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    Plan détaillé Texte intégral Expertise under pressure The historiography of knowledge and disciplinarity: some contemporary trends Finding a niche in the array of cultural histories of knowledge Ordering knowledge Notes de bas de page Auteur

    Ordering Knowledge

    Ce livre est recensé par

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    Table des matières

    Introduction

    Richard Somerset

    p. 7-38

    Texte intégral Expertise under pressure The historiography of knowledge and disciplinarity: some contemporary trends Finding a niche in the array of cultural histories of knowledge Ordering knowledge Notes de bas de page Auteur

    Texte intégral

    The mathematician turns away from the chemist; the chemist from the naturalist; the mathematician, left to himself, divides himself into a pure and a mixed mathematician, who soon part company; the chemist is perhaps a chemist of electrochemistry; if so, he leaves common chemical analysis to others; between the mathematician and the chemist is to be interpolated a ‘physicien’ (we have no English name for him), who studies heat, moisture, and the like. And thus science, even mere physical science, loses all trace of unity. (William Whewell, Quarterly Review, 1834)

    The exercise of taste and sound criticism is, in truth, one of the most improving employments of the understanding. […] Such studies […] lead to inquiries acute, but not painful; profound, but not dry or abstruse. They strew flowers in the path of science; and while they keep the mind bent in some degree, and active, they relieve it, at the same time, from that more toilsome labour to which it must submit in the acquisition of necessary erudition, or the investigation of abstract truth. (Hugh Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, 1783.)

    Expertise under pressure

    1Science has been much in the news of late. At least since the end of 2016, a ‘crisis in authority’ has called into question the hitherto largely sacrosanct standing of politicians, economists, scientists, university lecturers and representatives of public expertise of all kinds. The theme of factuality has suddenly become a major public issue, and the legitimacy of technocratic guardians of such knowledge ever more loudly called into question.1 High-profile political theorists warn of the threat to the stability of the modern state, with its foundation in a rationalist-liberal vision of collective interest served by enlightened self-interest.2 Journalists produce articles connecting the current political mood to epistemological debates several hundred years old, and we scarcely bat an eyelid to come across an opinion piece in the morning paper opening with a reference to a seventeenth-century natural philosopher:

    ‘What is truth? said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer.’ Francis Bacon may have been the father of the great English empirical tradition […] but when he wrote one of the most quoted lines in the language, he could mock Pilate because in 1625 it was self-evident that Jesus was the son of God. Today we are less certain about God and Jesus, but ever more certain about Bacon’s greater point – that if we don’t question and test the answers there is no route to truth.3

    2This article was a critique of the BBC’s actions when it distanced itself from the Newsnight anchor Emily Maitlis who, in May 2020, presented a story about top government advisor Dominic Cummings’ trip to visit relatives during the COVID lockdown as having provoked a public reaction of ‘fury, contempt and anguish.’ The author of the piece, The Observer’s Will Hutton, argued that the confrontation between Maitlis and the BBC was a case of conflicting narratives about ‘factuality’: Maitlis had offered a narrative that clashed with that preferred by the government, and the BBC management – without consulting the presenter – effectively chose to back the government line. To Hutton, this meant that the BBC had renounced its institutional status as legitimate arbitrator of factuality, and handed it over to the state: the legitimate experts were being disempowered, and factuality re-politicised.

    3But the opposite side had an obvious riposte. What sort of expertise, they could ask, is the BBC meant to have in such matters anyway? The brief answer is the capacity to assess newsworthiness. Once upon a time, newsworthiness would have been presented as an essentially objective issue, relating to the inherent significance of the event itself; though naturally the more impressionistic assessment of public mood had always played an equally important – perhaps more important – part. The façade gave the concept of ‘newsworthiness’ a degree of substantiality; an impression that it was decided by a rational weighing up of events in themselves. By ostensibly shifting away from the myth of objectivity towards a franker avowal of intuitiveness, the BBC stands to gain respect from users who naturally prefer not to be patronised; but it is a risky move in the longer term since it participates in the banalisation of expertise, and feeds into the tendency for debates around the legitimacy of content to be replaced by debates around the legitimacy of ownership. Not ‘what’s in the news?’, but ‘whose news is it?’

    4This politicisation of expertise has played into the hands of unscrupulous leaders who have become adept in constructing attractive political identities around a worldview that pits popular wisdom against that of the ‘elites’. The general public is thus encouraged to reject expert opinion as unrepresentative. Contrarian political leaders set the example by taking up the mantle of champions of the people in the crusade against these out-of-touch ‘elites’ with their arrogantly entitled attitudes and unpatriotic values. The groups thus targeted as public enemies are naturally made up of people unlikely to vote for Johnson: remainers, cosmopolitan globalisers, Humanities professors, BBC journalists – and the more traditionalist elements within the Conservative Party. This fake antagonism is transparently designed for electoral purposes not as a matter of ideological conviction, but its very success raises worrying questions about the forces that have been unleashed as a result.

