Felix Kaufmann’s journal book review endorses Baker’s defense of scientific freedom while questioning one of its empirical arguments and shifting its strongest justification toward human liberty. Baker’s book, a sequel to The Scientific Life (1942), warns against centralized research under state supervision. Kaufmann presents its arguments in sequence: science has intrinsic value beyond material usefulness; creative inquiry requires freedom to pursue unforeseen directions; and political control threatens investigations that challenge official doctrines. His concluding assessment distinguishes agreement with this cause from acceptance of every argument offered for it.
The review opens by locating Baker’s intervention within a rapidly changing political situation. The atomic bomb has intertwined the organization of research with international policy, and Kaufmann attributes legislative measures in the United States, Great Britain, and Canada to that wider political setting. Baker scarcely addresses this development, yet scientists debating nuclear-research legislation have strongly endorsed many of his arguments. Kaufmann thus identifies both a limitation in the book’s scope and the continuing relevance of its defense of free inquiry.
Baker’s first conceptual move is to reject the claim that science matters only insofar as it serves the community’s material welfare. Kaufmann reports his comparison of science with music, art, and literature as activities valuable in themselves. The scientist’s primary motive, on this account, is discovering truth rather than securing a predetermined practical result.
State control over inquiry is likely to weaken this impulse by overemphasizing the function of research in promoting material welfare.
The objection concerns what directs inquiry, not merely who administers it. Making practical benefit the governing criterion risks displacing the pursuit of truth. Baker’s second argument concerns discovery itself: assigned tasks may prevent scientists from following apparently incidental paths that disclose unexpected possibilities. His repeated emphasis on chance discoveries supports the view that scientific progress cannot be fully anticipated through centrally prescribed objectives.
The third danger is ideological suppression. Research that undermines—or is merely suspected of undermining—the scientific basis of rulers’ doctrines may be discouraged. Kaufmann reports Baker’s example of genetics in Soviet Russia, then extends the argument beyond the book’s predominantly natural-scientific scope:
But it goes without saying that state control of research in the social sciences is even more dangerous. To reconcile it with political freedom is virtually impossible.
This extension makes explicit the connection between the organization of knowledge and political freedom. In the social sciences, inquiry may directly scrutinize the institutions and claims of those exercising control. Kaufmann’s concern therefore reaches beyond the loss of particular discoveries to the freedom to investigate politically consequential questions.
His support nevertheless leaves room for methodological criticism. Baker asked seven Oxford science lecturers to identify the most important discoveries between the world wars. Their list contained twenty-seven items, none credited to a Soviet scientist. Kaufmann rejects this result as significant evidence that state control caused inferior scientific achievement. Even granting the comparison’s implied ranking, other factors could explain it. His objection separates an observed difference in achievement from a warranted causal explanation: agreement with Baker’s conclusion does not validate this particular route to it.
The review culminates in a reordering of the case against centralized research:
While I grant that centralization of research and its direction by the state would impair scientific progress in the long run, I believe that the effects on human freedom would be even more detrimental, and that centralization and state direction should be opposed primarily for this reason.
Scientific productivity remains important, but it is not Kaufmann’s decisive standard. He believes Baker would probably accept this priority, although the book insufficiently stresses it. The review’s distinctive contribution is therefore to combine a defense of open-ended discovery with a demand for sound causal reasoning, while placing human freedom above research efficiency as the principal ground for resisting state direction.
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