ABSTRACT
The Napoleonic political arena, in fact, had to be loosely enough defined to contain all the competing definitions of elite status that Napoleon’s many different concurrent policies towards the formation of his ruling class created. The political arena was much less strongly defined than is usual in modern Western societies. Politics, bureaucracy, and intellectual life flowed into each other; individuals, methods, attitudes, and metaphors were transferable over the whole area. Science faced peculiarly acute problems in the context because its ideology as a vocation, with its emphasis on the abstraction of the true scientist from the political world, was peculiarly resistant to the justification or support of its political organization. In the case of science in the specific period, vocational ethos not only gave a plan of campaign against the over-powerful; it also contained the means of intellectual and personal survival in a world where the status of science was often uncertain, and success in the patronage system of science.
