely the sort of people who are condemned as heartless liberals by French Socialists.

Both of these radically opposed pejorative uses have some basis in the broad tradition of liberalism as a group of political movements and political ideas, sharing certain convictions and disagreeing about others. It is a significant fact about our age that most political argument in the Western world now goes on between different branches of that tradition. Its great historical figures are Locke, Rousseau, Constant, Kant, and Mill, and, in our century, its intellectual representatives have included Dewey, Orwell, Hayek, Aron, Hart, Berlin, and many others.With the recent spread of democracy, liberalism has become politically important in countries throughout the world.

THREE EGALITARIAN CHALLENGES TO DEMOCRATIC EQUALITY

Egalitarianism is not one idea but many, for there are many different kinds and degrees of equality that people can promote and still lay claim to being egalitarians. Rawls's egalitarianism is complex in what it requires, since his “democratic equality” rests on three principles of justice that interact with and limit each other. Democratic equality is also complex in its justification, since it is motivated by several distinct egalitarian ideas that must be integrated in a justifiable way. Our task in what follows is to better understand this complex egalitarian view by considering three challenges to it. First, I present a brief statement of its main ideas.

Democratic equality guarantees citizens equal basic liberties, including the worth of political liberties, through Rawls’s First Principle. His Second Principle consists of two principles that specify how the benefits of social cooperation are “open to all” and work “to everyone’s advantage.” Its guarantee of fair equality of opportunity requires that we not only judge people for jobs and offices by reference to their relevant talents and skills, but that we also establish institutional measures to correct for the ways in which class, race, and gender might interfere with the normal development of marketable talents and skills. The difference principle (DP) restricts inequalities to those that work maximally to the advantage of the worst-off groups.

For John Rawls, public reason is not one political value among others. It envelops all the different elements that make up the ideal of a constitutional democracy, for it governs “the political relation” in which we ought to stand to one another as citizens (CP, p. 574). Public reason involves more than just the idea that the principles of political association should be an object of public knowledge. Its concern is the very basis of our collectively binding decisions. We honor public reason when we bring our own reason into accord with the reason of others, espousing a common point of view for settling the terms of our political life. The conception of justice by which we live is then a conception we endorse, not for the different reasons we may each discover, and not simply for reasons we happen to share, but instead for reasons that count for us because we can affirm them together. This spirit of reciprocity is the foundation of a democratic society.

Public reason has emerged as an explicit theme in Rawls’s writings only after A Theory of Justice with his turn to “political liberalism” and the pursuit of a common ground on which people can stand despite their deep ethical and religious differences. But the concept itself has always been at the heart of his philosophy. It runs through his first book in the guise of the idea of publicity, playing an indispensable part in the theory of justice as fairness.

The theory of chemical structure was developed in the 1850s and 1860s, a product of the efforts of a number of leading European chemists. By the late 1860s it was regarded as a mature and powerful conceptual scheme that not only gave important insight into the details of molecular architecture in an invisibly small realm of nature, but also furnished heuristic guidance in the technological manipulation of those molecules, providing assistance in the creation of an important fine chemicals industry. The theory continued to develop in its power and subtlety throughout the following decades, until by the end of the century, it was by all measures the reigning doctrine of the science of chemistry, dominating investigations in both academic and industrial laboratories. Consequently, the story of the rise of this theory is an important component of the history of basic science, and also of the manner in which scientific ideas are applied to industry.

EARLY STRUCTURALIST NOTIONS

Speculations concerning geometrical groupings of the imperceptible particles that make up sensible bodies go back to the pre-Socratics. However, for our purposes, it is expedient to begin the story with the rise of chemical atomism, since structural ideas presuppose atoms in the modern chemical (post-Lavoisien) sense. The founder of the chemical atomic theory was John Dalton (1766–1844), and it is suggestive that immediately following the proposal of chemical atoms, Dalton and others began to speculate how they might be arranged into molecules (often then called “compound atoms”). As early as 1808 – about the time Dalton’s ideas first began to be known in the chemical community – William Wollaston was “inclined to think … that we shall be obliged to acquire a geometric conception of [the] relative arrangement [of the elementary atoms] in all the three dimensions of solid extension.”

