Reflections on the Ideological Meanings of Western Science from Boyle and Newton to the Postmodernists

Latour also attacks a version of postmodernism but on certain key elements his position belongs in that camp: He denies the existence of the subject and the force of human agency; he is an epistemological relativist and he attacks the Enlightenment legacy which he characterizes as an “asymmetrical rationality”. On the issue of human agency Latour comments: “the whole attribution of meaning to human actors is, of course, problematic. We have less difficulty with that in France than the English-speaking sociologists do, because we have been fed on Foucault and all these other people. We take the deconstruction of the subject for granted [italics in the original].” As quoted in the interview with Callebaut Werner (ed.), Taking the naturalistic turn or how real philosophy of science is done (Chicago, 1993), 472.

See Latour Bruno , We have never been modern, transl. by Porter Catherine (New York, 1993), 17–21.

Ibid., 26–27. Note I am not here describing a methodological relativism which might be confused with historicizing for the sake of an historical recreation of past events, rather I am identifying Latour's position with the postulate: There is no possibility of truth; “knowledge” is simply a signifier the powerful give to new forms of power or tactics for hegemonic manipulation.

Shapin Steven Schaffer Simon , Leviathan and the air-pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the experimental life (Princeton, 1985), 342.

For this caricature of the audience for science, see Leviathan and the air-pump, 333–4.

Latour , We have never been modern…, 30.

Ibid., 17; and on p. 108: “If you want Hobbes and his descendants, you have to take Boyle and his as well. If you want the Leviathan, you have to have the air pump too.”.

Ibid., 143.

Pocock J. G. A. Schochet Gordon J. , “Interregnum and Restoration”, in J. G. A. Pocock with the assistance of Schochet Gordon J. Schwoerer Lois G. (eds), The varieties of British political thought, 1500–1800 (Cambridge, 1993), 176.

Latour , We have never been modern , 143; for Hobbes's search for peace, see Shapin Schaffer , op. cit. (ref. 4), 334.

On this point see Jacob Margaret C. , The radical Enlightenment: Pantheists, freemasons and republicans (London and Boston, 1981), 76, 228. Cf. Berti Silvia (ed. and intro.), Trattato dei tre impostori (Turin, 1994).

It should be noted that in Shapin Schaffer , op. cit. (ref. 4), ‘absolutism’ never appears in the index and as far as I can see is only mentioned once in the text.

Hobbes , Leviathan [1651], ed. by Macpherson C. B. (Harmondsworth, 1968), 691–2. Unless otherwise stated, this is the edition used in what follows.

Ibid., 703. For what happens to civil servants who trade in truth for allegiance to the state see the account of German philosophers of the 1930s in Sluga Hans , Heidegger's crisis: Philosophy and politics in Nazi Germany (Cambridge, Mass., 1993).

For Hobbes on law and lawyers see A dialogue between a phylosopher and a student of the common-laws of England (London, 1681), 11, 28, and 42 for the quotation. Found in Tracts of Thomas Hobbes (London, 1681).

For some indication of the stakes between Hobbes and Boyle see the important argument of Jacob James R. , “The political economy of science in seventeenth-century England”, Social research, lix (1992), 505–32; reprinted and expanded in Jacob Margaret C. (ed.), The politics of Western science, 1640–1990 (Atlantic Highlands, N.J., 1994). Here I am restating the point about the possibility of ahistorical extrapolations made in my review of Leviathan and the air-pump; see his, lxxvii (1986), 719–20. See in particular in the J. R. Jacob essay, p. 513. There he is citing Hobbes , De cive (New York, 1949), 120, and Leviathan, ed. by Tuck R. (Cambridge, 1991), 106.

Hobbes , Leviathan (ref. 13), 670–1.

Ibid., 368–9.

Leviathan, 715 (final paragraph of the treatise): “For it is not the Romane Clergy onely, that pretends the Kingdome of God to be of this World, and thereby to have a Power therein, distinct from that of the Civill State. And this is all I had a designe to say, concerning the Doctrine of the Politiques. Which when I have reviewed, I shall willingly expose it to the censure of my Countrey.”.

