The Ivory Tower: The History of a Figure of Speech and Its Cultural Uses

The Ivory Tower: The History of a Figure of Speech and Its Cultural Uses

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The Ivory Tower: The History of a Figure of Speech and Its Cultural Uses

dc.contributor.author	Shapin, Steven
dc.date.accessioned	2012-03-08T15:13:50Z
dash.embargo.terms	2013-04-01
dc.date.issued	2012
dc.identifier.citation	Shapin, Steven. 2012. The Ivory Tower: the history of a figure of speech and its cultural uses. The British Journal for the History of Science 45(1): 1-27.	en_US
dc.identifier.issn	0007-0874	en_US
dc.identifier.issn	1474-001X	en_US
dc.identifier.uri	http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:8336536
dc.description.abstract	This is a historical survey of how and why the notion of the Ivory Tower became part of twentieth- and twenty-first-century cultural vocabularies. It very briefly tracks the origins of the tag in antiquity, documents its nineteenth-century resurgence in literary and aesthetic culture, and more carefully assesses the political and intellectual circumstances, especially in the 1930s and 1940s, in which it became a common phrase attached to universities and to features of science and in which it became a way of criticizing practices and institutions deemed to be ‘irrelevant’. The paper concludes by reflecting on the tag’s relationship to pervasive cultural tropes and how its modern history may be used to appreciate better where science and its academic setting now stand in the ancient debate between the active and contemplative lives.	en_US
dc.description.sponsorship	History of Science	en_US
dc.language.iso	en_US	en_US
dc.publisher	Cambridge Journals	en_US
dc.relation.isversionof	doi:10.1017/S0007087412000118	en_US
dash.license	LAA
dc.title	The Ivory Tower: The History of a Figure of Speech and Its Cultural Uses	en_US
dc.type	Journal Article	en_US
dc.description.version	Version of Record	en_US
dc.relation.journal	The British Journal for the History of Science	en_US
dash.depositing.author	Shapin, Steven
dc.date.available	2013-04-01T07:30:32Z