Ether Wave Propaganda

In historiographical discussions, a key concern is whether certain problematics prejudice historical portraiture.  By “problematics” I mean the dialectical process that determines what topics are researched, how they are investigated, and how the results of investigations are presented.  By “portraiture” I mean the sum total availability of information about the various aspects of history, apart from any analytical statements made by it or our ability to navigate within a historiography.  In other words, how do the questions we want to ask about the historical record both expand and limit our summary and publication of the record’s contents?

For at least a half a century, one way that professional history of science (and history more generally) has consistently attempted to distinguish itself is by pointing to its ability to recognize and correct for earlier historians’ and non-professionals’ prejudicial limitations in their portraiture.  Hagiographic biographies discount major historical actors’ flaws.  Positivistic accumulations of scientific contributions discount scientific “wrong turns” and the importance of theoretical frameworks.  Intellectual histories of science discount the culture of science.  Philosophical accounts of the historical establishment of claims discount the sociological work necessary to secure assent around them.

Invisibility

Initially, criticisms of prejudicial portraiture emphasized that important constituencies have been rendered invisible through various forms of bias.  Social history in the vein of E. P. Thompson emphasized bias against histories of common people in favor of interest in political figures, cultural leaders, and other heroic or otherwise individually influential figures identified through what we might think of as a problematic that emphasizes concerted action.  Along these lines, portraiture of disempowered and marginal constituencies has flourished, although sometimes these retain a concerted-action problematic, choosing to emphasize actors who are on the fringe but who, within the confines of their particular sphere, are influential nonetheless.  Historians who discover new classes of invisible things stand to gain significant cachet.

In the historiography of science, scientists, historians, sociologists, and, indeed, many philosophers, have been noting for an exceedingly long time that the motivation behind scientific work, and the actual processes of that work, are often expunged or rearranged when work is distilled into a finished product.  There is a strong tradition, therefore, of offering a supplementary, informal portraiture to demonstrate the “human side” of science, the craftsmanship of scientific work, or the social and political context and implications of that work, for example.

In the last 30-40 years, however, an influential socio-epistemological point has made the rounds that scientific work actually depends on rendering the socio-cultural content of science “invisible”, because, it is claimed, maintenance of the authority of claims requires that the claims be regarded as the product of a purely epistemological process.  This strategy is said to break down when assent is not successfully secured, and socio-cultural content is rendered visible.  Notable here is Steven Shapin’s chapter, “Invisible Technicians: Masters, Servants, and the Making of Experimental Knowledge” in his Social History of Truth (1994), but the whole train of objectivity studies in the mid-’90s takes this to be a key point, and it is crucial to the claims to relevance and cogency in the commentary of Bruno Latour on “science”, “nature”, and “modernity” from the late 1980s on.

Various criticisms of prejudicial portraiture and resulting invisibility have often been confounded.  Thus, discussions of historiographical craft often segue effortlessly into discussions of scientific epistemology and, for example, the nature of this epistemology’s relationship with public ideas.  I gather this is because epistemological misconceptions are taken to be a generic cause of systematic invisibilities in historiographical craft.  It is not clear to me that this is so, nor is it clear to me that scientific legitimacy has actually depended on sweeping cultural content under the rug, exactly.  More on these suspicions in follow-up posts.

For the time being, I want to suggest that there is a pressing need for an alternative posture to assumptions that a prejudicial historical portraiture is grounded in a particular kind of epistemological bias.

Positive Portraiture

The criticism of David Edgerton provides an interesting variation on the problem of historiographical invisibility.  This blog regularly promotes Edgerton’s critical observations on historiography (speaking of, see his most recent essay in the July Technology and Culture).  To date, I have paid less attention to his craftsmanship.  Edgerton’s history-writing is characterized by his assembly of inchoate sets of portraits, which typically highlight points that are “of importance”, for example, in assessing the history of British state sponsorship of R&D, he has noted the importance of the postwar Ministry of Supply.

The unity of Edgerton’s assemblages is to be found in their presentation of an amalgamated portrait that is invisible to, and at odds with, existing historiographical narratives and portraits.  The power of his work is in this strategy.  Among his recent works, Warfare State (2006) challenges the signal importance of the welfare state in British history and the search for explanations for British military vulnerability and weakness in science and technology.  Such narratives fail to discuss Britain as the major military and scientific and technological nation that it was.  Similarly, The Shock of the Old (also 2006) challenges the traditional historiographical bias toward novel technologies, arguing that even histories challenging the hype surrounding novel technologies simply “invert” the narrative to show the failures and problems associated with novel technologies.  To escape the narrative, the point is that it is important to study non-novel technologies as well (as well as related issues of technology use, like maintenance).

The difficulty here is that Edgerton’s criticism can be mistaken as claims to have simply discovered new forms of invisibility that historians can make visible.  In cases where I have seen him cited, he is often regarded as simply calling for studies of “old” technologies, or of state scientific bodies (see Melissa Smith’s article on the Home Office’s Scientific Advisers’ Branch in the June BJHS).  Such studies are certainly a step in the right direction, but I think these do not capture the full point of Edgerton’s critique, which revolves more around the historiographical riches to be mined through what I call “positive portraiture”.

Positive portraiture relates to the historiographical effort to arrive at useful and extensive depictions of what existed in history, putting individual entities (events, people, technologies) in the context of comparable entities.

Edgerton’s work is interesting in that retains existing historiography’s interest in remedying persistent invisibilities, but, unlike that historiography, it finds a way forward not by arguing with that historiography’s conclusions, but by using positive portraiture to build an alternative vision of the past that undermines the historiography’s key assumptions about what issues need to be addressed and how.

I think a crucial aspect of positive portraiture, is its emphasis on the fact that vast aspects of the past are undocumented.  Undocumented history differs from invisible history in that the assumption is that the primary task of the historian is not to diagnose and undo past concealment, though that may be a useful secondary task.  Diagnosis and remedy too often adheres to that historiography’s investigatory agenda by engaging in a dialectic with it — what Edgerton calls “inversion”.

Instead, the primary task should be to extend portraiture as best as we can, and to build new argumentation on the basis of this portraiture.  How to move forward in this vein is an open question.  We know that undirected empiricism can produce exceedingly tedious and unilluminating history, but there is not much historiographical thought laying out what constitutes the most useful methods of portraiture.  The more inchoate qualities in Edgerton’s oeuvre suggests the need for an explicit new set of problematics, and some overarching means of navigating through our portraiture and the arguments associated with it, rather than engaging with various arguments in the historiography pell mell.  Once we have a better handle on how to do this and how to make historians and others interested in it (I suspect we may actually provoke more interest from outsiders already interested in specific topics), it will be correspondingly easier to engage with the historical record in more open-ended, exploratory, and productive ways.

This is the third and final part of a look at two of Simon Schaffer’s 1993 works, 1) “Augustan Realities: Nature’s Representatives and Their Cultural Resources in the Early Eighteenth Century”, and 2) “A Social History of Plausibility: Country, City and Calculation in Augustan Britain”.  In Pt. 1 and Pt. 2, and now here in Pt. 3, the focus is on the papers’ mode of argumentation and this mode’s significance within the historiographical culture of the early 1990s.

In these papers, a historiographical malignancy is identified: an insistence on seeing a rise of reasoned polity and society, and of spaces of free inquiry; this rise is attended by a decline of false belief.  This is considered a malignancy because it ignores the extensive and persistent controversies over various beliefs.  The remedy, thus, is taken to be what I call “insultography”: a charting of commonalities in the polemics used to secure the boundaries of belief about what exists, or at least what is plausible.  Historical “polemical work” consistently references widely acknowledged sources of credit-worthiness and discredit (in Pt. 1 these pervasive opinions are referred to as “grand cultural ideas”): religious piety, superstition, the vulgar crowds, the emotional manipulation and illusion of the theater, courtly society, bourgeois society, investment schemes, the legacy of Isaac Newton…  Historians’ failure to acknowledge the historical importance of this polemical work as they chart the history of knowledge is taken to stem from their own selective credulity toward of these same polemics.

The current goal is to understand why the identified historiographical issue is considered an important malignancy and why the remedy is considered apt.  As suggested in Pt. 2, portraying historiographical issues as malignancies could be used to explain a gnawing problem of historiographical craft: fragmentation.  In his (free, and well worth reading) 2005 Isis article on this fragmentation phenomenon in the historiography of science, David Kaiser traced complaints about it as far back as a 1987 article by Charles Rosenberg in Isis, a 1991 Casper Hakfoort article in History of Science, and a 1993 James Secord article in BJHS.  Kaiser suggested that the fragmentation was akin to specialization that occurred within the natural sciences as they expanded in the 20th century, pointing to similar patterns of growth in the recent history of the history of science discipline. 

In the natural sciences, the key danger of specialization is topical and methodological isolation.  Lacking an overarching understanding of the interconnections between the sciences, it becomes difficult to apply knowledge from one branch of the sciences to another even though natural phenomena often cannot be explained by reference to a single specialty.  Only expressly interdisciplinary efforts can establish new links.

If historiographical fragmentation is related to scientific specialization, this lets us see it as a symptom of unnatural divisions between historians’ efforts.  Some — such as dividing the historical record by place and period — are historians’ own doing.  Others are inherited.  Historians may limit themselves to distinct disciplines: physics, biology, physiology and medicine.  What had not occurred to me is that it could be possible to think of divisions between history of science and cultural history as being a product of this inherited fragmentation as well.  But it follows easily in Schaffer’s arguments: the historical record is divided into science and culture, or knowledge claims and polemics.  The expunging of polemics from the record of science is part of what Schaffer refers to as the “‘amnesia’ of realism”.

As with divisions by period, by region, and by discipline, the answer to fragmentation-as-specialization between the histories of science and culture is interdisciplinary work.  What constitutes a successful interdisciplinary historiography, however, seems not to have been a subject of serious meditation.  The idea seems to have been that you could put an eclectic bunch of scholars together in a room for a few days, and have them find similarities between their work.  The fact that you could find similarities validated the exercise and the notion that unnatural divisions appeared in the historical record, and that interdisciplinarity was the solution.

This is an undiscriminating kind of interdisciplinarity.  In juxtaposing portions of the historical record arbitrarily or semi-arbitrarily, commonalities found will revolve around pervasive historical phenomena, in particular the “grand cultural ideas” that manifest themselves in polemics.  This pervasiveness, combined with the notion that these ideas represented a heretofore hidden cultural content of science gave these ideas a status in the historiography of science as the missing “social” component of epistemology.  Conveniently, these ideas will also find overlap with the subjects treated by social and cultural historians.

Some sympathetic critics had long voiced their suspicions of this sort of exercise.  Notably, in his 1980 Isis review of Barry Barnes and Steven Shapin’s Natural Order (1979) collection, Charles Rosenberg had observed that the observations relating to the cultural content of science were “facile”, lacking the more detailed reference to social, political, and intellectual context that would give them meaning.  Where Barnes and Shapin, inspired by anthropologist Mary Douglas, seemed to want to reconstruct “cosmologies” that linked knowledge with social order in intricate ways, Rosenberg saw more of a kinship to Arthur Lovejoy’s (1873-1962) history of ideas in the tendency of this historiography to satisfy itself with identifying common cultural tropes in the historical record.

The 1980s were to be the proving ground to see which view prevailed.  As Shapin wrote in 1982, it was time to stop doing methodological battle, and to get on with it, to show that the new program for a history of science and culture was both productive, and an augmentation of, rather than a threat to, traditional historiography: “For my part I see no danger of ‘the history of science losing its science’”.  It is my contention that the program, for about ten years, could credibly claim it was on the road to success.  Not only was it connected to striking historiographical successes like Shapin and Schaffer’s Leviathan and the Air Pump (1985), but a productive tension arose between approaches such as Jed Buchwald’s, Smith & Wise’s, Morrell & Thackray’s, Jan Golinski’s, Martin Rudwick’s, and Schaffer’s to major issues like the transformations in the sciences in the decades surrounding 1800.

By the early-to-mid-’90s, claims to programmatic success would be much harder to maintain as warnings such as Rosenberg’s remained apt.  It is possible we can pin this on faulty models of historiographical fragmentation and integration.  If the fact that interdisciplinary history could successfully find overlaps between social history and the history of science validated the exercise, then there was no need to place more stringent bounds on interdisciplinary historiography, despite pleas such as Lorraine Daston’s “Moral Economy of Science” piece (1995).  Further, if the pervasive grand cultural ideas identified came to be seen as a missing key to epistemilogy and as an intentionally effaced fragment of the historical record, pieces could attain value simply by identifying points in the historical record where these ideas manifest themselves (which is what this blog has referred to as the “socio-epistemic problematic”).

Schaffer’s two articles are a microcosm of the resulting historiography: there is no rationale underlying his selection of historical episodes to discuss, nor are the specific connections, or lack of specific connections between them especially important.  Only the most pervasive ideas are taken to be of intellectual value, and thus worthy of historians’ interest.

Perversely, this mode of history-writing exacerbates rather than remedies the phenomenon of historiographical fragmentation.  Aside from any specialization between branches of the historiography, individual works even within specialized branches of historiography become isolated from each other, because the chief concern of historians is not to engage with the details of others’ works, but to share with them an interest in pervasive cultural ideas.  Importantly, though, this historiographical phenomenon is no longer fragmentation-as-specialization, but what this blog refers to as the “new internalism” or the “gallery of practices”.

If the isolation of individual works exacerbates, rather than remedies, the fragmentation of historiography that causes such wide frustration, the question is: why does it persist?  My quite speculative contention is that it is because this mode of historiography had already been identified as possessing the virtue of combating the maladies of fragmentation-as-specialization.  This results in a situation so familiar to political economy: if something does not appear to work, but it has virtue ascribed to it, it must be because it has not been tried strenuously enough.

Schaffer’s pieces must be seen as instrumental (but very far from alone) in instilling this virtue in this mode of historiography.  In identifying a key source of historiographical error and fragmentation, and identifying a key strategy to reverse this malignancy, what was being sold from the hustings, I speculate, was not the history of science to social historians, but the idea of a virtue in a new historiographical culture to historians of science and to social historians alike.

I do not think it was Schaffer’s intention to unify sources of historiographical error, or to unify remedies into a mode of scholarship.  After all, in 1993 he also published the excellent “Comets & Idols”, which had similar arguments about trust and cultural sources of authority, but was much more nuanced in their application (pointing to the function of canonical or “sacred” texts in historical polemics) and addressing the needs of specific branches of historiography (those of cometography and the legacy of Isaac Newton).

Yet, the unifying of sources of error and remedy was precisely what was happening.  Differences between the diversity of perspectives that thrived in the 1980s were slowly ironed out.  In reviewing the Ferment of Knowledge volume (1980) in 1982, Geoffrey Cantor had been optimistic that disparate views of the 18th-century could be productively reconciled, but warned against the language of partisanship that divided historiography into distinctly old and new approaches.  By 1993, amid a rapidly decohering historiography, I speculate that partisan consensus allowed historians to maintain a sense of the virtue and progressiveness in their work.

Necessarily, partisanship papers over differences within parties, and augments the differences between them.  Once the key source of historiographical virtue had been identified, all other tensions hinging on detailed argumentation and synthesis between pieces could be viewed as superfluous.  Technical history was edged to the sides of mainstream history of science; tenuous links to political and business history were severed; philosophy of science was shunned; and strong connections to interested members of the scientific community were allowed to wither.  As I have previously argued, Schaffer’s own approach to the genre of natural philosophy disappeared.  Methodological homogenization and the self-containment of individual pieces followed.

(Note for newer readers of this series: Schaffer’s early work emphasized a systematic relationship between morality, social order, and the contents of knowledge.  See his work in pneumatics and pneumatology for an excellent example; see my post on his “Self Evidence” and my post on what I call the “entente cordiale” between the methodological use of anthropological cosmology and the analysis of historical natural philosophical cosmology for a discussion of the waning of this interest.)

Pt. 1 of this post began a discussion that stems from (but extends well beyond) two works of Simon Schaffer: 1) “Augustan Realities: Nature’s Representatives and Their Cultural Resources in the Early Eighteenth Century”; and 2) “A Social History of Plausibility: Country, City and Calculation in Augustan Britain”.  These works identified misleading narratives within a broader social and cultural historiography: a rise of reasoned polity and culture, and a decline of superstition and enchantment.  I suggested that in critiquing these narratives Schaffer had taken to the hustings to show how these narrative faults could be remedied by making use of then-recent insights in the historiography of science.  According to Schaffer, in order for all historical beliefs (scientific or superstitious) to survive and proliferate, their proponents had to engage in polemics that portrayed the beliefs as beneficial — and opposed beliefs as dangerous — to the social order.

In a sense, Schaffer was playing a role that is quite similar to the people he was writing about.  As he wrote in (1), “Representations about nature were stabilized … because … natural philosophers made their representations grip key interests within culture.”  His diagnosis of a historiographical ill and offer of a remedy from the historiography of science should invite us to consider why the diagnosis and remedy were deemed apt by the critic, and why he thought it would be received as apt by his intended audience.  Also, as Aaron suggested in the comments to Pt. 1, we should likewise be open to questioning who this audience really was.

