Robert N. Proctor: Importance

Robert N. Proctor is American historian. Explore interesting quotes on importance.
Robert N. Proctor: 28   quotes 0   likes

“Yet in an important sense the Nazis might indeed be said to have "depoliticized" science (and many other areas of culture). The Nazis depoliticized science by destroying the possibility of political debate and controversy. Authoritarian science based on the "Fuhrer principle" replaced what had been, in the Weimar period, a vigorous spirit of politicized debate in and around the sciences. The Nazis "depoliticized" problems of vital human interest by reducing these to scientific or medical problems, conceived in the narrow, reductionist sense of these terms. The Nazis depoliticized questions of crime, poverty, and sexual or political deviance by casting them in surgical or otherwise medical (and seemingly apolitical) terms … politics pursued in the name of science or health provided a powerful weapon in the Nazi ideological arsenal.”

Robert N. Proctor

Source: Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under the Nazis, 1988, p. 293

Health , Question , Problem , Sense

“It is certainly true that, in one important sense, the Nazis sought to politicize the sciences.”

Robert N. Proctor

Source: Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under the Nazis, 1988, p. 290

Sense , Science

“The case of Otto Neurath, first author of the Vienna Circle's manifesto, is a revealing one. In the years before the First World War, the young Austrian economist became interested in eugenics, translating (with his wife, Anna Schapire-Neurath) Francis Gallon's Hereditary Genius for the first time into German. His most important early work, however, was his analysis of the war economy. War economics, in his view, was a science with well-defined laws and principles which, like ballistics, are "independent of whether one is for or against the use of guns."”

Robert N. Proctor

Source: Value-free science?: Purity and power in modern knowledge, 1991, p. 168

War , World , Law , Science