Historian of science, professor at Harvard University (United States), Naomi Oreskes has been exploring for more than a decade the history of ambiguous relationships between scientific knowledge – particularly on environmental issues – and society and public life. American. In a landmark work (The Merchants of Doubt, The Apple tree, 2010), she analyzed the historical and political roots of climate skepticism and, more generally, the sources of distrust towards environmental sciences.
Just published in France, The Great Myth. How industrialists taught us to hate the state and worship the free market (with Erik M. Conway, trans. Elise Roy, The Links that Free, 704 pages, 29.90 euros) analyzes the means by which “market fundamentalism” – as the financier and philanthropist George Soros called it – gradually established itself in the United States throughout the 20th centurye century.
What path led you, Erik Conway and you, historians of science and technology, to write about economic ideas?
This is the consequence and continuation of the work that we undertook in The Merchants of Doubt. In this book, we sought to answer the question of why intelligent and informed people, people with solid intellectual training – often researchers! – came to reject scientific evidence acquired long ago on the reality, severity and causes of ongoing global warming.
By the end of the book, we came to the conclusion that the major cause of this denial was the preeminence of “market fundamentalism” – that is, the idea that markets are fundamentally good and that their free functioning cannot cannot cause deleterious effects greater than those that would be produced by State action to regulate them.
If the State wanted to fight against global warming, then it had to intervene in the functioning of markets and in the minds of many Americans, this implies an erosion of individual freedoms. This idea is very significant: any regulation of markets would imply a loss of freedoms. How did people in the United States come to think this, across the political spectrum? Above all, why is this idea so common, when the entire history of Europe since the post-war period shows precisely the opposite, that is to say that it is possible to have a State who intervenes in the functioning of the economy, organizes social protection, while guaranteeing the maintenance of public freedoms? We have thus moved from a historical investigation into disinformation in science to another, into disinformation in economics.
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