Just a quick note to say I won’t be doing any posting until next week, because I’ll be at the History of Science Society conference in Phoenix.  I’ll be presenting my paper, “The Past, Present, and Future of West Antarctica: Research on the Behavior of a Continent, 1957-1990,” in the Saturday morning session, as part of the panel “Producing Knowledge for Policy: Research Program Planning and Scientific Assessments”.  Other presenters are Clark Miller, Keynyn Brysse, and Jessy O’Reilly (who is working on the integration of WAIS research into climate change assessments).  Naomi Oreskes, UCSD historian and scholar on the science, politics, and rhetoric of climate change, will be doing commentary.  The full program in pdf is here.

Now, because I can already feel the impatient demand for a YouTube clip from America’s finest era of woodenly-produced televised entertainment:

Lucien Lévy-Bruhl was born in 1857 in Paris.  In 1876, he entered the Ecole Normale Superieure, specializing in philosophy.  Lévy-Bruhl taught at secondary schools until 1895.  Obtaining his doctorate in 1884, from 1886 onwards he lectured at Ecole Libre des Sciences, and from 1895 onwards, at Ecole Normale and the Sorbonne.  At the Sorbonne, in 1904, Lévy-Bruhl became professor of philosophy.  In 1917, Lévy-Bruhl became the editor of Revue Philosophique and in 1925 founded the Institut d’Ethnologie, together with Paul Rivet and Marcel Mauss.  In 1927, he retired from the Institute as well as the Sorbonne.  He was a visiting professor at Harvard from 1919 to 1920.  Levy-Bruhl died in Paris in 1939.

Lévy-Bruhl considered the history of French philosophy, from Descartes to the 1890s, to demonstrate specific features connected to the French national character and intellectual life.  For Lévy-Bruhl, it was of utmost significance that many French philosophers began their studies in either mathematics or the natural sciences.  Voltaire “became the herald of Newton” in France, while Condillac wrote on the language of the calculus.  “It seems allowable to infer,” Lévy-Bruhl concluded, “not that French philosophy was based upon mathematics, but that there has been in France a close affinity between the mathematical and the philosophical spirit” (History of modern philosophy in France, 470.)

Due to the legacy of Descartes as well as mathematics,  philosophers “took it for granted that among the various ways of representing reality, there is one which is adequate and recognizable on account of its clearness and sufficient evidence” (ibid.)  The connection of French philosophy to mathematics explained why French philosophers “have nearly always taken care to show that their doctrines were in perfect accord with common sense” and that method “was a mere application of the rules of common sense”  (474,475.)  

Consistent with Lévy-Bruhl’s coupling of French philosophy with the rational and the scientific was his privileging of the Cartesian tradition over that exemplified by de Maistre.  Lévy-Bruhl’s association of French philosophy with a particular kind of system and a particular kind of intellectual work forced him to gloss over some of the more extravagant features of the French socialists and Utopians, such as Saint-Simon and Fourier, as well as the more extreme ideologues of the French Revolution.  For Lévy-Bruhl, the history of “philosophy” was the steady growth of reason itself.  Any derivation from such a growth was explicable by either a falling away from tradition or to a concern for justice which obviated reason. 

According to Lévy-Bruhl, French philosophy strove towards totalizing explanations, and accordingly, considered practicality and utility objects of its inquiry, as well as developed  a belief of “mankind’s power over nature” (476.)  Referring to French socialists and Utopians, Lévy-Bruhl noted that in the first half of the nineteenth century, “French thinkers were not over-timid in their political and social conceptions,” wishing to find “in society, as well as in nature, a clear and logical order, justifiable in the eyes of reason.”  When philosophers did not find order in society, they attempted to establish it. For Lévy-Bruhl,  such an effort revealed a lapse of judgment that was all the more surprising given philosophers’ knowledge of the history of philosophy and the fate of utopian schemes.  The move towards “a priori social constructions,” despite of the lessons of the history of philosophy, was due to French philosophers desire for both justice and order.

French philosophy, from the seventeenth century until the closing decades of the nineteenth, was defined by the undulations of the Cartesian spirit. The Cartesian spirit was that of “criticism incumbent upon modern philosophy when out of the Middle Ages and past the Renaissance and the Reformation,” whose main object was the separation of “scientific or philosophical speculation from theology,” as well as to “overthrow the entire body of institutions based on historical tradition which was often indefensible….” (477.)  “This spirit,” Lévy-Bruhl continued, “which had become predominant by the end of the seventeenth century, was transmitted in the eighteenth through Fontenelle and Montesquieu, prevailed among ‘the philosophers’ (of the Enlightenment), and even in Condillac, and spent itself in the French Revolution.”  This Cartesian spirit was “revived” in the philosophy of Auguste Comte.

Lévy-Bruhl  contended, however, that recent philosophy was defined by the spirit of cosmopolitanism, whereby “national philosophies are on the decline.”  Both “positive science,”  sociology, logic, epistemology, and psychology were “cultivated at the same time and by similar methods, in Germany, the United States, England, and France.”  Lévy-Bruhl foresaw “only one philosophy common to civilized mankind” (480.)  Lévy-Bruhl also argued in his history of French philosophy that with the progress of civilization comes the universality of reason.  As noted below, this conception of universality becomes important as a background element in his conception of the primitive mind.  When speaking of “primitives,” Lévy-Bruhl underscored the provincial character of their rationality.

Franz Boaz viewed Lévy-Bruhl’s “Primitive Mentality” as part of a tradition of discussions on primitives in anthropology which had developed from Herder and a particular strand of the German Romantics who emphasized the causal action of the environment over inherent and heritable racial differences.  Anthropologists and ethnographers of this tradition, E.B. Tylor, Adolf Bastian, and James G. Frazer, as well as the sociologist Emile Durkheim, have “disregarded racial differences completely,” instead using the similitude of beliefs, mentalities, customs, rituals, and material culture as the basis for comparison.

In all of these  writings, Boaz concluded, “it is only the difference between culturally primitive man and civilized man that is relevant.” The central problematic in all of these works was the process of “the development of culture,”  narrated as the interaction between psychological and social factors, common to all mankind, as well as the “effects of historical happenings” (The Mind of Primitive Man, 33.)  Lévy-Bruhl, however, saw himself as inaugurating a new era in the study of anthropological man through his realization of the cognitive and cultural gulf separating primitive and civilized man.

Lévy-Bruhl’s investigations led him to conclude that “the primitive’s mentality was  essentially “‘mystic.’”  While both the primitive and the civilized mind began with sense impressions, Lévy-Bruhl noted, at the point of intellection and abstract thought, the primitive “makes an abrupt turn” (431.)

In opposition to the accounts of missionaries, Lévy-Bruhl argued that the principal distinction between primitives and civilized individuals was not the absence of abstract thinking among primitives, but the inappropriateness of the western conception of abstract thinking to the cognitive processes of primitives.  The accounts of missionaries and an earlier generation of ethnographers were characterized by “concepts…encompassed by the logical atmosphere proper to European mentality….” (434.) The lack of progress and understanding among western observers was due to a failure in the language used to describe the primitive mind, a mind distinct from that of civilized man.   Western concepts and taxonomies thus rendered primitive customs, beliefs, and manners incomprehensible.

