Brooks Adams, The Law of Civilization and Decay, and Economic Determinism January 28, 2011
Posted by Christopher Donohue in History of the Human Sciences.Tags: Alexis de Tocqueville, Arthur de Gobineau, Brooks Adams, Georg Simmel, John Ruskin, Karl Marx, Leslie White, materialism, Matthew Arnold, Max Weber, Robert Michels, Russell Kirk
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Brooks Adams (1848-1927)
Russell Kirk (1918-1994) noted that Brooks Adams was “an eccentric.” Adams was disgusted with American society in his day and thought inertia was “social death.” He believed the only solution to the ills of society was progress and change, denouncing capitalists and bankers in much the same language as Karl Marx. Adams, much like Marx, was to Kirk, an “economic determinist,” but unlike Marx, he “detested the very process of change which he urged society to accept,” and “longed hopelessly for the republic of Washington and John Adams,” condemning “democracy” as both “a symptom and cause of social decay.” Adams’ “detestation” of capitalism stemmed from his aversion to “competition,” enjoining his fellow man to seek stability and order. According to Kirk, however, Adams’ dream of harmony was subverted by his own understanding of historical laws, as “by the logic of his own economic and historical theories, permanence is never found in the universe.” Kirk underscored that the persistent theme throughout Adams’ four works — The Law of Civilization and Decay, America’s Economic Supremacy, The New Empire, and The Theory of Social Revolutions — was man’s imprisonment by economic forces and civilization as the product of ceaseless centralization (The Conservative Mind, 367-9) (more…)
Ngrams and World Peace January 26, 2011
Posted by Will Thomas in Uncategorized.Tags: Waqar Zaidi, Winston Churchill
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As I think most historians will know by now, the Ngram viewer from Google Laboratories can become a compulsive pastime. Nobody thinks it’s really all that healthy. The data sets are not totally reliable, the numbers are meaningless, and alternative usages of words easily undermine the point one would like to make by charting the prevalence of those words in Google’s massive scanned-in library across dates of publication. Still, it’s obvious there’s something in it, which is what gives it its appeal. Let’s say you didn’t simply want to show how immune to vulgar enthusiasms you are by shifting immediately into academic-wet-blanket mode, or by lampooning your own compulsion by saying it’s all just good fun. Let’s say you actually wanted to think constructively about this tool (as Dan Cohen of GMU does). What modest uses might you make of the Ngram viewer? Illustration of points you already know something about is a good one:
"air police" vs. "international control of atomic energy" (smoothing = 1)
A nice specific phrase search is “air police” and “international control of atomic energy”. I choose these phrases because I am a fan of Waqar Zaidi’s recent PhD thesis, which was written here at Imperial College CHOSTM. Zaidi argues for the central, successive place of two technologies, airplanes and atomic weapons, in the policing strategies imagined by internationalist thinkers. He claims that although there was overriding resistance to the idea of a world air police, far from being pie-in-the-sky, the plan was taken very seriously in wide circles. In his 1946 “iron curtain” speech, Winston Churchill devoted several lines to a fairly well-developed call for the new United Nations to be armed with just such a force: (more…)
David Hume on the Reduction of Sentiments January 21, 2011
Posted by Will Thomas in Chymistry, History of the Human Sciences.Tags: Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier, Bernard de Fontenelle, Carl Linnaeus, David Hume, Friedrich Engels, Michel Foucault, Staffan Müller-Wille, Thomas Hobbes
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This post illustrates some points concerning how arguments were constructed in 18th century philosophy, which I made in my last post on the historical science-economics relationship.
Last summer I was staying over at someone’s house and happened to notice an old college copy of David Hume (1711-1776), I think An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751), sitting on a bookshelf. With a little downtime on my hands, I decided to have a quick skim. What struck me at the time was Hume’s use of historical events and poets’ observations as facts or phenomena that could be fit within a more systematized theory of human sentiments. I was going to write about that, but, going back, either I wasn’t reading the same thing, or Hume just doesn’t use the device as much as I thought (preferring more vague references to common experience and opinion). So, never mind that.
What did grab me on re-reading is Hume’s well-known argument against a reduction of human sentiment to self-interest, per Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) among others. Hume framed his criticism in an interesting way:
An Epicurean or a Hobbist readily allows, that there is such a thing as a friendship in the world, without hypocrisy or disguise; though he may attempt, by a philosophical chymistry, to resolve the elements of this passion, if I may so speak, into those of another, and explain every affection to be self-love, twisted and moulded, by a particular turn of imagination, into a variety of appearances. But as the same turn of imagination prevails not in every man, nor gives the same direction to the original passion; this is sufficient even according to the selfish system to make the widest difference in human characters, and denominate one man virtuous and humane, another vicious and meanly interested.
