In Michael Polanyi and His Generation , Mary Jo Nye investigates the role that Michael Polanyi and several of his contemporaries played in the emergence of the social turn in the philosophy of science. This turn involved seeing science as a socially based enterprise that does not rely on empiricism and reason alone but on social communities, behavioral norms, and personal commitments. Nye argues that the roots of the social turn are to be found in the scientific culture and political events of Europe in the 1930s, when scientific intellectuals struggled to defend the universal status of scientific knowledge and to justify public support for science in an era of economic catastrophe, Stalinism and Fascism, and increased demands for applications of science to industry and social welfare.   At the center of this struggle was Polanyi, who Nye contends was one of the first advocates of this new conception of science. Nye reconstructs Polanyi’s scientific and political milieus in Budapest, Berlin, and Manchester from the 1910s to the 1950s and explains how he and other natural scientists and social scientists of his generation—including J. D. Bernal, Ludwik Fleck, Karl Mannheim, and Robert K. Merton—and the next, such as Thomas Kuhn, forged a politically charged philosophy of science, one that newly emphasized the social construction of science. “There isn’t a lot of current interest in who Polanyi was and how he came to hold the views he did. Mary Jo Nye’s excellent and richly researched book aims to tell us and, along the way, uncovers a genealogy for the notion of tacit knowledge that situates it in the force fields shaping much 20th-century thinking about politics and economics as well as science.” -- Steven Shapin ― London Review of Books “[Nye’s] rich, impressive book recasts the science wars barbs of the recent past by illuminating the searing politics, intellectual passions, and spirited debates that drove Polanyi and his generation to think about science in social terms.” -- David Kaiser ― Science “Replete with encounters with major intellectual currents and figures of the mid-twentieth century and with a wealth of references, this book will be a touchstone for scholars seeking to understand how science and its claims to truth evolved in the twentieth century. Highly recommended.” -- D. Bantz ― Choice “The book shows the continuities between the phases of Polanyi’s manifold career—from Budapest, to Berlin, to Manchester, to Oxford; from medicine, to physical chemistry, to economics, to politics, to philosophy of science—and convincingly demonstrates how each phase furnished Polanyi with conceptual resources he deployed to tremendous effect in his magnum opus, Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy . . . . Throughout this transnational story of a whole generation of scholars, Nye not only displays immense erudition but astutely analyzes how the ‘social construction of science’ came to be understood as a critique of science. Close attention to her arguments will reward patient readers from any academic background.” -- Michael D. Gordin ― Chemical Heritage Magazine “The scholarship behind Nye’s book is both wide and deep; its organization very thoughtfully plotted; and its presentation remarkably coherent, given the many-layered narrative. Due to the scope of the inquiry, readers like this reviewer may encounter individuals and ideas previously unknown to them from the fields of sociology, philosophy, economics, and politics, in addition to a number of lesser known scientists. . . . Nye’s nuanced and persuasive narrative will amply reward the reader who gives it the close attention it deserves.” -- Stephen J. Weininger ― Bulletin for the History of Chemistry “No brief review can do justice to this densely packed book. Those interested in Polanyi’s insider account of the nature of scientific investigation can be grateful for Mary Jo Nye’s painstaking research.” -- Jude P. Dougherty, Catholic University of America ― Review of Metaphysics “[A] masterful study of how Polanyi’s concepts were molded by their context. In analyzing the complex interplay of theories, practice, and social life in Polanyi’s career, Nye exposes the experiences of her subject, encompassing the ‘hard’ sciences as well as economics, philosophy, religion, and much else. But there Nye does not stop. She systematically places Polanyi’s scholarship in the context of his major contemporaries. In doing so, she introduces, among many others, the basic outlines of Kuhn, Popper, Imre Lakatos, Mannheim, Robert K. Merton, and Friedrich von Hayek. All of these are succinctly explained, and put into the perspective of Polanyi’s interests. . . . [A] piece of scholarship that brilliantly achieves a deeper understanding of how a major classic of science studies came into being, and has been shaped by its receptions . . . [and] a crucial work on the social construction of science studies.” -- Carsten Reinhardt ― H