Thus, the school of ethnology guided by the thesis of an overall psychic unity of all peoples was an exemplar of this failure of understanding.  For Lévy-Bruhl, no similar ’spirit’ or ‘mind’ existed between Westerners and primitives.  As importantly, primitive social life contained no social organizations which could accurately be described according to the Western signifiers of “family,” “marriage,”  “property,” or “money.” Money, to Western minds, was “a question of a medium…which makes it possible to exchange something.”  It signified a “universal medium of exchange.”  The ideas of “natives” are more “concrete.”  “Natives,” such as the Melanesians, “use shells for their purchases, but always with a very definite specification” (485.)  These differences in signification revealed distinct worldviews.

Lévy-Bruhl also underscored that the primitive mind, though like the civilized mind in its search for causes,  did not seek the reasons for “what happens” in the same “direction” as the civilized mind.  The primitive “moves in a world where innumerable occult powers are everywhere present and always in action or ready to act” (487.)  To the primitive mind, there was the no circumstance which was “purely physical.”

In contrast, when the civilized mind sought the cause for something, “we look for the conditions which would be necessary to bring it about, in a series of similar phenomenon.”  If the conditions are determined “we ask no more; knowing the general law, we are satisfied.”  The attitude of the primitive is such that “he will always seek the true cause in the world of unseen powers, above and beyond what we call Nature, in the ‘metaphysical.’”  “In short,” Lévy-Bruhl concludes, “our problems are not his, and his are foreign to us” (438.)

Lévy-Bruhl demonstrated his indebtedness not only to the history of philosophy but also his commitment to the scientific rationalism and general progressive outlook of pre-war French Third Republic.  For Lévy-Bruhl, the civilized man occupied the highest, most scientific stage.  Lévy-Bruhl here appropriated Comte’s account of rational and scientific progress without paying any attention to the revolutionary or mystic elements of Comte’s system.  Lévy-Bruhl achieved such a construction by also linking Comte to Cartesian rationalism.  Lévy-Bruhl’s earlier conception of the growth of the civilized mind in his history of French philosophy then became the principle criteria by which he  judged the content and structure of the primitive mind.  Accordingly, Lévy-Bruhl’s conception of the primitive intellect corresponds roughly to the “Metaphysical Stage” of Comte’s account of the progress of the human mind from savagery to civilization.    In this second stage, which saw progress from the initial stage of animism and totemism, primitive gods were  abstracted into forces or vital principles.

The situation of primitives at the second stage and the emphasis on foreign quality of their reasoning points to a lack of certainty regarding savage rationality, a mixture of optimism and resignation that is characteristic of much of nineteenth and early twentieth century anthropology.  As “primitives” are at a particular stage in the evolution of peoples, they will eventually reach civilization and universal reason.   However, the immediate character of their existence reveals so distinct a form of civilization and psychic worldview that progress to the level of Western civility seems impossible.  Thus, primitives were both progressing and fixed in a specific stage.

Daniel Defoe

One of the clearest findings in my long-term exploration of the oeuvre of Simon Schaffer, is the centrality of Schaffer’s use of the idea that a thinker’s personal understanding of the arrangement of the cosmos, their process of inquiry, and their ideas about proper social order were often intimately interrelated in philosophical inquiry in the 17th and 18th centuries.  This insight provides a powerful tool for investigating different facets of the wide field of “natural philosophy” as it intersected with other realms of intellectual activity.

It is clearly the case that natural philosophy had no defined form nor any clear boundaries with other kinds of literature.  In today’s post we step slightly outside the bounds of natural philosophy with two pieces that examine writings at the beginning and the end of natural philosophy’s golden age:

1) “Defoe’s Natural Philosophy and the Worlds of Credit,” in Nature Transfigured: Science and Literature, 1700-1900, edited by John Christie and Sally Shuttleworth, 1989.

2) “The History and Geography of the Intellectual World: Whewell’s Politics of Language,” in William Whewell: A Composite Portrait, edited by Menachem Fisch and Schaffer, 1991.

In (1), Schaffer observes the novelty of natural philosophy in Defoe’s time (c.1659-1731) and notes similarities in literary strategies between it and another new form of writing, “the news journal,” both of which “appealed to a new authority relation—that of the circumstantiated report of the novel and unprecedented event…”  In (2), at the other end of the time frame, we find a portrait of Whewell (1794-1866) as a critical writer on scientific work, attempting to define an intellectual and social place for it in contrast to a broader enterprise of philosophy—a concern directly related to Schaffer’s work on the new role of the scientific “genius”.

A question that comes up here (and that I want to revisit later) is how well analytical tools used for dealing with the history of natural philosophy translate into other realms.  As varied as natural philosophy was, it does seem to have been persistently characterized by its adherents’ devotion to working out systems of arguments in an explicit way.  While cultural anthropology, literary analysis, and the analysis of natural philosophy all readily accept analysis of conceptual cosmologies (an “imaginary”, if you’re into Lacan), it is not so clear how well the methods Schaffer likes to use can answer the questions he likes to ask outside of the more tightly structured conceptual systems of natural philosophy.

Notably, in Schaffer’s 1989 piece on the nebular hypothesis and the notion of “progress” in the mid-19th century, it was fairly clear that there was enough space between cosmology and political economy to make the rhetorical links he pointed out between them seem less cutting than they might have been.

Similarly, it is unclear that Defoe actually had a “natural philosophy”.  Seeing as Defoe is not one of Schaffer’s usual suspects, I’m kind of curious about the origins of this piece, because it strikes me as an attempt to import a toolbox used effectively in Leviathan and the Air-Pump (1985) into a literary analysis that never really coheres.  While it’s certainly the case that Defoe’s writing was conceptually innovative (he first applied the term “credit” to the “credit” side of an account ledger), and that he was influenced by natural philosophical work, the piece comes off as a collection of stray observations derived from a rudimentary sociology: the piece “focuses on the ways in which different techniques and communities made different claims for control over natural and social milieux” (13).

The main question seems to revolve around who, in Defoe’s work, can be a credible witness (as to a spiritual visitation), and how can proper behavior be produced.  Financial credit can serve good ends (in contrast to the opinion of Jonathan Swift), but the “bad” credit of stock “jobbery” results in bubbles, and is to be avoided.  Similar questions pervaded religion: “Papists doctrines of redemption through confession were like the claims of those who ’stock-job Heaven in Exchange Alley by Puts and Refusals” (31).  Figures of bad credit in Defoe’s “economic cosmology” (36) were influenced by the Devil and likened to pirates, conjuring to mind hellish and unstable pirate societies as an analogy to the society of the stock exchange.  The basic point here seems to be about metaphorical innovation being used to develop a path to proper behavior and thus trust.  Schaffer’s analysis tolerates but doesn’t really reward the comparison he provides with natural philosophy and cosmology, and with Robert Boyle’s (1627-1691) “literary technology” in particular.  (Of course, I’m certainly no Defoe scholar, so if others would like to argue, please do.)

