418 J.-A. PEMBERTON
Here, it is useful to note here that in 1927, when Zimmern occupied
the role of deputy director of the IIIC, he had come into conflict with
Julien Luchaire, the IIIC’s first director, because Zimmern wanted the
IIIC to focus on high themes rather than involve itself in the quotid-
ian aspects of intellectual and artistic life.^283 Zimmern’s conception of
UNESCO would not have thrilled those who wanted the new institu-
tion to be more representative, more wide-ranging in its activities and
more practically oriented than its predecessor. James P. Sewell suggests
that Zimmern’s report was evocative of the ‘ethereal universalism’ which
many associated with the ICO, an association that Zimmern’s report
could only have reinforced.^284
One can contrast Zimmern’s vision for UNESCO with that of Huxley
and Needham. In April 1946, while still in China, Needham was beck-
oned by Huxley to join the UNESCO secretariat. Not, long after this,
Needham, whose work on behalf of the British Scientific Mission to
China had impressed Huxley, became the first head of UNESCO’s nat-
ural sciences division.^285 Far from conceiving of UNESCO as occupy-
ing some lofty intellectual plane, Huxley and Needham envisaged it as
an agency actively devoted to the enrichment of the lives of the world’s
people, in particular, the world’s most deprived peoples, by scientific
means.^286 Needham powerfully evoked this vision of the organisation in
stating the following:
I see the job of UNESCO as that of pumping scientific knowledge into the
arteries of the world, until it flows to the service of the worker in the field,(^283) Renoliet, L’Unesco oubliée, 79–80.
(^284) Sewell, UNESCO and World Politics, 85.
(^285) Archibald, ‘How the “S” Came to Be in UNESCO,’ 45; Sewell, UNESCO and World
Politics, 94, and Huxley, ‘Science and the United Nations,’ 554.
(^286) Julian Huxley, UNESCO: Its Purpose and Its Philosophy (Preparatory Commission
of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation, September 15,
1946), 38, 1 C/6, UNESCO/C/6, UA. For the attitude of Huxley and Needham towards
colonialism, see Patrick Petitjean, ‘The Ultimate Odyssey: The Birth of the Scientific and
Cultural History of Mankind Project,’ in Petitjean, Zharov, Glaser, Richardson, Padirac,
and Archibald, eds., Sixty Years of Science at UNESCO 1945– 2005 , 86; Gavin Schaffer,
‘“Like a Baby with a Box of Matches”: British Scientists and the Concept of “Race” in the
Inter-war Period,’ British Journal for the History of Science 38, no. 3 (2005): 307–24, 321;
and Sewell, UNESCO and World Politics, 87.