Cultural entrepreneurs and the origins of modern economic growth

Abstract

The concept of entrepreneur is a central one in economic history. The definition of entrepreneur is extended here to include ‘cultural entrepreneurs’ and show how they can be integrated into the new modern economic interpretation of ‘culture’ as agents who change the beliefs of others. This concept can help us understand one of the central dilemmas of modern economic history, namely how the new institutional economic history can be deployed to understand modern economic growth. Cultural changes in the early modern age led to institutional changes that made Europe more friendly to innovation. In that process, two English figures can be seen as central, Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton. The essay shows how they meet the definition of a cultural entrepreneur and how their work coordinated and focused cultural change that was instrumental in preparing the ground for the Industrial Revolution.

Keywords:

• entrepreneurship
• institutional economics
• Industrial Revolution

Notes

The article is based on my Eli F. Heckscher memorial lecture given in Stockholm, October 2011. Some of the material below is adapted from my The Cultural Roots of the Modern Economy (2012) and related papers.

¹For a good summary of the current literature on the importance of institutions in economic history. See Acemoglu et al., ‘Institutions’ (2005). Acemoglu/Robinson, Why Nations Fail (2012).

²Greif, ‘Cultural Beliefs’ (1994). Greif, Institutions (2005).

³Spolaore/Wacziarg, ‘How Deep Are the Roots?’ (2011).

⁴See Greif, ‘Cultural Beliefs’ (1994). Greif, Institutions (2005).

⁵The concept of ‘cultural entrepreneur’ was inspired by Greif's recent work on morality and his innovative concept of' ‘moral entrepreneur’. He notes that:

moral entrepreneurs are individuals with new moral visions who seek to gain followers. When they fail, they enter the history books, if at all, as anarchists, rebels, false prophets, cult leaders, and heretics. When they win, they write the history book’. [Greif, ‘Theory’ (2012), 31]

⁶Glaeser, ‘Political Economy’ (2005), 46, 52, 62.

⁷Acemoglu/Jackson, ‘History, Expectations and Leadership’ (2011).

⁸Gelderblom, ‘Cities’ (in press).

⁹This issue is particularly salient in the literature that compares China with Western Europe. In an important paper, Keller and Shiue show that trade-supporting institutions in China around 1750 were not much inferior than they were in much of Western Europe and that the allocation of resources (as measured by price cointegration) were of comparable magnitude. But they then link this to the onset of the Industrial Revolution without relating to the ‘Needham Question’, which asks why science in technology in China fell behind Europe at some point after 1600. Shiue/Keller, ‘Markets’ (2007).

¹⁰This distinction can also be found in much of the Enlightenment literature, such as d'Alembert's work, where he distinguishes between the Science of Man and the Science of Nature. d'Alembert, Preliminary Discourse (1995), 54–55.

¹¹I have argued for this case at length in Mokyr, Gifts of Athena (2002).

¹²A good description of such activity in Elizabethan London is in Harkness, Jewel House (2007).

¹³Westfall, Scientific Revolution (2000), 50. The glaring exception to Westfall's statement is the work of Margaret Jacob, above all Jacob, Scientific Culture (1997).

¹⁴Cited by Hunter, Establishing the New Science (1989), 233.

¹⁵For more details, see Meisenzahl/Mokyr, ‘Rate’ (2012). Mokyr, Enlightened Economy (2009), 57–58, 121–122.

¹⁶See for instance Gans/Stern, ‘Product Market’ (2003). In their context, the market of ideas concerns more concrete markets in intellectual property rights, Mokyr, ‘Market for Ideas’ (2006).

¹⁷This was pointed out by Stephen Stigler, and is known as ‘Stigler's Law’. Appropriately enough, Stigler has attributed its original discovery to Robert K. Merton; Stigler, Statistics (1999).

¹⁸Collins, Sociology of Philosophies (1998), 523–569; see also Grafton, Worlds (2009), 9–34.

¹⁹This was stressed by Paul David, who has linked the rise of modern ‘open science’ to the competition for patronage based on reputation effects; David, ‘Historical Origins’ (2008).

