This conference, remarked Edward Shils, “led an important bloc of British scientists to support the Marxist theses that all scientific work, however abstruse, is a witting or unwitting response to the practical problems confronting the society or the ruling classes of the society in which the scientists live.” Pure research meant nothing on its own, but constituted a preparatory step to applied science and, ultimately, social change. At the same time, many natural scientists themselves supported a wider application of science to social problems, promoting its rationality and tangibility over the dead-end of partisan shibboleths. The fact that economic planning had been infused with scientific credibility granted a good measure of legitimacy to sympathetic scientists. They were to be the “men of science” or “experts” in charge of rationalising the economy and the administration.

Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, loc. 76