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Abstract
Historians of science and technology once worried about the anachronism that suffused their discipline. Today there is less patience for such critical self-reflection. There are however still certain types of anachronism that historians of science have reason to worry about. My essay interrogates the abiding allure of what I call Disney history. Narratives that link the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment, and the Industrial Revolution together in an imagined causal series are prone to Disneyish anachronism, especially when they employ bundles of robustly anachronistic terms – economist, expert, scientist – to denote their imagined protagonists. Eighteenth-century oeconomies, which constitute the focus of this volume, have been especially susceptible to this kind of analysis, as indicated by the invention of concepts such as the ‘economic Enlightenment’ and the ‘Industrial Enlightenment’. Such concepts, I argue, are tailored to serve the needs of Disney history.
Acknowledgements
My thanks to Eric Ash, William Ashworth, Lorraine Daston, Gabriel Finkelstein, Martin Gierl, Ernst Hamm, Rebecca Kornbluh, William Newman, Marc Redfield, Sophus Reinert, Lissa Roberts, and Leonard Rosenband for commenting on various versions. But I am the only one (with the possible exception of Ashworth) who is responsible for it. The Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin generously supported me while I was conducting research for this article.
Notes
1. Butterfield, Whig Interpretation, v.
2. “Introduction,” Oeconomies in the Age of Newton, 4.
3. See Tribe, Governing Economy and Land, Labour, and Economic Discourse (London: Routledge, 1978); also Lissa Roberts, “Practicing Oeconomy.”
4. J. G. H. Feder, review of Adam Smith, Göttingische Anzeigen von gelehrten Sachen (1777), 237.
5. Pfeiffer, Der Antiphysiocrat, 44.
6. Galiani, La Bagarre, 81–83; and Vardi, The Physiocrats,142–143.
7. See Reinert, Translating Empire, 1–12, 73–74, 176–178.
8. Tribe, Governing Economy, 133–48.
9. Cf. Alvey, A Short History of Ethics and Economics,15–32; Baloglou, “The Tradition of Economic Thought,” 7–92.
10. Ross, “Scientist: The Story of a Word,” 65–85.
11. Cited in Ross, “Scientist,” 78.
12. See Lucier, “The Professional and the Scientist,” 726; also Ross, “Scientist,” 76.
13. Phillips, Acolytes of Nature, 2.
14. Phillips, Acolytes, 4–5.
15. Dear, “Genealogy of Modern Science,” 431.
16. With apologies to Margaret Cavendish and Maria Sibylla Merian.
17. See, for example, Klein, “Artisanal-scientific Experts,” 303–306.
18. Cf. editors’ Introduction, in Reich, Rexroth, and Roick, eds., Wissen, maßgeschneidert, 7.
19. There is some disagreement about this. See, for example, Hirschi, “Moderne Eunuchen?” 292–300. For a different perspective, compare Leclerc, Le juge et l’expert.
20. Dwyer, Expert Evidence, 242.
21. Gilbert, The Law of Evidence.
22. Drosdowski, ed., Duden Band 7, 169.
23. Golan, Laws of Men and Laws of Nature, 7, 69–70.
24. Ash, “Expertise and the Early Modern State,” 4.
25. See Roberts and Schaffer, “Preface,” xiii–xxvii. At a 2004 gathering, workshop participants were urged to avoid using the terms “science” and “technology” in their contributions. These contributions formed the basis of The Mindful Hand, which appeared a few years later.
26. Dear, “Genealogy of Modern Science,” 435.
27. Ibid., 431.
28. Borges, “On Exactitude in Science,” 325.
29. Butterfield, Whig Interpretation, 11–16, 29.
30. Butterfield, Whig Interpretation, 69–71.
31. Foucault, Discipline and Punish.
32. Butterfield, Whig Interpretation, v.
33. See, for example, Scranton, “Theory and Narrative in the History of Technology,” 385–393; Forman, “Independence, Not Transcendence, for the Historian of Science,” 71–86; and Jardine, “Whigs and Stories: Herbert Butterfield and the Historiography of Science,” 125–140.
34. Stocking, “On the Limits of ‘Presentism’ and ‘Historicism’,” 211–218.
35. Gould, Time’s Cycle, Time’s Arrow.
36. The history of the earth sciences has been especially blessed with creative historical work inspired by non-Whig approaches. Martin Rudwick’s writing constitutes another paradigmatic example.
37. Staudenmaier, “What SHOT Hath Wrought,” 708.
38. Staudenmaier, “What SHOT Hath Wrought,” 712.
39. Hall, “On Whiggism,” 45–59.
40. Nature 329 (17 September 1987): 213–214.
41. Brush, “Scientists as Historians,” 229.
42. Alvargonzález, “Is the History of Science Essentially Whiggish?”, 94; also Mayr, “When is Historiography Whiggish?”, 301–309.