Our first question relates to the appeal of the diagnosis.  One possibility I want to consider right off the bat is that maybe the patient was a hypochondriac.  In the terminology of argumentation: was the identified historiographical flaw a straw man?  My answer is maybe.

G. M. Trevelyan (1876-1962) and his English Social History (1942) are rolled out for a ceremonial whipping at the beginning of (2), as is Lucien Febvre’s (1878-1956) The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century (also 1942) which sought to historicize the appearance of “a concept of the impossible” as a “mental tool”.  (I should note that (2), as opposed to (1), is a history of what beliefs are “plausible” rather than accepted as “real”).  A little later on Peter Burke’s Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (1978) is cited in the footnotes as a source on “the discrediting of popular beliefs”.

A little closer reading reveals a kind of anti-Popperian slant.  The argument is against those who purport to tell the history of the creation of a cultural space where free inquiry can take place.  The Stallybrass & White reference in Pt. 1 on the importance of “processes of social exclusion, boundary maintenance and satirical ribaldry” was made to oppose literary critic Terry Eagleton’s discussion of the historical importance of the creation of a bourgeois space “for the free, equal exchange of reasonable discourse” in The Function of Criticism (1984).  In (2), the chief targets of criticism seem to be Gaston Bachelard (1884-1962), and another literary critic and historian, Ian Watt and his account of the rise of literary (rather than scientific) realism, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding (Schaffer cites a 1983 edition, but the work was apparently 1957; Schaffer had already written on Defoe).

Attacks on scholars of the past and on the instrumental uses of history by those in fields like literary studies might be signs of a critic looking too hard for enemies to best.  However, the critique lands closer to home as well.  Schaffer cites The Scientist’s Role in Society (1972) by sociologist of science Joseph Ben-David (who had actually died in 1986, and whom Shapin had identified as an opponent of the new sociology of scientific knowledge in 1982) as an “influential survey of scientific institutionalisation as the creation of intellectual autonomy”.  The living purveyors of this influence were left anonymous, perhaps because they received the strongest words:

…too many historians of science have found these cushions [i.e. the idea of economic, cultural, and technical isolation] comfortingly seductive.  The clerisy’s fragile isolation is used as an excuse for intellectual laziness.  Links between scientific problems and economic purposes are dismissed as vulgar Marxism.  Connections between natural knowledge and social interests are damned as sociological relativism. (2; 133)

The failure to attend to the insultography that persisted around scientific work was part and parcel of controversies within the historiography of science that had been percolating steadily for well over a decade at that point.  If indeed this was a straw man, it was at least related to reasonably recent conflicts.  Aaron was right to suggest that I question what audience Schaffer had in mind.

Even if we allow that historiographically misleading positions persisted, that the targets were more than straw men, there is still a question of why the diagnosis is needed.  If the historiographical sins of various brands of scholarly realists and politico-epistemic Popperians were so noxious, why not walk away, create a schism (as was happening anyway), and move onwards and upwards?

Aside from run-of-the-mill conflicts over academic positions and resources, I speculate the answer might have to do with a need to see one’s own historiographical program as suffering affliction that cannot be solved by simply cutting out dissenters.  In 1993, it seems to have been as yet unclear what a functioning historiography absent the constraints of past views would actually look like.  However, one can postpone indefinitely a reckoning with problems of historiographical craft if one can understand oneself as engaged in an ongoing struggle to purge oneself of malignancies of historiographical method.

Adrian Wilson expressed this anxiety well in his introduction to the 1993 Rethinking Social History volume that (2) was a part of.  He referred to “the diversity of themes treated in this book” as reflecting the “contemporary paradox of English social history” which juxtaposed “an enormous vitality and a very wide range of concerns” with its lack of “a clear sense of direction or unifying perspective”.  He acknowledged a “sense of fragmentation which besets the subject today.”  The consequence was that “social history has tended to lose both its integrative potential and its ability to grapple with historical change.”

I have always thought of historiographical “fragmentation” as an obvious product of newer historiographical priorities.  But I’d like to make a new speculation: what if this “fragmentation” that bedeviled historiography could be portrayed as an inheritance of past historiography?  If it were, then diagnosis of the past malignancies and a recitation of their most common historiographical manifestations might be seen as offering a clear prescription for undoing this fragmentation once and for all, so that a properly reintegrated historiography might finally emerge.

Unfortunately this post has ballooned on me again, so Pt. 3 will have to deal with further speculation about how this fragmentation process was envisioned as working, and, following from that, how it was imagined reintegration could best be brought about.

This post looks at two works from the oeuvre of Simon Schaffer:

1) “Augustan Realities: Nature’s Representatives and Their Cultural Resources in the Early Eighteenth Century” in Realism and Representation: Essays on the Problem of Realism in Relation to Science, Literature, and Culture, ed. George Levin, 1993, pp. 128-157.

2) “A Social History of Plausibility: Country, City and Calculation in Augustan Britain” in Rethinking Social History: English Society 1570-1920 and its interpretation, ed. Adrian Wilson, 1993, pp. 279-318.

Both papers find Schaffer on the hustings.  As historian of medicine Adrian Wilson puts it in the introduction to the Rethinking Social History volume, “Simon Schaffer’s chapter … can be read as a plea to social historians to concern themselves with the history of science.”  This appeal is made by identifying certain misconceptions about the role of science in history prevalent in a broader historiography.  According to Schaffer:

Received history has it that the eighteenth century was a crucial period for the establishment of [realist] regimes.  The novel and the experimental report appeared as legitimate means of representing the moral and the natural order….  Somehow or other, older, courtly forms of making knowledge failed or were thrust aside. (1; 283/5)

Likewise:

The social history of [stories about claims about things like humans giving birth to animals, perpetual motion, and the inverse square law of gravity] has typically been described in terms of the ‘decline of magic’ and the ‘disenchantment of the world.’ (2; 128)

Schaffer diagnoses the source of these narrative misconceptions to be historians’ credulity  in polemical rhetoric used by historical actors who sought to establish themselves as intellectuals leaders who, if followed, could realize this narrative.  Crucially, according to Schaffer, this rhetoric specifically portrayed natural philosophical, and, by extension, scientific knowledge as free from cultural influence:

In the sciences, we are told, the facts speak for themselves.  Here communal authority and individual dogmatism allegedly have no place.  Early modern natural philosophers’ slogans set the pace.  (2; 131)

Also:

Representations of nature were stabilized not because their promoters escaped from culture’s grip, but because these natural philosophers made their representations grip key interests within culture.  Scientific realism is a philosophical position that distracts attention from this cultural work of representatives of nature, and points it toward the adequacy of nature’s representations.  There is a relationship between the ‘amnesia’ of realism, in which the work that establishes representations is forgotten, and the apparent power of realism as a scientific and literary genre.  (1; 279)

Thus, the methodological solution to mainstream historians’ misconceptions is to reintegrate the histories of science and culture.  According to Schaffer,

Epistemologists [citing Ian Hacking and Nick Jardine] using the work of Kuhn or Foucault have sought to describe ‘scenes of inquiry’ or ‘positivities’, the set of questions judged urgent and proper by a well-defined community of investigators.  Here communities are defined by shared questions rather than common answers.  We may ask sociohistorical questions about the genealogy of such apparently secure communities. ” (2; 129)

However, the key historiographical task was apparently not to chart these communities and survey their questions, but instead to survey the means they used to identify their allies and to exclude their opponents.  In other words the united historiography of science and culture takes the form of a historical study of the same polemics that produced mainstream misunderstanding of the past in the first place, except now polemics are to be charted symmetrically, i.e. there is to be no prejudice between the polemics used by or against natural philosophers:

An account of the real contents of nature rules out enterprises that tell different stories about the world.  So the polemical work that establishes that a group of representatives are reliable delegates of some natural order can also settle the contents of that order.”  (1; 280)

Likewise:

“…as Peter Stallybrass and Allon White pointed out [in 1986's The Politics and Poetics of Transgression] … references to the public sphere are insufficient unless accompanied by attention to the processes of social exclusion, boundary maintenance and satirical ribaldry which helped intellectuals fashion themselves as uniquely privileged bearers of culture and knowledge.”  (2; 132)

What this amounts to is a tabulation of spots where natural philosophy and certain grand cultural ideas converged in rhetoric.  As Schaffer explains, “Natural philosophical conduct hinged on conventions of trust.  The conduct of eighteenth-century courts and exchanges threatened the basis of credit in traditional culture.  Courtiers’ status relied entirely on customary means of representation before their lord.”  However, “Many were distrusted, either in principle or in fact: the vulgar, the hired hand, womenfolk, ‘enthusiasts’” (1; 288).

Where pervasive ideas like the enthusiasm of the crowds, the illusion and emotional manipulation of the theater, the scurrilousness of projectors, and the immorality of atheists appear in the historical record of natural philosophy, these are signs that an integration of the  historiographies of science and culture has been achieved.

The papers resulting from this confidence amount to a tedious procession of not-directly-related things some people wanted other people to believe (the circulation of the blood, the oblateness of the earth, Jethro Tull’s farming methods, investment and insurance schemes, electrical cures…), juxtaposed with lists and some analysis of the structure of common 18th-century insults (hysterical, illusory, immoral, superstitious, atheistic…), which were hurled when belief was not successfully instilled.  All this is interposed with repetitious invocations of the same historico-epistemological point voiced in slightly different language each time: to be accepted, claims must be trusted, but trust is subject to dissolution in the face of cultural attack.

In all of this, though, it is not at all clear to me that the pervasiveness of a science-culture distinction is the source of the identified misconception in the mainstream historiography, or that an absolute independence of science from culture was a key feature of 18th-century rhetoric.  It is not clear to me that the historiographical recommendations actually constitute the remedy to the identified misconception, nor that they constitute the best method of integrating the history of science with the history of culture.

We will explore some of the deeper historiographical issues underlying these opinions in Pt. 2.

In Pt. 2 of this look at Zuoyue Wang’s In Sputnik’s Shadow, I critiqued Wang’s adherence to a central analytical rubric pitting an “enthusiasm” for technological “fixes” against a more reserved “skepticism”.  I argued that the rubric led to misleading interpretations of selected quotes.  It modified, rather than moved beyond, a questionable narrative of 20th-century ideas about the relationship between politics and science.  Finally, the narrative mainly seemed to function as a way of explaining why good reason often fails to prevent bad outcomes — as might be expected given the narrative’s origins in historical polemics.

Nevertheless, readers of this book who are prepared to disagree with certain aspects of it can and should still find a great deal that is useful.  My more pressing concern is what aspects of history are simply forgotten because they can only be found by probing beyond what the enthusiasm-skepticism rubric can parse.

One key issue is the characterization of the importance of the President’s Science Advisory Committee as fulfilling an almost unique role as scientific skeptics in a government apparently otherwise enamored with the prospect of technological fixes to policy problems.  However, this creates the impression that those whose general attitudes are labeled enthusiastic held a belief in something like what we might call “technology without policy”.

For example, we might be led to believe that these individuals thought development of nuclear weapons obviated the need for diplomacy.  But does this really describe their position, or is it a caricature of their position? Perhaps, cognizant of the increasingly long lag-times between development and production, proponents of arms development were reluctant to relinquish advantages based on possibly ephemeral diplomatic gains.

Also, by attributing to enthusiasm individuals’ adherence to strategic positions, such as a maximally robust technological preparedness, it may detract from a recognition of those individuals’ skepticism at times when they were not pursuing those positions.  For example, although runaway defense R&D in the Cold War is seen as symptom of a technologically enthusiastic military, in my own research I have found the military services to have been quite interested in controlling the wasteful duplication of projects and the pursuit of development contracts that do not lead to a procured technology.  As flush with funding as the military was, they, too, demonstrated restraint within their own realms of management.

This is not just about coming to a better understanding of the “enthusiasts”.  It is also about understanding the “skeptics’” positions and how they came to them.  Let’s say we take a softer position on the enthusiasts and allow that their general attitude did not actually exclude them having a position on the role of diplomacy in foreign policy.  We are now forced to distinguish their ideas on the relationship between diplomacy and weapons development from those of the skeptics, since no government adviser was against development, only the development of certain technologies.  According to what more particular ideas, then, did they decide which development programs constituted a reasonably restrained policy?

Here is where a more thorough picture of the workings of PSAC would have been useful.  Wang offers portraits of some members’ personalities, but they often come off as figures who are consulted and recommend, rather than people who deliberate and conclude.  To what extent that is or is not true, I can’t really say.  The scientific/technical knowledge and advisory/administrative experience of PSAC members receive insufficient attention.  It is not clear how members’ experience informed, or did not inform, PSAC’s work.  Although the PSAC panel system’s work receives ample mention, it is not clear how the system functioned.  How were panel members chosen, how did they study issues, and did how their work mesh with the work of the committee itself?

How, in the light of all of this, did PSAC differ, or not differ, in its activities from other, not specifically scientific standing and ad hoc blue ribbon groups?  Wang’s analysis of PSAC as depending on a certain model of technocratic polity suggests an important distinction, but I am inclined to suspect more of a parallel.

Where In Sputnik’s Shadow seems to ask what the implication of PSAC was for science and technology in the American state, a more constructive question might have been: what was a specifically science-and-technology committee supposed to be able to accomplish at the White House level?  While it might be intuitive to see a top-level science committee as indicating a certain indication of respect or seriousness with which matters of science and technology were handled by the state as a whole, this is more typically an outsider’s perception.  Custodians of bureaucratic machinery would be more inclined to ask whether individuals with a certain expertise are in places where their expertise can be of most use, and this is not necessarily at the highest level.

It is only when certain administrative problems rise to the top level that such advice can really be fruitful.  Notably, even with the unification of the military services under the Defense Department in the late 1940s, the White House continued to have trouble uniting service ambitions under a central defense policy.  As President Eisenhower attempted to tame this system, including by streamlining defense R&D spending, choices about what projects to pursue and what projects to cancel depended on a technical understanding of those projects’ competing merits.  However, all technical information was generated by the services competing for those projects, which was a clear conflict of interest.  In this case, PSAC represented one of the few organizations that could offer readings of this evidence on which the administration could rely.

While Wang does get at the importance of interservice rivalries, these are portrayed more as a function of the services’ innate enthusiasm against Eisenhower’s more staid attitude toward technology,  rather than as a function of Eisenhower’s more general administrative problem in getting the services to put aside their conflicts of interest in the interest of a coherent policy.

This also becomes important when Kennedy becomes President.  PSAC was one organization in a long line of inadequate attempts to control defense R&D.  Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara’s Planning Programming and Budgeting System (PPBS) was supposed to offer a newly effective means of bringing spending into line with overall defense goals.

This actually explains rather well an incident to which Wang refers: “When [PSAC chair Jerome] Wiesner first described to him the role of his office and PSAC, McNamara responded that ‘If I am doing my job properly, none of these would be necessary’” (190).  Wang doesn’t bother to describe McNamara’s primary mission as essentially being to take technical decisions about defense expenditure out of the ad hoc intervention of the White House and (with the aid of a new Office of Systems Analysis) put it back into a Pentagon dedicated to serving White House policies, where such decisions would reasonably belong.  Instead: “McNamara soon came to appreciate the independent judgments, and often support, that Wiesner and PSAC could provide him at the presidential level.”  His “initial skepticism” (247) to PSAC soon melted away.

Now, McNamara is always a tricky figure to deal with, and I think that Wang does a generally good job.  Classically, McNamara is painted as an enthusiast, full stop, because of implementation of PPBS at the Pentagon, and because he presided over the escalation of the Vietnam War, which is often explained (including in this book) as a product of America’s technological hubris.  Wang makes clear, I think correctly, that McNamara always had a more ambivalent take on technology and quantitative methods of management than generally assumed, and that the failures of his term as Secretary of Defense cannot be explained by reference to a sort of technocratic mentality.

What is most needed, however, is not a more proper assessment of particular individuals’ or agencies’ generic attitudes toward science and technology, but a more nuanced understanding of the decisions they faced and the means they used to face them.

A good comparison might be US Naval Academy historian Benjamin Greene’s book, Eisenhower, Science Advice, and the Nuclear Test Ban Debate, 1945-1963 (Stanford UP, 2007; if you don’t want to read it, check out Michael Gordin’s useful review, available as a freebie from the American Historical Review).  In that book, Greene very nicely explains why Eisenhower was early-on content to rely on advice from AEC chair Lewis Strauss and his political ally Edward Teller.  It also explains how their technical concerns about the drawbacks of a test ban could make a test ban appear undesirable, but how access to a wider range of technical opinion could make a test ban at least appear to be a viable goal.  Such treatments allow for clear portrayals of the ways in which policy can depend on technical knowledge, and how a good system of technical advising, when deployed by a conscientious executive, has impacted the formulation of policy, even without offering scientifically validated answers to policy problems.

