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2017; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 108; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1086/691413
ISSN1545-6994
Autores Tópico(s)Law, Rights, and Freedoms
ResumoPrevious articleNext article FreeSecond LookComment Behemoth v. the Sceptical Chymist, RevisitedPaul WoodPaul Wood Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreAs Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer observed in 2011, “Leviathan and the Air-Pump belongs to the past.”1 The authors’ account of the genesis and reception of the book is fascinating on a number of levels, and their description of the academic milieu out of which Leviathan and the Air-Pump emerged elicits the feeling of nostalgia shared by many of us whose professional and personal lives took shape in the heady days of the 1970s and 1980s (“Up for Air,” pp. xxi–xxvii). Their retrospect is, however, too narrowly focused on disciplinary genealogies to explain why the book became so controversial, for they say surprisingly little about broader historical developments—such as the cultural moment of postmodernism, the rise of Thatcherism, or the onset of the culture wars in the United States—that, in varying degrees, structured the reception of their work. Although the authors write that “to situate the book firmly in its original political setting is not to say it was meant as a political manifesto” (“Up for Air,” p. xvii), their comment fudges the fact that when Leviathan and the Air-Pump appeared it was invariably read as a manifesto, regardless of their intentions. Their assertion that “solutions to the problem of knowledge are solutions to the problem of social order” and their claim that “it is ourselves and not reality that is responsible for what we know” were widely viewed as highly contentious interventions in the debates of the period (Leviathan, pp. 332, 344; see also “Up for Air,” pp. xl–xli). In revisiting Leviathan and the Air-Pump thirty years after its initial publication, one is struck by the extent to which the text registers the context(s) in which it was written. And my rereading of the book has prompted second thoughts about the authors’ conceptualization of seventeenth-century science in general and their depiction of the Royal Society in particular.In certain respects, Leviathan and the Air-Pump speaks to the extent to which the study of the Scientific Revolution dominated the scholarly and institutional agenda of the history of science for much of the twentieth century. Given the pluralistic configuration of the profession today, the academic world in which Leviathan and the Air-Pump was written has well and truly been lost. Nevertheless, in the 1970s and 1980s many of the most prominent historiographical debates in our field were bound up with the study of the Scientific Revolution, including the role of alchemy and other “pseudo-sciences” in the making of modern science, the relations between science and religion, the links between science and technology, and the politics of science. Even though Shapin and Schaffer deny that their book was conceived of in terms of accepted narratives regarding the Scientific Revolution, the fact that they chose to articulate their general thesis regarding the making of natural knowledge on the basis of an episode from the seventeenth century attests to the power those narratives exerted over even their most vocal critics.2 Moreover, Leviathan and the Air-Pump addresses a major theme in the literature on the Scientific Revolution: namely, the emergence of the experimental method. And, in doing so, the book perpetuates the distorted depiction of seventeenth-century natural philosophy created by historians anxious to identify the origins of “the scientific method.” For although the growth of experimentalism was a significant aspect of scientific inquiry in the seventeenth century, the empirical investigation of nature was by no means restricted to the use of experiment alone. Over the past twenty years or so, it has become a commonplace that the descriptive and classificatory methods central to the disciplines associated with natural history played an important role in the knowledge-making enterprise of the seventeenth century.3 In foregrounding the “experimental life,” Shapin and Schaffer thus perpetuate an anachronistic view of how men and women of science created natural knowledge in the early modern era that is rooted in the obsession with tracing the birth of the experimental method found in the standard literature on the Scientific Revolution. Or, to put the point differently, the authors imply that the seventeenth century was more “modern” than is warranted.Leviathan and the Air-Pump’s depiction of the Royal Society is similarly anachronistic. Although Shapin and Schaffer state in their retrospect that “one inescapable feature of the book is its attention to heterogeneity, variation in belief and judgment, [and] controversy” (“Up for Air,” p. xliii) they do not explore the methodological differences that existed among the Fellows of the Society. Furthermore, their exclusive focus on experiment marginalizes the adoption of other knowledge-making practices in the early Royal Society, such as those associated with the Society’s natural history program.4 The portrait of the Royal Society as a “house of experiment” in Leviathan and the Air-Pump is doubly misleading.5 First, in likening the Society to a “nascent laboratory” the authors give the erroneous impression that it was a center for experimental research when in fact it was primarily a site for the display of demonstration experiments.6 Second, their characterization of the Society as an “experimental space” that housed an “experimental community” fails to register the fact the Society was equally a museum space and a hub in the global network of naturalists endeavoring to compile the natural histories of the three kingdoms of nature (Leviathan, pp. 334–336, 338–341).7 As an institution, the Royal Society performed multiple functions in order to achieve its collective aim of “promoting Natural Knowledge,” although one would never know this from reading Leviathan and the Air-Pump.8Once we recognize that there was a plurality of methodological orientations at play in the early Royal Society, we can see that Shapin and Schaffer’s interpretation of the politics of the Society is problematic. Because of their fixation on Boyle’s experimentalism, they define the Society’s political outlook exclusively in terms of the view they ascribe to Boyle and his fellow experimentalists. They write:For Boyle and his colleagues, … their cultural terrain was vividly marked out with boundary-stones and warning notices. Most