43. Jardine, “Uses and Abuses of Anachronism,” 251–270.
44. Jardine, “Uses and Abuses,” 253.
45. Daston, “Science Studies and the History of Science,” 800–802, 805.
46. Dear and Jasanoff, “Dismantling Boundaries,” 770–771.
47. Dear, “Science is Dead: Long Live Science,” 50–54.
48. Novick, That Noble Dream.
49. Daston, “Science Studies,” 808.
50. It would be less than useful to rehearse here the vast and growing literature on objectivity and scientific personae. As an entry point, a few options include: Daston and Galison, Objectivity; Becker and Clark, eds., Little Tools of Knowledge; Daston and Sibum, “Introduction: Scientific Personae,” 1–8.
51. Novick, That Noble Dream, 11.
52. Alvargonzalez, “Is the History of Science Essentially Whiggish?”, 90.
53. Mokyr, “Intellectual Origins of Modern Growth,” 284–351. See also Mokyr, The Gifts of Athena.
54. McCloskey, “Review of Mokyr,”
55. Rostow, Stages of Economic Growth.
56. Ashworth, “The Ghost of Rostow,” 249–274; Rostow, The Process of Economic Growth and The Stages of Economic Growth.
57. Ashworth, “Ghost of Rostow,” 250.
58. Parsons, The System of Modern Societies, 1.
59. See Lerner, “Modernization,” 387–394.
60. Therborn, “Modernization” Discourses, 61–62.
61. Cited in Ashworth, “Ghost of Rostow,” 253.
62. On Landes, see Rosenband, “Never Just Business: David Landes,” 168–176.
63. Landes, Wealth and Poverty of Nations, xxi; cited in Rosenband, “Never Just Business,” 168.
64. See, for example, Judt, ‘A Clown in Regal Purple,’ 66–94; Smith, The Concept of Social Change; Tipps, ‘Modernization Theory,’ 199–266. The reception in West Germany was much different and much less critical, largely because of Germany’s effort to deal with its own past after 1945. For the classic German model of modernization theory, see Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Modernisierungstheorie und Geschichte (1975).
65. Eley, “German History and the Contradictions of Modernity,” 67–103.
66. Popplow, “Ökonomische Aufklärung,” 4–48.
67. Popplow, “Ökonomische Aufklärung,” 4.
68. Popplow, “Ökonomische Aufklärung,” 7.
69. Justi, Oeconomischen und Cameral-Wissenschaften.
70. On reputation and publication in eighteenth-century German universities, see Clark, Academic Charisma.
71. For the full account, see Wakefield, The Disordered Police State, 49–80.
72. Klein, “Artisanal-scientific Experts,” 304.
73. Etienne Stockland, “Policing the Oeconomy of Nature.”
74. Elena Serrano, “Making Oeconomic People.”
75. Van Driel, “Ashes to Ashes,”
76. Lissa Roberts, “Introduction.”
77. William J. Ashworth, “Commentary: Expertise and Authority in the Royal Navy, 1800–1945,” Journal for Maritime Research 16,1 (2014): 103–116. See also Ash, “Expertise and the Early Modern State.”
78. All of these terms and phrases appear on the first page of Popplow, “Ökonomische Aufklärung,” 3.
79. It would be pointless here to offer a full review of that literature. Suffice it to say that most of the debates and contributions to the vast literature on industrialization of the last few decades – whether about the role of violence and slavery, or industriousness, or comparative conditions for take off, or the role of the state – are not the focus of my critique here. Among them, Cannadine, “The Past and the Present in the English Industrial Revolution”; Brewer, The Sinews of Power; Berg, Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth Century Britain; O’Brien and Quinault, eds., The Industrial Revolution and British Society; Pomeranz, The Great Divergence; and Inikori, Africans and the Industrial Revolution in England.
80. William J. Ashworth has detailed this historiographical strand at length in his article on ‘The Ghost of Rostow.’
81. Mokyr, “Cultural Entrepreneurs,” 2.
82. Mokyr, “Cultural Entrepreneurs,” 8.
83. The reference is to Farrington, Francis Bacon: Philosopher of Industrial Science, which Mokyr calls a “dated but still useful biography of Bacon.” (Mokyr, “Cultural Entrepreneurs,” 11.).
84. On Butterfield’s “Whiggishness” in the Origins of Modern Science, see Dobbs, “Newton as Final Cause and First Mover,” 30.
85. Butterfield, Whig Interpretation, 109.
86. Wallace, Mickey Mouse History.
87. Nilsen, Projecting America, 64.
88. Haber served as an aeronautics expert with the Luftwaffe, conducting experiments on prisoners at Dachau to assess the effects of flight-related stress “by immersing some in freezing water and subjecting others to extreme changes in air pressure.” See Chalquist, Deep California,159–160; also Schlosser, Fast Food Nation, 39.
89. Cf. Jacob, The First Knowledge Economy.