Ibid., 166.

This point is missed altogether in Leviathan and the air-pump (ref. 4), 333, where it is imagined that Hobbes is simply criticizing professionalism.

Latour , We have never been modern, 18: “This doxa was not the raving imagination of the credulous masses, but a new mechanism for winning the support of one's peers. Instead of seeking to ground his work in logic, mathematics or rhetoric, Boyle relied on a parajuridical metaphor: Credible, trustworthy, well-to-do witnesses gathered at the scene of the action can attest to the existence of a fact, a matter of fact, even if they do not know its true nature…. Boyle did not seek these gentlemen's opinion, but rather their observation of a phenomenon produced artificially in the closed and protected space of a laboratory.”.

The literature on this subject is vast, and here I cite items particularly germane to this critique: Jacob James R. , Robert Boyle and the English Revolution (New York, 1977); Jacob James R. Jacob Margaret C. , “The Anglican origins of modern science: The metaphysical foundations of the Whig constitution”, Isis, lxxi (1980), 251–67; Martin Julian , Francis Bacon, the state and the reform of natural philosophy (Cambridge, 1992); Stewart Larry , The rise of public science: Rhetoric, technology, and natural philosophy in Newtonian Britain, 1660–1750 (Cambridge, 1992). For the expansive nature of Boyle's medical practice see Kaplan Barbara Beigun , “Divulging of Useful Truths in Physick”: The medical agenda of Robert Boyle (Baltimore, 1993).

The reflexive voice being employed in this essay differs from “the uprooted, acculturated, Americanized, scientifized, technologized Westerner” invented by Bruno Latour, in We have never been modern, 115.

Latour , We have never been modern, 18, citing Shapin Steven , “‘The mind is its own place’: Science and solitude in seventeenth-century England”, Science in context, iv (1991), 191–218.

Habermas Jürgen , transl. by Thomas Burger with the assistance of Lawrence Frederick , The structural transformation of the public sphere: An inquiry into a category of bourgeois society (Cambridge, Mass., 1989); see also Jacob Margaret C. , “The mental landscape of the public sphere: A European perspective”, Eighteenth century studies, xxviii (1994), 95–113.

For a development of this argument see the article by James R. Jacob cited in ref. 16.

For the implications of Stewart's work see the discussion by Stephen Pumfrey, John Money, Michael Hunter and myself in Metascience, n.s., no. 4 (1993), 32–55.

See Jacob Margaret C. , The cultural meaning of the Scientific Revolution (New York, 1988; 2nd rev. edn, Oxford, in press), chaps. 5 and 7.

Latour , We have never been modem, 26–27.

Callebaut (ed.), op. cit. (ref. 1), 28, interview with Latour.

For a further discussion of the deficiencies of relativism see Appleby Joyce Hunt Lynn Jacob Margaret , Telling the truth about history (New York, 1994). For an excellent scientific and historical discussion of the Shapin and Schaffer book, see Kitcher Philip , The advancement of science: Science without legend, objectivity without illusions (Oxford, 1993), 294–7.

Bentley Richard , A confutation of atheism from the origin and frame of the World (London, 1693). I want to thank James Moore, the co-biographer of Darwin, for making me reopen the topic of science and religion. See his “Speaking of ‘Science and religion’ — Then and now”, History of science , xxx (1992), 311–23; intended as an appreciative but provocative review of Brooke John Hedley , Science and religion: Some historical perspectives (Cambridge, 1991). See also Jo Betty Dobbs Teeter Jacob Margaret C. , Newton and the culture of Newtonianism (Atlantic Highlands, N.J., 1995).

The phrase belongs to Thomas Hobbes who delineates religions as made by “two sorts of men. One sort have been they, that have nourished, and ordered them, according to their own invention. The other, have done it, by Gods commandement, and direction: But both sorts have done it, with a purpose to make those men that relyed on them, the more apt to Obedience, Lawes, Peace, Charity, and civill Society. So that the Religion of the former sort, is a part of humane Politiques; and teacheth part of the duty which earthly Kings require of their Subjects.” Found in Hobbes , Leviathan, 173. Here Hobbes employs relativism as a method, not as an end in itself.

