Post-war political economics and the growth of Australian university research, c.1945-1965

What is it about?

In this article I was trying to understand why nations were growing research after the Second World War and what it meant as new knowledge became increasingly important to states. The traditional 'military industrial complex' argument did not really work, as Australia (my case here) did not have one. In the paper I bring together Marxist arguments about connections between technology and exploitation with historical descriptions of the growth of the postmodern condition after the Second World War to see that research had both economic and discursive or meaning-related purposes.

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Why is it important?

The article makes a unique historical intervention into our understanding of connections between research and the state after the Second World War and draws on an innovative methodology that seeks to combine techniques from economic and cultural history.

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