The piece on Whewell begins with a brief discussion of his literary metaphors, but quickly settles into the familiar analytical groove concerning the division of the bounds of inquiry, knowledge, and public trust.  Whewell’s “role has been notoriously difficult to categorize: alongside more familiar types, such as philosopher, historian, naturalist, and priest, let us now place that of ‘critic’” (230).

This case is quite convincing.  As scientific work became both increasingly productive and specialized, in the wake of the rationalistic and “‘extravagantly democratic’” excesses of the French Revolution and the “‘critical spirit’ of extreme German idealism” (207), the conservative Cambridge Anglican Whewell saw it as incumbent upon himself to put philosophy and science in their proper places.  To do this he relied on a division between “permanent” and “progressive” knowledge.

The object of science, through rigor, was to add to a store of authoritative, time-tested permanent knowledge, and to increase the sophistication of the common vocabulary.  In placing science in firm grounds, the establishment of proper nomenclature was essential (which motivated his dialogues with the prolific innovator Michael Faraday).  In this form it could be responsibly communicated.  The more rarefied realms of philosophy and unsettled science were progressive, and, as such, had to be kept bounded to their proper places.  Doing so was among “the cultural responsibilities of the élite” (209).  Whewell’s position was intended to oppose that of “artisan radicalism and utilitarian propaganda” (213).

“Scientists”—Whewell himself coined the term—were not entirely sanguine about his appointment of himself as a meta-scientific arbiter of the epistemological status of their work and their status in society.  Roderick Murchison (1792-1871), “prominent fox-hunter and geologist” complained that after “Whewell ‘had risen on the backs of the men of science‘ he [turned] upon them ‘as a high priest who abjured their ways” (212).  This role was not so different from that to which Defoe had appointed himself, linking proper knowledge, proper behavior, and proper social order.

*One final note.  Schaffer has an interesting throwaway line in the Whewell piece: “It can no longer surprise historians that the rhetorical and the figurative were deeply intertwined in such a set of scientific practices.  The point is not to demonstrate the mere existence of such verbal features, but to see how they worked, to describe Whewell’s linguistic tool-kit and the philosophical and political uses to which these tools were put” (202).  The point echoes one Steven Shapin had made nine years earlier.  I get the sense that routine acceptance of correct-but-trivial argumentation (as in straw-man bashing) is a perennial problem in humanistic scholarship.

In my last discussion of the challenges involved in writing about the history of science in the 20th century, I noted that local narratives can be taken to be revealing of broader issues, but that such narratives can also simply reflect back some larger narrative already understood to exist.  In this post we take this consideration to the case of the national narrative.

John Krige’s 2006 book American Hegemony and the Postwar Reconstruction of Science in Europe is, I would say, an important step in the establishment of a historiography of post-1945 science on the European continent.  Until recently, the history of scientific Europe in this period has not been systematically explored.  1999’s Science under Socialism, edited by Dieter Hoffmann and Kristie Macrakis (who just joined Krige at Georgia Tech this year), etched out a picture of science in East Germany.  Cathryn Carson has written on science in West Germany (publications list here).  In 1998’s The Radiance of France (out in a new edition this year), Gabrielle Hecht wrote on the development of the unusually important nuclear power industry in that country.  The object here is not to put together a complete bibliography, but if anyone wants to add to the picture of this historiography, please do leave a comment.

Krige’s book covers a lot of important bases, looking at the Marshall Plan, NATO, the State Department and CIA, the activities of the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, and the establishment of CERN (on which he has written more extensively elsewhere) as institutions linking American and European science and politics.  (Here one should also make note of Ron Doel’s ongoing project to study American science’s diplomatic uses.)  Similar to Needell’s book on Lloyd Berkner, the emphasis here is on individual cases.  In this case, different deliberations are marshaled into a narrative linking the “reconstruction” of scientific Europe to the larger narrative of America’s political “hegemony” in western Europe as part of an effort to build a bulwark against Soviet influence in the east: “The case study approach I have followed does not make for an integrated narrative.  Each example throws into relief a different facet of the process of empire building.  Underlying them all is the struggle to contain Communism” (256-7).

The book walks a line between confrontation and conservativeness in its claims: “This book is not ‘anti-American.’  My argument is permeated not with hostility to the United States but with a sense of the Realpolitik and its meaning in the Cold War.  I reject as morally arrogant and self-deceptive that view of American exceptionalism that hold that whereas ‘other states had interests, the United States had responsibilities’: all great powers have both” (14).  Krige is challenging Geir Lundestad here.

The book’s thesis and its analytical focus on archive-level negotiations seem designed to persuade those who might be convinced of an utter lack of self-interest and a complete purity of idealism in American foreign policy.  The term “hegemony” is used to reject such a position; the term’s definition is watered down in such a way that the story cannot help but stick.  Hegemony, Krige emphasizes, is “co-produced”, meaning that European beneficiaries of American scientific assistance not only agreed to its terms, but enthusiastically so.  He further details American elite scientists’ respect for European autonomy, with the obvious constraint that American resources not be used to support communism.  That such measures were insufficient to allay all criticism, including French reluctance to commit to transatlantic alliances (as expressed most clearly in de Gaulle’s 1966 withdrawal from NATO) can be seen as further evidence that such forms of intervention constituted a hegemony.  The lack of overt exercise of power merely serves to render that hegemony less visible.

The overarching picture Krige presents is surely correct: the American scientific model was both highly influential, and American resources were not provided free of American approval of the ends to which they would be put.  I suspect this argument is unlikely to reach an audience that needs to be convinced of it.  This, to my mind, makes the focus on national narrative unfortunate, since it tends to take on an overriding importance in the presentation of more local narratives.

That scientific diplomacy was designed to accord with American foreign policy goals is obvious; that diplomatic goals were in the balance in the intricacies of scientific politics is not, yet the presentation continually takes it for granted that they were.  This results in some strained presentation, as when Krige suggests on p. 185 that Niels Bohr might have ethically erred in the mid-’50s in not informing international guests at his Copenhagen institute—if, indeed, he didn’t; “we will probably never know”—that he was being funded by the Ford Foundation, and that his Ford Foundation contact, Shepard Stone, was explicitly aligning the Foundation’s programs with those of the CIA’s ironic (but, Krige allows, sincere and unalloyed) plot to promote an image of the United States as a supporter of open dialogue between nations.  (It was of course expected that this dialogue would result in new strategically-useful information on what was happening in science behind the Iron Curtain.)

A similar sensibility inhabits Krige’s presentation of the development of NATO projects, wherein particular suggestions presented by Americans automatically become identified with the American hegemonic project, and rejection of said suggestions becomes anti-hegemonic “European” resistance.  Thus, when American NATO representatives present a scheme for an international MIT-like technology institute, its defeat is taken to be of clear significance in the narrative arc of American techno-hegemony, as well as clear evidence of the blindness of Americans to “local specificities and to existing European strengths” (225), even though the proposal was widely embraced by European representatives, even though the scheme’s opponents had no objections to the kind of education to be offered, and even though the eventual scuppering of the proposal seems to have been on the rather mundane grounds that it might negatively impact existing universities.

