Poison and justice: An investigation into the debate over poison gas after the Great War to rethink current practices of judgement in science, industry, and the military

The thesis develops Jean-Francois Lyotard's rereading of Kant's Critique of Judgement to investigate how our idioms silence idioms which give a different significance to the Great War.;This coalition saw in the chaos of technological change, in the destruction of the War, and in the rapid destabilization of our preconceptions by scientific research, the concepts of science, industrial progress, and total war (economic and military). Believing they embodied these ideas, this chaos called forth a sublime enthusiasm--a state of exaltation based on the sacrifice of natural and human forms--which supported strategies for a transformation of America into a society in which science-based industry established the limits of democracy.;In Kantian terms ethics was submerged by aesthetics. This led to a pre-critical politics in which proponents of other ideas could gain no hearing and were dealt with cynically because they are prejudged in advance as either irrational or as trying to destroy society.;The thesis considers how views the coalition suppressed--the views of statesmen like Woodrow Wilson Newton Baker, officers like Chief of Staff General March, pure scientists, inventors like Edison, women, workers, and the to-be-scientific world--suggest alternative coalitions for the development of technology. The role of organo-chlorines in human immune and reproductive system failure, and of CFC's in destroying the ozone layer, gives the highly specific focus of this thesis a global significance.;I look at the 1919 coalition between the U.S. Army Chemical Warfare Service (CWS), the National Research Council (NRC), the American Chemical Society (ACS), and Du Pont. The coalition prevented the General Staff demobilizing the CWS, and it reinforced the wartime establishment of a science-based chemical industry. It secured the new chlorine industry, whose wartime products were poison gases, and which would go on to produce organo-chlorines, Agent Orange, Dioxin, DDT, PCBs, and CFC's.