Neglected Connections between the Histories of Science and Economics, Pt. 1 January 17, 2011
Posted by Will Thomas in Uncategorized.Tags: Charles Darwin, Herbert Spencer, Isaac Newton, John Stuart Mill, Karl Marx, Patrick Geddes, Philip Mirowski, Simon Schaffer, Steven Shapin, Thomas Hobbes, Thomas Malthus
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Although historians of science have not traditionally shown a strong interest in the history of economic thought, developing such an interest would make good professional sense, in particular because epistemological issues in economics and the natural sciences have long been intertwined in less than obvious ways. Historians would do well to familiarize themselves with historical epistemological debates around economic thought, such as the Methodenstreit of the 1880s, because important ideas like “science”, “objectivity”, and “impersonality” have meanings that, in much of the historical commentary on them, were specifically associated with debates surrounding the validity of social scientific abstraction, and the important distinctions that were made between the goals of theorization and normative practice.
Aside from brushing up on the historical meanings of certain terms, historians of science also have an opportunity to lend additional clarity to the historical connections between thinking about science and thinking about politics, society, and economy. Intellectual historians and philosophers of economics, and of science more generally, have studied the more explicit historical debates surrounding political economy and its connections to the methods of science, say, in the thought of John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) or Karl Marx (1818-1883). Additionally, the transfer of metaphors between domains has received good attention, particularly in the area of evolutionary theory: from the economics of Thomas Malthus (1766-1834) to Charles Darwin (1809-1882), or from evolutionary theory back into Herbert Spencer’s (1820-1903) social theory (on this blog, also see Chris Renwick’s discussion of Patrick Geddes).
There is further important work to be done in straight-up intellectual history, but additional opportunities may be found in the history of intellectual practices that provide the context in which ideas make sense. (more…)
Sketch: UK Agricultural Research and Education January 7, 2011
Posted by Will Thomas in Technocracy in the UK.Tags: Alfred Charles True, Alfred Daniel Hall, Charles Townshend, Edward John Russell, Frederick Gowland Hopkins, George Henry Falkiner Nuttall, John Bennet Lawes, John Sibthorp, Jonathan Harwood, Joseph Barcroft, Joseph Henry Gilbert, Justus Liebig, Margaret Rossiter, Marsha Richmond, Redcliffe Salaman, Reginald Punnett, Robert Kohler, Rowland Biffen, Thomas Barlow Wood, Vincent Brian Wigglesworth, William Bateson
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Joseph Henry Gilbert (1817-1901)
It is difficult to trace the lineage of agricultural research in Britain without the bottom falling out from underneath your feet, putting you in freefall until you land with a thud in the eighteenth century. Since this is well outside the scope of my project, I will just note a few reference points before scrambling back toward the twentieth century: the growth of experimental farming by “improvement”-minded landowners (good ol’ Turnip Townshend and co.), the 1791 foundation of the Veterinary College of London (later the Royal Veterinary College), and the 1796 foundation of the Sibthorpian Chair of Rural Economy at Oxford through the benefaction of John Sibthorp (1758-1796), who was Sherrardian Professor of Botany there from 1784 until his death (having replaced his father, Humphrey, who held the post from 1747 to 1783).
A Board of Agriculture existed in England from 1793 until it was wound up in 1820. The Royal Agricultural Society of England was founded in 1838, and the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons was founded in 1844. For reference, the Board of Longitude was wound up in 1828, the Royal Astronomical Society was founded in 1820, the British Medical Association was founded in 1832, and the Chemical Society of London was founded in 1841.
EWP 2011 January 3, 2011
Posted by Will Thomas in Uncategorized.2 comments
Me doing some EWP-related reading during some downtime on my honeymoon in Hawaii last July. No, seriously, this is relaxation for me!
Happy New Year everyone! In retrospect, it has been very convenient for me that I started this blog on January 1, 2008, because that way the new year provides a good occasion for reflection on blogging past, present and future. At three years into this project, things have slowed down a little. Once upon a time, I managed a few posts each week. Now I try to get in one. However, they tend to be longer, and, I think the ideas are better developed than they once were, which really was the whole point of the exercise. What was once a scattershot series of observations and complaints has become a more fully worked out critical viewpoint, which I can draw upon in day-to-day conversations and writing.
However, one year ago, this viewpoint was already reasonably well worked out. My new year’s blogging resolution is once again to stop leaning so hard on the crutch of methodological introspection. (more…)
Will Thomas
Christopher Donohue