    5One obvious victim of this politicisation of expertise is the concern for truth in the sphere of public debate. As Hutton pointed out, we look rather like Pontius Pilate washing our hands of this annoying inconvenience. In theory at least, the technocratic way towards knowledge has never been a straightforward power game. It is the dialectal confrontation of hypothesis and criticism that is meant to produce expertise, not just personal opinion. Clearly the process is not and cannot be as neutral as the theory would wish, since it is operated by institutions that make choices and build strategies and are subject to pressures. However, if the attempt to organise expertise is rejected for having failed to achieve adequate neutrality, the counterproductive effect will be to open the door to more flagrant and more dangerous forms of politicisation. It already feels as though knowledge – at least in its more topical manifestations – is being colonised. It increasingly struggles to stand for itself, even if only as an ideal; instead, it seems to exist only as ‘owned’ by one voice or another.

    6The recent travails of ‘knowledge’ are reminiscent of the similar agitation around culture provoked by postcolonial thought a decade or so in advance. The legacy of Edward Said’s 1978 ‘orientalist’ thesis is an obvious example. Having deconstructed the West’s scholarly interest in oriental society and culture as a back-door route to the essentialising and normalising of Western ascendency, Said was sometimes subsequently read as implying that the dominant cultural canon of modernity was, as a whole, irredeemably tainted by its imperialist legacy; and its fundamental legitimacy called into question as a result. As a professor of comparative literature, it is hardly surprising that Said did not in fact thus reject out of hand the material his professional life was built on, preferring instead to treat the orientalising colouration of the Western literary canon as an engaging complexity. As Adam Shatz has recently put it, ‘his was an ethics of complex resistance, not an escape from complexity’.4b Nevertheless, Said’s totalising tendency in Orientalism fed into the more radical interpretation. The orientalist bias was presented as so ingrained as to operate unconsciously, thus tainting even the efforts of the well-intended; yet Said’s own practice quietly assumed a difference between elite and vulgar orientalism – and treated only the latter as irredeemably lost to culture by the force of the ideological undertow. Later generations of post-colonialists, who did not necessarily come from a similar cultural and intellectual background, tended to be less accommodating. Shatz has a telling anecdote about a 1993 lecture after which, asked why his talk had focused on white male authors, Said admitted to being ‘confounded’ by the realisation that ‘the general validity of the point made in Orientalism…was now being directed at me’.5 The movement Said had been instrumental in shaping soon escaped him completely. What had been for him, ostensibly, an important corrective to the understanding of the content of Western culture, effectively became a mistrust of that culture in itself. Thereafter, to engage too directly or too exclusively with Western culture was to expose oneself to accusations of a form of betrayal: to be perceived as an apologist for imperialist ideology.

    7As these two examples serve to illustrate, there are grounds for thinking that the general pathway followed by the cultural history of science since the 1990s resembles in some ways that followed by postcolonial critical theory after the 1970s. Broadly speaking, the critical first phase served to deconstruct a long-standing cultural myth and expose its implicit ideology; it was then followed by a second phase in which the critical insight generates structural renewal: intellectual realignments, disciplinary rearrangements, and perhaps even institutional reorganisation. Finally, the unexpected consequences of the innovations make themselves felt, both on-campus and in the wider political world. The recent wave of hostility to technocratic elites, fanned by populist opportunists, was perhaps one such unintended outcome. The absence of consensual content capable of securely shaping ‘culture’ and ‘knowledge’ has been ruthlessly exploited by those willing to pursue the explicit politicisation of those spaces. Edward Said in the 1990s and the BBC in the 2020s both got accused of a form of betrayal. The critique comes from diametrically opposed political quarters; but the charge is the same, and the sense of outrage animating it derives from similar roots. Edward Said’s on-going commitment to the Western canon was denounced as a betrayal to the values of postcolonialism by those who feel that ‘culture’ could no longer be related to ultimate meaning but only to specific identity. Similarly, the BBC’s on-going assertion of its competence to adjudicate on newsworthiness has been denounced by self-appointed guardians of the popular will as a scandalous breach of trust. When meaning becomes something to be asserted not negotiated, those expressing discordant meanings are no longer just people with different opinions, but adversaries or even enemies.