²⁰As Schumpeter noted in a widely cited passage:

In capitalist reality, as distinguished from its textbook picture it is not [price] competition which counts but the competition from the new commodity, the new technology […] which strikes not at the margins of the profits of the existing firms but at their […] very lives. [Schumpeter, Capitalism (1950), 84]

²¹For the statement on Calvinism, see Landes, ‘Culture’ (2000), 11.

²²Schumpeter maintained, somewhat unfairly, that ‘the Wealth of Nations contained no really novel ideas and […] cannot rank with Newton's Principia and Darwin's Origin as an intellectual achievement’. Schumpeter, History (1954), 185.

²³See Mokyr, ‘Market for Ideas’ (2006). The same environment of fragmented and uncoordinated polities was conducive to the emergence of political socialism in the nineteenth century.

²⁴John Pocock takes it as ‘a premise of this book that we can no longer write satisfactorily of “The Enlightenment” as a unified and universal intellectual movement’. Pocock, ‘Barbarism’ (1999), 12, cf. Carhart, Enlightenments of Pocock (2001).

²⁵Israel, Revolution (2010). Porter/Teich, Scientific Revolution (1991). Pocock, ‘Barbarism’ (1999), esp. ch. 2.

²⁶Carhart, Enlightenments of Pocock (2001), rightly asks ‘how many enlightenments there were […] I wonder at what point it will become impossible to speak at all of The Enlightenment’.

²⁷Venturi, Utopia (1971), 132 notes that:

the very country which was moving towards the Industrial Revolution [was] the only one in which the organization of the Enlightenment did not exist [which] should suffice in itself to call into question the oft-repeated Marxist interpretation of the Enlightenment as the ideology of the bourgeoisie. [See also Robertson, Unenlightened England (2000)]

²⁸The classic statement here is perhaps Hume's statement in his ‘Of Refinements in the Arts’ (1760) about ‘the spirit of the age’ which, in his view, ‘roused the minds of men from their lethargy and put them into a fermentation […] to carry improvement into every art and science’, Hume, Essays (1985), 271. This sense was quite general in the eighteenth century even if the exact path that would lead to such improvements was of course widely debated.

²⁹For a forceful summary statement, see Spadafora, Idea (1980), 408–415.

³⁰One of the great believers in progress, the linguist and biographer William Wotton (1666–1727), made the crucial distinction between areas that were cumulative (such as science and technology) and those that were not (such as rhetoric). His conclusion was that the ‘world has gone on, from age to Age, Improving and consequently […] it is at present much more Knowing than it ever was since the earliest Times’. Wotton, Reflections (1694), preface.

³¹For a detailed exposition of the interrelation between technological and institutional improvements, see Mokyr, ‘Great Synergy’ (2006).

³²Bury, Idea (1955/1932). Pollard, Idea (1971). Nisbet, History (2008).

³³For instance, no economic historian would seriously maintain the notion that had James Watt never been born, there would have been no Industrial Revolution. Yet, as MacLeod has recently demonstrated, following Watt, Britain developed what must be regarded as a hero cult around Watt as an emblem of a set of cultural ideals of what could be done to advance useful knowledge; see MacLeod, Heroes (2007).

³⁴Dobbs, ‘Newton’ (2000), 34.

³⁵Copernicus, Galileo, and Darwin share the distinction of being fiercely opposed by the religious establishment and overthrowing beliefs that had been held for millennia. See Gaukroger, Emergence (2006), 19, who makes the case for Copernicus and Darwin, and Huff, Intellectual Curiosity (2011), especially 20, 48–71, making the case for Galileo.

³⁹Bacon, Preface to the Great Instauration (1620).

³⁶Farrington, Bacon (1979).

³⁷Bacon, ‘Aphorisms’ (1999), 66, 68, 81, 84.

³⁸Bacon, Praise (1838).

⁴⁰As always, there were earlier expressions of his ideas, not always wholly acknowledged by Bacon. One example is the sixteenth century French theologian Pierre de la Ramée (Peter Ramus), with whom Bacon would have agreed that ‘the union of mathematics and the practice of scholarly arts by artisans would bring about great civic prosperity’. See Smith, Business of Alchemy (1994), 36.

⁴¹Harkness, Jewel House (2007), 246.