Similarly, when MIT physicist Philip Morse worked with NATO to spread operations research (OR) in European militaries in the early 1960s, his scheme to promote a pedagogy of OR not unlike that offered in his burgeoning program at MIT (which included instruction in advanced mathematical techniques) was rejected.  This is taken to represent a rejection of an “American” model of OR in favor of a British model.  What Krige does not note is that at that time American military OR was essentially identical to British OR, and that what Morse was promoting was still a fairly peculiar vision for OR training as it pertained to the military services.  Most of my own research on this subject is not widely published, and none of it was in 2006, so this should by no means have been clear (and I’m willing to accept counter-arguments).  However, more caution in equating the Morse model with an “American” model might have prevented confusion as to the larger meaning (or lack thereof) of the success or failure of this or that model of OR.

The incidents portrayed in Krige’s book are important contributions to the historiography.  In the area of OR, for instance, there is no other material on OR in NATO, and I myself have not researched the specific topic so it is useful to me personally.  Krige also makes important contributions to the historiography of the impact of anti-communism on scientific work (as in the work of Jessica Wang): anti-communism clearly became Rockefeller Foundation policy in the early 1950s—against the Foundation’s avowed lack of concern for scientists’ political beliefs—as Foundation officials worried that mainstream biologists with communist sympathies would use Foundation funds to promote Lysenkoism.  However, this book also reinforces my feeling that the labyrinthine 20th-century archive tends to reflect more than it reveals when read too strictly in view of pre-posed concerns, such as national narratives.

This post looks at two articles by Simon Schaffer:

“States of Mind: Enlightenment and Natural Philosophy,” in The Languages of Psyche: Mind and Body in Enlightenment Thought, ed. G. S. Rousseau, 1990, pp. 233-290.

“Genius in Romantic Natural Philosophy,” in Romanticism and the Sciences, ed. Andrew Cunningham and Nicholas Jardine, 1990, pp. 82-98.

It makes comparison with some related points in Jan Golinski’s book Science as Public Culture: Chemistry and Enlightenment in Britain, 1760-1820, 1992.  Unlike the last post integrating Schaffer’s and Golinski’s analysis of eudiometry, this one distinguishes the (complementary) positions of the two authors.

Jeremy Bentham's "Panopticon" prison

Since his earliest pieces (especially his 1983 piece on natural philosophy and spectacle), Schaffer had been exploring the tensions between natural philosophical inquiry and the forces leading to professionalized specialties.  In pieces circa 1990, Schaffer further explored the relationship between enlightenment political ideals—which stressed rational assent as a path away from enthusiasm and despotism toward a proper polity—and natural philosophy and the political pressures it created and to which it was subjected.

In “States of Mind”, in a move not unlike his and Steven Shapin’s analysis of Hobbes’ critique of experimental philosophy, Schaffer stresses objections, particularly that of Edmund Burke (1729-1797) that the politics of rational assent proffered by people like Joseph Priestley (1733-1804) simply cloaked alternative religion-like claims to political authority.

The transformation of politically important elements of cosmology—rather than the elimination of their significance—is once again central to Schaffer’s argument (see also the transformation of comets from omens to source of physical disaster).  Here Priestley’s objection to the pneumatic philosophy of souls and spirits (as in Disquisitions on Matter and Spirit, 1777) brushes away the idea of mind as guided by spirit to allow the mind to be seen as a material organ with its own relationship to the material world, including its pneumatic aspects.  A new hygiene is now required to ensure proper reasoning: the elimination of unhealthy air and the creation of well-aired environments by “medical managers”.  Hence the importance seen in the program of eudiometry.  (Incidentally, readers should also be aware of the importance of historian Roy Porter’s work to the identification of a medical enlightenment).

Schaffer notes the close collaboration of Priestley with Jeremy Bentham as part of the provincial “Bowood group” under the patronage of the Earl of Shelburne.  Bentham was a strong supporter of Priestley’s chemical philosophy, drawing on its philosophical example and implications for hygiene in his own political arguments.  Bentham’s famous idea of the Panopticon itself represented a kind of laboratory of the mind, in which it could be determined how a proper state of reason could be restored—such as from a state of criminality or madness—in a process that could only be overseen by philosophically enlightened inspectors (yes, Foucault figures in here).  Schaffer synthesizes the points thus:

The members of such a [model] polity were to be governed through the complete management of their atmosphere and their surroundings.  The Panopticon relied on the link between the bodily situation of its inhabitants and the state of their mind.  The right distribution of light, air, and space prompted the right associations: every inmate would ‘conceive himself’ to be under constant surveillance. ¶ The Panopticon was an ‘enlightened’ project, concerned with rational order and moral reform, deriving its authority from the natural philosophical understanding of the work of the mind (234).

Golinski’s more directed concern with chemical experimentation highlights what kinds of experimentation were appealing or possible in different political environments.  He observes the importance for Priestley of simplicity of method and instrumentation, thereby allowing experiments to be widely replicated and the rational process of discovery to be shared by experimenter and audience alike.  The troubles with complexity of instrument formed part of the rhetorical arsenal against Lavoisier’s chemistry.

The shared rational experience could also carry its own burdens, particularly in the wake of the purported rationalism of the French Revolution.  The shared experience of breathing nitrous oxide, and the resulting delirium, could easily be attacked as being of a piece with the mad excesses of the Revolution, particularly for the experiments’ association with radical figures such as the physician Thomas Beddoes (1760-1808).  Chemistry became a regular target for anti-Jacobins such as Burke.  In the 1790s, Priestley’s house was destroyed and he emigrated to America.

It was in these circumstances that chemical experimenter (and poet) Humphry Davy (1778-1829) severed his relationship with provincial chemical philosophy, its radical political affiliations, and its experimentation with nitrous oxide, and moved in 1800 to conservative London and the new Royal Institution (RI, est. 1799).  Here Davy was able (eventually) to shed the controversies the provincial philosophers attracted.

Why "eventually" is included in parentheses: an 1802 cartoon by James Gillray of a demonstration on nitrous oxide done in 1800 at the Royal Institution. Davy is holding the bellows.

At the RI, Davy crafted a different relationship with the audience.  For example, by commanding the sophisticated apparatus of the voltaic pile, he was able to use its “galvanic fluid” to dissociate chemicals into their basic elements.  The pile was expensive, and not a common device of chemical experimentation.  Its creative use secured Davy’s reputation as a scientific “genius”.  In lectures, he did not come to experimental conclusions with an audience; he interpreted his carefully crafted performance for them.  In this position of responsibility, to the disappointment of some, he refrained from connecting chemical work to political philosophy, and enjoyed a productive career in the metropole (see also our primer on Faraday).

Davy demonstrates to a captive audience an electric light, powered by banks of voltaic piles kept in the Royal Institution's basement.

As I noted in January, in a 1986 piece Schaffer understood the rise of the idea of “discovery” by inspired geniuses to split scientific work into elite figures and ordinary laborers, which augured the “end of natural philosophy” and the rise of professionalized science.  In “Genius,” he elaborated that the extension of the disembodied force of “genius” from artistic masters to the work of philosophers in the late-18th century helped to dissociate their accomplishments from their political authority.