    8Power and knowledge have always existed in tension with one another. But the modern-period norm in which the mastery of the content of knowledge was used as a pathway to elite status and so to power is potentially under threat from an alternative attitude according to which it is merely the control of the diffusion of knowledge which permits access to influence and so to power. In its less extreme forms, this challenge is salutary. Elites of all kinds need to be challenged as to the nature and the credibility of their particular status. On the other hand, it seems particularly important in the current setting that academic historians of science and of culture should be wary of being perceived to play into the hands of currents and fashions willing to sacrifice all aspiration to ‘objectivity’ on the altar of popular representativity. The guardianship of ‘public knowledge’ by technocratic elites certainly generates political issues around accountability, but if we believe at all in the inherent value of that tentacular network of relations of expertise called ‘science’, we should accept this challenge. The struggle to manage the politics of science is an important and real issue: we must be concerned about the relationship between knowledge and power. But this concern is not well served by total effacement of the boundaries between the two terms. If we treat ‘knowledge’ as nothing more than the product of a particular kind of power-based negotiation, no credible riposte will be available to those who demand majoritarian oversight for the whole process. This sort of reductionism clearly needs to be resisted. Citizenship is an adequate qualification for the right to vote or for jury service; it is not in itself an adequate qualification for deciding on what counts as reliable knowledge. Academic commentators should beware of inadvertently feeding into such movements by normalising an approach to ‘science’ that focuses only on the institutional and discursive structures of meaning and leaves out the content of meaning. Nobody with a sense of public responsibility really wants to throw out the epistemological baby with the political bathwater.

    The historiography of knowledge and disciplinarity: some contemporary trends

    9It is striking that the current attack on technocratic authority tends to treat the expertise at the heart of that authority in undifferentiated terms. The institutional and conceptual complexities are reduced to a singularity which has surreptitiously managed to corner power. Whatever the political validity of this critique of technocratic influence, it is certainly problematic conceptually and historically. The constitution of the modern technocracy was far more complex than this reductive politicization would suggest; and indeed many of the issues about the legitimacy of the forms of knowledge generated by the early modern revolution in meaning-making were as strongly debated at the time as they are now. At the heart of this debate was the question of the impact of disciplinary specialisation upon knowledge.6 The characteristically modern mode of knowledge-production – empirical thinking allied with experimental methods – inevitably precipitated an ever-increasing array of more or less methodologically distinct disciplines and disciplinary fields. This division of intellectual labour produced an extraordinarily productive knowledge-machine whose instrumental results were deeply satisfying to anyone willing to take them at face value. However, specialisation also produced problems, notably political problems of institutional management and conceptual problems of epistemological coherence.

    10This book is not about the current crisis of confidence in technocratic elites, since it treats the conceptual past rather than the political present. But the two subjects are of course linked. A nuanced understanding of the epistemological and structural tensions underlying the establishment of the modern disciplinary landscape – the breeding ground of technocratic elites – is vital to the understanding of both the past and the present, and to the sense of the connectedness of conceptual and political issues in knowledge-making. It is the broad intention behind this collection of essays to help provide a historical platform of this sort.

    11The issues at stake are thus fundamental ones, relevant both to the history of thought and to contemporary politics; however, this book’s material scope is necessarily more specific and more limited. It is in no sense an attempt to encapsulate the whole history of modern Western knowledge, but merely a historical survey of some of the ways in which knowledge was reorganised in Europe in the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This geographical zone and this timeframe are of particular interest as representing the crucible of the modern disciplinary schema of knowledge. Though often challenged for its aptitude to replicate and reinforce the ascendency of privileged groups, the schema nevertheless continues to operate as a default model, if only as a pragmatic requirement for the structuring of research and of university teaching. Indeed, the critique of discipline-based knowledge structures as perpetuating the influence of political elites has arguably had the paradoxical effect not of undermining the model but extending its range. New modes of ‘cultural history’, for example, have not replaced traditional ‘history of science’ or ‘history of ideas’, but sit alongside them as alternative disciplinary structures, which behave much as the former did, establishing specific critical canons and seeking to extend their influence through the establishment of new university courses and, eventually, departments.7 Such ongoing fragmentation of the historical and critical study of the cultures of knowledge is likely to exacerbate the tendency towards politicisation. It is therefore important to tap into energies that might pull the field together, and not leave the naturally dispersive and centrifugal tendencies of disciplinary diversification to dominate alone.

    12Disciplines were only of limited interest in a historiographical setting that treated specialisation more or less exclusively as the rational organisation of clearly delimited issues of practical methodology in the service of equally clearly defined outcomes. Starting in the 1980s and 1990s, cultural historians engaging in the actual processes by which data was produced, processed and shared, convincingly showed that the disciplinary and institutional structures of emergent modern science were as much influenced by codes of social interaction as they were by deliberate rational choices. The work of Steven Shapin is particularly influential in the area, notably A Social History of Truth (1994). This sort of approach has led to a plethora of studies investigating the detail of material practices in one way or another, while leaving the study of philosophical aspirations to more traditional historians of science. This division means that the construction of wider meaning tends to get studied by historians focusing on concepts, and ignored by those focusing on practices. Meaning, or meaning intention, tends be left aside by the cultural historian of knowledge, sometimes even in a programmatic way, as inherently ideological and therefore beyond their remit.8