⁴²See an early paper by Stearns, ‘Scientific Spirit’ (1943). Rossi explicitly claims that:

Bacon was voicing the general opinion of his age […] when he strove to rehabilitate the mechanical arts […] and planned a history of arts and sciences to serve as a foundation for the reform of knowledge and of the very existence of mankind. Rossi, Bacon (1978), 9.

⁴³Colie, ‘Cornelis Drebbel’ (1954), 245–269.

⁴⁴Rossi, Bacon (1978), 11–20.

⁴⁵One of the most influential historians of science to explain and support Bacon's role in the rise of economic modernity is Gillispie, Edge of Objectivity (1960), 78, who summarised Bacon's vision memorably as a ‘program for building an infinity of better mousetraps into a better world’. For a more recent statement in that spirit, see Zagorin, Bacon (1998), 97, 121.

⁴⁶One interesting view has been put forward by Barbara J. Shapiro, who has credited Bacon with nothing less than being the ‘central agent’ of applying the notion of a fact from the realm of law to that of science and technology, Shapiro, Culture (2000), 107. Other experts have pointed out that a whole series of applied fields, such as heat, electricity, magnetism and biology were created and ‘sanctioned by the Baconian tradition as properly belonging to the cognitive scope of natural philosophy’, Pérez-Ramos, Bacon's Idea of Science (1988), 35. As Brian Vickers notes, this constituted an enormous expansion and legitimization of the study of nature. Vickers adds that ‘Bacon's influence can be traced to a great range of scientific pursuits, including geology, topography, statistics, medicine and much else’. Vickers, ‘Bacon’ (1992), 516–517.

⁴⁷Zilsel, ‘Sociological Roots’ (1942), 544–560.

⁴⁸One example is the Accademia Segreta described by Girolamo Ruscelli in the 1540s, in which academicians mixed with apothecaries, herbalists, gardeners and other craftsmen to study their recipes and techniques. In it, Eamon noted, ‘artisans worked side by side with men of leisure and learning’, and it serves as a remarkable example of the union of scholars and craftsmen; Eamon, ‘Science’ (1985), 478. This description may have been more of a Utopian vision than reality, but it is clear that the idea was ripening in Europe even before Bacon.

⁴⁹Zilsel, ‘Sociological Roots’ (1942), 551.

⁵⁰Mokyr, Gifts of Athena (2002), 54, 64–66.

⁵¹Keller, ‘Accounting for Invention’ (2012), 242.

⁵²Zagorin, Bacon (1998), 121.

⁵³Thus, for example, Claus Zittel writes, ‘[Bacon's] philosophy gave birth to the scientific dream of modernity that the advancement of society goes hand-in-hand with the unimpeded development of all technologies’. Zittel, ‘Introduction’ (2008), xx.

⁵⁴Grafton, Worlds (2009), 98–113.

⁵⁵Bacon, Valerius Terminus (1734).

⁵⁶Rossi, Bacon (1978), 18.

⁵⁷Hartlib and his close friend John Dury (1596–1680), a Calvinist minister, were deeply religious Protestants who strongly felt that the spreading of knowledge in the Baconian fashion would lead to a unification of the heavily splintered Protestant Churches of his time. He was also keenly interested in agriculture, Helmontian chemistry, medicine, and was issued a large number of patents. He and his followers shared a deep belief in the potential of technical progress based on increased knowledge free of the obfuscations and confusions of the past. One of his main projects was his ‘Office of Address and Correspondency’, a kind of virtual Solomon's House in which useful knowledge would be circulated and distributed by means of epistolary networks, a precursor of the basic Enlightenment project to reduce access costs and enhance the dissemination of scientific and technological knowledge.

⁵⁸The term was apparently first applied to him by John Winthrop, governor of Massachusetts. Webster, Great Instauration (2002), 3, sees him as the one who undertook the Baconian ideal of organizing Europe's intellectuals in a ‘noble and generous fraternity’ – obviously an early version of the eighteenth-century Republic of Letters. One of his main projects was his ‘Office of Address and Correspondency’, a kind of virtual Solomon's House in which useful knowledge would be circulated and distributed by means of epistolary networks, a precursor of the basic Enlightenment project to reduce access costs and enhance the dissemination of scientific and technological knowledge.

⁵⁹Hartlib was particularly interested in bee-keeping, both as an interesting agricultural pursuit and because he saw the symbolism of bees pollinating flowers in analogy to men of learning spreading information to increase the productivity of the economy.

