Ether Wave Propaganda

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 @ #49, 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.

Click to go to the excellent Robert Boyle Project site

I haven’t talked about it much here, but I’ve mentioned once or twice my admiration from afar of the recent revival of an alchemy/chymistry sub-historiography spearheaded by Indiana’s Bill Newman and Johns Hopkins’ Lawrence Principe.  At a glance, this literature traffics in older methodological currents of intellectual history, but far from a musty antiquarian pursuit, those writing in it ask pointed, well-targeted questions and, sure enough, find revealing answers.  I suspect a strong case could be made that this corner of the history of science literature has been the most intellectually productive one of the past decade.

One sign of liveliness is the prospect of dispute, and it turns out there is an interesting and current one between Newman and philosopher Alan Chalmers of Flinders University in Australia about the experimental and philosophical practices of Robert Boyle (1627-1691).  The citations of present interest are at the end of this post, though the dispute has a longer historiography which you can find in the footnotes to those papers.

At one level this is a classical historian-philosopher conflict about how to read the historical record responsibly, but the dispute also has deeper currents that have a lot to say about a question in which this blog has recently dabbled: the historical characteristics of natural philosophy.  While I programmatically agree with Newman here, and while I ultimately side with him on the specifics, the specific case is not open-and-shut, so I thought I’d discuss it as well as I can make it out here in Pt. 1 of this post.

The crux of Chalmers’ specific claim regarding Boyle is in his critical evaluation of his chymistry.  According to Chalmers, in an argument made in his The Scientist’s Atom and the Philosopher’s Stone (2009), Boyle’s natural philosophical explanations of chemical action and properties failed to contribute materially to the advance of chemical knowledge, because it departed from what could legitimately be demonstrated by means of Boyle’s chemical experimentation.  Crucially, he claims that such an evaluation is not ahistorical because it draws on a distinction between experimentation and philosophical explanation that Boyle himself comprehended, and which he put to good use in his pneumatics.

Based on his negative evaluation of the intellectual productivity of Boyle’s chymistry, Chalmers objects to Newman’s characterization in Atoms and Alchemy: Chymistry and the Experimental Origins of the Scientific Revolution (2006) of Boyle’s chymistry as contributing substantially to a transition from an unproductive Aristotelian hylomorphism to a productive mechanical philosophy.  Newman’s point was that Boyle built on the arguments of predecessors, notably physician Daniel Sennert (1572-1637), that certain fundamental “pristine” particles (minima naturalia) were preserved through chemical transformations.  While Sennert had identified as a scholastic, Boyle reinterpreted this point within a mechanistic framework.

Much of the dispute seems to rest on a point that has not really been brought out by either author: what would Boyle have considered to be the kind of knowledge most worth pursuing?  In claiming that mechanical philosophy “did not help Boyle make significant advances in chemistry”, Chalmers implies that “chemistry” constituted its own field of knowledge, which Boyle wanted to understand better.  For Chalmers, progress in the field could only be achieved by following what experiment could verify.  This more-or-less implies the construction of a self-contained body of knowledge akin to what was found in Lavoisier’s (1743-1794) much later chemistry.

Now, it seems sensible to say that Boyle would have indeed understood an enumeration of pristine particles and the systematic analysis of chemical transformations to constitute a form of knowledge.  However, based on Chalmers’ and Newman’s arguments, I don’t see anything to support the idea that Boyle had reason to consider the chemical taxonomy that would have been directly accessible to experimental inquiry to have been a fundamental, philosophical form of knowledge.  (It would probably have been closer to practical knowledge or natural history.)  For Chalmers, this is not an issue, because for him a key achievement of the Scientific Revolution was the distinction of (secure) scientific knowledge from (speculative) philosophical knowledge.  (More on this presently.)  However, as a self-identified natural philosopher, it is not clear that Boyle would have seen things that way.  Thus the key point is: could Boyle have actually conceived of experiment as rendering natural-philosophically relevant knowledge absent hypotheses grounded in a microscopic ontology?

By Chalmers’ account, yes: Boyle (per Michael Hunter) may have had a religious stake in developing mechanical philosophy, but he could still set it aside temporarily.  According to Chalmers, Boyle “engaged in practices and formulated distinctions that involved experimental science that was able to, and did, progress independently of mechanical matter theory.”  By Newman’s account, no: Boyle seems to have considered the prospect of a legitimate natural philosophy to be premised on the basis of using a single style of argumentation: his mechanical philosophy.