Until the 1980s, it was usual to tell the story of the developments in physics during the twentieth century as “inward bound” – from atoms, to nuclei and electrons, to nucleons and mesons, and then to quarks – and to focus on conceptual advances. The typical exposition was a narrative beginning with Max Planck (1858–1947) and the quantum hypothesis and Albert Einstein (1879–1955) and the special theory of relativity, and culminating with the formulation of the standard model of the electroweak and strong interactions during the 1970s. Theoretical understanding took pride of place, and commitment to reductionism and unification was seen as the most important factor in explaining the success of the program. The Kuhnian model of the growth of scientific knowledge, with its revolutionary paradigm shifts, buttressed the primacy of theory and the view that experimentation and instrumentation were subordinate to and entrained by theory.

The situation changed after Ian Hacking, Peter Galison, Bruno Latour, Simon Schaffer, and other historians, philosophers, and sociologists of science reanalyzed and reassessed the practices and roles of experimentation. It has become clear that accounting for the growth of knowledge in the physical sciences during the twentieth century is a complex story. Advances in physics were driven and secured by a host of factors, including contingent ones. Furthermore, it is often difficult to separate the social, sociological, and political factors from the technical and intellectual ones.

Scientific methods divide into two broad categories: inductive and deductive. Inductive methods arrive at theories by generalizing from what is known to happen in particular cases; deductive methods, by derivation from first principles. Behind this primitive categorization lie deep philosophical oppositions. The first principles central to deductivist accounts are generally taken to be, as Aristotle described, “first known to nature” but not “first known to us.” Do the first principles have a more basic ontological status than the regularities achieved by inductive generalization – are they in some sense “more true” or “more real”? Or are they, in stark opposition, not truths at all, at least for a human science, because always beyond the reach of human knowledge?

Deductivists are inclined to take the first view. Some do so because they think that first principles are exact and eternal truths that represent hidden structures lying behind the veil of shifting appearances; others, because they see first principles as general claims that unify large numbers of disparate phenomena into one scheme, and they take unifying power to be a sign of fundamental truth. Empiricists, who take experience as the measure of what science should maintain about the world, are suspicious of first principles, especially when they are very abstract and far removed from immediate experience. They generally insist on induction as the gatekeeper for what can be taken for true in science.

This chapter explores the impact of science and technology research capacity and educational change on industrial performance in the century and a half since 1850. Analysis covers four countries remarkable for their industrial achievement, England, France, Germany, and the United States. It is important to note that for each of these countries, economic growth has often been organized around contrasting systems of education and research.

Today, most scholars agree that education, as a general phenomenon, does not constitute a linear, direct determinant of industrial growth. For example, Fritz Ringer has shown that although German and French education had numerous parallels in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, such as per capita size of cohorts, the economic development of the two nations was extremely different. Peter Lundgreen, who has compared the size of France’s and Germany’s engineering communities and the character of training, has come to much the same conclusion. Robert Fox and Anna Guanine, in a comparative study of education and industry in six European countries and the United States for the pre-World War I decades, demonstrate that although nations had contrasting rates of industrial growth, their educational policies and practices nevertheless frequently converged.

The existence of a direct and linear connection between research and industry is also viewed as doubtful today. For example, during the decades immediately preceding and following World War I, very few French firms possessed any research capacity, and with scant exception, neither was applied research present inside the educational system. Still, France’s industry advanced at a steady albeit slow pace, thanks largely to alternative innovation-acquisition practices, such as patent procurement, licensing, and concentration on low-technology sectors.

The historical relations between the physical sciences and the life sciences have often been framed in terms of overarching conceptions about the nature of vital processes. Thus, in antiquity, the mechanistic viewpoint of the atomists, represented in physiological thought by the Alexandrian anatomist Erasistratus, is contrasted with the teleological foundations of Aristotle’s biology, defended in late antiquity by Galen. For the early modern period, the Aristotelian framework within which William Harvey (1578–1657) discovered the circulation of the blood is contrasted with the “mechanical conception of life,” introduced in the new “mechanical philosophy” of René Descartes (1596–1650), and a chemical conception of life, associated with the iconoclastic Renaissance physician Paracelsus (1493–1541).