⁶⁰Greengrass et al., Hartlib (1994), 18.

⁶¹Wilkins was a good example of the kind of talented disciple needed by cultural entrepreneurs to disseminate their message. A practicing Puritan clergyman and widely renowned theologian and a founding father of the Royal Society, his work shows how religion and scientific endeavour complemented one another at this time. He foretold, in Charles Gillispie's words, ‘with surprising insight the accommodation to be reached between Galileo's mathematization and Bacon's socialization of science’. Gillispie, Edge of Objectivity (1960), 113. His work on developing a universal language was directly inspired by Bacon, see Lynch, Solomon's Child (2001), 116–156.

⁶²Hunter, Establishing the New Science (1989), 8.

⁶³Hunter, Establishing the New Science (1989), 15.

⁶⁴Lynch, Solomon's Child (2001), 233–234.

⁶⁵Lynch, Solomon's Child (2001), 31, 77–78.

⁶⁶Hunter, ‘Debate’ (1995), 102.

⁶⁷Boyle, Works (1744), 155. Rose-Mary Sargent points out that Boyle derived from Bacon a general epistemological outline of his experimental philosophy – the sign of knowledge was no longer the deductive certainty of classical philosophy; knowledge was now that which has a ‘tendency to use’, see Sargent, ‘Learning’ (1994), 59.

⁶⁸Boyle, Works (1744), 154. In essay IV in his Some Considerations Touching the Usefulness of Experimental Natural Philosophy entitled significantly ‘That the Goods of Mankind May Be Much Increased by the Naturalist's Insights into Trade’ published in 1671, he defended the proposition that the Naturalist's knowledge would enrich technology, but that his knowledge of technology would improve his naturalist science as well, Boyle, Works (1744), 167–176.

⁶⁹Hunter, Boyle (2009), 5.

⁷⁰Evelyn, Sylva (1670/1664). William Lynch insists that in this book Evelyn applied Bacon's method, and that the results do not fit the stereotypes later commentators attached to Bacon of ‘undirected empiricism’ but extensive and disciplined use of analogy, see Lynch, Solomon's Child (2001), 37.

⁷¹Robert Merton notes that the growth in interest in medical science in the seventeenth century was an aspect of the growth of interest in science. For the vast majority of medical practitioners, this was probably at best only marginally the case; see Merton, Science (2001/1938), 24. The strong connection between biology and medicine was a product of the nineteenth century. But for the very top medical practitioners such as Sydenham, and his followers such as Richard Blackmore (1654–1729), famous for being a writer of dull poetry, and Thomas Dover (1660–1742), a physician who turned privateer, the impact of Baconian ideology is quite marked. Sydenham's impact on Continental medicine (such as on the great Dutch physician Herman Boerhaave) was also quite large; see Poynter, ‘Sydenham's Influence’ (1973), 223–234.

⁷²Bynum, ‘Nosology’ (1993), 343. The systematic collection of information was extended in this age to surgery, up to then a little-respected craft. Richard Wiseman (1621–1676), the Royalist surgeon who served in the Civil War, published his Chirurgicall Treatises in 1676, in which he listed a catalogue of 660 individual cases. While there is no explicit mention of Bacon in Wiseman's book, he sighs in his introduction that:

when the young chirurgeon shall find the cure easie in the Theory and appear so at first in the practice too, yet suddenly [the condition] deceive him with a Relapse […] he will then wish that all other practitioners had done what I have done in this Treatise viz. recommend their observations both successful and unsuccessful, thereby increasing Knowledge in our Profession, and leaving Sea-marks for the discovery of such Rocks as they themselves have split upon before. [Wiseman, Treatises (1719), v–vi]

⁷³Seventeenth century writers on farming and natural history explicitly acknowledged their debt to Francis Bacon and especially his Sylva Sylvarum, a somewhat indiscriminate collection of facts and putative facts, which included the New Atlantis as an appendix. Between 1626 and 1685 this work became something of a best-seller, with sixteen English and three Latin editions; see Gaukroger, Emergence (2006), 33.

⁷⁴Webster, Great Instauration (2002), 27, 335.

⁷⁵Webster, Great Instauration (2002), 335.