Such approaches seem to me both more faithful to the historical record, and also more useful than attempts to see the scattered historical attempts to define science vs. politics, or the struggle between skeptics and enthusiasts as the defining features of the recent history of a thoroughly and irreversibly technocratic state.

In Part 1 of this look at Zuoyue Wang’s In Sputnik’s Shadow: The President’s Science Advisory Committee and Cold War America, I suggested Wang’s use of a dichotomy between technological enthusiasm and technological skepticism as his central analytical rubric held the book back from being as illuminating as it might have been.  Part 2 explains how it does so.

As I noted in Pt. 1, the enthusiasm-skepticism rubric clearly has a moral resonance: enthusiasm is bad, skepticism is good.  Once a moral dichotomy has been established, historiography easily fades into “theodicy” — an explanation for why there is evil in the world.  The theodicy of science basically goes like this: if science, or indeed knowledge, is supposed to make the world a better place, then why does it fail to do so?  Why does it sometimes seem, or threaten, to make the world worse?  A common mid-to-late-20th-century version is: why did scientists fail to stop the Cold War?

No sane historian would actually phrase the question this way, but using the enthusiasm-skepticism rubric more-or-less implies the question, simply because the rubric’s terms are one answer to the problem of theodicy.  Blind enthusiasm for science and technology as a simple “fix” can result in evil.  Skepticism can prevent that evil.  Where skepticism fails, enthusiasm may prevail.  This line of reasoning rose in reaction to Enlightenment thought, often to reinforce the legitimacy of religious ethics and tradition-based government in the face of an idolatry of reason (see, for example, Chris’ post on Maistre, or Schaffer and Golinski on attempts to constrain scientific “genius”, or Schaffer on the criticism of Whewell).  Importantly, though, this critique is mainly just a modification or inversion of the Enlightenment argument.  Where the Enlightenment pitted the potential of rational governance against superstition and arbitrary authority, the enthusiasm of rationality and technology is simply recast as an impostor, a new form of “faith” to be overcome by those purporting to represent a truly rational response to the evils of the world.

What this rather elaborate critique has to do with PSAC is that the instantiation of a group scientists at the highest level of power, the White House, becomes the scene for an  important confrontation of good and evil, or reason and blindness.  Historiographically, this rubric translates into mundane, but still very important, consequences that manifest themselves in style and composition: it defines what questions are worth asking, which explanations and descriptions of historical events and ideas suffice, and which ones will suggest the need to ask other questions and bring in additional context in order to feel satisfied that an adequate understanding of past events has been reached.

In Sputnik’s Shadow offers a substantial revision of a familiar picture of Cold War science as entirely dominated by its enthusiasm.  Toward the end of the book Wang notes how, during the rise of the New Left, PSAC, and even science generally, became implicated in a perceived militaristic techno-enthusiasm of the American state.  He refutes this picture.  I remember during the Q&A for the panel I was on at last year’s HSS, he also mentioned (I think in a discussion of Yaron Ezrahi, which had to do with Clark Miller’s paper) how he disagreed with the idea that the postwar era was marked by a more-or-less unquestioned faith in science and technology.  I agreed, and agree, with that position, but I didn’t know how much his book hewed to the basic historiographical rubric.

Wang’s analysis, like Ezrahi’s, crucially depends on distinguishing a historical socio-politico-epistemic model of polity that prevailed at mid-century, but that did not, in the long run, prevail.  He makes this idea clear in his summary of the thinking underlying Eisenhower’s initial support for the space program (p. 88, my emphasis):

The decision was an unusual one in that it allowed a group of technically private citizens to shape one of the most important public policies of the day.  That Eisenhower took such a step and had it accepted by the American public and polity was testimony to the effectiveness, in this period of American history, of what political scientist Yaron Ezrahi has called the “depoliticization of executive action” through the “utilization of science and technology.”  Symbols of openness and rationality, science and technology functioned as political and ideological resources, allowing the president to present his actions as “impersonal, nonarbitrary, and publicly accountable measures to enhance the public good.”

The key revision in Wang’s account is to portray PSAC as perhaps the key source of “skepticism” in American government.  He takes its efficacy to have been predicated on its ability to maintain a politically stable position.  In broad strokes, this is surely correct.  For instance, as he illustrates, PSAC’s efficacy as a force for informing test ban and arms control policy was clearly predicated on the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations’ interest in curbing the disturbing pace of Cold War militarization; Nixon’s insistence on pursuing ABM technology doomed PSAC.  Similarly, though PSAC members strenuously objected, they were ineffective in arguing against the Apollo moon landing program given Kennedy’s political interest in it.

However, where I part ways with Wang’s analysis is in presuming that PSAC’s efficacy was linked to its ability to maintain credulity in its capacity as a scientific panel to offer objective, and thus authoritative, advice.  As a good illustration, Wang quotes Kennedy: “For those of us who are not experts and yet must be called on to make decisions [...] we must turn, in the last resort, to objective, disinterested scientists who bring a strong sense of public responsibility and public obligation.”

For Wang, the statement “reflected Kennedy’s optimism that scientists could help solve major problems in American public policy” (188).  But I find there to be an uncomfortable tension in the interpretation.  For me, the statement is a rather unremarkable appeal to the ideal of selfless public service, be it for lawyers, military officers, scientist advisers, or even senators.  It is certainly optimistic in its own Kennedy-esque way (“ask not what your country can do for you…”), but, again for me, there is nothing special in its application to scientists.  Of course scientists can “help solve major policy problems” (my emphasis).  Why, then, is it a sign of Kennedy’s “optimism” that he thought so?

The answer, of course, is that the science-technology and science-politics distinctions upon which PSAC supposedly relied as a platform to enforce its “skepticism” were themselves based on an “enthusiasm”, “faith”, or “optimism” in “science” as opposed to the enthusiasm of politics or technology.

Wang traces the detachment of science from technology to our old friend, the linear model, or, in Wang’s terminology, the “assembly-line model”, which he traces to the rhetoric of “pure science” in the interwar period.  Notably, on p. 17, we learn that “as a result of the scientists’ campaign [for pure science as a prerequisite to technological development], the belief in scientific superiority in [the interwar] period became so ingrained in American society and culture that engineers began to define technology as applied science.  The 1933 World’s Fair (‘Century of Progress’) in Chicago captured this faith in pure science with its motto: ‘Science Finds, Industry Applies, and Man Conforms’.”  As is common in discussions of an alleged historical linear model, scientists’ own enthusiasms become most apparent in instances where their self-interest is most directly at issue.  The influence of their rhetoric is either presumed (science caught on big, after all), or supported with extremely scanty evidence.

However, Wang gives the credulity of the science-technology distinction, as rooted in the linear model, its own periodization, leading to a new distinction based on science as embodying the true rationality of skepticism.  On p. 57, Wang quotes Lee DuBridge juxtaposing his hopes that a new organization of defense R&D will help curb wasteful R&D spending with his desire to see funding for research increased, and explains the juxtaposition thus (my emphasis):

Like keeping in touch with scientists, this justification of basic research as a way to prevent technological blind alleys or as an antidote to technological excess marked another important revision to Bush’s assembly-line model….  [T]he Dubridge appeal formed an important part of scientists’ technological skepticism, and represented a move in public science by linking policy for science with science in policy.  What motivated DuBridge to justify basic research as a possible cure for developmental problems was not just that he knew the latter to be of paramount concern to the Eisenhower administration.  It also derived from the fact that Bush’s assembly-line model of science producing practical technologies was not as forceful in 1953 as it had been in 1945.

Ultimately, though, science-politics distinction, and science-technology distinctions could not be maintained, which ultimately leads to the rupture of the basic socio-politico-epistemic model that ultimately made PSAC’s skepticism possible.  The idea relies on a paradigmatic tension between a technocratic basis for polity and a popular basis for polity, leading to epochal paradigm shifts.

This tension comes out nicely in Wang’s discussion of pesticide regulation.  Wang reads a PSAC appeal that “all data used as a basis for granting registration and establishing tolerances should be published, thus allowing the hypotheses and the validity and reliability of the data to be subjected to critical review by the public and the scientific community” as a radical shift in ideas about governance: “Significantly, what PSAC endorsed here was a profound shift in the authority of American public policy from government technocrats to a scientifically informed public, and with it a new model of policymaking based on contested rationality” (211).  I believe reading such a shift in a call for additional openness is a rather extreme interpretation.  However, for Wang, it is what makes his narrative make sense — the loss of technocratic reason as a basis of polity is what ultimately undermined the ability of PSAC to function as a voice of skepticism against enthusiasm at the highest level.  Popular polity elected Nixon, and Nixon killed PSAC.

What I am claiming here is that if my critique of theodicy via a narrative stretching from the reaction to the Enlightenment to the 20th century is elaborate, Wang is partaking in a critical narrative that depends on a mythology every bit as elaborate.  The difference is that my narrative only has to explain the persistence of certain argumentative strategies.  The Wang narrative (which is really the STS narrative) has to explain the historical record itself.

Where the STS narrative falls apart is that it is essentially based on a credulity in the validity of certain aspects of historical rhetoric that are part-and-parcel of the same history under examination.  In other words, the enthusiasm-skepticism rubric was itself a political tool — perhaps the most effective one available at that time.  For example, James Conant’s observations are used to establish a key periodization: a supposed World War II-era switch from military recalcitrance toward technology to an unquestioning enthusiasm.  Wang quotes him referring to the military attitude toward nuclear weapons in 1951 (p. 27):

It seems to me something like the old religious phenomenon of conversion.  As I see it now, the military, if anything, have become vastly too much impressed with the abilities of research and development.  They are no longer the conservatives.  I don’t know what I should say — at times they seem to be fanatics in their belief of what scientists and technologists can do.

Even more forcefully, on p. 104, Herbert York, the former director of the Livermore weapons lab, is quoted recounting how he “had gone to Washington a technological optimist, full of confidence in technological fix.  I came away three and a half years later gravely concerned about the all too common practice of seeking and using technological palliatives to cover over serious persistent underlying political and social problems.”  However sincere York’s account of the evolution of his own mental state, I would nevertheless urge that we question the terms he used to describe it.   After all, there is no faster way to discredit an opponent’s position than to portray it as the product of an obviously deficient, googly-eyed version of rationality.  And there is no one more credible in using this strategy than the convert who has seen the light.  (I’ll leave the comparison to Conant’s statement above for homework.)

The central difficulty here is not that the analytical rubric of skepticism-enthusiasm is wholly inappropriate — it is effective because it functions as a plausible explanation for the historical arc of PSAC and individual events within that arc.  One central difficulty is that, like the “toggle-switch” view of early modern chymistry as playing out along a philosophy-science rubric, bits of evidence become interpreted only as they seem pertinent to the enthusiasm-skepticism rubric.  Did the quotes above from Kennedy, DuBridge, the Chicago World’s Fair, and the PSAC recommendation on pesticide regulation procedure really reflect the significance that Wang ascribes to them?  Or does the significance read into those quotes ring true because we already accept that good and evil events are mainly explicable in terms of the victories and failures of skepticism in combating policies rooted in faith rather than reason?

Thus a second difficulty with the skepticism-enthusiasm rubric is that it invites us to stop asking questions just when the questions start to get really interesting.  As I mentioned in Pt. 1, further questioning is not intended to “rescue” the positions ascribed to “enthusiasm” from that accusation.  The point is to arrive at as thorough an understanding of history as we can.  In Pt. 3, we will look at some of the questions that might have been examined more thoroughly in In Sputnik’s Shadow.

What possible motivation could historians have to stop asking searching questions about history?  This has to do with this blog’s longstanding interest in historians’ turn away from engaging with each other and the growth of an imperative to engage the public at-large.  If we believe our history is lesson-bearing, that is has a clear normative component, we have plenty of motivation to reinforce mythologies of the past that reinforce the normative component in our own writings.  Here, for example, is the bulk of the ending of Wang’s book:

Although it is crucial to clarify the scientific argument over global climatic change, it takes political leadership, and often scientific activism, to move toward the making of prudent decisions to avert or at least mitigate a possible environmental catastrophe.  However, the George W. Bush administration, like the Nixon and Reagan administrations before it, seems to think that, on the one hand, faith-based politics and ideology take priority over evidence-based scientific reasoning and technological evaluations, and, on the other hand, that American military-technological superiority could be relied on in pursuing domestic and international objectives.

What is potentially at stake is not just precious resources wasted or critical warnings ignored, but the cultivation of a blind faith in technological solutions to social and political problems that had led the United States into disasters like the Vietnam War, and, in many ways, the war in Iraq.  [...]  The division over the Iraq War, just like that over the Vietnam War, has unfortunately also spilled over into other areas of the relationship between the scientific community and the federal government, deepening the breach that already existed over federal support of basic research and the formulation of a sound environmental policy.  That is a pity, because it will take more than the “shock and awe” of military and technological power to win the war on terror and solve the myriad other problems facing America and the world.  [...]  If PSAC scientists’ experiences in the post-Sputnik era of the Cold War hold any relevance for us today, if their technological skepticism still speaks to our own age of technological enthusiasm, it should alert us to not just the potentials but also the limits of technological fixes, to the necessity of taking actions in the face of potentially catastrophic environmental changes, to the need for a balanced science policy that looks beyond immediate technological payoff, and to the value of transparency and dissent in a democratic society.

Theodicy indeed.  Historians of science love to look back on the simplicity of past thinking about the relationship between science, state, and society, and to offer cogent reminders about the need to think about things in a more complex way.  But, what if it is in our own professional self-interest to endow our writings with a broader cogency?  Does this causes us to simplistically ascribe a simplicity to past thought in order to simplistically explain, and thus claim a (totally ineffective) authority over, the problems of the world today?  What effect does this have on the historical narratives we write, and the historical picture of the past we collectively build?

This is not a problem with Zuoyue Wang — he is a terrific researcher, and I always look forward to his writing — this is a problem with the institutions and intellectual life in the history of science that prevents good research and writing from accumulating into a well-functioning historiography.

Though a visible and important office in American policy history, and though, historically, it has been much discussed, PSAC has garnered surprisingly little analysis by historians.  Thus Zuoyue Wang’s In Sputnik’s Shadow: The President’s Science Advisory Committee and Cold War America (Rutgers UP, 2008) automatically constitutes a valuable contribution to the historiography.

PSAC’s predecessor body, the Science Advisory Committee of the Office of Defense Mobilization, was established in 1951 during the Korean War.  Although comprised of highly respected members of the scientific community, that committee was a marginal body, and it was replaced by PSAC following the Soviet launch of the Sputnik satellite and reconsideration of American government’s management of its scientific and technological resources.  PSAC’s chair served as the science adviser to the President until 1973 when Richard Nixon dissolved PSAC.  In 1976 Gerald Ford established a new organization, the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP).  Though its exact structure and function have varied from administration to administration, that body still exists, and its director (currently John Holdren) serves as Assistant to the President for Science and Technology.  Wang’s book covers this whole history, with the OSTP period as an epilogue.

In my own experience, the further one gets from World War II, the more convoluted and confusing the terrain becomes, the less helpful the historiography becomes, the more difficult it becomes to write good, coherent history.  Wang’s book flips this on its head.  The book begins with a discussion of a mysteriously defined entity Wang refers to as “American public science”, cobbled together from the prevailing mythology of American science.  The book then picks up steam when it begins to discuss the specifics of PSAC’s debates over, and involvement in, individual issues such as the foundation of NASA in 1958, the regulation of pesticides in the wake of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), and the struggle over whether America should pursue anti-ballistic missile (ABM) technology — the issue that was largely responsible for PSAC earning Nixon’s enmity.

This book is good and useful.  Let that be clear.  As ever, though, this blog is dedicated to the development of a pointed and useful critical language, and so I want to concentrate on some systematic issues that I think really hold In Sputnik’s Shadow back from being as illuminating and great as it might have been.  In general, I believe Wang’s analysis of the history of PSAC falls prey to the persistent historiographical difficulties presented by what I am calling the “20th-century problem”.

The 20th-century problem relates to the historiographical difficulties involving the unusual scale and complexity of science, technology, and their management in the 20th century.  Although scale and complexity also afflict efforts to come to grips with the history of prior centuries, the scale shift in the 20th should make it into a defining historiographical challenge. Currently, though, historians have not really begun to acknowledge it as a serious problem, preferring to maintain a historiography of largely self-contained case narratives.

Insofar as the existing historiography is united at all, it is united around a handful of thematic issues.  Most notably, these issues include the managerial problems presented by “big science”, and the heightened political and policy significance of science and technology, which, for clear reasons, is the key issue in Wang’s book.  Beyond these issues and what can be gleaned from individual cases, historians have forfeited the responsibility to chart history, and have been timid in establishing and debating new narratives.  As a consequence, we have difficulty discussing history coherently in all but either its microscopic specifics, or, alternatively, in the most hand-waving and unilluminating language.