In his defense against Chalmers, Newman details Boyle’s confrontations with Aristotelian Peripatetics, on one end, and against “Cartesians and Epicureans” on the other.  Boyle’s objections to each were premised on its stifling effects on a progressive natural philosophy.  Hylomorphism was unacceptable because, according to the common complaint, phenomena could always be explained by reference to a formal cause.  Hence Boyle’s insistence, departing from Sennert, that the “sensible qualities” of matter (opacity, reflectivity, odor…) had to be explained by reference to a mechanical cause rather than innate properties.  Likewise, Boyle chafed at Cartesian-Epicurean mechanical philosophy’s insistence that all properly philosophical explanations had to take the form of a fully coherent scheme of corpuscular motions.  Such a “whole Systeme” seemed to him to make impossible demands on the natural philosopher.

What Boyle argued for instead is a “mechanical philosophy” that allowed for “subordinate causes” and “intermediate explanations” where certain phenomena like gravity, “fermentation”, the springiness of air, and chemical action could legitimately become part of a mechanical explanation, even though those phenomena could not themselves be accounted for by mechanical means.  For Boyle, these intermediate explanations had to be invoked to circumvent the need for Peripatetic-style recourse to innate tendencies or properties of matter.  Newman has a good discussion of a dispute Boyle had with Cambridge Platonist Henry More (1614-1687) that speaks to this point.

For Chalmers, the matters of fact that Boyle was able to produce through chemical experimentation did not support the mechanical philosophical explanations of chemical phenomena that he offered.  Thus these explanations could provide no support for his general argument for mechanical philosophy.  So Chalmers argues that Boyle worked with two evidentiary standards: a rigorous one to support experimental matters of fact, and another, much weaker one to support the mechanical philosophy.  This is fatal: for Chalmers, Boyle’s reductionism in support of his mechanical philosophy was as indefensible as the purely corpuscular arguments of the Cartesians and Epicureans.

Newman, I think quite correctly, counters:

Pace Chalmers, it is not at all clear to me that Boyle intended his imagined micro-level mechanisms to supply empirical support in any sense—they were meant primarily to act as illustrations of how things might work mechanically in the invisibly small world in order to show that there was not an overriding necessity to invoke substantial forms or other explanatory agents.

Newman’s argument seems to be that Boyle’s version of the mechanical philosophy was appealing not because its explanations had firm experimental support, but because as a means of natural philosophical explanation he felt it preferable to alternative means then in circulation.

So, where Chalmers seems to feel that Boyle might have built a body of chemical knowledge had he stuck to building matters of conceptual fact out of matters of experimental fact, by my reading of Newman, it would not have made sense to Boyle to unite a taxonomical body of knowledge on the one hand, and a mechanical body of knowledge on the other, within the singular rubric of natural philosophy, simply on the basis that both were supported by experimental facts.

Just the opposite: within the basic rubric of his mechanical philosophy, Boyle required a scheme of accounting for chemical phenomena as a sub-class of natural philosophical phenomena, and this scheme had to be of the same universal character as all natural philosophical explanations.  While special chemical mechanisms could be used in accounting for chemical phenomena, chemical phenomena had to be explained by mechanisms all the same, in order for the explanation to qualify as natural philosophical.

Another way of putting this is that in Boyle’s 17th-century natural philosophy, there was no such thing as a matter of conceptual fact that could be generated from experimental facts.  As Newman puts it, Boyle’s appeal to experiment did not mean “that he was only concerned with mechanical explanations at the macro-level such as the operations of balances and levers”: the theory was definitively not in the apparatus.  Where Chalmers views Boyle’s air-pump experiments and resultant pneumatics as following a distinct scheme from his chymistry, Newman argues that Boyle would have seen no such fundamental difference between the way he philosophized about pneumatics and the way he philosophized about chymistry.  In both cases, experiment was simply a guide in the creation of coherent mechanical explanations of natural phenomena.

Newman attributes Chalmers’ specific arguments to his general argument that in the Scientific Revolution the rise of experiment distinguished “science” from “philosophy”, and that henceforth properly scientific claims could only be derived from experimental facts: Chalmers’ book is a “positivist manifesto”.  Thus, “Seldom indeed does Chalmers entertain the possibility that within the context of the times, one theory might have presented distinct advantages over another without being ‘scientific’ or ‘unscientific’ simpliciter, in some transchronological sense.”

If Newman’s and Chalmers’ disputes about Boyle’s mechanical philosophy hinge on subtle points of the historical character of natural philosophy, their positions are grounded in drastically different views about the relationship between philosophy and history, and about what constituted a significant historical development.  More on this in Pt. 2.

