Anthony Mills discusses the need to “recover” science policy.

The aftermath of a global public health crisis, combined with the rise of populism at home and growing economic and security threats abroad, has persuaded a wide swath of Americans that a more interventionist state is needed to shore up, promote, or protect particular sectors of the economy. This has led commentators to declare the “return of industrial policy.” These changes in the politics of industrial policy have been accompanied by distinctive and underappreciated changes in the politics of the related area of science policy. In effect, science policy—the sets of questions concerning how and to what degree the government should fund, conduct, or direct scientific research—has been eclipsed by, or, perhaps more accurately put, absorbed into, industrial policy. …

… Implicit in this policy package is an instrumentalist conception of science. According to this idea, science is the raw material for technological innovation—an “input” in a process of production that begins with knowledge discovery, leads to invention, and culminates in innovation and commercialization. The state’s role, accordingly, is to intervene in the “pipeline” of innovation—in the production of knowledge (science policy) or the production of the goods and services the knowledge enables (industrial policy). …

… [I]t was not so long ago that a non-instrumentalist idea—that the pursuit of knowledge is valuable in and of itself—still informed public discourse about science. Before and after World War II, pioneers of science policy such as Vannevar Bush, Michael Polanyi, and Edward Shils articulated the concept of scientific autonomy as an alternative to policies to “plan” science as part of a larger political project to “plan” or “rationalize” the economy and society overall. For Bush, Polanyi, and Shils, scientific autonomy was about much more than science per se or even economic policy; it provided a normative standpoint from which to defend a politically liberal conception of scientific institutions and their place in society at a moment of growing extremism at home and abroad.