One specific difficulty here is that PSAC provides Wang with a fixed vantage point, which inhibits his ability to provide the background knowledge really necessary to understand the importance of, and strategies taken on, the various issues PSAC addressed.  As we saw with Allan Needell’s book on Lloyd Berkner, even a very lofty fixed vantage point — be it an influential individual or a high government office — tends to see history passing by it without really knowing where it’s coming from. This means that even though readers are hanging around the actors, they do not know what the actors know, and thus do not really have a good specific idea of why they make the choices, and say the things that they do.

There is, as yet, no adequate methodological solution to the problem of combining a detailed study of a particularly large subject with the extensive background needed to understand the subject.  But without grappling with the problem, histories will perhaps inevitably fall victim to the limitations of the “view from the archive folder”.

PSAC was quite possibly the most important science-and-technology committee of its time.  Nevertheless, it occupied a government structure populated by an immense network of committees, some specifically scientific, some not.  Discussions and actions taken in any one place inevitably can only be reactions to discussions and actions taken in other places.  Thus, for discussions and actions to make sense, one must move beyond the fixed vantage point.  Without that background, debates tend to center around “MacGuffins”, where it doesn’t really make much difference to the narrative whether a rocket or a nuclear reactor is the subject of debate, just so long as people are fighting over it and using revealing polemics.

It is then these polemics that establish the contours of the narrative, lending it thematic unity.

Wang’s history finds its thematic unity in some awfully familiar territory.  There is much boundary patrolling: between “science” and “politics”, and between “science” and “technology”.  Fortunately, “such a clear-cut distinction between science and technology has come under question in recent scholarship in science and technology studies; close examination often reveals a deep intermixing at the boundary.”  This remarkable theoretical innovation allows us to see that “the interesting question here is not whether the science-technology distinction existed in reality, but how scientists perceived such a difference and made political use of it” (17).

This, of course, tacitly presumes that the delineation of rhetorical boundaries was central to PSAC’s ability to influence events.  Judging by the centrality of the analysis of rhetoric to Wang’s analysis — many of his quotations relate to some comment made here or there about “science” or “technology” or “experts” or “politics” — I take it that he deems such rhetoric was elemental to PSAC’s power.  For my part, I am inclined to doubt it.

Wang also relies excessively on a distinction that he has no problem drawing between technological enthusiasm and skepticism.  In his narrative, historical actors’ positions are explicable mainly in terms of their predilection for enthusiasm or skepticism.  The moral resonances of these predilections are easy to discern: enthusiasm=bad, skepticism=good.

Once the good and bad positions on some question have been identified (nuclear weapons development=bad, environmental regulation=good, man-in-space=technically bad, but maybe not all bad since it was more-or-less acknowledged to be a political stunt), the bad position is characterized as having been thought of as a naive technological “fix” to some political problem, and adherents to that position can be safely characterized as enthusiasts for the fix and their views need not be further considered.  The crux of the book is that PSAC, while certainly “not monolithic”, still tended to represent a generic force of skepticism that counterbalanced widespread enthusiasm within the US government, particularly its military.

Definitively, the point of this critique is not, in some sense, to “rescue” positions like nuclear militarism, and resistance to environmental regulation from being tarred with the brush of enthusiasm.  By and large, I believe I share Wang’s perspectives on these issues.  The point is that the enthusiasm-skepticism rubric is probably not the most illuminating way for historians to analyze the history. I believe it runs into some of the same problems Bill Newman was talking about in describing a science-vs.-philosophy analysis of early modern chymistry as a “toggle-switch” model of history, essentially rendering historical events and statements of interest, and thus explicable, mainly insofar as they can be interpreted in the terms of the central historiographical model being used.

A detailed discussion of problems surrounding the enthusiasm-skepticism rubric will follow in Pt. 2.

Click for the Ralph Gomory profile at the IBM archives

One of my activities on my recent blogging hiatus was an oral history interview with Ralph Gomory.  The interview was originally instigated as part of the AIP History Center’s History of Physics in Industry project, on which I’ve helped out here and there.  Our discussions with researchers at IBM all pointed to Gomory as a crucial figure in that company’s history.  Personally, I had a strong interest in the interview, because Gomory’s background is in mathematics, and he is a notable figure in the operations research (OR) community, primarily on account of his foundational work on integer programming.  (For those keeping track, I wrote my dissertation, and am currently polishing up a book manuscript, on the history of certain sciences of policy analysis, including OR.)  This post is mainly based on the background research I did ahead of the interview.

Gomory was director of research at IBM from 1970 to 1986.  IBM Research had been established in its present form in the late 1950s by Emanuel Piore.  Piore had spent much of his postwar career at the Office of Naval Research, culminating in a stint as Chief Scientist.  Careful readers of Zuoyue Wang’s recent book on the President’s Science Advisory Committee (to be discussed on this blog presently) will know that Piore became a ubiquitous figure on various high-level government panels (i.e., though not well-known to historians, he was a big deal).

The idea behind establishing IBM Research was the general sense, widespread in the 1950s and ’60s, that technologically-oriented companies would be well-served by conducting their own basic research.  Piore’s goal was to establish an environment — housed in a modern building designed by Eero Saarinen — where researchers could freely explore their own ideas.  Gomory had originally been brought in to be part of the new mathematics department (along, incidentally, with fractal geometry pioneer Benoît Mandelbrot).

Now, going back to my previous post’s interest in basic research and the “linear model” in history: once one had established the importance of the link between research and technological development, one was faced with a series of subsidiary questions, to which one would have devoted more or less thought. At what level should this research be funded, overall?  What sorts of organizations should house research activities?  In what ways, and to what degree, should research activities be connected to, or liberated from, organizational (or simply others’) goals?  Of all possible specialties, what sorts of specialists should particular organizations hire?  According to what criteria should organizational managers initiate, discontinue, prioritize, and fund competing research projects?  Answers to these questions necessarily depended on more specific notions of the importance and character of research activities and their connection to technological work.

Gomory’s long term as director of research was, in many ways, centered around an attempt to better integrate IBM Research’s to-that-point freestanding activities into corporate strategy.  He became convinced that the best opportunities for research contributing to IBM’s products were generally limited to very certain points in the product development cycle (the succession of generations of products).  Developers and manufacturing engineers were often better positioned to offer judgment on what research results would prove the most useful to them, even as their ability to do so was predicated on researchers effectively communicating potential implications of their work to the engineers.  IBM Research, meanwhile, would continue to pursue open-ended academic-type work — including Nobel Prize-winning work — but the research division also began to concentrate more on problems suggested by difficulties and challenges foreseen in the product development and manufacturing processes.

In the 1980s and ’90s, at IBM, and then as president of the Sloan Foundation, Gomory began to publish short articles about the management of research, initially concentrating on the problem of the Japanese challenge to American competitiveness.  IBM, of course, experienced first-hand the threat from surging Japanese electronics firms.  Gomory’s articles responded to what he believed were misguided appeals to American underinvestment in research and science education as explanations for the challenge.  For example, some commentators, particularly academic researchers, were likely to point to large Japanese research investment and state projects, notably those at MITI (now METI), as a key source of the challenge.  (Incidentally, the international polemical/political arc leading from DSIR to MITI would be well worth tracing.)  Gomory preferred to point to particular Japanese methods of integrating design, manufacturing, and marketing, and their contraction of the product development cycle, to explain their successes.

Accordingly, while Gomory supported funding American basic science to maintain competitiveness in all fields, he argued that it was unlikely to make a substantial contribution to pressing problems of national economic competitiveness.  He attributed the idea that it could to what he referred to as the “ladder of science” model (essentially the linear model).  He asserted that whatever advantages might accrue from success with that model were fleeting as new industries based on novel technologies were quickly replicated in other nations.  Most economic advantage and long-term success was grounded in large industries’ ability to put low-cost, high-quality products through the development cycle more rapidly than their competitors.  Academic researchers were even less likely than industrial researchers to know what research results could be fruitfully applied in the cycle.

One lesson we could draw from the arc at IBM Research from the ’50s to the ’80s is a progression in ideas from Piore to Gomory.  This would map well onto existing narratives detailing a widespread questioning of the wisdom of unalloyed support for research in the 1960s and ’70s, which has been linked to a decline of the perceived validity of the linear model more generally.  The classic example is the increased Congressional questioning of military support for university research, punctuated by the Defense Department’s mid-1960s “Project Hindsight”, a study that failed to find a substantial link between advances in military technology and investment in research.

Framing this story in terms of the rise and fall of the linear model makes sense, because it renders a rationale for the support for research as a path to technological and economic prowess.  However, my own preference (and I think this mainly accords with David Bruggeman’s suggestion for thinking of the linear model as “incomplete”) is to think of a sort of undefined virtue as having been attributed to research, with little further reflection being given to problems such as who should be responsible for supporting research, and what institutional frameworks best mediate between university research, industrial research, and technology development communities.

This could all reduce down to “I say po-tay-to, you say po-tah-to”, but my feeling here, also expressed in my previous post, is that doing away with the historical idea of a linear model frees us up to look at, and evaluate the relative significance of the history of other rhetoric, other ideas, and other practices.  For example, while it seems likely that high-level managers and policymakers were convinced to support research perhaps out of some vague notion that it would yield occasional windfalls, this support would likely have been disconnected from their management or policymaking regarding technology development activities, which do not seem to have been substantially chained to any linear model, even though these activities were ostensibly a part of it.

From this perspective, the focus in the IBM Research narrative can be detached from Gomory’s reforms and criticsm; instead those reforms and criticism become an invitation to look at the significance of the history of company management, technology engineering, and marketing, and its relationship to scientific research for what it was, rather than for what it failed to be.  Fortunately for us, the house history of computing leaves us with a good head-start in the case of IBM, and studies such as Christophe Lécuyer’s of Silicon Valley, or Joan Bromberg on the joint-history of quantum optics and the laser industry, give us a good look at what a more integrated history would look like (although one should note both these cases focus on novel industries).

Indeed, we have a good start on a long-term historiography of these areas, as early modern technology-knowledge confluences in areas such as naval architecture, waterworks, practical medicine, and chemical dyes have found historians’ interest, and there is also good work in later periods on topics such as metrology, telegraphy, and forestry.  The difficulty, as ever, is broader survey and synthesis.  To develop what I would view to be a satisfying historiography, it is not enough to say, “but so-and-so did their case study of X, which amply demonstrates the historical connection between science and technology; how can you say there is not a sufficient historiography on the matter?”

The point is, we need to find better ways to talk about developments and trends en masse, to get out of the “view from the archive folder”, to deal not with just the actions of a single committee, for instance, but to describe how the work of thousands of committees coordinated the scientific and technological world.  I am convinced that if this happens, the historiographical importance of things like some “linear model” will start to seem very odd in retrospect, that, somehow, we became distracted by a few snippets of rhetoric that, while prominent and even influential in some respects, can only be properly evaluated amid a much larger, and more complex context.  From this view to focus historiography on a few items of rhetoric would be to make the same mistake of incompleteness as those who deployed that rhetoric in the first place.

David Edgerton

Although I have discussed the paper here a few times in the past, including in one of this blog’s first-ever posts, this post will revisit David Edgerton’s argument in “‘The Linear Model’ Did Not Exist” (available in .rtf format via his website @ #41, and published in The Science-Industry Nexus: History, Policy, Implications, Karl Grandin, Nina Wormbs, and Sven Widmalm, eds., 2004; hereafter GWW).

The “linear model” is a very specific claim stating that basic scientific research in universities (or other non-profit institutions) contributes to national economy and security by producing new knowledge, which can then be translated into new technological applications.  Edgerton’s argument that it “did not exist” is that it is an idea that has been held, in a strict sense, by few, if any, actors, and that it has been concocted as a straw man by individuals purporting to offer a superior alternative.  I believe continued discussion of Edgerton’s argument is needed because the reasoning underlying its claims is not obvious, it is now being used productively in new work such as Sabine Clarke’s, and because it has broader historiographical significance.

Much difficulty may be caused by the problem of what it means for an idea to “exist” in history: how well does a historian’s articulation of an idea have to map on to the actual idea in order to claim that it existed?

For instance, at HSS last November, one participant (at the special session on John Krige’s American Hegemony book on the reconstruction of science in postwar Europe) held that Edgerton’s view that “the linear model did not exist” was absurd in that arguments for basic scientific research as leading to new technologies was prevalent, especially in the postwar period.  I forget who said this, but the idea is also expressed in David Hounshell’s comment on “Did Not Exist” in GWW.

In this view, to say that basic research was merely linked to technological development qualifies as an expression of the “linear model”; it is not necessary to say that there was a direct relationship between a research result and its technological implementation.  What seems to be the bottom line of qualification here is not the specificity of the model, but that it was used polemically as a justification to initiate new funding of basic research.  This justification was essentially a promise that the research would, in some sense, result in future technological advance.

This interpretation causes a problem, though, because the implication is that the linear model was a specious justification — a self-serving rationalization designed to garner public (or, in the case of industrial research labs, corporate) funding for work that had no necessary economic benefit.  However, to ascribe the status of rationalization to the idea is almost necessarily to presume the strictest version of the model.  But (as Dan Kevles pointed out at the aforementioned HSS meeting) the mere point that technology developers can make productive use out of recent research is practically a truism.

The upshot here is that, depending on one’s interpretation of what the linear model means, historical claims can range from truism to cynical and specious self-justification.  Clearly, then, much depends on what specific views historical actors held.  The difficulty is that historical actors saw no need to theorize explicitly and in detail about the relationship.  We must read their views from their proposals and their rhetoric.  Let us go to the canonical case.

As Edgerton detailed, Vannevar Bush’s published report to the President, Science: The Endless Frontier (1945), is often cited as an important expression of the linear model on account of its advocacy for federal funding for basic, university-based research on the basis of its importance for further technological progress.  Reference to the model allowed Bush to countenance a major violation of the tradition of federal non-involvement in university life.

However, one must willfully read a linear model into Bush’s phraseology, because nowhere did he state that basic research results are necessarily the immediate source of new technologies and applications.  The more likely reading is the weaker truism that scientific research simply makes new developments possible, perhaps as a kind of catalyst in the process of technological improvement.  Bush, remember, was himself an academic engineer, and would have understood intuitively the function of knowledge in technological work.

Reading Bush’s words against the spectrum of views described in Clarke’s recent Isis article, he seems to have been thinking of basic research somewhat along the prewar lines of Richard Gregory, wherein basic research provides a kind of pool of primordial intellectual resources, which were at that time being increasingly drawn upon in the advance of technical work:

Basic research leads to new knowledge. It provides scientific capital. It creates the fund from which the practical applications of knowledge must be drawn. New products and new processes do not appear full-grown. They are founded on new principles and new conceptions, which in turn are painstakingly developed by research in the purest realms of science.

However, Bush also seems to have been fully aware of the day-to-day independence of industrial and military “research and development” — geared specifically toward the improvement of existing technologies — from “basic research” activities.  (One would hope, given his wartime experience as head of OSRD, which oversaw decidedly non-basic research.)  Beyond that distinction, Bush likewise recognized the peculiar role of longstanding research programs in civilian government agencies, using language more-or-less echoing that used (per Clarke) to describe work in the British DSIR.  Bush:

Much of the scientific research done by Government agencies is intermediate in character between the two types of work commonly referred to as basic and applied research. Almost all Government scientific work has ultimate practical objectives but, in many fields of broad national concern, it commonly involves long-term investigation of a fundamental nature. Generally speaking, the scientific agencies of Government are not so concerned with immediate practical objectives as are the laboratories of industry nor, on the other hand, are they as free to explore any natural phenomena without regard to possible economic applications as are the educational and private research institutions. Government scientific agencies have splendid records of achievement, but they are limited in function.

Bush’s report was ultimately very ambiguous in describing the nature of “basic research”, industrial “research and development”, as well as the in-between work pursued in government agencies, and especially in describing the nature of the relationship between these categories.  This ambiguity should not be taken as a license to ascribe a naive linear model to him.  The only thing we can affirmatively ascribe to him, as far as basic research is concerned, is the view that basic research is simply important to the progress of technical development, that without it technical development, in the long run, may not be able to proceed past a certain point.

To say that the linear model did not exist is to liberate us to ask further questions, which cannot be answered by textual exegesis, but only by examining how Bush actually managed various activities in basic research, and in industrial and military research and development, working as director of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, as chair of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, as director of the committee structure of the wartime OSRD, and the postwar Research and Development Board.  It is clear, for example, that Bush did not derive his budget proposals for his proposed National Research Foundation from any sort of correlation between university funding and expected economic output, but rather from “studies by the several committees” which provided “a partial basis for making an estimate of the order of magnitude of the funds required to implement the proposed program.”  We have little idea of how these “studies” were conducted and integrated into recommendations, but they clearly point to a more sophisticated point-of-view than we would garner from being satisfied by describing Bush’s ideas simply in terms of the “linear model” divined from his rhetoric.

In a follow-up post, we will look at the persistent difficulties in finding a role for basic research in industrial organizations, wherein it will be emphasized that a lack of clear policy is not adequately described in terms of adherence to a linear model.