—

Alan F. Chalmers, “Boyle and the Origins of Modern Chemistry: Newman Tried in the Fire” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 41 (2010): 1-10 (free)

William R. Newman, “How Not to Integrate the History and Philosophy of Science: A Reply to Chalmers” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science forthcoming (abstract + paywall)

For fans of this blog’s Schaffer Oeuvre series, two fun bits of news.

First, by way of Advances in the History of Psychology, Simon Schaffer’s latest article, “The Astrological Roots of Mesmerism” is in preprint at Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences.  I’ll not do a full write-up now, but I will say that I was surprised to find that it is in his mid-’80s vintage style, which is to say, it is basically an intellectual history of the 18th-century natural philosophical ideas surrounding animal magnetism and a predecessor concept, animal gravity.  This history is combined with searching observations about how natural philosophers began to construct their own histories of these natural philosophies so as to render some of Mesmer’s predecessors, notably Robert Fludd (1574-1637), progressive figures within their own historicized contexts, while rendering Mesmer himself a figure whose ideas were of the past.  Schaffer also demonstrates interesting parallels with current historiography, which takes Mesmer’s ideas to have progressive components, while Mesmer’s key intellectual source, physician Richard Mead’s (1673-1754) use of astrological ideas is taken to make him a figure with backward-looking tendencies.  Really a fun, informative, and unexpected piece.

I was likewise surprised to be reading an article at independent.co.uk for unrelated reasons, only to find that one of Schaffer’s most recent projects is a study of the work of the British Board of Longitude (1714-1828), which he is undertaking in collaboration with the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich.  Framed as a way of complicating the heroic story of humble clockmaker John Harrison’s solution to the longstanding problem of finding longitude at sea, I am looking forward to results coming from this study simply as an elucidation of the work of an important technical department of the British state.  It is a direct ancestor of issues I will be studying when I move to Imperial College London this fall.

One thing that I think is not appreciated enough is how much history is generally available for easy consumption.  Working at the American Institute of Physics over the past few years, something that’s become increasingly clear to me is that the vast bulk of history of physics is produced by physicists.  Generally it is well-written, and the interests and subject matter tend to be much more eclectic than in writing by professional historians.  Pieces do not really communicate with each other, and so the historiography is hardly synthetic, but if new syntheses of 20th-century physics were ever to be constructed, they would do well to draw heavily on these scattered bites of history.

Letter from George Washington to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences

Increasingly, professional organizations are making these bites more systematically available.  This week I was contacted by the communications officer from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, who informed me that the Academy is now presenting a weekly “From the Academy Archives” feature on its home page, highlighting items from its archival collection, which dates back to the 18th century.  An archive of these posts will soon be available.  The official press release is below the jump.

The Center for History of Physics, where I work, is the history arm of the American Institute of Physics, but “member societies”, which include the American Physical Society, sometimes also undertake their own historical work, such as through the APS Forum for the History of Physics.  The APS has a similar feature to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, “This Month in Physics History”, which has an archive going back to 2000.  The APS is also making the audio and slides of history presentations at APS meetings available on their website, which is another resource from which professional historians might be able to gain if they actively try and integrate this material into what they already know.

Historians need not feel that this sort of work totally fulfills their nutritional historiographical requirements in order to gain from it.  Now that this work is coming out in small, regular portions, there is no reason for historians not to take advantage of its ready availability to help round out their personal knowledge of history.

May 2010

CAMBRIDGE, MA – Over the past 230 years, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences has accumulated a large collection of documents, records, and objects that help tell the story of the nation’s intellectual development since the latter part of the 18th century. Now the public is being offered a glimpse into that history through a new web-based feature, From the Academy Archives.

To commemorate its founding on May 4, 1780, the Academy announced the new online resource, located on its web site at http://www.amacad.org/.

The site will highlight one or more significant events from the Academy’s history that occurred during a given month.  For example, during the month of May:

In 1780, the Academy’s charter was approved by the Massachusetts legislature. Among the sixty-two incorporating members were leaders in the movement for American independence, including Samuel Adams, John Adams, James Bowdoin, John Hancock, and Robert Treat Paine. The charter also named prominent ministers, educators, judges, lawyers, physicians, and businessmen.

In 1852, medical doctor and Fellow Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., spoke at an Academy meeting on “The Use of Direct Light in Microscopic Researches.”