⁷⁶The earliest admirers of Bacon were indeed on the European Continent, among them René Descartes who in one letter expressed the view that he and Lord Verulam (Bacon) complemented one another. Two other leading French intellectuals of the era, Pierre Gassendi and Marin Mersenne, were influenced by his work. So was the Dutch philosopher and physicist Isaac Beeckman. Yet while many of these writers agreed with some of the central tenets of Bacon's method, they often misconstrued his work and did not share the aggressive approach towards the exploitation of nature and drive towards technological progress, much less the inductive methodology; see Pérez-Ramos, ‘Bacon's Legacy’ (1996), 312.

⁷⁷d'Alembert, Preliminary Discourse (1995), 74–75 refers to Bacon as:

the immortal Chancellor […] the greatest, the most universal, and the most eloquent of the philosophers […, who] conceives of philosophy as being only that part of our knowledge which should contribute to making us better or happier […] confining it […] to the science of useful things.

Voltaire, in his Philosophical Letters called him ‘the father of experimental philosophy’ and added that the Novum Organum was the scaffold by means of which the edifice of the new philosophy has been reared; so that when the building was completed, the scaffold was no longer of any use. Chancellor Bacon was still unacquainted with nature, but he perfectly knew, and pointed out extraordinarily well, all the paths which lead to her recesses” [Voltaire, ‘Philosophical Letters’ (1901), 47]. Even the curmudgeonly Rousseau, who had little sympathy for philosophies of technological progress, admitted that ‘Verulam was perhaps the greatest of philosophers’. See Gauss, Rousseau (1920), 58–59.

⁷⁸Voltaire, ‘Philosophical Letters’ (1901), letter XII. Michel Malherbe points out that despite their admiration for him, most of the French philosophes had actually read little of his work, and that even the article on Baconisme in the Encyclopédie, written by the Abbé Pestré, shows little evidence of having read much of Bacon's work; see Malherbe, ‘Bacon’ (1985), 387–404.

⁷⁹Gillispie, Edge of Objectivity (1960), 174. Bacon's influence on Robert Hooke, after Newton the most ingenious and talented English scientist of his age, can be seen from Hooke's somewhat exaggerated plan to write the history of every artisanal occupation, including the makes of counterfeit pearl and precious stones, bugle-makers, book-binders, dancing masters, varnishers and so on; see Farrington, Bacon (1979), 137.

⁸⁰Macaulay noted that:

some people may think the object of Baconian philosophy [to provide a man with what he requires to continue to be a man – that is technology] a low object, but they cannot deny that, high or low, it has been attained […] they cannot deny that mankind have made and are making great and constant progress in the road which he pointed out to them. [Macaulay, ‘Lord Bacon’ (1837), 129–132]

Triumphalist these lines are without a doubt, but by the time they were published, on the eve of the Victorian era, they were based on real and palpable technological achievements in the British Industrial Revolution.

⁸¹Thus Hegel writes somewhat acerbically that:

Since Bacon has ever been esteemed as the man who directed knowledge to its true source, to experience, he is, in fact, the special leader and representative of what is in England called Philosophy, and beyond which the English have not yet advanced. For they appear to constitute that people in Europe which, limited to the understanding of actuality, is destined, like the class of shopkeepers and workmen in the State, to live always immersed in matter, and to have actuality but not reason as object […]. His practical writings are specially interesting; but we do not find the bright flashes of genius that we expected. As during his career in the state he acted in accordance with practical utility, he now, at its conclusion, likewise applied himself in a practical way to scientific endeavours. See Hegel, Lectures (1805/1806).

⁸²Pérez-Ramos, ‘Bacon's Legacy’ (1996), 311.

⁸³The most recent and eloquent statement of her position is in Jacob/Stewart, Practical Matter (2004), 26–60.

⁸⁴The first and best-known application of calculus was to hydraulics, but the French mathematician Antoine Parent famously erred in his computation of the maximum useful effect that a waterwheel could draw from the force of a stream.