Coming off this blog’s discussion of Paul Lucier’s “The Professional and the Scientist in 19th-Century America,” I would next like to look at Sabine Clarke’s “Pure Science with a Practical Aim: The Meanings of Fundamental Research in Britain, circa 1916-1950″ (abstract + paywall) from the most recent Isis.

Lucier’s piece delineated important distinctions and connections between 19th-century American and British vocabularies of science, with an attendant examination of important issues to which the American lexicon was applied.  Reading that work, I found myself not really willing to believe that the subject matter had not been previously parsed that way, and am still half expecting someone to pop up with some obvious reference that tells all about it — it’s really useful stuff.

Clarke’s piece seems to offer more of a clarification of certain points of vocabulary, rather than an important new delineation of historical ideas, but it is successful in the task it sets out to accomplish.  The actual ideas discussed — the relationship between “research” (as in “research and development”) and “science” — should already be familiar to those with a serious interest in the relationship between scientific research and technological development in the industrial era.  What is of primary interest here is the search for appropriate language to describe this relationship.

The idea we should all already have in mind is this: “research” connotes any form of investigation that is not immediately directed toward the development of a new technology or industrial process (henceforth, simply “technology”).  Over the past couple of centuries, research entailed developing an understanding of, or even just exploring, certain classes of phenomena — the properties of certain classes of materials, for example.  This research was often inspired by efforts to improve existing technologies.  Sometimes, it might well have led to deeper developments in scientific knowledge, but did not necessarily need to do so.

Institutionally, because research subjects and problems of technology development are expected to be linked, contact and coordination between researchers and developers may be desirable.  In some regional institutional frameworks, universities may not be desirable places for this research to be undertaken.  University researchers’ academic interests may not prompt them to pursue problems of industrial interest, and when they do, weak university-industry relations might prevent the implications of their research for technology development from being seen.

In the early 20th century, there was a great deal of anxiety that such an institutional framework existed in Britain.  Industries were thought not to undertake sufficient research for the nation’s firms to produce competitive goods, and universities, pursuing a “pure science” ideal, could not make the necessary contributions to Britain’s economy.

To bridge this gap, it was thought that the government might take responsibility for encouraging research of benefit to industry.  This talk resulted in the creation of the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (DSIR) in 1916 (just as World War I had revealed certain technological gaps in Britain’s home industry, augmenting existing anxieties).  DSIR was to run certain government laboratories.  It would, for instance, soon take over the National Physical Laboratory (previously mentioned here).  It would also fund research, and oversee a series of “research associations” through which industrial firms would fund and undertake mutually beneficial research.  The DSIR’s story has been told a number of times.

Clarke’s piece elucidates the vocabulary deployed by DSIR’s proponents to describe its activities.  At first, DSIR used the term “pure science” to distinguish its contributions from the typical activities of industrial workshops, but the term, in turn, failed to distinguish DSIR activities from university science.  Some critics feared DSIR would simply support academic research irrelevant to British industry.  Meanwhile, proponents of the idea of “pure science”, such as Nature editor Richard Gregory, were likely to tout the primordial foundations of technologies in scientific discoveries (e.g., electromagnetic induction as prerequisite to telegraph and telephone).  Emphasizing the inherent unpredictability of scientific progress, they were skeptical of DSIR’s ability to plan the research programs that would lead to improved industry.

Responding to these difficulties, the DSIR soon adopted the terminology of “fundamental research”, as distinct from “pure science”, to emphasize the character of research that could be inspired by industrial concerns as well as fruitfully subjected to bureaucratic direction, and that, while beneficial from a national standpoint, might not otherwise be done in industry or universities.  This point modifies careless historical literature that suggests the terms, as well as terms like “basic science” were interchangeable.

In making this observation, Clarke adopts two methodological slants.

First, “In its focus on language this paper is a contribution to a body of scholarship that has sought to investigate the strategies employed in scientific discourse to construct and disseminate knowledge claims, demarcate science from non-science, and assert the cultural value of science” (286).

However, I would distinguish this article from that literature, because the terminology adopted in DSIR relied on no firm demarcations being drawn — just the opposite, it bridged otherwise misleadingly demarcated domains.  No one would have claimed that “fundamental research” represented an unimpeachable category into which DSIR work had to be pigeonholed to legitimize state support.  The rhetoric served more as a clarification of intended bureaucratic function.

While it’s true this clarification did serve in some ways as a defense of DSIR’s work against some criticisms of what constituted proper state activity, that is a somewhat different concern from the sociological and historical literature on demarcation and boundaries, wherein much is taken to depend on the epistemic purity of domains and the integrity of boundaries between them.  One could plausibly argue that clarification nevertheless fits into the literature on historical demarcation, but if nearly any act of description for the sake of facility in communication and purpose is an act of demarcation, then the potential analytical power of that literature is substantially diluted.

The second methodological slant runs somewhat against the first.  Clarke astutely points out, “The more general problem with many accounts of the DSIR has been a tendency by scholars to focus on making an assessment of its success or failure that reflects the concerns of the particular writer, rather than focusing on any debates that occurred at the moment of the DSIR’s establishment.  In addition, evaluating the contribution of the DSIR to British science policy, or to state and science relations, misses the point that the DSIR was specifically concerned with research, not science per se” (289-290).

In other words, the reason why DSIR has been a historiographical focus is because the instantiation of an industrial research organization within the state apparatus has been taken as a moment when some action was taken in bodies responsible to the public to address the aforementioned anxieties over the British nation’s institutional framework (in their roughest form, expressed as a national problem with “science” — a rhetorical legacy dating at least to Babbage).

In fact, though, fundamental research flourished in Britain prior to, and regardless of, the contribution of DSIR or, for that matter, a clearly expressed concept of “fundamental research”.  “David Edgerton and Sally Horrocks have … shown that the picture of absolute neglect by British industry to be misleading.  British firms were conducting scientific research before World War I, notably the United Alkali Company, Cadbury, Noble, and Vickers, and it has proven difficult to substantiate the claim that British industry was far behind that of Germany in its spending on research” (289).

Perhaps the most interesting part of the article for me is the insistence of British Marxist scientists, such as J. D. Bernal, Hyman Levy, and Lancelot Hogben, on not distinguishing “pure science” from “fundamental research” in view of their commitment to portraying all scientific work as inextricably the product of its social-economic milieu, which served their goal of seeing the state provide a forum for the coordination of scientific work in view of potential industrial-technological contributions to social welfare.  Clarke might also have mentioned their predilection for the term “scientific research worker” rather than “scientist”, which also nicely links this article to the concerns over the terminology of the “man of science” vs. “scientist” noted in Lucier’s piece.

Importantly, Clarke acknowledges how loosely critical rhetoric mapped onto historical practices, and thus how toothless it was: “this paper shows that the ideal of pure science promoted by public scientists [I dislike this term, by the way -- too vague] around the time of World War I exercised very little influence on the character of policies that were being developed for the funding and organization of research….  A close examination of the texts of the DSIR reveals that actors had more nuanced understandings of the interplay between research and practice [technological development?] than they sometimes have been credited for, and that they also knew the difference between the rhetoric of official documents and journals, and the nature of scientific work in practice” (287).  Edgerton’s important paper “The Linear Model Did Not Exist” is profitably cited here.

My feeling is that the disconnect between rhetoric and practical considerations somewhat undercuts the impact of the paper’s extended analysis of the use of the term “fundamental research”, but that the forthrightness about this issue augments the paper’s credibility and utility — an all-too-rare restraint in a literature often seemingly determined to mine profundity from the tea leaves of historical rhetoric.

There are a few different things in the blog pipeline, but I haven’t finished any of them before hitting a period of travel and other assorted tasks.  Posting will be sparse-to-non-existent the next few weeks, but will be back later this month.

Like nearly all sociologists, anthropologists, philosophers, and social theorists in the twentieth century, Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown (born 17 January 1881 in Birmingham – died 24 October 1955 in London)  spent much of his career describing what his anthropology was not.  Adam Kuper similarly attempts to disentangle the misunderstood Radcliffe-Brown from the true theorist.

While the misappropriations of Radcliffe-Brown’s theories are not interesting from the standpoint of the anthropologist or ostensibly to the student of the history of anthropology, as Kuper explains, Radcliffe-Brown’s influence among subsequent national generations of anthropologists is. Kuper laments that Radcliffe-Brown has been ridiculed as a “displaced naturalist” who mistakenly applied physiological and physical models to the study of social structures.  What matters more for Kuper was the “direct inspiration” his kinship studies had on the work of Fred Eggan, Meyer Fortes, and Sol Tax. Radcliffe-Brown also  emerged as the “hero” of Levi-Strauss’ Totemism as well as “strongly influencing” Victor Turner and other important later twentieth century anthropologists.  In conclusion, Radcliffe-Brown’s “profound” yet in many cases second-hand or indirect influence on subsequent generations has made his work difficult to objectively apprise.  His “structural positivism” while “unfashionable” was not necessarily “untenable” (The Social Anthropology of Radcliffe-Brown , 1977, p. 1)

Despite numerous changes throughout his career, Radcliffe-Brown, Kuper explains, consistently argued that the structures that he was investigating as the subjects of social anthropology, were “directly observable” and corresponded simply to “empirical reality.”  The “starting point” of any investigation was “a set of living human beings involved in a series of social relationships with one another.”  This “social network” was the “social structure” (3.)  Behind the everyday network of interactions were the “structural forms” of society.  Such an abstraction was “empirically real,” since the social form “corresponded to the stated norms and customary usages of various kinds of social relationships.”

Radcliffe-Brown was early on converted to the methodology of Emile Durkheim.  Along with Marcel Mauss, Radcliffe-Brown was the most prominent proponent of Durkheim’s anthropological outlook.   The Durkheimian tradition, according to Kuper, mandates that sociological analysis “may explore the connections among social institutions and the connections between these connections.”  As important for Durkheimian social analysis was an understanding of the interaction between the individual and the group, particularly those values which are internalized by the individual which contributed to group solidarity.

Radcliffe-Brown’s “structural positivism” distinguished him from the latter followers of Durkheim in France, as for the French Durkheimians, “structures” were the creation of the anthropologist rather than the product of the systematized observations of the anthropologist.  If “structures” revealed anything for Claude Levi-Strauss, it was the hidden rather than the empirical reality.  For Maurice Halbwachs, according to Kuper, this “reality may lie at the level of a ‘collective unconscious.’”  Levi-Strauss noted in this regard that “The term ‘social structure’ has nothing to do with empirical reality but with models which are built up after it.”   Where Levi-Strauss and Radcliffe-Brown really differ, as Alan Barnard points out, was that Levi-Strauss conceived of  “social structure” as the “structure of social relations of all societies.”

Levi-Strauss’ conception of  social structure concerns the underlying structure of all possible social structures.   Radcliffe-Brown, on the other hand, always regarded social structures as accessible empirically, moving from the individual to the relations of that individual with others in the community, to groups within the community and how they interact with other groups, and finally to relationships between communities (Encyclopedia of social and cultural anthropology, ed. Alan Barnard and Jonathan Spencer, 511.)

Radcliffe-Brown’s “structural positivism” and practicing anthropologists’ castigation of his natural historical methods and his scientism, uncovers a central problematic about how “science” was deployed in 20th century anthropology in order to legitimate specific methodological innovations and conceptual tools while denigrating other approaches.  Chief among these, for Radcliffe-Brown, were Malinowski’s “functionalism,” the  priority of  “culture” among Franz Boas and his students, and the persistent evolutionist school.  As important was the consistent emphasis of anthropology upon the category of the social, rather than the psychology of the individual as the principle subject of study.

Many of Radcliffe-Brown’s own writings were consequently built around the rejection or modification of existing arguments. In these writings, Radcliffe-Brown underscores the importance of social anthropology’s approach to the status of a natural science of society and emphasizes anthropology’s continuities with the natural sciences through its mutual examination of “structures.”  As importantly, like many eighteenth and nineteenth century social theorists, Radcliffe-Brown understood “science” to be the perceivable law-governess of nature which allowed for sciences to be ontologically grounded and new sciences, such as social anthropology, to be epistemological probabilities. As with many nineteenth century theorists, Radcliffe-Brown was particularly concerned with how knowledge was transmitted from generation to generation of practitioner and what kinds of knowledge counted as theory.

Radcliffe-Brown begins his article “On Social Structure” by noting that the ‘Functional School of Social Anthropology’ “does not really exist,” being a “myth” invented by Professor Malinowski.  As social anthropology was a branch of the “natural science,” it was not appropriate for “schools” to exist, where generations of anthropologists become partisans for the methods of their teachers.   Anthropologists were only to find flaws in the existing interpretations of anthropological problems and to contribute in the best manner possible to a growing body of theory (25.)

Social anthropology was, furthermore, a study first and foremost of the “relations of association between individual organisms.”  These associations were “social phenomenon” rather than “cultural phenomenon,” as social phenomenon were the prior and proper objects of social anthropology.  Culture denoted, contra Boaz,  “not any concrete reality, but an abstraction,” and as it was used it was a “vague abstraction.”

Anthropology could only be a science of the observable and not of the abstract since it was, as a “natural science” “revealed to us through the senses.”  Anthropology, like other sciences, dealt with structures, much in the same manner as atomic physics “deals with the structures of atoms” and crystallography with the structures of crystals.”  There was consequently a place for a science of society which “will have for its task the discovery of the general characteristics of those social structures of which the component units are human beings.”  Social phenomena were then “a distinct class of natural phenomena” with social structures “just as real as individual organisms” (27.)  For Radcliffe-Brown, the term “social structure” underscored how far away from a science social anthropology actually remained.  All terms, in this prescientific period,  were merely “the most convenient for the purposes of analysis.”  (28)

Social institutions, much as Durkheim argued, were then nothing but “standardized modes of behavior.”   Social institutions, moreover, “constitute the machinery by which a social structure, a network of social relations, maintains its existence and its continuity.”  Social institutions have the “function,” according to Radcliffe-Brown, following Durkheim, “as the relation of the social structure to the existence and continuity of which it makes some contribution”  (37.)    Function, Radcliffe-Brown, later wrote “may be defined as the total set of relations that a single social activity or usage or belief has to the total social system” (43.)

Social anthropology must then, again following Durkheim, also study all of those phenomenon which allow social relations to persist in a community, such as legality, morality, codes of conduct, religion, and government, among other things.  All of these things could be profitably studied in the context of how they “depend on, or affect, the social relations between persons or groups of persons” (32.)

Radcliffe-Brown’s understanding of social structures and the functions that they possessed in the community in order to maintain social solidarity was opposed to that of Malinowski.  Malinowski held, according to Radcliffe-Brown, “that every feature of a culture past or present is to be explained by reference to seven biological needs of individual human beings” (49.)  Radcliffe-Brown, on the other hand, used “function” to denote “the discoverable interconnections of the social structure and the processes of social life.”  For Radcliffe-Brown, institutions did not directly support biological needs but the maintenance of the social fabric (51.)  This understanding of function has nothing in common with “the theory of culture as derived from individual biological needs” (52.)

Radcliffe-Brown’s emphasis on the continuity of social anthropology with the natural sciences allows for a discussion of the continuities of twentieth century practitioners with nineteenth century methodologies and problematics. In particular, the deployment of the shared vocabulary of the sciences not only emphasized what social anthropology was ideally to become but distinguished what social anthropology should not become.  Though Radcliffe-Brown was particularly concerned with the profusion of “schools” in anthropology, his positivism allowed him to engage in a particular kind of canon building which linked him to Durkheim and away from Boaz, Malinowski, and Levi-Strauss.

For decades now, historians of science and their allies in science studies have had an enduring fondness for boundary studies.  The “boundaries” in question are taken to be places where agreements that define what constitutes a legitimate claim no longer clearly apply.  In Thomas Kuhn’s idea of the “paradigm” (Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 1962), arguments across paradigms cannot be decided based upon evidence, because the standards of interpretation that would allow a decision to be made differ.

Kuhn’s point spoke to a potential philosophical irreconcilability, but sociologists would adopt the basic idea to discuss the importance of social coalition-building in knowledge-building, which could be hidden beneath an apparent epistemological smoothness where arguments were well-accepted, but which became visible in instances of controversy along coalition boundaries.

Harry Collins wrote in 1981, “In most cases the salience of alternative interpretations of evidence, which typifies controversies, has acted as a level to elicit the essentially cultural nature of the local boundaries of scientific legitimacy—normally elusive and concealed” (“Introduction” to a special issue of Social Studies of Science 11 (1981): 3-10).  Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer wrote in Leviathan and the Air Pump (1985):  “Another advantage afforded by studying controversy is that historical actors [...] attempt to deconstruct the taken-for-granted quality of their antagonists’ preferred beliefs and practices, and they do this by trying to display the artifactual and conventional status of those beliefs and practices” (p. 7).

A particularly pressing place to look for agreement was at the boundary of what did and did not constitute “science”.  Robert K. Merton’s sociology of science sought to determine the sociological preconditions of science as well as the impacts different social contexts could have on the content of science.  Combined with Merton’s identification of a series of “norms” associated with science, his sociology was understood to take “science” as a granted activity, which society both made possible and influenced.