Where figures such as Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814) would connect Romantic ideas to enlightenment ideals in his “attempt to connect the work of philosophical genius, natural power and popular right” (85), others called foul on the implication “that genius had been collectivized” (ibid).  For figures such as Burke, genius was localized and the process of achieving new insights stood apart from any rational process.  Ethics, not reason, was the only firm basis of polity.  Geniuses were themselves bound by ethical responsibilities not to exercise their powers inappropriately, as was said to have happened in the Revolution.  Rationally constructable principles discovered through genius could only be worked out subsequently.  Once they were, they could be taught to others, and possibly—as in the late-enlightenment philosophy of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)—become a basis for authority.

In the history of science, the 20th century is unique in terms of the sheer scale, social importance, and intellectual diversity of the scientific enterprise, and the closeness of its relationship to the development and design of technology.  This can create some intimidating historiographical challenges.

For example, as National Air and Space Museum historian Allan Needell observes in his 2000 book, Science, Cold War, and the American State: Lloyd V. Berkner and the Balance of Professional Ideals, “the Cold War relationships among scientists, politicians, the expanding national security bureaucracy, and advocates of more broadly based technocratic initiatives are extraordinarily complex” (3).  It sounds obvious enough, but it resonates with me—I think it’s that “extraordinarily” that speaks to the sense of confusion following the sobering encounter with the archive, particularly a major one, such as the US National Archives here in College Park, Maryland.  Having seen reams of committee minutes, reports, and correspondence documenting the (often painfully mundane) organizational details of a seemingly endless stream of institutions and initiatives, I know that the question inevitably arises: “What in the hell am I going to do with all this?”

Figuring out what is to be done demands a set of historiographical tools capable of analyzing scientific and engineering work in general ways: it can be extremely limiting to concentrate on singular narratives of significance (say, the history of DNA or elementary particle theory), because it would ignore entire categories of important work that can only be fruitfully analyzed in terms of the evolution of research programs or other general trends, instead of great breakthroughs.  It can feel like—indeed, it is—a real accomplishment to reassemble even a single strand of narrative from the archival morass.  But faced with the insignificance of any individual narrative, it can be depressing to consider the fact that hundreds of similar narratives are playing out at the same time.

A key strategy is to take hold of certain life preservers that pop out of the depths of the archival record, such as familiar players.  In military archives, one is often faced with the frustrating experience of finding lots of mid-level administrators identified only according to some inscrutable abbreviated title (e.g. “ACNS(W)”)  and maybe a messy signature (if one doesn’t have a carbon copy of an original document).  Finding a famous scientist in the mix can seem like meeting an old friend on the street of a foreign country where one doesn’t speak the language.

Needell feels that such figures can serve as a useful guide, observing that the complexities of the historical terrain “strongly suggest … the wisdom of looking closely at the actions and influences of key individuals—those who made the arguments, the decisions, and the compromises that shaped the Cold War interactions between science and the government” (3).

He uses Lloyd Berkner, a radio physicist who (he emphasizes) was not an academic: he was on the Byrd Antarctic expedition, worked at the National Bureau of Standards, the Carengie Institution of Washington, and was president of Associated Universities, Inc. (AUI) in the 1950s (an inter-university organization, initially set up to administer Brookhaven National Laboratory on behalf of the federal government).  Berkner was one of the more important scientific movers and shakers in the postwar era, but in that world the importance of any given individual must be considered circumscribed.  Needell is aware of this, noting, “It is my hope that the richness and depth of this account of a single man’s experience and influences will prove useful to at least some ambitious enough to ask and insightful enough to answer [questions about relations between scientists and the state in the Cold War]” (8).

Twenty-four hour party people: Berkner and NSF Director Alan Waterman signing the contract establishing the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (1956), photo credit: Chase, Ltd. Photo, National Science Foundation, from the AIP Emilio Segre Visual Archives

As a preliminary guide to various postwar projects, Needell’s book is essential, containing information on Defense Department’s short-lived Research and Development Board (RDB), the construction of the DEW Line continental radar defense network, the organization of the International Geophysical Year (IGY) of 1957-58, the State Department’s Project Troy (which worked to develop the technical capabilities and content of Voice of America radio broadcasts), and the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (created under AUI auspices).  In fact, Needell’s book was contemporaneous with, and has been followed by, other histories that lend further insight into the RDB, the IGY, and (I believe) Project Troy.

As an introduction to science in the Cold War state, the focus on Berkener presents some danger: as the various initiatives with which Berkner was involved pile up, it can be difficult to place these initiatives in the broader context of quite similar institutions and initiatives not mentioned, or mentioned only in passing.  I decided to read the book cover-to-cover for the first time a week or so ago to see how it would read in light of my other work over the past few years.  I found that my ability to contextualize the episodes Needell recounts was much improved by facts I’d picked up only very recently.

Likewise, it can be difficult to judge the significance of Berkner’s particular role, ranging from interested observer to initiating figure to central player.  Especially in the 1950s, it is important to remember that Berkner’s only position with authority was in AUI, which (as Carnegie Institution president Vannevar Bush noted when Berkner left) was an oddly marginalized place to choose to be, since the organization was a purely administrative entity.  Mainly Berkner was an adviser, which is a position that the historiography has often played up at the expense of examining actual policymakers (perhaps because academics and other publicly known figures tended to occupy advisorial rather than responsible positions).

Given the variable perspective that following Berkner offers, it is not clear how much the details of protracted committee-level negotiations (what I think of as the “view from the archive folder”) contribute to broader understanding.  It is a common style of presentation, and, at a basic level, I know from personal experience that one is loath to simply gloss over the labor involved in reassembling these negotiations.

More importantly, though, the terms of negotiation often seem to be revealing of some larger narrative or set of ideas.  Just as one can use familiar figures as a guide, one can also pick out and follow familiar themes.  In the historiography of post-1945 America, well-rehearsed themes include tensions between patronage and independence, the power of organizations versus the versatility of small projects, the virtues of openness versus the political demands of the Cold War, the benefits of technology versus its limitations and liabilities.  Needell finds in the meat of the negotiations the “balance of professional ideals” in the Cold War state.

The question, though, is whether the local narrative is revealing or reflective.  I like to think of the archive as something like a Greek oracle.  It always answers no matter what you ask it, and if you get a cryptic answer, you always think it’s an answer to the question you’ve asked.  In a sense, the themes highlighted in Berkner’s work are perennial.  Any given organizational decision may reflect these themes, without the problems suggested by them necessarily being in the balance.  It may be that seeing the reflection of large themes in the archive will prevent the archive from revealing issues that are a little less grand, but perhaps of more immediate consequence.  In this sense, I find the less expansive, but deeply-parsed book-length analysis of the postwar V-2 panel by David DeVorkin (also at the Smithsonian) to be a useful stylistic comparison.

Imperial Nature: Joseph Hooker and the Practices of Victorian Science is a study of late Victorian botany and natural history centered around the career and practices of naturalist Joseph Hooker (1817-1911).  Endersby avows to be less interested in the structures or mentalities which informed Hooker’s long career in botany, ending as director of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, than in “considering his material practices and the objects they involved” (312.) By analyzing practices, Endersby “sets” Hooker back “on his feet,” while previous accounts, by beginning with ideas,  have stood him “on his head.”  Much like Marx’s purported inversion of Hegel’s philosophy into the realm of social action and into praxis, the result of Endersby’s book, is, in many ways,  as concerned with ideas as those histories he is writing against.