For the nineteenth century, the cleavage between the “vitalist” views of physiologists early in the century and the “reductionist” views of physiologists coming of age in the 1840s, who aimed to reduce physiology to physics and chemistry, has been treated as the most significant turning point in the relation between the physical and biological sciences. The views of these, mainly German, physiologists are often compared with those of the most prominent French physiologist, Claude Bernard (1813–1878), who also opposed vitalism but believed, nevertheless, that life is something more than the physical-chemical manifestations through which it must be investigated.

In 1799 the Royal Institution was founded in London, in the wake of various provincial literary and philosophical societies; in 1851, under Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg’s aegis, the Great Exhibition attracted vast crowds to London, yielding profits to buy land in South Kensington for colleges and museums; and in 1900 the Paris Exposition heralded a new century of scientific and technical progress. There were prominent critics, but the wonders of science proved throughout the nineteenth century to be attractive to audiences of the aristocracy and gentry, of working men, and of everybody in between – which was fortunate, because in this world of competing beliefs and interests, of markets and industrial capitalism, those engaged in science needed to arouse the enthusiasm of people who would support them. Popularization started in Europe but was taken up in the United States, in Canada and Australasia, in India and other colonies, and in Japan.

We shall focus upon Britain because of its place as the first industrial nation, where cheap books and publications emerged early, and scientific lectures were a feature of intellectual life. Specialization came relatively late to British education, so that until the end of the nineteenth century, university graduates shared to a great extent a common culture. Great Britain contained two nations, the English and the Scots, whose educational histories were very different; and Ireland was another story. Scotland had been, ever since its Calvinist Reformation, a country where education was valued and could be had cheaply in parochial schools and at the universities: It was throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries an exporter of talent, to England, the Continent, and North America.

Richard Feynman (1918–1988) loved to tell the story of his close encounter with poetry while a graduate student in physics at Princeton. Sitting in on a colloquium in which “somebody” analyzed the structural and emotional elements of a poem, Feynman was set up as an impromptu respondent by the graduate dean, who was confident that the situation would elicit a strong reaction. To the literary scholar’s inquiry, “Isn’t it the same in mathematics …?” Feynman was asked to relate the problem to theoretical physics. He tells us about his reply:

Like other anecdotes in Feynman’s memoirs, this story – in both its enactment and retelling – is framed upon a frequently recurrent motif of clever one-upmanship that displays several constituent characteristics of his psychology and personality. The special notice he takes of the smile he is about to wipe off the speaker’s face participates in the kind of intellectual sadism that Feynman later enjoyed as the perpetrator of elaborate practical jokes, some with near life-and-death consequences.

During the past decades, the historiography of nineteenth-century chemistry has become increasingly complex and at the same time more interesting. Rising on the sound “internalistic” foundations laid by Aaron J. Ihde’s The Development of Modern Chemistry (1964) and, of course, by James R. Partington’s A History of Chemistry (four volumes, 1961–1970), the edifice of more recent historiography depicts chemistry as an endeavor in close interaction with the cultural and intellectual currents of that time. Departing from the question of the disciplinary identity of chemistry during the nineteenth century and thus joining “the separate analyses of schools, disciplines, and traditions into an integrated analytical matrix,” Mary Jo Nye has with a sure hand sketched out the framework of this chemical edifice. As reflected in her book, new problems have moved to the forefront, among them the question of the disciplinary development of chemistry and its subdisci-plines, such as biochemistry, stereochemistry, and physical chemistry, as well as questions of the emergence of scientific schools and of science policy in general. Last but not least are the questions of the metaphysical background and of the internal discourses among chemists. In this context, two questions are of eminent importance: What is “chemical” in chemistry, that is, what distinguishes chemistry from its neighbor sciences? And how does chemistry arrange the objects of its scientific experiences?

CHEMICAL VERSUS PHYSICAL ATOMS

One may well say that it is the notion of units of matter showing certain measurable relations of their weight and possessing certain characteristics to explain the specificity of chemical reactions (that is, the notion of “chemical atomism”) that distinguished chemistry from its close relative, physics. This may sound a little strange, as we are used to seeing atoms as the same entities in all sciences. From the time of Democritus (ca. 410 b.c.) up to the first decades of the nineteenth century, atoms were considered to be little indivisible lumps of matter, which, when forming compounds, are attached to one another either by their respective shapes or by “affinities.”