While I tend to think the reaction against Merton was overly strong, and the abandonment of explicit Mertonian institutional-functional analysis ill-advised, later sociologists were correct to point out that establishing a zone of “science” was also a sociological activity that gave those within the zone access to certain polemical resources.  “Boundary-Work and the Demarcation of Science from Non-Science: Strains and Interests in Professional Ideologies of Scientists” American Sociological Review (1983): 781-795, written by Thomas Gieryn (a former student of Merton’s), was a landmark contribution to the anti-demarcationist movement in the sociology, history, and philosophy of science.  Writing alongside historians examining the Victorian establishment of “science” versus “the sciences” (mainly via X-Club activities and the British Association), Gieryn argued that varying aspects of the amorphous sciences could be emphasized to justify “scientists’ claims to authority and resources”.

However, as Gieryn himself noted, boundary studies were not limited to just the boundary of “science”.  Conflict and demarcation existed within and beyond science wherever disagreements about credibility and plausibility existed.  Figures such as Collins and Bruno Latour would take the prospect of arguments’ succeeding to be reliant on recourse to other things already deemed credible or plausible.  This is the basis of Collins’ sociological “relativism” and Latour’s “hybrids” and “networks” (see this post for some discussion of the difference between their positions).

Because rational agreement made recourse to trusted resources, the underlying basis of knowledge was taken to be grounded in a shared culture, as referenced in boundary polemics.  As Gieryn later wrote in Cultural Boundaries of Science: Credibility on the Line (1999): “Interests, rhetorical tropes, power, identity, hands-on practices, tacit skills, instruments, experimental systems, and (as a catchall) culture are now standard ingredients in sociological studies of the construction of scientific knowledge” (viii-ix).  Such cultural matters were understood both to draw sets of continuities between scientific credibility and broader sources of cultural credibility, and to emphasize the role of trust in credible sources within the scientific community.

However, the importance of boundary polemics, and the cultural objects and ideals referenced by those polemics, remains unclear.  One temptation has been to write the question off as a matter of personal taste.  Even Jed Buchwald has resorted to the position.  In his 1999 book, Gieryn made the point vividly by likening the depiction of the relations between the cultural and the natural in scientific work to a stew in preparation: “What happens to nature in all this kitchen work depends upon the chef you ask…”  As deeply unsatisfying as saying the matter is subjective is, it is not much better to imagine that the relationship is essentially some inscrutable mix, which varies in its proportions depending on “contingencies”.  A better alternative would be to develop an analytical taxonomy to help discern the significance of boundary polemics, since it is likely that fairly superficial historical issues have been repeatedly emphasized as the crucial objects of historical inquiry on the blind assumption that boundary polemics are automatically of interest wherever they occur, simply because they reflect the supposedly heretofore hidden cultural aspects of science.

Let us begin by taking to be a trivial observation the idea that basic presuppositions must be accepted for informed consensus to be reached.  When people do not share your presuppositions, engagement with such individuals can be frustrating, and it becomes easier to hurl a polemic than to try and bring them through all the necessary steps that would ostensibly bring them around to your point of view: they are superstitious, corrupted by economic interests, ill-mannered, and undisciplined.  However reflective these polemics may be of broader cultural ideals, your resort to them, to my mind, does not so much signify the social foundations of your epistemology as they are surface effects that serve to reinforce the reality of an internal-external divide between your work and the outside world.  Little need be said about the cultural stalemates, policy conundrums, and open power struggles that boundaries create, except to say that they exist.  It should not be surprising that they do.

Of course, sometimes things get existential—the resources needed to go on are at stake—which forces a “negotiation”.  At this point, whatever one’s own motivations, one must portray one’s work as more broadly valuable: contemplation of the work elevates the mind, the work leads to useful technologies, it employs workers, it predicts the future, it suggests new policies, or it is a signal of national prestige.  When one’s work becomes such a “boundary object”—Star and Griesemer, “Institutional Ecology, ‘Translations’ and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907-39,” Social Studies of Science 19 (1989): 387-420—one assumes its continued existence is dependent on its cultural surroundings.  One needs local workers to build an observatory, one needs military funding to build a laser, one needs amateurs to gather specimens.

The fact of multiple meanings and values is inherent to the idea of exchange, and is not novel.  While there is much to be said about the long-term history of particular dependencies, the actual multiplicity of meaning in a dependent relationship strikes me as only a marginal spin on classic Marxist and Mertonian observations about science-society relations.  What is of interest here is not the fluidity of meaning at the boundary, per se, but rather meaning within either the history of the particular science, or the political/economic/cultural history of the surrounding society.  The boundary object is only of interest insofar as both sides of the boundary agree that it should be supported (or either or both sides think it should not).

Of course, not just support, but meanings themselves can also be negotiated.  Again, there are very strong precedents in Marxist and Mertonian sociology concerning the relationship between science, ideology, and economic interests.  That the content of science and surrounding social norms can reflect each other is a well-rehearsed point, particularly for sciences such as psychology, ethnology, sociology, population genetics, and so on.  In the mid-twentieth century ideological influence over physics and genetics in totalitarian states, and the prospect of politics and vested interests influencing expert witnesses, was likewise much discussed.  Efforts have also been made to connect the core intellectual content of the physical sciences to culture, notably with Paul Forman’s argument about Weimar culture and causality in quantum theory, albeit with rather less sustained success.  In any event, while contributions to long-term histories of ideas remain of interest, individual case studies struggle to maintain relevance.  As Steven Shapin wrote 28 years ago, “work is often thought to be completed when it can be concluded that ‘science is not autonomous’, or that ‘science is an integral part of culture’, or even that there are interesting parallels or homologies between scientific thought and social structures.  But these are not conclusions; they are starting points for more searching analyses of scientific knowledge as a social product.”

Within the sciences, meanwhile, Peter Galison has described productive exchange across boundaries occurring through “trading zones” (originally in 1989, but canonically in 1997′s Image and Logic).  Here concepts and objects at boundaries take on a stripped-down meaning as they are passed between weakly linked domains.  Accordingly, he refers to exchange at the boundary in terms of “trading languages” of “pidgins” and “creoles”.  Galison’s point that pidgins can develop into creoles and thus new research programs is important, but to my mind, the more important point is that, as with the above examples of conflict, dependence, and negotiation, the most meaning-rich environments are away from boundaries—hence his argument for the “intercalation” of the histories of autonomous domains.

To my mind, to determine the significance of what happens at boundaries, it is important to have a full and detailed knowledge of what happens away from the boundaries.  This is especially important, because boundary polemics are not necessarily superficial, as the now-largely-defunct historiography of natural philosophy as its own distinct genre has shown.  When questions of matter, cosmology, physiology, spirit, thought, virtue, and theology coexist within the singular plane of philosophy, there is practically no such thing as a boundary.  In more recent times, certain sciences can indeed undergo profound epistemic shifts, and in such instances, it is likewise important to attend to boundary issues because successful installment of a new epistemological regime can make, break, or instantiate enduring instabilities into certain scientific fields.

However, I want to finish with the provocative suggestion that, despite their porosity, boundaries are not, in general, very interesting places, mainly because they are intellectually impoverished.  They are filled with superficial and often cliched polemics and items of exchange that only gain meaning when understood in the context of the more complex ideas lurking deep within particular territories.  Until the main contours of these various territories are better mapped, these deeper meanings will remain opaque.  Studies of life at the boundaries are more apt to rehearse what we know about the chaos and contingency of boundaries, and what we imagine we already know about life within the surrounding territories, than they are to reveal something genuinely new.

First off, as an extension of my two-part post on chymistry and natural philosophy, readers interested in the topic may enjoy this interview with Bill Newman for NOVA’s “Newton’s Dark Secrets” program, which first aired five years ago.

Next, my once-and-future collaborator Lambert Williams sends along a link to this profile of Martin Gardner, who just recently died.  Gardner was a writer, ponderer of things scientific and philosophical, and is probably best-known for his long-running Mathematical Games column in Scientific American.

Finally, for those who like a face to go with their posts, via the latest AIP History Center newsletter, a typical day for me at the office:

The book, by the way, is Galileo’s Two New Sciences.  I picked up a cheap used copy on Amazon, but, not being a scholar of 17th-century mechanics, I still haven’t actually read the thing all the way through.

Enthusiast or gadfly? Frederick Lindemann, Lord Cherwell in 1948; photograph by William J. Sumits, from the LIFE photo archive

In Paul Lucier’s article on science and the professions in 19th-century America, one point relating to the California oil controversy caught my eye.  In discussing the controversy’s historiography, Lucier observed that one interpretation “popular among business historians and modern scientists” seemed to support a “delay” thesis.  Since chemistry professor Benjamin Silliman, Jr., working on a sizable capitalist contract, was ultimately proven correct that oil would be discovered in California, his science was “vindicated”.  Meanwhile, Josiah Whitney, who criticized Silliman “with all the power of a government position behind him” had his “vindictiveness” revealed.  As Lucier explains, Whitney’s attitude could thus be taken to explain “why California, with its rich oil fields, did not take off sooner.”

I do not think it’s inappropriate to retroactively judge whether one side or another was justified in their claims, either by contemporaneous or later standards, and regardless of later discoveries.  I would, however, like to leave the issue aside here.  (Personally, I have no idea who, if anyone, was justified in the Silliman-Whitney case.)  I also don’t want to make a warmed-over point about the relationship between scientific credibility and political interests.  Instead, I want to concentrate on just how common the polemics of obstruction and delay, and a counter-polemic of enthusiasm, are in history and historiography.  To talk about the issue, I want to move to a territory I know a bit better: World War II.

In the years prior to his becoming Prime Minister in 1940, Winston Churchill positioned himself as a robust opponent of Nazism.  His friend, adviser, and the director of Oxford’s Clarendon Laboratory, physicist Frederick Lindemann (1886-1957), was of like mind.  Both were wary of bureaucratic mediocrity, and they understood it as their duty to awaken the state apparatus from its sloth in order to combat the Nazi threat.  Churchill routinely inserted himself into the details of military planning, and both he and Lindemann were aggressive proponents of technological game-changers.

When the Committee for the Scientific Survey of Air Defence (CSSAD) was established in late 1934 to consider possible technological responses to a bombing campaign against Britain, Churchill and Lindemann were disappointed that it was created within, rather than above, the Air Ministry.  Churchill maneuvered Lindemann onto the committee, where he promptly pushed for an aggressive, multifaceted research and development effort, and reported on committee activities to Churchill, much to the aggravation of the committee’s other members.  They objected to Lindemann’s indefatigable enthusiasm for what they viewed as pet programs, such as the development of aerial mines, which had been deemed infeasible by members of the Air Ministry’s research establishments.  They saw such programs as necessarily detracting from promising technologies, especially radar (then called “RDF”).  Lindemann was duly maneuvered off the CSSAD, only to gain lasting influence once Churchill was named Prime Minister.

Lindemann’s wartime advocacy gained an iconic significance in 1960, when scientist-turned-novelist C. P. Snow (1905-1980)—fresh off his “Two Cultures” lectures decrying stagnation in the British state bureaucracy—contrasted him to the CSSAD’s chair, Henry Tizard (1885-1959).  Tizard’s insistence on using bureaucracy to marshal professional opinion into workable research and development priorities was portrayed favorably to Lindemann’s uninformed interventions and snide attitude toward civil service researchers.

The lessons of the Lindemann-Tizard dispute contrast with the historiography surrounding the atomic bomb, which tends to emphasize delay, particularly in the early phases of the project, and frustration with bureaucratic response to scientists’ overtures for prompt action.  Interestingly, one finds mention of these frustrations in the official American (Hewlett & Anderson 1962) and British (Gowing 1964) histories, generally tempered, especially with Gowing, by a sort of even-handedness along the lines of “as bureaucratic delays go, it wasn’t really so bad”.

The current most-comprehensive study of early fission research is (I believe) still the journalistic account, Richard Rhodes’ The Making of the Atomic Bomb (1986).  Rhodes dispensed with even-handed postures in favor of frequent criticism of the sloth of the pre-Manhattan Project Uranium Committee, and its chair, National Bureau of Standards director Lyman Briggs (1874-1963).  The 1940-41 period seems to be the focus of most criticism when work in Britain under the auspices of the MAUD Committee was deemed much more energetic.  Here step-by-step examinations of the feasibility of chain reactions prior to the investment of substantial funds is portrayed as obstructive to the rapid progress demanded by visionaries, especially Leo Szilard (1898-1964).

On the British end, although neither Tizard nor Lindemann were immediate proponents of the development of fission energy or weapons, Lindemann emerged as the more forceful proponent, while Tizard continued to doubt, following the favorable 1941 MAUD report, whether it would result in a workable technology during the war (though Tizard was responsible for setting up the MAUD Committee in the first place under the successor organization to his CSSAD, the Committee for the Scientific Survey of Air Warfare).  In the bomb literature, Tizard tends to emerge as more of a curmudgeon than as the dynamic-but-sound leader he is in the radar literature.

The historiographical problems of enthusiasm, delay, and bureaucracy are usually deeply embedded in past polemics, which were often heavily personalized, attributing bad habits and bad reason to opponents.  The historical significance of particular incidents, and the aptness of certain anecdotes, is often exaggerated for the sake of raising certain episodes to the level of lesson-bearing, and often deeply moralized, exemplars.

The atomic bomb history is a highly visible case-in-point of the structures that take place where polemics and historiography meet.  Scientific contributions to the war were good, but the bomb, of course, is evil, but, then,  so is bureaucratic sloth, so bureaucratic obstruction to the bomb ends up coming off badly.  Thus, during the war, the bomb only becomes evil when inserted into the evil strategy of strategic bombing (which, by the way, is also often associated with the enthusiasm of Lindemann).  Enthusiasm for bomb development only itself becomes evil in the wake of the immediate postwar failure to advance international control of atomic weapons, whereupon it is associated with suspect characters, notably Edward Teller (1908-2003), even though further development was much more widely supported.

The ultimate success of the Manhattan Project makes the idea that wartime development of the bomb was an unnecessary diversion of resources into a non-serious perspective, but it is important to remember that America’s diversion of resources into the bomb project was extraordinary, and even then the bomb was not finished until after the defeat of one of the Axis powers.  However incorrect it proved, pessimism about the bomb contributing to the war was certainly sensible.

As an example of this perspective, the Carnegie Institution of Washington’s Merle Tuve (1901-1982) left the uranium project in 1941 to work on the proximity fuse, satisfied that the construction effort found to be required made Axis development of it unlikely.  In a later interview, he continued to express the view that the Manhattan Project had been a diversion of resources, and attributed the scaling up of the American project to enthusiasts such as Marcus Oliphant, Ernest Lawrence, and Arthur Compton.

Coming to a proper historiographical posture with respect to these issues is difficult.  On the one hand, it would be not only trite, but incorrect simply to say that enthusiasm and delay are always in the eye of the beholder.  Sometimes enthusiasm does blind to obvious difficulties, and sometimes clearly beneficial ideas are obstructed for poor reasons.  On the other hand, accusations of enthusiasm and delay are part and parcel of historical polemics in the modern era, and can create the impression that scientific research and technological development had a natural rate at which they should have proceeded.

Finally, historians enjoy narrating historical controversies, and are good at not being taken in by historical polemics when resort to a he-said/she-said format is possible.  However, I want to surmise that the historiography of bureaucracy may remain unusually distorted by historical polemics, because “bureaucracy” is seldom in a position to fight back against the polemics constantly thrown against it.

Walter Bagehot (3 February 1826 – 24 March 1877) in both Physics and Politics (1872) and in The English Constitution (1867) combined a historical and functional analysis of political institutions with an anthropological account of their primeval origins and the forces behind their growth.  These writings on political theory combine the sociological account of the utility of institutions found in Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America with the economic and material anthropology of Henry Maine’s Ancient Law.

Bagehot’s Physics and Politics was also an extension of the work of Henry Maine, which like that of John Lubbock, Lewis Henry Morgan, John Ferguson McLennan, and Edward B. Tylor, was part of the late nineteenth century effort to ground the most primeval age of man in scientific fact, using a variety of evidences from linguistics, archeology, contemporary traveler and missionary accounts, and biblical hermeneutics. Bagehot, like his Enlightenment predecessors  Edward Gibbon, David Hume, and William Robertson,  was most concerned to discern what factors accounted for the progress which appeared to separate refined Europe from the underdeveloped rest of the globe.  Such an inquiry was given new life by what appeared to social theorists to be a satisfying account of the mechanism behind social, political, and intellectual development, that of “natural selection.”  Bagehot grafted archeological, linguistic, and legal researches onto this biological causality.  For Bagehot, this biological narrative was superior to the merely conjectural account of the Enlightenment due to its ability to ground a working hypothesis in natural laws, whereby the development of human civilization mirrored that of the rest of nature. 