    13The cultural histories of knowledge have since operated by developing a variety of decentring prisms through which to reconsider the object ‘science’ or, more likely, some particular part in the complex process of the production of scientific discourse. Perhaps most active has been the approach which explores what might be called the artisan’s perspective, and brings into view the contributions of classes of individuals who tended to be ignored in traditional historiography where their merely mechanical skills were treated as facilitating philosophical inquiry rather than shaping it. Countless publications of this sort have been produced over the last twenty years, but significant recent examples include Pamela Smith et al., Ways of Making and Knowing: The Material Culture of Empirical Knowledge (2014), or Ann Blair’s Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Information Age (2010), in which the forms of ‘scientific’ modernity are analysed as shaped by the essentially pragmatic challenge of what is today called ‘information management’. An alternative perspective is that which looks at the emergent modern knowledge economy as the product not of monolithic institutions but of the more fluid communicative dynamics of multiple relations between individuals and groups. Empires of Knowledge: Scientific Networks in the Early Modern World (2019), a collection of essays edited by Paula Findlen is a strong recent example. A variant on this network theme questions the dichotomy between centre and periphery in the knowledge-construction process implied by Bruno Latour’s concept of ‘centres of calculation’, and re-examines the creative input of actors associated with geographical locations traditionally thought of only as useful sources of exotic information. An example of this approach is offered by Kapil Raj’s Relocating Modern Science: Circulation and the Construction of Knowledge in South Asia and Europe, 1650–1900 (2007).

    14Alongside such studies are others with a similar approach but a wider discursive scope – covering not just those areas of activity we might see as feeding into the emergence of the sciences, but the whole range of concerns that might have played a part in the dynamics of knowledge in an early-modern setting. Thus, for example, Anthony Grafton and Ann Blair’s collection of essays, The Transmission of Culture in Early Modern Europe (1990) does not treat knowledge in itself as such; rather it treats a wide array of fields which rely on forms of knowledge embedded within a broader cultural framework. It thus touches upon law, theology, dialectics, statecraft and more, but it too is more concerned with how these fit together into a transmissible ‘culture’ rather than on the contents of the texts that constitute that culture.

    15All the studies referred to so far are cultural histories which share a bottom-up or process-oriented approach to the historical study of knowledge and its constitution. They take apart the notion of ‘science’, or ‘culture’ by dissecting the material processes that contribute to its construction. While a study like Grafton and Blair’s work on culture provides a useful broader canvas for the other studies more particularly focused on ‘science’, none of them seeks to offer explicitly conceptual context. To find this sort of treatment, we have to turn to traditional top-down or concept-driven historiography. There are of course many of these, though they no longer dominate the field as they did before the 1980s. One high-profile example is Stephen Gaukroger’s monumental four-volume Science and the Shaping of Modernity (2006-2020) covering the medieval, early modern, modern and contemporary periods in the development of scientific thought.9 We will have the occasion to discuss part of Gaukroger’s reading of the early modern material in a subsequent section; suffice to say here that his work comes out of a very different and more philosophical tradition, but it too has also opened itself to a wider purview, notably taking on board the cultural context of (abstract) meaning-making. Though practically challenging because of the sheer volume of material being produced within each domain, more communication between these ever more estranged approaches to the history of the constitution of knowledge would be mutually beneficial.

    16The specific study of the history of disciplinarity is a less active domain than those mentioned so far, partly because many cultural historians see disciplinary boundaries as artificial constructions imposed by the institutionally powerful, deserving to be thrown down rather than studied, the better to get at authentic practices, often perceived as transcending disciplinary boundaries. However, the formation of disciplines is not only an unavoidable part of the story of modernity, it also provides an effective focal point around which the bridging of material and conceptual approaches to the history of knowledge-construction might be attempted. Examples of such efforts already exist. Focusing on an earlier period, Grafton and Siraisi’s collection of essays, Natural Particulars: Nature and the Disciplines in Renaissance Europe (1999) offers a practice-oriented study of the prehistory of disciplinarity in the sixteenth century. More pertinent for our purposes is Tore Frängysmyr’s collection, The Structures of Knowledge: Classifications of Science and Learning since the Renaissance (2001) which covers a longer period, and attempts to combine the close-grained study of specific practices with a conceptually-oriented consideration of the formation of a characteristically modern taxonomy of knowledge categories.