In 1876, the Academy’s Recording Secretary presented a paper by Alexander Graham Bell “On Telegraphing Musical Sounds,” later published in the Academy’s Proceedings as “Researches in Telephony.” In the paper, Bell described past work in the field and explained his recent experiments in transmitting both pure musical tones and human speech.

In 1927, Herbert E. Ives spoke at the Academy on “Television” with lantern slide illustrations. A researcher at AT&T, Ives had given the first public demonstration of television transmission a month earlier.  [ed., my link]

In 1952, the Academy sponsored a two-day “Symposium on Climatic Change,” chaired by astronomer and past president Harlow Shapley. Speakers from the fields of astronomy, geology, geography, meteorology, paleontology, paleoanthropology, geophysics and geochemistry examined both the scientific basis for climatology and the role climate change has played in the development of life and human culture.

And in 1956, the Academy held a two-day conference on “Science and the Modern World View — Toward a Common Understanding of the Sciences and the Humanities.”

Members of the public can sign up to receive email alerts when new items are posted. A library of past items will also be available on the site.

“This initiative to link the past work of the Academy with our vital activities of today is made possible by our ongoing efforts to catalog and conserve the Academy’s rich archive,” said Chief Executive Officer Leslie Berlowitz.

Founded in 1780, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences is an independent policy research center that conducts multidisciplinary studies of complex and emerging problems. Current Academy research focuses on science and technology policy; global security; social policy; the humanities and culture; and education. With headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the Academy’s work is advanced by its 4,600 elected members, who are leaders in the academic disciplines, the arts, business and public affairs from around the world.

This post discusses four articles that Simon Schaffer published in the 1990s on the development of standards of measurement in Victorian Britain, focusing especially on work done at Cambridge University:

1) “Late Victorian Metrology and Its Instrumentation: A Manufactory of Ohms,” in Invisible Connections: Instruments, Institutions, and Science, ed. Bud and Cozzens (Bellingham: SPIE, 1992).

2) “Rayleigh and the Establishment of Electrical Standards,” European Journal of Physics 15 (1994): 277-285.

3) “Accurate Measurement is an English Science,” in Values of Precision, ed. M. Norton Wise (Princeton UP: 1995).

4) “Metrology, Metrication, and Victorian Values,” in Victorian Science in Context, ed. Bernard Lightman (University of Chicago Press: 1997).

The rise of metrology at Cambridge coincided with the establishment of the Cavendish Laboratory in 1871 (beginning work in 1874).  Schaffer emphasizes the importance of accepted standards for industrial development, the creation of telegraph networks, the fostering of trade, and the growth of Empire.  However, he also places special emphasis on the specific questions involved in the particular history of the Cambridge standards program. When James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879) became the first director of Cavendish, the use of the laboratory to develop precision instrumentation required strict group discipline from students, which ran against the grain of the liberal intent of Cambridge’s mathematical tripos, then in its heyday, as discussed in the video above.

Maxwell was able to link the search for suitable standards to his physical theories of electromagnetism and its identity with light.  To establish the identity, it was necessary to link precise measurements of the speed of light (a task of major interest since the 1849 when Hippolyte Fizeau made his measurements) to a measurement of electrical resistance (the ohm).  This fundamental physical significance of precision experimentation helped integrate the work of the Cavendish into Cambridge instruction in physics, but it also helped the cause of establishing a natural unit of resistance against a conventional one proposed by the German engineer Werner Siemens.  (3) deals with this topic in the most detail.

Maxwell himself did not fully succeed in developing Cavendish into a successful standards laboratory, but his successor at Cavendish, Lord Rayleigh (1842-1919), did.  The incorporation of cutting-edge laboratory practice into the Cambridge curriculum provided a boon to providers of teaching instruments, especially Horace Darwin’s Cambridge Scientific Instrument Company.  Rayleigh and his deputy Richard Glazebrook (1854-1935) likewise became key players in the establishment of the National Physical Laboratory in 1900, placing standards work in state hands, and keeping pace with the German Physikalisch-Technische Reichsanstalt, established in 1887.  Glazebrook became the first director of the new lab.

Article (4) takes a rather longer view, discussing the question of standardization from three different perspectives in 19th-century Britain, linking standards more fully to questions of morality and values.  The first perspective is that of John Herschel (1792-1871), who advocated the establishment of a newly precise—but nonetheless traditionally British—standard length based on precision craftsmanship, contrasting this to the rationalist (French) folly of attempting to establish an entirely new system based on a definitive measurement of a natural value.  To create a lasting measure was an accomplishment of highly developed skilled labor, and thus a testament to the moral fiber of Britain’s industrious scientists and instrument makers.