Henry Maine’s Ancient Law was, for its part, a critique of the historical theory of Montesquieu and of Jeremy Bentham, and of the “social  compact” tradition of John Locke and the Swiss jurist Jean-Jacques Burlamaqui.  Locke’s notion of a “social compact” and Thomas Hobbes’ account of the state of nature “resemble each other strictly in their non-historic, unverifiable condition of the race” (Ancient Law, 1906, p.124.)  Hobbes and Locke agreed that a “great chasm” separated man from the state of nature to that of society (1bid.)

Montesquieu was to be faulted for his assumption that “laws are the creatures of climate, local situation, accident, or imposture,” with Montesquieu in The Spirit of the Laws viewing the nature of man as entirely “plastic” (126.)   Montesquieu, however, “greatly underrates the stability of human nature,” paying “little or no regard to the inherited qualities of the race, those qualities which each generation receives from its predecessors, and transmits but slightly altered to the generation which follows it” (ibid.)  Bentham, on the other hand, suggested that “societies modify, and have always modified, their laws according to modifications of their views of general expediency” which while not “false” is “certainly unfruitful” (127.)

The mistake of all these political theorists  was analogous to one who “in investigating the laws of the material universe, should commence by contemplating the existing physical world as a whole, instead of beginning with the particles which are its simplest ingredients” (128.)   The simplest ingredients, according to Maine, were primitive societies, known through three kinds of evidence: anthropological accounts, ancient records, and “ancient law.”  The evidence gathered through the observation of primitive tribes was “the best we could have expected” since primitive cultures were nothing but “mankind in its infancy.”   (129.)

Maine, like Fustel de Coulanges, described the transition of archaic civilization from savagery to urbanity as an “ascending series of groups out of which the State was first constituted” of which the “elementary group” is the family, all connected “by common subjection to the highest male descendant.”  The aggregation of families forms the gens or “House,” which in turn forms the tribe, which in turn, forms the “commonwealth”  (136.)  All political theory, moreover, held that “kinship in blood is the sole possible ground of community in political functions”  (137) and that ancient law and society placed an individual under the iron yoke of obedience to the community.

In the English Constitution, Bagehot would envision a primitive society worked out in much greater detail in Physics and Politics.    All “rude nations” achieved the same kind of “polity,” or political configuration.  Every “rude” polity had a sacred office of kingship.  The king “was essentially a man apart.” The modern notion of law as a “rule imposed by human authority” altered at will by that authority, was unknown to primeval cultures.  Instead, laws were unalterable, divine, and from the ruler of the polity.  A “Divine limit” to the law was “impossible,” “as there was no other source of law.”  There was a “practical limit” to the degree of subjugation as the “pagan part of human nature” would regard every pronouncement with “inseparable obstinacy” (The English Constitution, 2nd edition, 1902, 272-3)

This ancient polity suffered from a fatal defect.  As authority was hereditary, it soon came to pass that a child or “idiot” ascended the throne.  When this occurred, the “listening assembly,” those brought together initially to advice the king, “begins not only to murmur, but to speak” (274.) Using George Grote’s   History of Greece, Bagehot contended that ancient civilization had developed into modern urbanity due to the “tentacula” of agricultural, commercial, and technological progress.  The development of English civilization had followed a pattern much like that of ancient Greece and Rome.

However, England, unlike Greece, began “as a kingdom of considerable size, inhabited by distinct races, none of them fit for prosaic criticism, and all subject to the superstition of royalty.”  Thus, unlike in Greece, where the kings were of short duration, in England, “royalty was much more than a superstition,” as it was necessary to control a country which was rife with divisions, “armed,” and “impatient” (275.)  The different social orders of England, particularly the peasantry and the nobility, have progressed at differing rates, with “the lower,” having varied “little” (276.)

The English Civil War and the execution of King Charles was the result of the long growth of the English middle class and the “animation” of that class “under the influence of Protestantism” (282.)  It was the development of these two factors which made the English polity less attached to royalty and more accustomed to criticism of government.  In this way, the English became less attached to their kings and became more like the ancient Greeks.  From this point forward, English government was defined by a twin tendency towards revolution and “the solid clay of the English apathetic nature” (283.)  Those who wished for revolution were always a minority in England, much like the French Jacobins.

Even the “minimum of revolution” with the abdication of James II and the beginnings of constitutional government, the “mass” comprehended only the “sovereign.”  With the advent of the rule of Parliament, the “appendages of a monarchy have been converted into an essence of a republic” and have, in this way, mirrored the development of the Greek cities away from hereditary monarchy.  Unlike the Greek city states, such was the obstinacy and heterogeneity of English society, that while the machinery of government was that of a republic, the government’s outward countenance was still that of a monarchy (286.)

Bagehot’s Physics and Politics was an extension of his earlier investigation of the primitive polity.   In Physics and Politics, Bagehot wished to extend the sciences of anthropology and jurisprudence into the furthest reaches of human history through the imposition of a general law of “natural selection” upon all of human history.   While admitting that the “special laws of inheritance are indeed as yet unknown,”  it was clear that there was “a probability” that the “descendants of cultivated parents will have,” by “nervous organization” a “greater aptitude for cultivation” than others.     This “transmitted nerve element” was the “continuous force which binds age to age” and which allows each age to improve over the last.  By giving a biological basis to history, Bagehot thought it possible to create a science of history (Physics and Politics, 1906, 12ff.)

The virtues of Maine’s theory of the absolute supremacy of the “eldest ascendant” (13) was that it forcefully against the degradation or degeneration of a once civilized race or people (15.)  The primitive man, Bagehot argued, possessing the simplest tools, had no modern notion of time or space, nor of the regular laws which the civilized English looked for in either politics or nature (19.) Consequently, Bagehot, like Maine, concluded that “rigid law” was what was originally needed for primitive human beings.   The principle of “natural selection,” for Bagehot, defined the governance of the primitive polity.    In early times the “quantity” of a government was of far greater importance than its “quality” (25.)  The task of the institutions of the primitive polity was to create a “cake of custom,” through which the actions of the citizens of a polity were to be directed towards a singular object.  This direction towards a singular object created the “hereditary drill” necessary for the initial advancement into civilization (27.)

Bagehot not only wished to address how society began but was as concerned with understanding how cultures advanced from a primitive to a refined state.   His narrative of the causes behind the progress of civilization belonged had its roots in the Scottish and English Enlightenments.  The content of this narrative very much reflected the scientific and literary commonplaces of the later nineteenth century, especially his concern with progress, degeneration, the applicability of Greek and Roman models for the growth of modern civilization, and the interconnection between natural and social laws.

His understanding of physics was not that of a separate, professional discipline with its own modes of analysis and experimentation.  By “physics,”  Bagehot meant a law-governed nature that was perceivable to the human mind through a knowledge of history and current affairs.    This genteel, literary, nearly subconscious,  notion of physics and of science more generally as the orderliness of nature also visible in history and society, persisted into the mid-twentieth century in the writings of sociologists, anthropologists, philosophers, and historians.

For Bagehot, the principle question posed by human history and the existence of both savage and civil beings was what factors enabled some civilizations to progress into refinement while the majority remained stationary.  “Savages,” Bagehot noted, “do not improve,” while only those nations in Europe seem to advance (42.)  In order to explain the different levels of progress in the world’s civilizations, Bagehot proposed three laws.  The two most important were that first, the strongest and the best tend to prevail over weaker nations., and second, within every particular nation the best traits tend to prevail over the lesser.   These laws illustrate the workings of the principle of “natural selection” in “physical science”  (43-44.)

Due to the continual combat of tribe against tribe and nation against nation, there has been persistent progress in the art of warfare.   The causes behind this growth and the gulf between the savage and the civilized was explicable since the “stronger nation has always been conquering the weaker” (49.)  Every nation’s advancement was tied to war.   Those nations who had the greatest technological advancements and the most characteristics suitable to war and conflict advanced over their neighbors.

Each nation, “tried constantly to be the stronger, and so made or copied the best weapons” which each successful nation subsequently imitated (ibid.) All of European history demonstrated the “superposition” of the greater military power over the lesser military power.  War, Bagehot concluded, fostered those “preliminary virtues”, such as valor and honor.  Since war has “ceased to be a moving force in the world,” men were now more “tender” to one another (78.)

The greatest distinction, then, between savage and civilized nations was that civilized nations at some point in their history began to progress rather than remain stationary.  Civilized nations were animated by the spirit of improvement (156.)  How then did savage nations become “unfixed?”  Extending Maine’s account of the development of nations from “status” or patriarchy to “contract” or the notion of individual rights, Bagehot believed that the most important transition of a nation was one from “status” to “choice.”  This entailed government by discussion rather than by force, where the problems of government became greater and greater degree those concerning abstract principles.  Most important was the ability of nations to break the ties of customary practices, the ability to transcend the weight of tradition and settled practices.  The fixity and uniformity which had previously enabled war-like civilizations to survive, the “hereditary drill,” was now an impediment to progress (158.)

“In early society,” Bagehot details, “originality in life was forbidden and repressed by the fixed rule of life.”  The source of progress, the desire of individuals to better their condition was “then not permitted to work” (160.)  A government which functioned by deliberation was the surest way to “break down the yoke of fixed custom” (161.)  A government by deliberation presupposes that there was no fixed or sacred authority that the community was absolutely bound to obey. Discussion too “gives premium to intelligence” (162-3.)  The decisions which confronted the primitive polity gave rise to a better quality of discussion and a toleration of a greater variety of ideas.  One of the most painful things in human experience was a “new idea.”

Novelty and discussion both allow for savage nations to attain civility.  The transition from contract to choice was, however, for the few, having their historical origins in the ancient polities of Greece and Rome and in the localities of the Mediterranean basin. The arts, sciences, and humane sentiments essential to the progress of civilization developed above all due to freedom of discussion.  “Athens, Rome, the Italian republics of the Middle Ages…have all had a special and peculiar quickening influence, which they owed to their freedom”  (166.)  The seminal events of history, the French Revolution, the Reformation, the Peloponnesian War, have all been the result of freedom of expression.  These events together demonstrated the advances of civilized races into a more refined culture.  All of these events were produced by discussions of principles and abstract reasoning.   It was this lack of abstract thinking which doomed the “North American Indian,” who talked only of “undertakings” to stasis.

John Shaw Billings (1838-1913): critic of the term "scientist" and the dudes who used it.

Indepenent historian Paul Lucier’s “The Professional and the Scientist in Nineteenth-Century America,” Isis 100 (2009): 699-732, presents an excellent overview of the place of different scientific activities in that milieu, the conceptual vocabulary and nomenclature with which those activities were routinely described, and how those descriptions changed with time.  The article engages actively with other portrayals in the historiographical literature from the past century, and presents new materials and arguments.  Stylistically, it is an exemplary work of scholarship.

As an intellectual contribution, Lucier’s piece comes up very strong as well.  His most immediately valuable contribution here is a clarification of the 19th-century lexicon.  Throughout the century, Americans followed their British counterparts in routinely referring to “men of science” as a generic term for geologists, chemists, and so forth.  While the Americans also followed closely on the British in founding new institutions of science, notably the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS, est. 1848) and the National Academy of Sciences (NAS, est. 1863), these and other organizations’ role in organizing American science ought not, under any circumstances, be referred to as “professionalization”.

As Lucier explains, the “professional” in 19th-century America was someone who earned a living through their educated services, especially physicians, lawyers, and clergymen.  Men of science could be professionals, because they were frequently employed on a fee-for-service basis: as geological surveyors, as chemical analysts, as tutors, etc.  But being a man of science was not in itself a “profession”.

(Side note: speaking as an American, classifying clergy as money-making “professionals” struck me as counter-intuitive, but ultimately understandable given the prominent role of the independent “preacher” in American history.  This should be distinguished from someone, like a theologian, who might be thought of as a “professional”, but more because they had a learned command over a specialist body of knowledge, and less because they made money through their work.  This is especially important to bear in mind so as not to confuse this issue with the idea of scientific figures’ work as “natural philosophers” giving them an otherworldly reputation akin to that of theologians; the whole point here is that professionals like clergy were worldly.  Also, in the 19th-century American context, in referring to someone with a specialist’s knowledge, we further cannot readily refer to “experts”, because experts were understood at the time to be someone with a practical knowledge of an art who had no need for knowledge of higher principles, a carpenter, for instance.)

Lucier has good reasons for insisting on proper nomenclature: the relationship between “men of science” and the professions was a fairly contentious issue beginning around the 1830s.  For instance, men of science Alexander Dallas Bache (1806-1867, Pennsylvania professor, then superintendent of the U. S. Coast Survey), Joseph Henry (1797-1878, Princeton professor and first Secretary, i.e. director, of the Smithsonian Institution, from 1846), and friends gathered in a group called the Lazzaroni to emphasize the unprofessional character of their preferred pursuits and desire to see science grounded in deep theory and not as the conduct of lower-level tasks.  The name “Lazzaroni” (from Lazarus, Gospel beggar and patron saint of lepers—not the Lazarus risen from the dead) was chosen to signify their status as scientific beggars.

Bache, Henry, and others associated with the creation of the AAAS and the NAS held the furtherance of this vision of science to be their main goal.  Accordingly, these organizations, unlike, for instance, the American Medical Association (est. 1847), made the self-conscious decision not to establish a code of ethics.  The object of these new institutions was to provide a means for coordinating the activities of like-minded individuals rather than to police the conduct of members.

Despite scientific institutions’ lack of interest in enforcing a professional ethics, ethics was a central concern for men of science, because of the constant threat of “quackery” (elevating oneself by professing general nonsense) and, more seriously, “humbugging” (swindling).  Questions arose as to what an appropriate fee for a scientific service rendered would be, so as to avoid the threat of corruption—a particular danger where there was a possibility of swindling investors in an era when stock markets were seen as rife with corruption.  This was a source of major controversy when in 1860 Josiah Whitney (1819-1896), the state geologist of California, accused Yale chemistry professor Benjamin Silliman, Jr. (1816-1885) of taking bribes for predicting, on commission from eastern capitalists, that oil would be discovered in the state.  (It was.)

A related issue was to what degree professional work detracted from the pursuit of scientific knowledge for its own sake.  There was always the possibility that one’s own work would be distorted by lucre, but also, more importantly, that professional work would prove so great a  distraction that it would derail progress in higher science.

This brings us to Johns Hopkins (est. 1876) physics professor Henry Rowland’s (1848-1901) famous 1883 “Plea for Pure Science”.  Rowland was upset with the rapid proliferation of institutions of higher learning in America, such as the land-grant universities of the Midwest.  He denigrated the quality of work done at them, and the predominance of professional work in American science.  His appeal was not made from a desire to protect a traditionally pure science from corruption; it was the latest in a series of attempts to raise a higher idea of science out of a longstanding practical scientific culture.

To advance this vision, Rowland drew on the obscure term “scientist”.  We may recall that the word was originally coined by Cambridge professor William Whewell to distinguish the rote work of scientist members of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (est. 1831) from higher philosophy (see here).  We can, properly I think, still think of that as a key moment in the “end of natural philosophy”, but the term “scientist” never actually caught on.  As Lucier notes, American astronomer Benjamin Apthorp Gould (1824-1896) tried to revive the term mid-century to distinguish scientists from professionals and to urge independence from wealthy benefactors.  In the late-19th-century, both Americans and British assumed “scientist” was an American neologism.

Rowland specifically connected the term to the pursuit of that work he delineated as “pure science”, which could only be done by professors working for their own interests (not even as teachers) in high-quality universities.  (Lucier doesn’t mention it, but it sounds as though Rowland was drawing on the German idea of the university and the exalted role of the professor within it.)

Rowland’s vision had its critics, among them John Shaw Billings (1838-1913), medical officer during the Civil War, director of the library of the Surgeon General’s Office (which later became the National Library of Medicine), and eventually first director of New York Public Libraries.  In an 1886 address to the Philosophical Society of Washington DC he described a man of science as someone “whose chief object in life is scientific investigation, whose thoughts and hopes and desires are mainly concentrated upon his search for new knowledge,” but this did not preclude a concern for money.  He viewed the new term “scientist”—”a coinage of the newspaper reporter”—to connote someone who removed themselves altogether from remunerative and practical concerns.  Billings, a government employee, understood it to be incumbent on men of science to commit themselves to the  public good, and described self-proclaimed scientists’ posturing to be a form of self-indulgent “dudeism” practiced by “a certain class of eulogists of pure science”.  It posed a threat to continued federal support for scientific activities, which he saw as valuable.

Although the term “scientist” would soon become ubiquitous, Rowland’s idea of  what a scientist was supposed to be never reflected what most science in America was actually like.  Lucier notes that many historians would take the rise of Rowland’s “pure” science in universities to equate with the rise of science in America.  In fact, most science would continue to reflect Billings’ more grounded vision.  The historiographical notion that federal involvement in science awaited World War II can only be sustained by privileging the history of the kind of work for which Rowland advocated.  Lucier also makes an excellent case that Victorian concerns about “amateurs” versus “professionals” failed to reflect the language and reality of 19th-century American science, as influential as Victorian scientific culture was.  The “professional scientist” would remain a contradiction in terms until the 20th century.