The practices of Victorian botany in Endersby’s narrative helps to narrate the interaction between  “apparently esoteric matters, like theories of geographical distribution” and “mundane matters like the practicalities of earning a living” (313.) As importantly, an emphasis on the minutiae of daily practice, for Endersby, helps underscore how Hooker’s botanical work “remade nature in empire’s image.”  Hooker, Endersby details, though only briefly visiting  colonial spaces- New Zealand, Tasmania, and British India-, was keen to persuade his network of colonial botanists, whose samples his work depended upon, “that he alone knew how many species of plants their land held and what each were called” (314.)

Endersby’s discussions of taxonomy and the species question in Hooker’s writing as well as his account of Hooker’s efforts to render his botany more philosophical in response to the pressures of distinguishing himself in a crowded field  depend upon the situation of Hooker in the history of ideas as well as concrete daily practices.

Endersby’s narrative of how the philosophical approach could raise the prestige of a lowly “collecting science” includes fine discussions of French and German taxonomical systems.  Endersby situates Hooker’s efforts to raise the prestige of botany within the general effort to determine what characteristics enabled sciences as systems of knowledge to progress. To these ends, Endersby argues that it was Whewell’s emphasis on the “greater creative role of the theorist” in his “History of the Inductive Sciences” as well as his discussions of Forbes’s and Lyell’s “speculative ideas about geological processes” which became “central” to Hooker’s ideas about the mechanisms behind the distribution of species (212.)

Endersby’s narrative also conjoins descriptions of scientific labor with discussions of mentalities.  The production of specimen labels, upon which “any details that would not be preserved in a dried specimens had to be sketched and noted” (138,)  point to such complex intellectual problematics as “status,” “trust,” “taxonomy,” and to the distinct kind of natural knowledge afforded by an intimate stance with the sample.

Hooker’s instructions for which terms to use and which details to note on specimen labels were one of the many mechanisms for ensuring uniformity in description and initial classification and in “encouraging compliance” among his network of colonial specimen collectors (140.)  Endersby argues that “standardizing such things as methods of collecting, labeling, and preserving specimens helped exchange networks to develop and flourish.” (141) Endersby also underscores the development of confidence and expertise of local collectors who sometimes “became aware of a potential defect in European books” and argued that dried samples were insufficient for proper description.

Thus, Endersby’s narrates  an interesting dynamic.  Colonial collectors were inferior in status to botanists and natural historians in the metropolis and dependent upon established centrally located botanists such as Hooker for patronage and recognition.   Hooker was as dependent upon colonial collectors, who owing to their position in the field, had better knowledge of living specimens and their lived environments.

Dorinda Outram has argued for a similar dynamic between the two kinds of natural knowledge and two different approaches to nature as existing in nineteenth century natural history- that of the sedentary naturalist and that of the field naturalist- in her contribution “New Spaces in Natural History,” in Cultures of Natural History, edited by Nicholas Jardine, James Secord, and Emma Spary.  Outram underscores how there was recognition among practitioners (such as Baron Cuvier) that while the field naturalist was superior in his appraisal of the individual specimen in its lived environment, his knowledge was incomplete: intense, fleeting, and unsystematic. The sedentary naturalist, such as Hooker, surrounded by books and prepared specimens, had a far better appreciation for the entire order of nature but less knowledge of life itself in its immediacy.

Such an aspiration to and possession of systematicity, Endersby contends, together with a professional, gentlemanly position and a central location in the metropolis, were key attributes of status within the world of botanists and natural historians.  This status, Endersby contends, was negotiated and made insecure by the empirical encroachments by colonial collectors who continually drew from their knowledge of living specimens and by the lowly status accorded to botany and natural history in the Victorian period.

The differing kinds of knowledge produced by the location of the collector on the periphery or at the center allows Endersby to focus as well on the “taxonomic” mentalities generated by these distinct positions.  Hooker was a “taxonomic ‘lumper,’ who constantly united numerous varieties by classifying them as a single species.”  Local naturalists, on the other hand, “were often ’splitters,’ subdividing Hooker’s broad species into more precisely defined ones,” justifying their positions by arguing that “only living plants could reveal the numerous varieties of a species.”  Endersby, however, is quick to point out that theoretical concerns were not the sole motivation in the resolution of taxonomical problematics.

Hooker implores in this vein that it was “‘imperative, on philosophical grounds as well as those of expediency,’ to reduce the number of species” (157.)  Endersby concludes that species concepts were determined not only by the location of the naturalist but also by the size of his collection, with Kew making “Hooker’s classificatory method possible, allowing him to defend his broad definition of a species” with the sheer size of his herbarium “undoubtedly” encouraging “adoption of broadly defined species” (ibid.)

Although Endersby attempts to situate Hooker’s botany in everyday practices, in material dynamics, and in social currents, rather than the history of scientific ideas, scientific ideas, particularly in the latter chapters of the work,”Classifying,” “Settling,” “Publishing,” “Charting,”  continually reassert themselves alongside and are connected to discussions of the praxis of botany and natural history in the Victorian era.  Endersby’s turn to praxis, rhetorical and otherwise, underscores his intention to stay within the grand narrative of science studies.  A close reading of the text, however, reveals Endersby’s engagement with both ideas and practices, rather than solely with the material objects of Hooker’s scientific carreer.

Today we have the second guest post by Chris Renwick, who starting in January will be a lecturer in modern British history at the University of York.

In one way or another, most approaches to history of science share a common intellectual assumption: that science can be related to the contexts in which it is produced, even if historians can’t agree about what’s important when talking about those contexts. Indeed, such is the importance of this contextualist point that it is often seen as a crucial moment in moving history of science away from the wholly discredited study of great men and their ideas. When, though, did this shift take place and who was responsible for it?

Ever since I started out as graduate student, I’d assumed, like many others, that the effort to relate science and its contexts was originally the gift of Karl Marx and Marxism. After all, who doesn’t know the story of the letter in which Marx explained how Charles Darwin had transplanted Victorian society onto the natural world (though, for the record, the letter we always attribute to Marx was actually written by Engels) or the legend of Russian physicist Borris Hessen’s presentation on Isaac Newton to the Second International Congress of the History of Science at the Science Museum in London in 1931? However, in considering this issue recently I’ve come to the conclusion that something is missing from our understanding of the history of history of science and that it tells us something important about the intellectual trajectory of the field.