    17The positioning of Frängysmyr’s collection is particularly suggestive and useful, demonstrating as it does that a focus on disciplinarity can offer a bridge between process-driven cultural histories and concept-driven traditional histories. It takes a relatively small number of disciplinary centres of activity – which we might rather reductively list as architecture, encyclopaedism, taxonomy, geography and curriculum development – and, through some particular manifestation in a variety of time-frames, seeks to explore the complex of conceptual and pragmatic issues that informed the shaping of modern science as an approach to knowledge marked by disciplinary differentiation. It thus manages to study the detail of the process of the emergence of disciplines without thereby losing sight of the overarching architecture of the various programmes or visions for modern knowledge as a whole. This suggestive outlook is one that we seek to emulate in this book and to extend by applying it to other areas.

    18Another recent publication has usefully shown that the engagement with ultimate meaning can be treated as a characteristic concern of early modern innovators. Ayesha Ramachandran’s The Worldmakers: Global Imagining in Early Modern Europe (2015) achieves an illuminating transversality by approaching a selection of technical writerly innovations of the early modern period through a generalising rather than a particularizing prism. The innovations are minutely studied, not so as to anatomise the procedures of their authors but so as to trace in the material text the bodying forth of an aspiration to globalizing conceptual revolution. For Ramachandran, modernity and modern disciplinarity did not entail a definitive turning away from Classical metaphysics and its aspiration to universal knowledge, but something more of the order of a reorganization and a restructuring of that desire. She rightly points to the paradox that ‘the emphasis on globalism’ promoted by process-oriented cultural history ‘has actually produced a plethora of local narratives and detailed micro-histories, but the intellectual problem of understanding “the world” and how it is imagined as a totality still demands critical attention.’10 Ramachandran offers a close reading of a small selection of influential texts by canonical authors – Mercator, Montaigne, Camoes, Spenser, Descartes and Milton – but places them all in exceptionally broad-ranging material and conceptual contexts which resist linear or parochial interpretation. Not all early modern actors in the culture of knowledge would be as credible as Ramachandran’s six as actual ‘worldmakers’, but most of them would have at least hoped that their efforts participated in a process of worldmaking. Or we might also call it meaning-making. World-making, meaning-making: the terms are near-synonyms when applied to the early modern period, since in that setting credible ‘meaning’ needed a capacity to appeal to the universal.

    19Our own approach is most closely inspired by the examples of Frängsmyr and Ramachandran. That is, it aspires to engage with the close texture of early-modern practices in the manner foregrounded by process-oriented cultural history without thereby losing sight of an overarching conceptual framing. We use the issue of disciplinarity as the bridge between the material and conceptual dimensions of the early modern knowledge-building project. Naturally, the work cannot claim to be complete in itself. Its goal is not in fact completeness but a form of suggestive exemplarity. Thus, we focus on a number of specific domains of thought and activity in which the conceptual and institutional remodelling of the edifice of knowledge under the pressure of disciplinary specialisation was, for a variety of reasons, particularly marked and particularly significant. These domains can be arranged on a spectrum ranging from the more abstract to the more practical, with the processes of disciplinary differentiation moulded conceptually from the top-down at the one extreme, and pragmatically, from the bottom-up at the other. Our objects of study cluster around different points on this spectrum. At one end of the scale, we will consider theoretical positions espoused by certain Renaissance or Enlightenment thinkers, specifically Francis Bacon, Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle and Alexander Gerard. In the middle can be situated chapters treating the theory-driven practical innovations driving the emergence of modern encyclopedism and museology, as well as the provision of suitably-adapted educational programmes. At the other end of the scale, we will look at an example of pragmatically-determined practices helping to shape the conceptual and institutional form of a modern discipline – the case in point being that of medicine.

    20In all of this, it is our constant concern to consider the innovations holistically, treating neither theory nor praxis as primordial, but focusing on contemporary efforts to manage the practical energies driving disciplinary specialisation in such a way as to contain their tendency to fragment the universalising aspirations of the knowledge-building project as a whole. The point of this focus cannot possibly be to recommend the revival of such a mission for knowledge, which would plainly be neither credible nor desirable. Instead it is simply an attempt to reinstate what we take to be a proper balance between fragmentary ‘bottom-up’ energies of structural emergence and unifying ‘top-down’ networks of conceptual relations in the genesis of the modern, discipline-based conception of universal knowledge. The crux of the matter is the tension between the diametrically opposed energies of disciplinary differentiation on the one hand, and epistemological ambition on the other. Though opposed in tendency, both forces need to be borne in mind simultaneously to do justice to the complex condition of modern knowledge. Unstable equilibrium can only be maintained in movement.