Some time ago, I posted on a subject I referred to as “insultography“, which is the study of insults operating in history.  When I later posted on Simon Schaffer’s (fantastic) “Comets & Idols” and its discussion of historical uses of Newton’s work as a kind of “sacred text”, I thought that might be a more general treatment of the problem.  Since then, I’ve been batting this vague idea around in my head, and thought it might be a good idea to do a post, albeit a very hand-waving one.

Every good historian knows it’s not wise to take historical insults at face value.  For example, if someone in history observes that someone else’s complaints against them were rooted in that person’s jealousy of their accomplishments, it might not be a good idea to repeat as fact the idea that that other person was complaining just because they were jealous.  There are two sides to every story, and so on and so forth.

What I have in mind here, though, goes more toward the relationship between historical polemics (or praise) and historical ideas.  The character of an insult can tell you a lot about the culture that the polemicist inhabits: they might accuse someone of being impious, or imprecise, or rough-mannered, or weak.  It seems reasonably safe to say that polemics and praise reflect on the ideals of a culture: piety, precision, refinement, strength.  In the history of science, insults can tell you a lot about surrounding cultural resources that a scientific culture draws upon to structure thinking within its community.

The recent “historiography of values” (discussed briefly here), seems to take great stock in the importance of these ideals.  Historians’ arguments very often seem to run something like along the following lines: 1) a scientific figure (SF) will explicitly express a self-evident epistemic ideal, such as “realism” or “calculation” or “precision” or “solitude”; 2) unable to achieve this ideal, the SF will inevitably be forced into compromise; 3) this compromise will usually unveil a polemics/hagiography, the ideals underlying which point to the subtextual or hidden cultural basis of the SF’s work; 4) it is the combination of explicit and subtextual ideals that constitutes the sum of the SF’s epistemic culture; and, optionally, 5) this is a super important observation about “how we know” and historians of science should be admitted forthwith to the fourth tier of the punditocracy and everyone should buy our books.

For example: 1) SF: “What I say is true, I did this experiment”; 2) Somebody, somewhere: “I saw your experiment fail that one time, I do not believe you”, SF is forced to respond; 3) SF: “That was because my servant was lazy and drunk; you are no better than those autocratic XYZers”; 4) the SF’s epistemic culture comprises the authority of an instrumental reality, which is made possible by appeal to class distinctions, the spiritual economy of temperance, and the political economy of mutual assent; 5) historian: “in our time of such controversy, we do well to remember that knowledge is fragile; it is not separable from politics and culture, but is embedded in it.”

My own feeling here is that while polemics do clearly correspond to ideals, ideals do not neatly correspond to ideas.  Where the above sketch would tend to portray the SF as mindlessly pursuing an ideal, and then floundering and resorting to cultural authorities in the face of difficulty (see my post from last year on the “automaton scientist”), I would tend to see an ideal as an approximation of some aspect of an idea set.  Thus, when deviating from an ideal, actors are not acting haphazardly, but drawing on ideas that inform how the compromise (if we can even call it that) is to be navigated.  If the actor does not wish to engage a certain audience, polemics may have been deployed in lieu of an articulation of those ideas.

So, for example, our SF might emphasize the importance of “rigor” in science and decry opponents’ “speculation”, but this by no means implies the SF is absolutely committed to rigor in all circumstances, nor that speculation is always out-of-order.  In this scenario, the historian’s task would be to attempt to find out what was implied by “rigor”, and how speculation was supposed to be managed.  There is no doubt that “rigor” relates to the underlying idea set, but that it was nowhere near an adequate description of it.

A further task would then be to understand the implications of the disjuncture between the polemics of rigor and deeper historical ideas.  Did polemics drive apart individuals with otherwise similar ideas?  Were the polemics effective in tarring the opponent?  Was the polemicist discredited for unfairly applying the polemic?

None of this is meant to refute the basic point that scientific work requires a cultural component—I do not intend “ideas” to be understood as a culture-free version of “ideals”; some ideas are shared with a wider cultures (not even necessarily in the form of ideals).  This particular polemic is intended to convey that a history of ideals that neglects an exploration of ideas and their lineage will have difficulty rising above being a portrait of historical polemics.

In a follow-up post, I would like to address the historiography of “boundary studies”.  I want to claim that “the boundary” is a zone that features frequent exchanges of both polemics and ideas, but that absent studies of ideas away from the boundaries, only polemics will tend to be visible.

Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges (1830-1889), according to the brief but sufficient biography supplied by Reinhard Bendix in State and Society: A Reader in Comparative Political Sociology (1973,) was “Professor of History at Strasbourg and at the Sorbonne in Paris.”  Coulanges’ The Ancient City (1864), Bendix declared, was  “a pioneering analysis of the role of religion in classical antiquity.”  Coulanges was the author of a number of other works on early French history but is remembered, if at all, as a persistent influence on Emile Durkheim.

According to Steven Lukes, Durkheim praised Coulanges, along with the French historian Gabriel Monod, for his rigorous historical method, but criticized the former for his lack of attention to the “comparative method” (Lukes, Emile Durkheim: His Life and Work, 58.)

Lukes is quick to point out that Durkheim’s criticism only referred to Coulanges’ account of the Roman family or gens in The Ancient City, as Coulanges’ 1889 essay, “The Origin of Property in Land,” has a section entitled “On the application of the comparative method to this problem.”  This essay contains an interesting summation of the status quo of economic sociology in the closing decades of the nineteenth century.  Coulanges’ notes Henry Maine’s use of the Indian village to inquire into the original constitution of Western property as well as Emile de Laveleye’s theory of the original communal ownership of the soil.

After an exhaustive refutation of Laveleye’s arguments, the reader is treated to a mature statement of method.   “If you wish to employ the comparative method,” Coulanges noted, “it would first be needful to study each nation in itself, to study it throughout its history, and above all, in its law” (Origin, 130-1.)  Coulanges was not averse to comparisons between India and ancient Europe, but cautioned that the use of the comparative method should not distort the legal traditions of the countries from which they draw.  The comparative method “does not consist in discovering amongst fifteen different nations fifteen different facts, which if interpreted in a certain manner, unite in the construction of a system.”  It consisted “in studying a number of nations in regard to their law, their ideas, all of the circumstances of their social life…” (131.)

What concerned Coulanges was the superficiality of accounts using the comparative method, not the comparative method itself.  Coulanges, throughout The Ancient City, engaged in a comparison of the institutional and religious forms of Greek, Roman, and early Christian life with those of modern Europe  (The Ancient City, trans. Willard Small, 10-11.) Coulanges was concerned not only with the progression of human kind from tribalism to urbanity but also with the growth and progress of the human mind.

Consistent with much of 19th century anthropology and sociology in France, including that of Emile Durkheim and Alfred Espinas,  Coulanges’ effort in The Ancient  City (1864) was a working out of the terms and implications of Comtean positivism in its elucidation of the historical growth of the rational intellect.   The growth of the intellect was most apparent through the systematization and reduction of an originally infinite number of household deities to a stable pantheon which steadily became more inclusive of strangers outside of the original family unit (161-67.)  It was this development in the religious aspect of ancient human beings which led to progressively more organized social structures   (“Introduction.”)

In contrast to Karl Marx, Durkheim, and William Robertson Smith, Coulanges contended that religion produced the economic and social relations between individuals rather than the inverse. From religion “came all the institutions, as well as the private law, of the ancients.”  It was from religion that the city “received all its principles, its rules, and its usages, and its magistracies” (12.)

Coulanges believed that rituals were survivals.  “The contemporary of Cicero,” Coulanges noted, “practiced rites in the sacrifices, at funerals, and in the ceremony of marriage” which were “older than his time.”  These rituals did not correspond to the present “religious belief,” but bore the marks of a worldview which men believed “fifteen or twenty centuries earlier”  (14.)  In this way, the writings of Cicero gave the investigator clues into the more primitive beliefs and social structures.

W.H.R. Rivers in his “Survival in Sociology” (1913) described “survivals” as “a custom….(which) can not be explained by its present utility but only becomes intelligible through its past history” (The Sociological Review, 6, 1913.)     Coulanges’ formulation of this anthropological heuristic predates Edward Burnett Tylor’s discussion of “survivals” in his Primitive Culture (1871.)  Tylor described a “survival” as something which “manifestly”  does not have  its “origin in the new state of things, but has simply lasted on into it.”   Through paying attention to survivals, “it becomes possible to declare that the civilization of the people they are observed among must have been derived from an earlier state, in which the proper home and meaning of these things are to be found ; and thus collections of such facts are to be worked as mines of historic knowledge” (Tylor, Primitive Culture, 71.)

Coulanges’ discussion of the interconnection between ritual, religion, and community foreshadowed one of the principle analytic debates of nineteenth and twentieth century anthropology.  This discussion was begun in earnest with the work of  William Robertson Smith, who argued for the primacy of ritual over that of myth and of the centrality of ritual to social cohesion.

Robertson Smith’s work on early Semitic rituals or “rites,” particularly his Religion of the Semites, based upon lectures delivered at the University of Aberdeen between 1888 and 1891, argued that primitive mythology were not an a kind of proto-science, as Tylor contended.  Religion derived its power from ritual or “rite,” which Robertson Smith, much like Durkheim, defined as acts and observances which cemented social bonds between members of the community.  Rituals were the worship of a representation, or totem, of the community itself.

As Catherine Bell details, for Robertson Smith, “ritual is the primary component of religion, and it fundamentally serves the basic social function of creating and maintaining community.”  Myth was given a second place of explaining what the ritual, or the rite, stood for after its original meaning had been forgotten.  Robertson Smith concluded, “the myth was derived from the ritual, and not the ritual from the myth.” (In Catherine Bell, Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions, 4.) Coulanges also held that in the ancient world religion enforced social stability.  In the “social system of the ancients,”  religion was “the absolute master, both in “public and in private life,” and the state was “a religious community” (520.)  Individuals, however, practiced the rituals prescribed to them by the state not out of any need for social solidarity or out of an understanding of its efficacy, but due to the respect given to antiquity and to the authority of the state.

Coulanges also underscored the historical role of religious ideas in societal change.  This change, though gradual, culminated in the disengagement of the laws of the state from the sanctions of the religious cult and in the complete disappearance of ritual as it was understood in the ancient world.    Christianity, though reviving religious sentiment, was in no way concerned with ritual or with the state.   Taking its “abode” in the “thoughts of man,” Christianity was also a universal faith rather than a belief system of a “caste” or “nation” (521-22.)

“Prayer,” Coulanges detailed, “was no longer a form of incantation” but “an act of faith and a humble petition,” with the “love of God” replacing fear of the divinity.  Christ was the great agent of secularization as “he separates religion from government” (525.)   Coulanges concluded that religion did enforce social conformity in some societies, as in ancient Greece and Rome.  Coulanges also argued that  the progressive separation of church and state, culminating in Christianity, was due to the work of religion as well.

Pt. 1 of this post discussed the latest entries in a dispute, which appear in the current and upcoming issue of Studies in History and Philosophy of Science.  The papers are by Alan Chalmers and Bill Newman, and they argue over whether Robert Boyle’s “chymistry” could have proceeded without being framed within his mechanical philosophy.  The immediate issue, the nature of Boyle’s work, seems ultimately to turn on fairly subtle points about how, in the 17th century, experiment was understood to relate to natural philosophy, and how knowledge of chemical phenomena related to natural philosophy and other orders of knowledge.  As I understand this issue, one would not have thought at that time that one could understand “chemistry” to be a self-contained body of knowledge, a fundamental way of looking at nature.  While one certainly could develop a practical understanding of chemical transformations at that time, such a knowledge would not have been thought relevant to the higher natural philosophical questions that most concerned Boyle.

Outside of this main historical issue, Newman stresses the importance of reading Chalmers’ particular claims in light of his “larger agenda … concerning the nature of scientific knowledge as a whole, an agenda I do not share.”  Chalmers is primarily interested in the ability to demarcate “science”, which founds knowledge on an experimental basis, from “philosophy”, which accommodates experiment into its theoretical schemes.  While Newman waxes skeptical about the philosophical project’s validity for even the most recent period of history, in his response (entitled “How Not to Integrate the History and Philosophy of Science”), he concentrates on the ways this philosophical lens affects historiography, claiming it narrows the scope of possible questions to those that can be framed within the structure of the central demarcationist concern.  Chalmers’ approach is “binary,” a “dualist methodology”, a “toggle-switch model” of history: if a historical event cannot be classified as proper “science”, it is of no further historical concern.  This methodology “allows for no gradual development or nuance over the course of history”, it “does not give sufficient credence to reorientations in scientific reasoning and experimental practice that laid the groundwork for later fruitful developments,” and it does not “allow for any significant heuristic application of theory”.  Chalmers’ evaluative rubric allows “little room indeed for disinterested analysis of arguments, determination of the real issues at stake, or the tracing of sources and intellectual traditions, which I view as the historian’s primary responsibilities.”

Newman’s main claim against Chalmers’ approach to history, then, is that it squelches the formulation of the questions that are most a propos to describing the contours of the historical record.  The failure to formulate good questions in turn impacts how one characterizes what the most significant changes in history have been.  For Chalmers, the possibility of demarcation hinges on the reality of a historical shift that marks when such a demarcation became intellectually possible.  Chalmers is explicit about this in his new paper: ”In my view, a crucial aspect of the Scientific Revolution was the emergence of science as distinct from philosophical matter theories.  Localised claims about specific phenomena accessible to experimental investigation were one thing.  Generalised claims about the ultimate structure of matter were another.”

Because the Scientific Revolution is of central concern to Chalmers, for him the nature of the Revolution must also be elemental to Newman, and he sees their opposing characterizations as a key source of their disagreements.  According to Chalmers, “Newman sees the Scientific Revolution as ‘the great disjunction between the common view of matter theory before and after the mid-seventeenth century’, the former involving material forms and the latter arrangements of minute, robust corpuscles.”  In fact, though, in the passage to which Chalmers points, Newman is saying that the transition that took place was a key change in the period that we commonly identify as the Scientific Revolution, but that “Whether one accepts the term ‘Scientific  Revolution’ or not is of little consequence for my narrative”.  Here Newman is defending himself against possible attacks by historians: “At a time when even the term ‘Scientific Revolution’ has become a contentious topic among historians of science, it may seem either otiose or impetuous to raise the issue of chymistry’s place in this putative historical period.”

Newman argues that the shift in matter theory he details is one of a large number of significant changes that have taken place throughout the history of the sciences.  He suggests that the historical sciences allow a variety of demarcations, and, further (with shades of Kuhn) that historical shifts need not lead to correctness to constitute important, perhaps even progressive, developments.  Any philosophy that purports relevance to historiography must be able to take this prospect into account.

(I have noted on this blog my own view that the ‘Scientific  Revolution’ should be loosely identified as a period when a number of different shifts in knowledge-making occurred, and it was widely understood that these shifts all had something to do with each other, even if connections actually drawn between different kinds of scientific work were more attitudinal and institutional than philosophically coherent).

Now, as a postscript, most historians of our time are doubtless likely to be put off by Chalmers’ demarcationist agenda, by his aims to evaluate the quality of long-past scientific work, and by his essentialism concerning the nature of the Scientific Revolution.  However, I’m not sure that with stronger arguments removed—in a “blind taste test”, so to speak—most historians would not actually be predisposed to favor Chalmers’ description of 17th-century scientific work.

Chalmers and historians of the most recent generation share an overriding interest in the generation and proliferation of “matters of fact” at the expense of deeper examinations of the historical theoretical and epistemic  frameworks in which facts were put to work.  The difference between Chalmers and historians is where Chalmers’ motivation is avowedly philosophical, historians, following particularly in the vein of Steven Shapin, seem more interested in the archival realism that uncovers the cultural difficulties and requirements of trust, which underlie the possibility of a matter of fact (or some other “epistemic thing”) being successfully passed on.

Despite this difference in motivation and methodology, the parallels should not be ignored.  Notably, the last two winners of the HSS Pfizer Award have shared Chalmers’ central contention that the principal achievement of 17th-century science was the establishment of knowledge as an accumulation of empirical matters of fact.  Hal Cook’s Matters of Exchange links the accumulation of reliable empirical knowledge and a concomitant move away from speculative knowledge to be related to the requirements of the Dutch trade culture.  Deborah Harkness’ The Jewel House seeks to place credit for the development of a culture of “science” with under-acknowledged botanists, medical practitioners, and gatherers of empirical lore rather than more elite and widely-recognized figures like Francis Bacon.

Historians may claim that the realism provided by intensive archival research allows their work to escape the foibles of philosophers, but I would claim all historiographies of science harbor implicit philosophies of how science can work that render narratives plausible and coherent.  We do well to follow Newman (incidentally, with Lawrence Principe co-winner of the 2005 Pfizer Award for their Alchemy Tried in the Fire: Starkey, Boyle, and the Fate of Helmontian Chymistry) in facing these philosophies head-on.  Let’s make our best books talk to each other.