This contrasts to Maxwell’s later insistence on a natural standard of electrical resistance.  For Maxwell, natural objects (like molecules) and laws were divinely created and universally uniform; to uncover their measure was to make a natural theological demonstration of God’s order.  This sort of argument was repugnant to contemporary scientific naturalists like Thomas Henry Huxley (who compared such doctrines to the eternal fixity of species), John Tyndall, and especially mathematician William Clifford.

Schaffer’s other example is astronomer Charles Piazzi Smyth (1819-1900), who advocated the view that natural measures had already been found by divinely inspired ancient civilizations and were reified in the dimensions of their monuments, most notably the Great Pyramid of Giza.  I won’t say more here, except that this example is part of an interesting theme in much of Schaffer’s post-1990 work on antiquarian Orientalism, and the enduring assumption of the wisdom and knowledge of the ancients, which British Imperialists contrasted with what they perceived to be the atavistic peoples of the Empire.  This links up to Schaffer’s observation of Newton’s belief in the perfected natural philosophy of ancient Chaldeans, through to the work he is putting out now (see, notably, his recent second Tarner lecture).  I imagine there’s still much more to be written on the topic.  After all, this ultimately has to link up with the incessant shows about the “secrets of the ancients” that now air on the science channels.

Now, these four pieces, though well-crafted, all tend to revel in their narrative details in a way that is very typical of the history of science scholarship of the past twenty to thirty years.  All locate the subject within an immediate context (e.g., Cavendish) and a general cultural context (Victorian Britain), while making it difficult to locate the subject in an intermediate context (e.g., the wider world of precision instrumentation).  (4) is a partial exception, which uses its comparative approach nicely.

The premium is placed on detail in these kinds of pieces because this is where the devils are supposed to lurk.  Where a history piece revels in detail, be on the lookout for a negatively-formulated thesis, usually along the lines of “science is supposed to be unproblematic, but in fact it is messy and full of culture-imprinted disputes”.

Thus we have Schaffer in (3): “The values which such [precision] measurements yield are supposed to escape the value-system which gave them such high status.  In fact, they are the results of this system….  Precision is the result, rather than the cause, of consensus among scientific practitioners.”  Later: “Precision itself may be neither necessary nor sufficient to establish conviction”.  In (4): “The development of universal standards was supposed to produce consensual uniformity but was just as likely to breed bitter dispute”.

These negatively-formulated arguments are not supposed to bash straw men; they are supposedly an entry in a long-term struggle against the prejudices ingrained in us based on our heritage in the history of ideas.  In (2): “Intellectualist condescension distracts our attention from these everyday practices, from their technical staff, and from the work which makes results count outside laboratory walls”.

It is necessary to do some historiographical history to fully appreciate the impetus behind the negatively-framed thesis.  One impetus is in the sociology of knowledge.  These pieces may be seen as direct follow-ups to late-’80s pieces “Glass Works” and “Astronomers Mark Time” wherein the acceptance of experimental results and astronomical observations is taken to require a combination of trust in results and disciplined (i.e. trustworthy) work habits, in accordance with Harry Collins’ sociology of calibration.  This was a thesis requiring repeated illustration to achieve academic victory.

Another impetus is the end of natural philosophy.  As natural philosophical systems-building gave way in the 19th century to the establishment of certain claims within constrained domains of knowledge, certainty could only be established by disciplined scientists achieving precise measurements that could unequivocally endorse specific claims.  Instrumental standardization was a central component of the historiography of objectivity that arose in the mid-’90s, focusing on a transition that is supposed to have occurred between the eighteenth century and the construction of the “modern” period.

Finally, there is the historiography of values.  By the mid-’90s, the history of science profession more-or-less decided to define the ontology of its history in terms of the “proliferation” of various kinds of stuff: facts, specimens, instruments, images, techniques, metaphors, standards, and so forth.  Patterns of proliferation are determined by the value ascribed to this stuff, value being provided by “culture”.  As Schaffer informs us in (3): “Undoubtedly a Victorian value, precision badly needs a cultural history which maps its historical credibility instead of assuming its methodological validity”.  By learning about this value, we can learn about what made the proliferation of Victorian science and Victorian Empire simultaneously possible.  (4) was an explicit continuation of the project to use the history of scientific practice as a means of studying systems of cultural values.