importantly, the experimental study of nature was to be visibly withdrawn from “humane affairs.” The experimentalists were not to “meddle with” affairs of “church and state.” The study of nature occupied a quite different space from the study of men and their affairs: objects and subjects would not and could not be treated as part of the same philosophical enterprise. [Leviathan, p. 337]Natural historians in the Royal Society did not police the same boundaries as “the experimentalists.”9 In natural history, the manners, customs, beliefs, social arrangements, political systems, and physical characteristics of human beings were anatomized, described, and classified using the same techniques that were routinely applied to the study of the other constituents of the creation.10 Furthermore, the map of knowledge Shapin and Schaffer attribute to the experimentalists was not the one adopted by the political arithmeticians in the Society such as Sir William Petty, John Graunt, and Edmond Halley. For Petty and his associates, political subjects were the objects of statistical investigation and the knowledge generated by the application of such quantitative methods was to be mobilized in the interests of the state.11 The domains of nature and society overlapped in the work of many of the Fellows, and the plurality of methodological approaches within the early Royal Society meant that the “boundary-stones and warning notices” Shapin and Schaffer identify were routinely ignored. Consequently, their interpretation of the politics of the Royal Society is, in retrospect, implausible.After my review of Leviathan and the Air-Pump appeared in 1988, I was accused of intellectual dishonesty by a colleague who had recently completed a Ph.D. under Steven Shapin in the Science Studies Unit at Edinburgh because I did not comment directly on Shapin and Schaffer’s assertion that “solutions to the problem of knowledge are solutions to the problem of social order.” To my mind, I had signaled my disagreement with this assertion when I queried their exclusively political reading of the polemical exchanges between Thomas Hobbes and John Wallis published in the 1650s.12 Insofar as science is a human activity, natural knowledge is textured by the social and cultural milieus in which it is produced. But to me, the exact meaning of such statements as “It is ourselves and not reality that is responsible for what we know” require further specification. One can agree with the general sentiment, yet disagree profoundly over how to parse the details. In retrospect, to echo Scots law, the case made in the book to back up Shapin and Schaffer’s theoretical claims regarding the creation of natural knowledge is “not proven.”NotesPaul Wood is Professor in the Department of History at the University of Victoria, Canada. His research focuses on the intellectual history of early modern Europe. He has published widely on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century science and, in particular, on Thomas Reid and the Scottish Enlightenment. Department of History, University of Victoria, Canada; [email protected]1 Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, “Up for Air: Leviathan and the Air-Pump a Generation On,” introduction to Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life, 2nd ed. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 2011), pp. xi–l; see esp. pp. xi–xiii and, for the quotation, p. l (hereafter references will be given in the text in parentheses).2 Compare Shapin and Schaffer, “Up for Air,” pp. xxviii–xxxi. As Shapin later pronounced in his introduction to the Scientific Revolution, “There was no such thing as the Scientific Revolution, and this is a book about it”: Steven Shapin, The Scientific Revolution (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 1996), p. 1.3 See, inter alia, William B. Ashworth, Jr., “Natural History and the Emblematic World View,” in Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution, ed. David C. Lindberg and Robert S. Westman (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990), pp. 303–332; Paula Findlen, Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy (Berkeley: Univ. California Press, 1994); N. Jardine, J. A. Secord, and E. C. Spary, eds., Cultures of Natural History (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996); David Freedberg, The Eye of the Lynx: Galileo, His Friends, and the Beginnings of Modern Natural History (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 2002); and Brian W. Ogilvie, The Science of Describing: Natural History in Renaissance Europe (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 2006).4 Paul Wood, “Behemoth v. the Sceptical Chymist,” History of Science, 1988, 26:103–109, on p. 107. For more detail on the methodological differences within the early Royal Society see Michael Hunter and Wood, “Towards Solomon’s House: Rival Strategies for Reforming the Early Royal Society,” ibid., 1986, 24:49–108.5 The allusion is to Steven Shapin, “The House of Experiment in Seventeenth-Century England,” Isis, 1988, 79:373–404, rpt. in Shapin, Never Pure: Historical Studies of Science as if It Was Produced by People with Bodies, Situated in Time, Space, Culture, and Society, and Struggling for Credibility and Authority (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2010), Ch. 5.6 Shapin subsequently brought attention to this distinction in “House of Experiment,” pp. 399–404.7 On the Society’s repository see Michael Hunter, Establishing the New Science: The Experience of the Early Royal Society (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1989), Ch. 4.8 According to the Second Charter of 1663, the Society’s official name was “The Royal Society of London for promoting Natural Knowledge”; see The Record of the Royal Society of London, 3rd ed. (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1912), p. 82.9 Elsewhere, Shapin and Schaffer emphasize that the “experimental study of nature” engaged in certain kinds of “humane affairs,” most notably the economic improvement of the nation: Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump, pp. 339–341.10 See Daniel Carey, “Compiling Nature’s History: Travellers and Travel Narratives in the Early Royal Society,” Annals of Science, 1997, 54:269–292; and John Gascoigne, “The Royal Society, Natural History, and the Peoples of the ‘New World(s),’ 1660–1800,” British Journal for the History of Science, 2009, 42:539–562.11 On Petty see esp. Ted McCormick, William Petty and the Ambitions of Political Arithmetic (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2009).12 Wood, “Behemoth v. the Sceptical Chymist” (cit. n. 4), p. 105. 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