‘Many Modern Industrial Spies are Excellent Scholars’: Industrial Counterespionage and Images of Knowledge in Czechoslovakia During the Great Depression

Abstract

The article uses Yehuda Elkana's theory of images of knowledge to link the ideological demand for industrial counterespionage in interwar Czechoslovakia with the shifting legitimacy of what was then considered publicly beneficial corporate research. Using industrial counterespionage as an example, the article traces continuities in the discourse on the security of technology transfer, while at the same time analysing the related state interventions during the Great Depression of the 1930s. The premise of the article is that in Czechoslovakia, between the 1920s and 1930s, the importance of such images of knowledge, whose content was ‘security’ and the ‘protection’ of society from foreign (and domestic) threats gradually increased. External influences such as the Great Depression and the threat to Czechoslovakia's territorial integrity by its neighbours in the 1930s accelerated these shifts but did not cause them. There was a growing ideological need for protection in society, which reinforced the security-oriented images of knowledge and, through the implementation of industrial counterespionage, ultimately led to restrictions on the technology transfer in corporate research. This is well illustrated by the expert debates on the Economic Espionage Act of 1935, which are examined in this article.