In a historiography where various experimental results and knowledge claims are seen as heavily disputed and contingent on local circumstances, it is values alone that seem to take on a larger, epochal significance and thus become a worthy subject of study for serious scholars.  It is not even necessary to study actual proliferation; it is only necessary to decode the values inhabiting instances of the history of the thing said to be proliferating.  In this historiography, institutional history and the history of scientific works are small fish—unless research into these small histories can be seen as commenting in some way on the big game of values.

It is a hallmark of an “ornamental” historiography, that the worth of scholarship comes to rest on the reaffirmation of truisms about its grand topics, such as Victorian values, while leaving the “intermediate” context of its immediate subject matter difficult to discern.  Schaffer’s pieces on metrology are products of useful research on the local subject matter, but because their main arguments only traffic in warmed over points about Victorian industrial and Imperial culture and the over/under-determination of knowledge, the detailed content of the papers lacks a substantially revealing context.  The links between standards and Victorian ideals certainly bears mention, but one wonders whether the links can sustain a “cultural history” as promised.  Can we really learn anything new about it and its contexts by studying accumulated instances of dispute surrounding it?  To my mind this question remains, fifteen years later, one of the pressing problems of current historiography.

To wind this post up on a more concrete note, here’s Schaffer again on Lord Rayleigh’s term as the director of Cavendish.

Joseph and Maria Goeppert Mayer; AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives

I’ve been away from the blog for some time now, which mainly has to do with the fact that I just got married.  Thus activities surrounding this event went to the top of my agenda, bumping ordinary work down into the space usually occupied by supplying content to EWP.  This post is inspired by my recent bout of marriage on the brain.

A bit of background: I nabbed some funding for putting together ACAP on my first try, but barely.  One thing that almost derailed the proposal was some anxiety that this would be yet another dead-white-male hall of fame.  That outcome is sort of inevitable: to this day, the physics profession suffers from a pronounced gender skew, albeit not so bad as in prior decades.  If one is to study physics history, one is going to end up studying a lot of white males, unless one specifically sets out to do a sociological or anthropological analysis of gender and minority relations in the profession.

I argued at the time that ACAP’s scale and reach to the present would almost certainly allow it to include women and minorities with whom professional historians rarely bother, but who have been well-known to physicists themselves.  This turned out to be correct.  On account of the historical bias of the physics profession against female and minority participation, only a small percentage of people in ACAP are women and minorities, but they are nevertheless there, and this allows the beginnings of a conversation about their history in the American physics profession—with certain important caveats, most notably that ACAP can analyze only the careers of those who have made it to the upper echelons of professional recognition.  ACAP must not be taken as a reliable sample from which to draw general conclusions about “women and minorities in physics”, since professional advancement has been one of the greatest challenges facing these groups in the profession.

One notable trend that we can look at is the prevalence of physicist married couples in the history of physics. The classic icon of women in the profession is Marie Curie (1867-1934), who, with her husband Pierre, won half the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1903 (Becquerel got the other half).  The only other woman to win the Nobel Prize in Physics was Maria Goeppert Mayer (1906-1972), who won in 1962 for her development of the “shell” model of the nucleus (she won with Eugene Wigner and German physicist Hans Jensen).  Mayer, though highly respected, had notorious difficulty securing her own position.  A German by birth, she was a student of Göttingen quantum physics luminary Max Born, and she moved to America in 1930 with her American husband Joseph Mayer (1904-1983).  Barred from professorships by anti-nepotism rules, Maria worked in low-level and unofficial positions until both she and Joseph became professors at the brand-new San Diego campus of the University of California in 1960.

On this blog, I have already discussed the career of Chien-Shiung Wu (1912-1997), who immigrated to the United States from China in 1936 to study physics at Michigan.  Learning of gender discrimination at that campus, she decided to study at Berkeley instead, where she met her husband, physicist Luke Yuan (1912-2003), another Chinese immigrant.  Wu found a place at Columbia in New York City, while Yuan spent his career at Brookhaven National Laboratory on nearby Long Island.  Although her career was slow in its early growth, by the 1970s she had become a distinguished figure in the American physics profession, and was the first woman to be named president of the American Physical Society.

Maurice Goldhaber (b. 1911) and Gertrude Scharff Goldhaber (1911-1998) met after both escaped Nazi Germany for England.  After Maurice secured a job at the University of Illinois in 1938, they both moved to Urbana where Gertrude had a similar experience with anti-nepotism rules as Maria Goeppert Mayer.  While Gertrude finally managed to secure a paying job at the university in 1948, in 1950 they decamped to Brookhaven, where both were employed until their retirement (Maurice would direct the laboratory between 1961 and 1973).