⁸⁵Keynes noted that:

For in vulgar modern terms Newton was profoundly neurotic of a not unfamiliar type, but – I should say from the records – a most extreme example. His deepest instincts were occult, esoteric, semantic-with profound shrinking from the world, a paralyzing fear of exposing his thoughts, his beliefs, his discoveries in all nakedness to the inspection and criticism of the world. “Of the most fearful, cautious and suspicious temper that I ever knew”, said Whiston, his successor in the Lucasian Chair. The too well-known conflicts and ignoble quarrels with Hooke, Flamsteed, Leibniz are only too clear an evidence of this […]. He parted with and published nothing except under the extreme pressure of friends. Until the second phase of his life, he was a wrapt, consecrated solitary, pursuing his studies by intense introspection with a mental endurance perhaps never equalled. See Keynes, ‘Newton’ (1946).

⁸⁶Iliffe, ‘Is He like Other Men?’ (1995), 175.

⁸⁷One of his most dedicated disciples was the Scottish mathematician John Keill (1671–1721), who taught at Oxford as the Savilian Professor of astronomy and who vigorously defended Newton in his priority dispute with Leibniz. Keill's student, John Theophile Desaguliers, became the leading exponent of Newtonian mechanics in Britain (see below). Another acolyte was the Swiss mathematician Fatio de Duillier (1664–1753), who was particularly instrumental in communicating Newton's view to leading Continental scientists such as Christiaan Huygens.

⁸⁸‘Yet the incomparable Mr. Newton has shown how far mathematics, applied to some part of nature, may, upon principles that matters of fact justify, carry us in the knowledge of some […] particular provinces of the incomprehensible universe’. Locke, ‘Thoughts’ (1812/1693), 186.

⁸⁹Among others, the visiting French scholar Jacques Cassini offered him in 1698 a large pension by Louis XIV that would have involved an appointment at the Royal Academy of Sciences, as well as the mastership of Trinity College; Westfall, Never at Rest (1980), 587–89. Although little interested in acquiring wealth, he left his nieces and nephews a liquid estate of £ 32,000 in 1727 (id., 870).

⁹⁰MacLeod, Heroes (2007).

⁹¹As Michael Hunter has pointed out, the prestige of the scientific endeavour and culture was by no means assured in Restoration England. Only after 1700, he notes, ‘under the presiding genius of Newton, science became increasingly orthodox, systematic, and influential’. Hunter, ‘Debate’ (1995), 119.

⁹²Thus, for example, the prodigiously gifted Italian scholar Cesare Beccaria (1738–1794) was dubbed ‘Il Newtoncino’ by his admirers; see Gay, Enlightenment: An Interpretation (1966), 12.

⁹³For summaries of this debate, which seems so absurd to us today, see especially Jones, Ancients and Moderns (1961), Spadafora, Idea (1980). Oddly enough, Newton himself seems to have believed that much of what he had discovered was already known by the ancients Greeks but had been lost subsequently; Iliffe, ‘Is He like Other Men?’ (1995), 165–168.

⁹⁴Cited by Spadafora, Idea (1980), 48.

⁹⁵Brock, History of Chemistry (1992), 76.

⁹⁶Dobbs/Jacob, Newton (1995). Boerhaave serves as another classic example of the kind of epigone that is instrumental in disseminating the ideas of the true cultural entrepreneurs, in his case Descartes and Newton. Famous and celebrated in his own days, his original contributions were few and middling, yet he helped spread the main cultural beliefs of the Enlightenment, not only in his own country but throughout Europe.

⁹⁷Schliesser, ‘Hume's Newtonianism’ (2007).

⁹⁸In his History of Astronomy, Smith wrote that:

Such is the system of Sir Isaac Newton, a system whose parts are all more strictly connected together, than those of any other philosophical hypothesis … . His principles, it must be acknowledged, have a degree of firmness and solidity that we should in vain look for in any other system. The most sceptical cannot avoid feeling this … . Can we wonder then, that it should have gained the general and complete approbation of mankind, and that it should now be considered, not as an attempt to connect in the imagination the phenomena of the Heavens, but as the greatest discovery that ever was made by man, the discovery of an immense chain of the most important and sublime truths, all closely connected together, by one capital fact, of the reality of which we have daily experience. For a recent analysis see Montes, ‘Newton's real influence’ (2008).

⁹⁹Gaukroger, Bacon (2001), 20–7.