King's College, Cambridge, Keynes MS 118, in Newton's hand from the reign of James II, probably 1687.

On the French context see “Afterword. Glorious Revolution, shameful revocation”, by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, in Cottret Bernard (ed.), The Huguenots in England: Immigration and settlement, transl. by Stevenson P. Stevenson A. Stevenson (Cambridge, 1991), 290–9.

As discussed by Merrick Jeffrey , “The body politics of French absolutism”, a paper given at the Clark Library, Los Angeles, 3 April 1993; citing Bossuet Jacques-Bénigne , Politique tirée des propres paroles de l'Ecriture sainte, ed. by Le Brun Jacques (Geneva, 1967; written in the 1670s, originally published in 1709), 185.

For the story of these alliances see Bradley James E. , Religion, revolution and English radicalism: Non-conformity in eighteenth-century politics and society (Cambridge, 1990).

Hobbes , Leviathan, Part IV, 640.

Bentley , A confutation (ref. 33), sermon on 7 November 1692, 4–8. The definition of fortune closely resembles that given by Hobbes , Leviathan, 696.

Ibid., 8–9.

Bentley , A confutation (ref. 33), sermon on 7 November 1692, 13.

I am reminded of the uses to which Newtonian natural philosophy could be put by Peter Miller whose Defining the common good: Empire, religion and philosophy in eighteenth-century Britain (Cambridge, forthcoming), I have been able to consult.

Martin Benjamin , A panegyrick on the Newtonian philosophy, shewing the nature and dignity of the science (London, 1754), 5.

From the 1656 poem by Waller Edmund (which came with a disclaimer by John Evelyn printed in the margin) prefixed to Evelyn's translation, Essay on the First Book of T. Lucretius Carus, De rerum natura (London, 1656); quoted in Kargon Robert H. , Atomism in England from Harriot to Newton (Oxford, 1966), 92. For a further explication of this theme of the democratizing potential found in the new science see Jacob Margaret C. , “The materialist world of pornography”, in Hunt Lynn (ed.), The invention of pornography: Obscenity and the origins of modernity, 1500 to 1800 (New York, 1993), 157–202.

Bentley , A confutation (ref. 33), sermon on 7 November 1692, 30.

See Zammito John H. , The genesis of Kant's Critique of Judgment (Chicago, 1992), chaps. 9 and 11.

Lenzer Gertrud (ed. with intro.), Auguste Comte and positivism: The essential writings (New York, 1975), 14: “the dogma of the sovereignty of the people corresponds to the dogma just considered, of which it is only the political application. It was created as a means of combating the principle of divine right, itself the general political basis of the ancient system, shortly after the dogma of liberty of conscience had been formed to destroy the theological ideas on which this principle was founded…. Both, being devised for purposes of destruction are equally unfitted for construction.”.

Ibid., 22; from his early writings.

Ibid., 336; from “The social aspect of positivism, as shown by its connection with the general revolutionary movement of Western Europe”.

Ibid., 342.

Ibid., 351.

Proctor Robert N. , Value-free science? Purity and power in modern knowledge (Cambridge, Mass. 1991), 160–70.

Latour , We have never been modern, 25.

Shapin Schaffer , op. cit. (ref. 4), 332–41; esp. p. 333: On Hobbes's view of the role of knowledge seeking in the state, “For Hobbes there was to be no special space in which one did natural philosophy”; for how winning occurs, p. 342; on the nature of science late in this century, p. 343.

Bruno Latour's comments occur in an essay entitled “One more turn after social turn” published in McMullin Ernan (ed.), The social dimensions of science (Notre Dame, Ind., 1992), 276–90, p. 289; for Latour's proclamation of the end of the Enlightenment, see p. 288. Note also the debt to Latour acknowledged in Shapin Schaffer , op. cit. (ref. 4), 340n.

Latour , op. cit. (ref. 56), 281. I am grateful for the comments of Charles Rosenberg, Lynn Hunt and Joyce Appleby.