Cécile Dewitt-Morette (b. 1922) didn’t get picked up in our ACAP selection criteria, but when one finds discussion of the intellectual ferment among postdocs at the Institute for Advanced Study in the late 1940s (as in Dave Kaiser’s Drawing Theories Apart on Feynman diagrams), her name inevitably comes up as one of the key players.  She met her husband, general relativity physicist Bryce Dewitt (1923-2004) there and remained in America, but went on to found the physics summer school at Les Houches in her native France.  She and Bryce were at the University of North Carolina (1956-1972), but she was never given a promotion.  They moved to the University of Texas at Austin, where she is currently professor emerita.

Although husbands and wives have collaborated, wives generally developed their own research programs.  We can always find exceptions: moving to the present day, Margaret Murnane (b. 1959 in Limerick, Ireland), and her husband Henry Kapteyn jointly run a laser research lab at JILA at the University of Colorado.  Murnane and Kapteyn met in graduate school (Murnane received her PhD from Berkeley in 1989), and, unlike predecessor couples discussed here, were both able to find positions at Washington State, Michigan, and, finally, JILA.

Being part of a married couple seems to have been a mixed blessing for women in mid-20th-century physics.  On the one hand, initial evidence seems to indicate that it was practically a prerequisite for reaching the highest echelons of the profession in mid-twentieth-century America.  The strength taken from the marriage seems to have been mainly in the moral support wives were given in their pursuit of a long-term physics career, rather than any influence male physicists were able to exercise over their wives’ careers, which was generally very little.  Indeed, the marriage was often used by universities to avoid hiring wives on as professors: “anti-nepotism” was habitually invoked as a barrier.  Sketchy evidence suggests the rise of national laboratories and new departments helped allay this difficulty.

Another interesting point is that both women in general, and women married to physicists in particular, who were pioneers in building highly successful careers in physics seem to have often been foreign-born.  (For another exception, one might look to Mildred and Gene Dresselhaus; Mildred, born in 1930, was the second female APS president in 1984, and is often cited as a crucial influence on women students at MIT).  In other words, while the process has traditionally been difficult for all women, the terrain seems to have been particularly forbidding for girls growing up in more typical American families.  Actually, Illinois professor Laura Greene (b. 1952) is the subject of a short video about her own experiences that addresses her own experiences going into physics after growing up in a non-scientific family in Cleveland:

For further information on women in physics, one should look to the unfortunately neglected Contribution of Women to Twentieth-Century Physics website, and the related book, Out of the Shadows, edited by Nina Byers and Gary Williams, which also focus on individual, high-level women.

In developing ACAP, I’ve picked up a broad and eclectic, albeit still superficial, knowledge of the American physics community.  I now want to start filling in some parts of this general picture for refereed publication, but there are other bits and pieces that I don’t think I’ll ever publish, and I thought this might be a good forum for “tossing them out there”.  So, taking a cue from a recent post on paranormal phenomena at Heterodoxology, I’d like to talk about an unexpected run-in I had with the history of paranormal research while collecting information on a physicist who worked at the National Bureau of Standards (NBS), of all places.

Coblentz, photo by Harris and Ewing for the National Bureau of Standards, courtesy AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives

William Coblentz (1882-1962) was a reasonably high-level figure in the pre-World War II American physics community.  Raised in rural Ohio, he went on to receive a PhD from Cornell in 1903, and, following two years of postdoctoral research there, he moved to the new NBS (est. 1901) where he would spend his career.  He was a key figure in the development of spectroscopy techniques for measuring heat, which he applied in fields ranging from astrophysics to physiology, and he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) in 1930.  He quasi-retired in 1945 and published his memoirs, From the Life of a Researcher, in 1951.  Today you can become a member of the Coblentz Society, whose mission is “to foster the understanding and application of vibrational spectroscopy”.  You can even buy a Coblentz Society t-shirt declaring that “spectroscopists do it with frequency and intensity”.

A proper biographical treatment of Coblentz would have to center around his professional work, but I want to concentrate here specifically on his investigations of paranormal phenomena.  Though a side interest, Coblentz took these phenomena seriously, and maintained a lifelong study of them. He included a chapter on his “investigations of psychic phenomena” in his autobiography, and in 1954 finally published his collected research and memoirs on the subject as Man’s Place in a Superphysical World through the Sabian Publishing Society, which he dedicated to another scientist and investigator of psychic phenomena William Crookes (1832-1919).  (The Sabian Assembly was founded in 1923 based on the astrology of Marc Edmund Jones, a fascinating story in itself; they’re still around.)