    21Our appeal to the literary is fundamental in this respect. Literature, and literary culture, we suggest, was the glue that might hold together a culture of knowledge threatened with fragmentation by the pragmatic forces of disciplinary specialisation. Often represented as equally timeless as ‘science’, the modern conception of the place of ‘literature’ was in reality equally rooted in this specific time-frame. Seizing the opportunity offered by the blindness of the empirical sciences to questions about the ultimate nature or basis of knowledge, ‘literature’ was able opportunistically to reinvent itself as a modern discipline paradoxically specialized in non-specialism. This exceptional position allowed it to aspire to a significant role in the making of meaning: a sort of meta-discipline that appealed to a different order of sensibility thanks to which adepts might join together the informational dots generated by empirical disciplines and thus transform mere data into a meaningful picture. In theory at any rate, the whole was worth decidedly more than the sum of its parts.11

    Finding a niche in the array of cultural histories of knowledge

    22The study of disciplinarity in the terms set out above poses something of a historiographical challenge. As we have seen, neither traditional history of science nor the mainstream of contemporary cultural history provide an adequate norm since both tend to misrepresent the issue of disciplinarity: the first giving the disciplines too much epistemological or systematic significance, and the second not enough. For the one, disciplines were the natural provinces of ‘science’ and so required no questioning; for the other, they are artificial constructs to be studied only for what they say about the discursive structuring of science as authority, or as a form of power. It is our intention to engage with disciplines and disciplinarity in the full range of requisite terms: the discursive, the structural, the epistemological. That is to say, the analysis of the discursive strategies of the actors involved in the transformation of the knowledge landscape needs to be carried out in terms that relate those discourses to practical and political structures on the one hand, but without losing touch with the conceptual issues for all that.

    23What this entails in concrete terms will be explored in this section. We will proceed by briefly describing the work of a range of cultural historians dealing with the history of forms of knowledge in ways that engage more or less directly with our theme of disciplinarity. The selection of works referred to is by no means exhaustive: it is intended to function only as a sort of schematic map of possible approaches to the cultural history of knowledge, the comparison of which will help us to establish our own preferred orientation. We start with a pair of historians whose focus is that of the intellectual historian’s top-down attitude that concepts shape practices; then we move on to a trio thinking in more structuralist terms (characteristic of contemporary cultural history) which prompts them to apply the reverse bottom-up principle that practices shape concepts. Within each group, we compare historians focusing primarily on ‘science’ to historians focusing on other forms of ‘knowledge’ or ‘culture.’ The selection thus offers us a two-way comparison, bringing into contact historians’ views about the workings of knowledge with their choices about what counts as ‘knowledge’.

    24We begin with Stephen Gaukroger and John Brewer, historians whose audiences probably overlap little since the first is essentially a historian of science and the second essentially a historian of culture. Though we have bracketed them together as ‘top-down’ intellectual historians, concentrating more on the work of influential theorisers than on the practices of less exalted groups, both are open to the trends of cultural history in the sense that their respective objects of study are defined in broad cultural terms rather than in narrow technical terms.

    25Hostile to the traditional disciplinary history that pits a new science against an old theology, Stephen Gaukroger offers in The Emergence of a Scientific Culture (2006) and The Collapse of Mechanism and the Rise of Sensibility (2010) a detailed analysis of philosophical and theological thought from the Middle Ages on, which allows him to make the case for a very different narrative, one in which the logic of modern science emerged from a combined appeal to reformed versions of classical natural philosophy and natural theology. Thus, Newtonian empiricists were able to overcome the epistemological criticisms of Cartesian mechanists by a strategy of what Gaukroger calls ‘triangulation’. This entailed drawing parallel support from arguments based in empirical observation to deal with secondary causes and from unconnected arguments derived from natural theology to render less problematic empiricism’s incapacity to address either first or final causes.

    26Gaukroger further argues that this compromise epistemology was substantially theorised in the eighteenth century, as is witnessed by the paradigmatic standing of ‘sensibility’ during this period, quickly displacing Cartesian ‘mechanism’. Both the French philosophes and British moral philosophers sought ways of incorporating the sensitive processes of cognition into the understanding of what ‘knowledge’ is and how it is constituted. They combined reason and sensibility as necessary partners in producing (non-definitive) empirical knowledge about a world understood in merely phenomenological terms. The figure most markedly sceptical of earlier rationalist traditions of natural philosophy was David Hume, who compared his incapacity to account for the causes of moral ideas to Newton’s incapacity to ascribe causes for gravitational phenomena.12 Hume’s scepticism led him to question, not the rationality of natural philosophy as such, but the capacity of any given system of rational thought to encapsulate all natural and human phenomena.13 So for Gaukroger, earlier rationalist natural philosophies were reformed in the mid-eighteenth century by an interest in subjective or sensitive agency, which tended to foreground an empirical interest in historical process as against rational categories. The same process would also promote a movement towards disciplinary differentiation, there now being ‘no hope for a single, unified model for knowledge.’14 This less-than-ideal result meant that the arrangement was accepted in a merely pragmatic spirit, as ‘many thinkers took the lack of unity of natural philosophy to reflect facts about the nature of understanding and about the nature of the world.’15

