By any other name: early modern expertise and the problem of anachronism

ABSTRACT

The idea of expertise in early modern Europe has attracted significant attention from historians of science and technology in recent years. Some find the term useful in describing the rise of a productive and flexible combination of practical and theoretical knowledge, for which a contemporary word did not yet exist. Others criticize the term as a pernicious anachronism that not only distorts our understanding of the pre-modern past, but also serves to promote a neo-modernization theory of the history of early industrialization. The goal of this article is to ask whether an admittedly anachronistic term such as ‘expertise’ can be a useful and illuminating concept in studying early modern history; whether it can do so without warping our view of the past beyond recognition; and whether it can be decoupled from current versions of modernization theory and other whiggish historical notions.

KEYWORDS:

• Expert
• expertise
• early modern
• modernization
• anachronism

Acknowledgements

My thanks to William Ashworth, Andre Wakefield, Vera Keller, the participants in the Group for Early Modern Studies at Wayne State University, and the anonymous reviewers for their many helpful suggestions for improving this essay. An earlier, shorter version was presented as the keynote address at the conference “Limits of Expertise? Practice and Spaces of Knowledge,” held at the Georg-August-Universität in Göttingen, Germany, in October 2017. I am grateful to Dr. Marian Füssel for inviting me to speak at that venue.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. With apologies to Steven Shapin, Scientific Revolution, 1.

2. Dear, “Science is Dead,” 52.

3. Hall, “On Whiggism,” 54.

4. Skinner, “Meaning and Understanding,” 31, 48–9 (original emphasis).

5. Butterfield, Whig Interpretation, preface.

6. However, Deborah Harkness has offered an interesting defense of ‘science’ as very much a contemporary term and concept in Elizabethan London, though she continues to reject ‘scientist’ as an anachronism. Harkness, Jewel House, xv-xviii.

7. Wakefield, “Butterfield’s Nightmare,” 235.

8. Ashworth, “Expertise and Authority,” 103 and 113.

9. Ibid, 113.

10. Wakefield, 243 (original emphasis).

11. Andre Wakefield, personal communication with the author, 27 September 2017; William Ashworth, personal communication with the author, 29 September 2017.

12. Mendelsohn and Kinzelbach, “Common Knowledge,” 261, 277–8.

13. Wakefield, “Butterfield’s Nightmare,” 243.

14. Rostow, Process; Rostow, Stages; Landes, Unbound Prometheus; and Landes, Wealth and Poverty.

15. Mokyr has published very widely, but for a chief overview of his theories see: Mokyr, Gifts of Athena; Mokyr, “Intellectual Origins”; Mokyr, Enlightened Economy; Mokyr “Cultural Entrepreneurs”; and Mokyr, “Culture.”

16. Mokyr, “Culture,” 40.

17. Ashworth, Industrial Revolution. Ashworth, “Manufacturing Expertise”; and Ashworth, “Intersection.”

18. McCloskey, Bourgeois Equality, xi-xii. See also McCloskey, Bourgeois Virtues; and McCloskey, Bourgeois Dignity.

19. McCloskey, “How We Became Rich,” 35–6.

20. Mokyr, “Culture,” 44.

21. Jacob, Scientific Culture; Jacob, First Knowledge Economy; Jacob and Stewart, Practical Matter; and Stewart, Rise of Public Science.

22. Popplow, “Knowledge Management.” See also Popplow, “Economizing.”

23. Ashworth, “British”; Ashworth, “Ghost of Rostow”; and Ashworth, Industrial Revolution, chap. 8.

24. It should be noted that free-market capitalism is not the only modernizing ideology that early modern “expertise” has been used to advocate for. Given its emphasis on material and technological progress and the productive mix of practical and theoretical knowledge, Marxist materialists have found the concept equally compelling. See Keller, “Deprogramming.”

25. Dear, “Science is Dead,” 52; and Wakefield, “Butterfield’s Nightmare.”

26. Ashworth, “Expertise and Authority,” 113.

27. Ash, “Introduction,” 4–11.

28. Smith, Body of the Artisan, 238–9; my emphasis.

29. Long, “Trading Zones,” 842; my emphasis. For a more extensive consideration of early modern trading zones, see Long, Artisan/Practitioners, esp. chap. 4.