¹⁰⁰Shapin, ‘Boyle’ (1988). There were exceptions, of course, such as the mathematician John Dee, who is believed by some to have been more advanced in his thinking than Bacon. This case has been heavily contested. In any event, while his introduction to Euclid's works remained quite influential, it is quite clear that his subsequent influence was far more limited than that of Bacon.

¹⁰¹Dear, Nature (2006).

¹⁰²Iliffe, ‘Philosophy’ (2003), 272.

¹⁰³Dobbs/Jacob, Newton (1995), 61.

¹⁰⁴Jacob, Scientific Culture (1997) has expressed this view most eloquently. It is true that the career and work of Jean T. Desaguliers exemplifies the positive effect of Newtonianism in Britain, focusing on the practical and useful application of the new mechanical science, but during Desaguliers's life (1683–1744), nor that of other similarly minded Newtonians of that age such as James Jurin (1684–1750), no Industrial Revolution took place.

¹⁰⁵Cardwell, Turning Points (1972), 49–50.

¹⁰⁶Home, ‘Physics’ (2003), 361.

¹⁰⁷Feingold, Newtonian Moment (2004), 148.

¹⁰⁸Becker, Heavenly City (1932), 61–62.

¹⁰⁹See Voltaire, Élements (1738); s'Gravesande, Elements (1720), translated into English (from Latin) by none other than Jean T. Desaguliers himself. A sixth edition of s'Gravesande's book was published in 1747, and the influence of this book is attested by its impact on the intellectual development of Joseph Priestley, a central figure of the English Industrial Enlightenment; Schofield, Enlightenment (1997), 24–28.

¹¹⁰Algarotti's book became a huge best-seller: it was translated into French in 1738 and English in 1739 and into many other European languages; Algarotti, Newton's Philosophy (1739). See also Mazzotti, ‘Newton’ (2004).

¹¹¹In a famous anecdote, the French mathematician Jean-Baptiste Delambre's in his eulogy of the great mathematician Lagrange recounts that Lagrange often cited Newton as the greatest genius that ever existed but also the luckiest, because there was only one universe the laws of which he could discover; Delambre, ‘Notice’ (1867), xx.

¹¹²Dobbs goes as far as dubbing Newton as one of ‘history's great losers’, failing in his aim to stem ‘the tides of mechanism, materialism, deism and atheism’. Dobbs, ‘Newton’ (2000), 38–39.

¹¹³While it is perhaps far-fetched to see in his Arianist (and thus heretical) convictions a driving force for his science, his Christian faith affirmed and supported his scientific work. He could do this by developing eclectic and idiosyncratic religious beliefs that were designed to be consistent with his scientific insights. He ignored the problems that his mechanical theory posed for cosmogenesis and ostensibly adhering to the literal biblical text. See Snobelen, ‘Newton’ (1999).

¹¹⁴Voltaire regarded Newton practically in religious terms, regarding himself as Newton's apostle and admitted that Newton was the ‘God to whom I sacrifice’, Feingold, Newtonian Moment (2004), 104.

¹¹⁵Dobbs, ‘Newton’ (2000), 37–38.

¹¹⁶A telling example is a 1797 letter from the eminent Scottish scientist John Robison to his friend and protegé James Watt, in which he begs Watt to present him with some original letters written by Isaac Newton, explaining it by his ‘superstitious veneration for every relick of that wonderful man. I would given anything to have Scrap, however insignificant, of his writings’. Robinson/McKie, Partners (1970), 272.

¹¹⁷Gay, Enlightenment: The Science of Freedom (1969), 130. Gay, Enlightenment: The Science of Freedom (1969), 133, that the many poetic tributes to Newton (of which Alexander Pope's famous lines are only the best-known example), while mechanical and monotonous, were fervent and sincere and were a reflection of ‘a new attitude toward nature, toward knowledge, toward the world’.

¹¹⁸Jacob, ‘Truth’ (2000), 320.

¹¹⁹For a recent survey, see Mesoudi, Evolution (2011).

¹²⁰Ziman, Technological Innovation (2000). Mokyr, ‘Useful Knowledge’ (2006).

¹²¹Mokyr, Cultural Origins (in preparation).

¹²²It may not be an accident that Bacon and Newton are spanning a period that witnessed the emergence of the telescope, microscope, thermometer, barometer, pendulum clock and air pump, as well as the astronomical observations of systematic astronomers.