    27This reading of the concept of ‘sensibility’ is markedly different to that offered by intellectual historians coming at the same period from a literary perspective. Where Gaukroger’s account focuses on conceptual debates around epistemological issues and treats ‘cultural’ texts as the expression of those concerns and positionings, historians other than historians of science have tended to accord the world of cultural expression an autonomous status, worthy and capable of analysis in its own right. In accounts of this sort, the values of ‘sensibility’ tend to be associated with discourses relating to power, not derived from discourses relating to knowledge. We might take as an example of a treatment of this sort the now somewhat elderly but still influential account offered by John Brewer in The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (1997). In his most abstract passage, Brewer sketches a historical overview of the processes by which a ‘culture of politeness’ transformed into a ‘culture of sensibility’ in the 1760s–1790s.16 He suggests that politeness failed because it was too superficial; sensibility took over as more genuine, more heart-felt, before it too was criticised in the aftermath of the French Revolution as affected and potentially dangerous in moral terms. The result is an evolutive narrative in which cultural traits and political trends echo one another in an interactive network of meaning. The network thus sketched is broad-ranging, with extensive treatment offered of a wide array of cultural loci such as theatres, concert halls, art galleries, pleasure gardens and so on. But it is striking that the cultural settings on offer do not include spaces devoted to the production of abstract knowledge.

    28Thus limited, Brewer sees ‘politeness’ and ‘sensibility’ only as ethical codes whose purpose is to define the gentleman and therefore to limit access to power. The main effort of his developmental analysis resides in the identification of the factors that contributed to the shift from the relatively superficial standards of the first ethic to the more demanding aspirations of the second. Many examples are cited to flesh out this narrative, including a passage from David Hume’s essay ‘Of the Standard of Taste’. The cited passage is introduced as follows:

    As David Hume put it, cultural appreciation depended on ‘A perfect serenity of mind, a recollection of thought, a due attention to the object; if any of these circumstances are wanting, our experiment will be fallacious, and we shall be unable to judge of the catholic and universal beauty.’

    29In the next paragraph, Brewer comments on how the critics of the period were attempting to reconcile

    the seemingly democratic view that taste was natural and innate with a strong sense that it was also something ‘finer’ and ‘more delicate’ which could only reach its peak through ‘culture’. Such cultivation meant not so much the acquisition of knowledge as the development of a particular frame of mind or way of looking.17

    30It is striking, however, that in order to make this claim – a valid one so far as it goes – Brewer needs to assume a natural cleavage between ‘knowledge’ and ‘culture’; and it is ironic that he uses Hume as one of his main witnesses here. Actually for Hume, as we briefly saw in discussing Gaukroger, the culture of the knowing gaze was absolutely central to the debate around knowledge – quite the reverse of Brewer’s claim. Hume’s goal in this passage was not to instruct his reader on how to look at an object of art with taste but to explain why the true assessment of beauty or value is problematic. The paradox, he suggests at the outset of the essay, is that we all agree on the general assessment, but disagree on the detail: we all think we know what the beautiful or the great in art is, but we fail to agree on our assessments of particular examples. That being the case, the best method of assessing art is to trust to the judgements of ages; the most reliably beautiful works are those which have earned the widest approbation for the longest time. This is Hume’s sceptical empiricism applied to the appreciation of art in much the same way as it applied to the use of empirical evidence for the evaluation of general propositions about natural or human phenomena.

    31Many historically significant concepts such as the eighteenth-century’s theory of ‘sensibility’ are only likely to be adequately understood if considered in terms that reflect the conditions of their elaboration, and eschewing the imposition of latter-day disciplinary norms that limit the operational field of ‘culture’ to the more material considerations of the world of politics and cut it off from the more abstract considerations that might link the domain to the world of knowledge. The failure in this case significantly impoverishes the concept of ‘sensibility’ since the rich vein of thought connecting feeling to empiricism is not just missed, but more or less written out of the account.18

    32Having thus looked at two examples of ‘top-down’ intellectual history, we now turn our attention to a selection of three bottom-up, or practice-first, cultural histories each of which focuses on a specific portion of the disciplinary spectrum. But since each of these authors is engaging with practices rather than concepts, these are not histories of disciplines as such but histories of particular types of expertise characteristic of a discipline. They do not analyse abstract ideas, but discursive spaces. The first example is provided by Steven Shapin, who offers a cultural historian’s reading of the material practices of early modern experimental philosophers and their instrumental impact on the shaping of the emergent institutional values of modern ‘science’. Meanwhile, Jonathan Kramnick does something broadly similar for ‘the critic’ as the expert whose attitudes shaped the emergent discipline of ‘English literature’. The third and final example represented by Robin Valenza stands out as a rare example of the cultural historian of disciplinary expertise who attempts to address a variety of disciplinary fields in parallel.

