Abstract
This session explores the question of the universality of science. Even more than natural law or the language of civilization, isn't science at the heart of conceptions of the universal developed in the 18th century ? To understand what is at stake, we need to distinguish three dimensions. Firstly, the idea of immutable laws of nature, valid everywhere and always, has been established since the end of the seventeenth century : the Newtonian law of universal gravitation is thearchetype, but it coexists, in Enlightenment thinking, with more descriptive or taxonomic conceptions of science. Secondly, the ambition of an international science, based on the cooperation of scientists, came into conflict with the increasingly assertive national and imperial logics of science. Thirdly, theuniversalityof knowledge implies that it should be accessible to all, that it should become a common and public good, as Voltaire advocates in his Elementsof Newton's Philosophy.
These three dimensions (immutable laws, international science and public knowledge) came to form a system in the ideal conception of modern Western science that took hold during the 19th and 20th centuries.The American sociologist Robert K. Merton gave it avery importantscopebydeveloping his theory of the " normative structure of science ". In his view, universalism was an essential criterion of both scientific ethos and democratic culture. This normative vision of science can be contrasted with that of another sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu, who constantly questioned the conditions of possibility of universalist knowledge, conducting both a sociological critique of the " monopoly of the universal " and thedefense ofan autonomous, reflexive science, capable ofaccessing transhistorical truths. It was from this perspective that he developed, in the 1980s, the notion of" interest in disinterestedness ".
Finally, the session returns to the eighteenth century, addressing the exclusion of women from the world of science. Émilie du Châteletused the language of " droits de l'esprit " to demand women's access to education. In the face of a scholarly universalism conceived as a male monopoly, she denounced an abuse, a historical injustice done to " half the human race " and proposed an experiment, both scientific and political, of radical equality inaccess to scientific careers.