There is a common trait in reviews by plasma- and solid-state physicists of their specialties: an emphasis on the ubiquity of the subject matter with which they are concerned. “As we now know, planet Earth is but a small non-plasma island in a vast sea of plasma. Though tenuous in outer space, plasma is dense and omnipresent in the stars and in their coronas. In fact this ‘fourth state of matter’ – plasma – is seen as the dominant form of matter in the Universe,” a pioneer of plasma physics writes in a review about his discipline. With the same zeal but a slightly different emphasis, a German solid-state protagonist has created a link between the omnipresent solid matter and human culture: “Solid substances have given their names to the great historical epochs of mankind. Stone, bronze, and iron have caused epochal changes,” he begins in a book on the history of solid-state electronics. Now, at the end of the iron age, we are entering a new era. “Probably this epoch will be given the name of the crystal.… This new epoch perhaps will be called silicon age.”

What is the message behind such a “ubiquity” rhetoric? Beyond the pleading for recognition, funds, and other means of furthering plasma and solid-state physics, are we supposed to consider research in those omnipresent substances as a cultural obligation? In contrast to specialties like elementary particle physics, which appear to the public as more fundamental, the study of plasmas is regarded as a corollary to the quest for controlled thermonuclear fusion. Similarly, solid-state physics seems to derive its importance more from technological applications than from intellectual curiosity.

Four different, but related, topics will be examined in this chapter: first, the debate between the emission theory and the undulatory theory of light; second, the discovery of new kinds of radiation, such as heat (infrared) and chemical (ultraviolet) rays at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and the gradual emergence of the consensus that heat, light, and chemical rays constituted the same continuous spectrum; third, the development of spectroscopy and spectrum analysis; and finally, the emergence of the electromagnetic theory of light and the subsequent laboratory creation of electromagnetic waves, as well as the discovery of x rays at the end of the nineteenth century.

The account given here is based on current scholarship in the history of nineteenth-century physics and, in particular, optics and radiation. However, as the current status of historical research on each of these topics is not homogeneous, different historical and historiographical points will be stressed for each topic. The first subject will stress historiographical issues in interpreting the optical revolution, with reference to Thomas Kuhn’s scheme of the scientific revolution. The second and third subjects, which have not yet been thoroughly examined by historians, will stress the interplay among theory, experiment, and instruments in the discovery of new rays and the formation of the idea of the continuous spectrum. The fourth subject, Maxwell’s electromagnetic theory of light, is rather well known, but the account here concentrates on the transformation of a theoretical concept into a laboratory effect, and then on the transformation of the laboratory effect into a technological artifact.

In the years between 1800 and the end of the twentieth century, astronomy was fundamentally transformed. That which had been at heart a science of position, in which astronomers strove to say where an object is, not what it is, became in many ways a vastly more wide-ranging and large-scale enterprise in terms of the questions asked of nature, the number of astronomers it engaged, the level of public and private support it enjoyed, and the size and sophistication of the instruments employed, as well as the remarkable extension of observations beyond the narrow window of optical wavelengths.

The focus of this chapter is on those changes in observational astronomy that comprised central elements in this remaking of astronomy between 1800 and 2000: the reform of positional astronomy in the early nineteenth century, the rise of astrophysics (although little attention is devoted to the study of the Sun, as that is discussed elsewhere in this volume), and the ways in which shifting forms of patronage provided new opportunities for state-of-the-art instruments. In all of these areas, the history of the telescope, the key instrument in observational astronomy in the last four centuries, will be key. We shall also see that the improvement of telescopes was often not tied to answering particular theoretical questions, but was rather seen as a worthy goal in itself that would, in turn, lead to novel results. It should be noted, too, that we are concerned with astronomy in the Western world at the cutting edge of research. I shall therefore not address very interesting questions about the development of instruments for use primarily in demonstrations (e.g., planetaria) or employed chiefly for recreational uses.