Ashley Montagu (1905-1999)

Part of what sparked my interest in this issue was a 1952 book, entitled Darwinism: Competition and Cooperation, by the British-American anthropologist Ashley Montagu, who played a leading role in the production of the famous 1950 UNESCO statement on race. In that book, Montagu argued that it wasn’t Marx or Marxists who first grasped how to relate science to its socioeconomic contexts but Patrick Geddes—the Scottish biologist, sociologist, and town planner whom I’ve spent a great deal of time studying (see pages 29 to 31 in particular). To illustrate his point, Montagu picked out a passage from Geddes’ late 1880s article on “Biology” for Chamber’s Encyclopaedia:

The substitution of Darwin for Paley as the chief interpreter of the order of nature is currently regarded as the displacement of an anthropomorphic view by a purely scientific one: a little reflection, however, will show that what has actually happened has been merely the replacement of the anthropomorphism of the eighteenth century by that of the nineteenth. For the place vacated by Paley’s theological and metaphysical explanation has simply been occupied by that suggested to Darwin and Wallace by Malthus in terms of the prevalent severity of industrial competition, and these phenomena of the struggle for existence which the light of contemporary economic theory has enabled us to discern, have thus come to be temporarily exalted into a complete explanation of organic progress.

There are many points that can be made about this passage but there a couple that have always struck me as particularly interesting with respect to history of science scholarship. The first relates to questions about the relationship between science and history of science, which was also addressed by Peter Dear in the focus section of the 100^th volume of Isis (full text). In his article on George Sarton and the context in which Isis was founded, Dear points out that up until around a century ago it was quite conventional for scientists to situate their work in a much bigger picture than they—and, we might suggest here, many historians of science—do now. Geddes’s take on biology, which comes from a general interest encyclopaedia article, surprises most people—it certainly surprised me when I first encountered his work—because his comments challenge our expectations about who can and does say particular things about science. Historians aren’t accustomed to entertaining the idea that practising scientists can and did talk about themselves and their work in such a reflective way. The question, though, is why? For my money, the surprise that writings such as Geddes’ generate comes from the fact that much history of science scholarship has lost sight of important aspects of the intellectual context in which science was once practiced.

This issue leads me to the second point that that I think is highlighted by Geddes’ efforts to relate science and its contexts: how changes in history of science scholarship have altered our view of science and the nature of scientific activity. The shift (charted on this blog) towards seeing the context of scientific activity as including almost everything but philosophical ideas has had a range of impacts on history of science. To be sure, we’ve now got a better sense of how the material culture of science, for example, has helped shape various aspects of its identity. However, we’ve also reached the point where we don’t automatically see thinking and reflection as a driving force behind scientific practices and theorising (see Jim Endersby’s recent book on Joseph Hooker for a good example of this point). The point here is that even for those historians who acknowledge that scientists engaged in philosophical debate, the conclusion is seldom that those discussions actually had much impact on how science has actually been done. However, for Geddes and others like him, it was obvious that they should position themselves in terms of the bigger intellectual picture. Indeed, an understanding of the history of science was an essential part of scientific activity.

Now, I don’t have a tidy conclusion with respect to the question of when exactly this separation between science and history of science took place—though I do think that much of what Steve Fuller wrote about these kinds of issues in Thomas Kuhn: A Philosophical History for Our Times rings true. However, I do think that the question is particularly important for a number of reasons. First, it would seem strange if historians weren’t interested in the history of their own field. Second, as I’ve mentioned, the answer to the question has important implications for how we write history of science. Finally, though, the question seems to relate to a bigger question about the purpose of history of science. If history of science was once an important part of science then what does that say about the discipline now? Indeed, can the answer to that question be used as part of a case for returning history of science to scientific debate? As I’ve said, I don’t have a tidy conclusion to present on this issue but it seems worth raising the question.

Diagram of a eudiometer, from the Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza in Florence

First off, apologies for slow posting—things have been too bananas recently to indulge blog-related side interests.  I’m hoping things clear up soon, but I’m presenting my research on Antarctic research at 4S here in DC at the end of the month, so things may remain at a trickle until November.  However, before it got too desolate around here, I did want to parachute in and do a quick write-up on eudiometry.  Our article is: Simon Schaffer, “Measuring Virtue: Eudiometry, Enlightenment, and Pneumatic Medicine” in The Medical Enlightenment of the Eighteenth Century, Andrew Cunningham and Roger French, eds., 1990, pp. 281-318.  A close companion work is Jan Golinski’s Science as Public Culture: Chemistry and Enlightenment in Britain, 1760-1820, Cambridge UP, 1992, esp. pp. 117-128.  I won’t try and distinguish the two treatments here.

The technology of the eudiometer is based on Joseph Priestley’s “nitrous air test”, devised in 1772.  A good explanation of the nitrous air test as well as a computer animation of how eudiometers worked are available from the Institute and Museum of the History of Science (IMSS) in Florence (for scientific explanation, see the animation here).  The basic idea is that manufactured nitrous air (nitrogen oxide) is mixed with a sample of ambient air.  Part of the mixture dissolves into water leading to a decreased volume of now-unrespirable air in the chamber, which can be measured.  Priestley (1733-1804), understanding the respirability of air to be reflective of its virtue, and understanding respiration to transfer phlogiston from the body to the air, understood the remaining air to be phlogisticated by the test, and the test to be a measure of the “goodness” of the common air used.

Italian experimenters, beginning with Felice Fontana and Marsilio Landriani replicated the test, embodying it in an instrument that Landriani called a eudiometer, which taken from Greek literally means a measuring instrument of the goodness of the air.  Through the 1770s and 1780s eudiometry became a common pursuit for men of science throughout Enlightened Europe as they conducted tours to gather air samples from various locales, transported the samples in vials, and compared measurements of quality.  The demonstration of the unhealthy quality of air in such putrid environments as marshes, cemeteries, and sewers supported medical and hygiene improvement projects advocated by enlightened authorities, such as the prescription of novel airs as medical therapies, hospital reform, the removal of corpses from graveyards (a move hotly contested by clergy) and swamp draining (note the Italian for “bad air” is mala aria).  The eudiometer did not create the concept of the quality of air—it was also measured by smell or by timing the deaths of small animals in enclosed containers—but it did help turn the measurement of air into a quintessentially ambitious Enlightenment project (see also the establishment of the meter).  Schaffer makes the point as only he can: “To use the nitrous air test as a tool of medical meteorology was to become committed to a more complex account of the cosmos and the social order” (290).

Priestley himself never promoted the broad eudiometry project, but as an enlightened philosopher, he did approve of it.  The eudiometer was a simple instrument, which not only made evident the utility of knowledge in the formulation of good policy, it could be widely used to replicate and demonstrate philosophical arguments, including to public audiences.  The eudiometer was also well-attuned to Priestley’s phlogistic chemistry.  Notably, through the mid-1770s, Lavoisier in Paris also took its measurements to be a demonstration of the effectiveness of Priestley’s chemical philosophy.

By the end of the 1770s, though, complexity began to upset the program of nitrous air eudiometry.  There was more variance in the quality of air at the same location over time than between different locations, and the simplicity of the device was undermined as questions arose such as by what method should nitrous air be created? did the water absorbing the air have to be distilled? and so on.  Priestley’s own isolation of “dephlogisticated air” in 1775 upset the principle that the best common air represented a pure standard.  In 1777 Alessandro Volta (1745-1827) introduced eudiometry using inflammable air (hydrogen) rather than nitrous air, which further challenged the clear links between combustion, respiration, and pneumatic virtue.  Italian eudiometry proponents and French chemists soon began to understand the processes taking place in eudiometers as varied chemical processes with only an oblique connection to matters of health.  By the early 1780s Priestley himself had abandoned medical eudiometry, though some continued to pursue it, even as Lavoisier reinterpreted the instrument’s operation in terms of his chemistry of oxygen, which would over the next decades replace the phlogiston concept to which Priestley would continue to adhere.