Coblentz recalled in his memoirs that his earliest knowledge of paranormal phenomena was derived from his childhood experience with the folk  interpretation of dreams using the Bible as a guide, but which he also learned about through “the almanacs issued by makers of patent medicines,—as I recall it, ‘Hood’s Stomach Bitters’ or perhaps it was ‘Perry Payne’s Painkiller’; also a little booklet on ‘Dreams and their Interpretation’” (Life, 192).  He also reported, “By the age of eighteen years I had come into close association with people who could move chairs without touching them, through what is known as telekinesis” (Man’s Place, vi).

He took various paranormal phenomena to be transmitted as a form of radiation, and he saw a direct connection between his work at NBS and this outside research: “As a specialist in selective radiometers for the interception and measurement of thermal radiant energy, my interest during all these years has been in finding the organic receptor of cerebral radiation that, in the exceptional case, permits clairvoyance” (Man’s Place, viii).  He allowed that there was still no means of instrumentally intercepting psychic transmissions, and so admitted that a fully satisfactory study remained for the moment impossible.  But he held out hope that continued expansion of investigatory techniques, as part of a general “expansion of the mind will enable man to comprehend his soul” (Life, 146).

Aware of experimental difficulties, which he referred to in terms of the “complexity” of the phenomena and the difficulty of differentiating the “personal from the extra corporal” (Man’s Place, 5), Coblentz was committed to ensuring the quality of his investigations. In his memoirs, he recalled an early sobering experience: “Early in my post-graduate work at Cornell, I was impressed with the then widely proclaimed discovery of ‘N rays,’ and I made an extensive bibliography of literature on the subject.  Soon thereafter it was shown to be an optical illusion” (Life, 179).  He was dismissive of scientific cranks, remembering inquiries to the NBS about one “fellow who claimed that ‘perpetual light, perpetual heat and perpetual motion are one and the same thing’” and another “fellow who had definite proof that ‘there was no rainbow before the Flood.’” (ibid).

In the realm of paranormal research, he was likewise wary of fraud, and became a student of its variations.  He was glad to gain “entrée to a wider or perhaps more esoteric circle of people and [to meet] those who had more genuine mediumistic powers and represented a different brand of individual than the public mediums who have to make a living by catering, as one ex-shoesalesman did, to a clientele interested mainly in how soon money would be inherited and whether husbands or sweethearts were faithful” (Man’s Place, 8).  He conducted optical and electromagnetic experiments during seances, and attempted to develop and monitor his own clairvoyant faculties, which he had detected in himself.  He was also unwilling to state that he had ever found any fully compelling proof that consciousness survived death, though he did view it as a distinct “possibility” that the dead communicated through processes related to psychic abilities.

While he understood psychic and spiritual phenomena to be physical in nature, Coblentz consciously kept his investigations into these phenomena separate from his NBS work.  William Meggers, another NBS physicist, wryly wrote in his NAS memoir of Coblentz (pdf), that “during our forty years of friendship preceding the publication of his book, he never once mentioned this subject in my presence.  This might be explained by saying that he ‘extrasensed’ my skepticism of so-called occult phenomena, but it is also likely that, because of his sensitive nature, he restricted discussion of such controversial subjects to known believers or followers.”  (I am, by the way, using Meggers’ personal copies of these books; he was a major donor to AIP’s collections.)

Coblentz himself recalled, once, “when I mentioned an interesting experience to a colleague in the National Bureau of Standards, he condemned the whole subject, apparently because of his religious beliefs.  Whereupon I asked whether he had had any personal experience, and was surprised to learn that he had never even read any authoritative discussion of the subject.  That cured me of all missionary impulses” (Man’s Place, 5).  For him, investigation of the paranormal was indeed science, but he saw it as dangerous to force it, either intellectually or socially, into contact with mainstream work.

For those who don’t follow Biomedicine on Display, Thomas Söderqvist has been spreading the news there that the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine is to close down over the next couple of years.  Apparently the Centre’s history of medicine faculty are to be absorbed into University College London, and the Wellcome Library and Collection will remain largely unaffected.  Nevertheless, even for those of us who rarely cross into the history of medicine and the life sciences, the Wellcome Centre’s reputation as a center of scholarship is well-known, and one has to wonder what the scale of the implications will be.  For further information, see the recent posts and comments at Biomedicine on Display and the new Friends of the WTCHOM blog.

Update: There is now also a more definitive story at the British Medical Journal’s news site.