30. Long, “Trading Zones,” 844.

31. Ibid., 842–3.

32. Long, Artisan/Practitioners, 125.

33. Long, “Trading Zones,” 845.

34. Harkness, Jewel House, 118, 141, and 217. For an exploration of London’s eclectic communities of artisans, natural philosophers, and entrepreneurs over a more extended period, see Iliffe, “Capitalizing Expertise.”

35. Portuondo, Secret Science; and Portuondo, “Cosmography.”

36. Barrera-Osorio, Experiencing Nature; and Barrera-Osorio, “Knowledge and Empiricism.”

37. Barrera-Osorio, Experiencing Nature, esp. chap. 3.

38. Barrera-Osorio, “Experts.”

39. Klein, “Chemical Expertise.” See also Klein, “Apothecary’s Shops”; and Klein, “Blending.”

40. Ash, “A perfect.” See also Ash, Power, chap 2.

41. Walton, “State Building,” 76. See also Mieg, Social Psychology, chap. 3.

42. Mahoney, “Organizing Expertise.”

43. Mukerji, Impossible Engineering.

44. For a strikingly similar case of a diverse array of technical experts, local inhabitants, and central administrators collaborating around a large hydraulic engineering project in the Spanish colonial capital of Mexico City during the late sixteenth century, see Barrera-Osorio, “Experts.”

45. Ash, Draining, chaps. 5 and 8.

46. Mendelsohn and Kinzelbach, “Common Knowledge,” 278.

47. See, for example, Collins and Evans, “Third Wave”; Collins and Evans, Rethinking Expertise; and Collins, “Introduction.”

48. Long, “Trading Zones,” 842.

49. Popplow, “Knowledge Management,” 424; and Popplow, “Economizing,” 263.

50. The literature on projectors is long and growing; see Thirsk, Economic Policy; Novak, Age of Projects; Keller and McCormick, “Toward”; Ratcliff, “Art to Cheat”; Yamamoto, “Reformation”; and Yamamoto, “Distrust.”

51. Mendelsohn and Kinzelbach, “Common Knowledge,” 277–8.

52. Dear, “Science is Dead,” 52. See also Dear, “What Is”; and Dear, “Towards.”

53. Skinner, “Meaning and Understanding,” 48, original emphasis.

54. Dear, “Science is Dead,” 52–4.

55. Jardine, “Whigs and Stories,” 128.

56. Jardine, “Uses and Abuses,” 252. See also Jardine, “Etics and Emics.”

57. Skinner, “Meaning and Understanding,” 48.

58. Mieg, Social Psychology, esp. chap. 3.

59. Ashworth, “Expertise and Authority,” 113.

60. Walton, “State Building.”

61. Stewart, Rise of Public Science.

62. Wakefield, “Butterfield’s Nightmare,” 243.

63. Klein, “Hybrid Experts”; and Klein, “Artisanal-Scientific Experts.”

64. Wakefield, Disordered.

65. Ash, Draining, chap. 8.

66. Mokyr, “Cultural Entrepreneurs”; Popplow, “Economizing”; and Popplow, “Knowledge Management.”

67. Popplow, “Knowledge Management,” esp. 431–3. See also Popplow, “Nightmares.”

68. Klein, “Savant Officials,” 373. See also Klein, “Artisanal-Scientific Experts.”

69. Sandman, “Educating Pilots”; Sandman, “Controlling Knowledge”; Barrera-Osorio, Experiencing Nature, chap. 2; Walton, “State Building”; Ash, Draining; Ash, Power.

70. Mokyr, “Culture,” 40; and McCloskey, “How We Became Rich,” 35–6.

71. O’Neil, “Free Market”; Adler, “Warming”; and Cook, “Paul Ryan.”

72. Collins and Evans, “Third Wave”; and Collins and Evans, Rethinking Expertise; Turner, “What Is.”

73. Mendelsohn and Kinzelbach, “Common Knowledge,” 277.

74. Friedman, “E. P. A.”; Gabriel, “Trump Chooses”; Davenport, “Rick Perry”; Zernike, “Trump’s Pick”; Harris, “Diplomats”; and Irwin, “Donald Trump.”