A word on Golinski’s book (his first): it is a history of different varieties of chemical practice toward the end of the eighteenth century and at the beginning of the nineteenth, spanning Cullen, Black, Priestley, to Davy.  He acknowledges the “inspiration” of Schaffer, and the book reads a lot like what a solo book by Schaffer might be like if Schaffer wrote books.  In 1990 Golinski had written what amounts to perhaps the best consolidation of 1980s methodological gains, “The Theory of Practice and the Practice of Theory: Sociological Approaches in the History of Science,” Isis 81 (1990): 492-505; for expanded coverage see his 1998 book Making Natural Knowledge: Constructivism and the History of Science (1998, 2nd ed. 2005).  Consolidation of gains is a particularly apt term here, because Golinski has a talent for taking and elucidating the best of ideas and not saying much about the rest, except for maybe a mildly critical aside slipped in here and there.  If you want a good guide to the up-side of constructivist historiography, go to Golinski.

The generic title, “Science as Public Culture” is a clear nod to the use of history as a path to conceptual understanding that arose in the 1980s, as is his sociology-heavy introduction’s explanation of the need to challenge and explain a general notion of science as a “public” activity.  Ultimately, though, the book doesn’t have much to say about “science as public culture”, but Golinski does use the idea of analyzing scientific work as an activity of public interest to turn in a really fine history of chemical experimentation’s various public ramifications and institutional manifestations in the period, of which enlightened eudiometry was one.  Even if you don’t work on this era, I’d recommend reading it.  It’s very informative.

Getting back to the series on Simon Schaffer, we’re going to be looking at a series of articles on Enlightenment chemistry, which will hopefully give us the opportunity to discuss Jan Golinski’s book Science as Public Culture: Chemistry and Enlightenment in Britain, 1760-1820, which expressly owes a lot to Schaffer’s work, and covers a lot of the same ground.  First, though, I want to backtrack to jot down a few notes about the 1984 piece, “Priestley’s Questions: An Historiographic Survey,” History of Science 22: 151-183.

Joseph Priestley

At the end of last year, we discussed Schaffer’s 1987 piece, “Priestley and the Politics of Spirit”.  To recap, Schaffer was calling attention to the connections some 18th-century natural philosophers made between pneumatic and electrical phenomena and the actions of spirit, and Priestley’s desire to dissociate theological from natural philosophy.  In the earlier piece, Schaffer was reviewing problems identified in the analysis of Priestley’s life and identifying historiographical strategies used to address those problems—a service that should be a much more common feature of our journals (and one also at work in his criticism of the Newton literature).

Priestley (1733-1804) was a dynamic figure of particular historiographical interest for a couple of reasons: first, he was an innovative chemical experimenter, making significant contributions to the chemistry of air that began to develop in the latter half of the 18th century, but also remaining a staunch proponent of the phlogiston theory even after most chemists accepted Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier’s chemistry of oxygen.  Second, Priestley was a proponent of the Enlightenment project linking political authority to reasoned assent—a radical position at that time.  Schaffer pointed out that the historiography of Priestley was dominated by the effort to link his science to his politics, noting that the politically inspired destroying of Priestley’s property in 1791, including his papers, presented a burden on the historiography, but also removed “most obstacles to the creative interpretation of [Priestley's] published legacy.”

As a scientific thinker, Priestley proves difficult to locate, since his work in chemistry must be understood as fitting within a more general rubric of natural philosophy, and because of the pervasive concern with his position on the phlogiston question.  Schaffer points out that Priestley has been cast as an ideal epistemologist, an innocent mind dedicated to the collection of facts without imposing a preconceived set of ideas on their interpretations; others, accordingly, have viewed Priestley as an unskilled amateur, a judgment that tends to contrast him with Lavoisier.  Of course other interpretations have understood his political and religious concerns as offering “a hidden source for his science (and thus a set of prejudices)”.

In this article Schaffer (joining Jan Golinski and J. R. R. Christie), is highly critical of any “historical account hijacked by philosophical bias.”  He chides, “Just as it seems difficult to analyse the relation between Priestley’s open empiricism and his theoretical commitments, so it seems equally difficult—if not impossible—to purge historical interpretation of equally strong philosophical prejudice” (153).

The Great Escape is at work here, but in an early, sophisticated, and well-articulated way designed to make extremely specific points about a particular body of historiography.  In addition to the old empiricist/theory-laden concerns (which is linked to the “Newtonian tradition” problem of which Schaffer has been an arch-critic), Schaffer also notes a historiographical preoccupation with questions related to the development of matter theory, a commitment to which could be a source of adherence to the phlogiston model  (which, of course, could be offset by a more thorough analysis of Priestley’s experimental, rhetorical, and social “practice”).

As I mentioned in my post on cosmologies of thought, Schaffer criticized attempts to portray Priestley as a “synoptic thinker”, which attempts to reconcile Priestley’s various projects into a particular intellectual program, creating tensions in his work, which the historian analyzes.  Schaffer has a great line here: “Throughout such historiography we find nothing but paradox: a search for some unifying principle is matched against a set of imposed divisions between Priestley’s various avocations” (152).

Schaffer notes encouraging directions in understanding Priestley’s participation in various communities, and thus in multiple projects, and his command over intellectual and social resources available to him toward each.  Between these projects, it is possible to read common strategies, as in his commitment to achieving “communal assent”, which evidences “his own allegiance to the civic humanist concept of knowledge”, which comes up again in the 1987 piece, and informs Golinski’s analysis.

On a tangential note: I notice that what I bring away from articles is evolving as I proceed through them and get to know the historiography a little better each time, and as I explore my own historiographical concerns.  In the wake of my Great Escape series, what has become clearer to me, personally, is how concerned the early years of the movement were with adding narrative complexity to existing historiographical pictures, where later manifestations have tended to emphasize the study of local complexity, but mainly in the service of embellishing a literature of coarsely-defined macrotraditions.  An intriguing statement to me in light of recent posts here: “The synoptic appeal seems overwhelming: this might, perhaps, explain the surprising lack of micro-studies of the details of Priestley’s work in contrast with more general surveys of the whole thrust of his career.”

Finally, I’d like to quickly make a note of ambivalence about this Schaffer project.  Personally, I have found it extremely useful in understanding the motivations underlying his work and its relationship to the historiography of the period.  There is a danger, though, that when presented in this format, his articles will be taken to represent conclusive or the most important contributions to the historiography on their respective subjects.  This would be unfortunate, since Schaffer’s work is particularly intensive in its engagement with existing historiography.  Those seeking a deeper understanding should seek out the articles themselves, footnoted references, and later scholarship on the same topic.  For example, in this piece Schaffer cites earlier work by historian and philosopher John McEvoy, but McEvoy continues to work on the Chemical Revolution, and has engaged with the positions of Schaffer and Golinski, among many others; for an easily accessible 2007 paper by McEvoy discussing the literature, see here.