    33In his seminal work co-authored with Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump, Steven Shapin analysed the functioning of Robert Boyle’s experimental procedures in the early Royal Society, and suggested that the naturalist’s methods were able to command respect more for pragmatic than philosophical reasons. No less a figure than Thomas Hobbes pointed out the rational fallibility of Boyle’s empirical reasoning from experimental observations, but Boyle’s studies of the material characteristics of air were nevertheless treated seriously because the public (or semi-public) nature of the demonstrations of his air-pump created the necessary weight of validating testimony. That is, Boyle’s experimental procedures commanded consent largely in virtue of an unspoken assumption about the inherent value of acts of witnessing performed by people of suitable social status. In a later book, A Social History of Truth, Shapin generalised the claim, and argued that empirical science was able to establish institutional credibility in the eyes of the public by imitating the gentlemanly codes of honour that fostered relationships of trust between individuals of suitable standing. It was a matter of honour that a gentleman was as good as his word, and trust in this principle permitted the construction of a self-reinforcing system for the validation of belief.19 For Shapin, it was this social convention that permitted the elaboration of a network of trusted scientific expertise – a vital first step towards the acquisition of disciplinary identity. Disciplines began as networks of specialized expertise, and expert status was acquired by demonstrating trustworthiness – a quality as much determined by social skills as technical ones. So in Shapin’s analysis, the process of disciplinary differentiation resulted from the patterns of trust that shaped the building up of communication networks between mutually recognising experts,20 rather than from any conscious attempt to address the epistemological fragilities of empiricism, as Gaukroger suggests.

    34Jonathan Kramnick’s Making the English Canon: Print-Capitalism and the Cultural Past, 1700–1770 is structurally similar to the work of Shapin in the sense that it offers a pragmatic analysis of the elaboration of a network of expertise that would provide the necessary infrastructure for an emerging disciplinary field. However, Kramnick’s analysis focuses on the figure of the literary critic, whom he takes primarily as an arbiter of taste, engaged with cultural phenomena as distinct from natural phenomena. He attributes to the early eighteenth-century critic a new-found interest in the meaning of England’s cultural past. Previously, he suggests, the relatively insignificant history of English literature traced a progressive curve from a primitive ‘gothic’ past towards the more polished present. However, as reading was democratised in the age of Addison, modernity started to be suspected of vulgarity, prompting the need for a specialist arbiter of taste – the Critic – who would secure for the right sort of literature the label of proper high culture. These experts proceeded to distinguish ‘the literary’ from the baser verbal exchanges connected with politics and commerce, and secured its specifically national identity by deriving it from pure (because premodern) sources which became the English Classics: it was in this way that Spenser, Shakespeare and Milton became a sort of cultural trinity defining the eternal values of Englishness.21 With this yardstick in place, the discussion of the merits of contemporary literary production was able to take on specific but far-reaching cultural meaning.

    35The social functioning of Kramnick’s critic is thus fairly close to that of Shapin’s man of science: each is a specialist purveyor and arbiter of a particular kind of information constitutive of elite opinion. It is striking, however, that there seems to be no overlap between the contents of the expertise offered by Shapin’s man of science and Kramnick’s critic. Serving structurally similar purposes, they nevertheless seem to inhabit different worlds. For Kramnick as for Brewer earlier on, it is as though ‘culture’ already exists in its own airtight bubble, self-sufficient and distinct from the world of knowledge or ‘science’. This disciplinary parochialism blinds Kramnick to a wider reading of his material which would explain how the elaboration of a specific literary discipline would permit the new critic to aspire to outdo the new man of science as a purveyor of coherent universalising meaning. The ambition was realisable because the literary critic had two poles around which to organize his world of cultural knowledge – the permanent and universal world of Classical culture on the one hand, and the limited and specific world of national culture on the other. This schema was complete in itself in a way that modern empirical science could no longer hope to be: it addressed a particular set of cultural phenomena whose forms might be interpreted both ‘empirically’ in relation to the political life of the nation they represented and rationally, in relation to a set of fixed, universal values pertaining to all literary productions from any time or place. So, paradoxically enough, ‘literature’ started to emerge as a discipline by becoming specialized in anti-specialism. It would not join in with the modest object-oriented disciplinary typology associated with the empirical sciences; instead, it would overwrite that scheme of modernity with another, more limited in material scope, but apparently far better able to connect material realities to a more transcendent and more ultimate sense of meaning.

    36When literary culture is allowed its proper place in a pre-disciplinary discursive field, it becomes clear that the political significance of its emerging disciplinary organisation is by no means limited to that of access and status. It actually had a potentially more credible claim than ‘the sciences’ to hold together the power-knowledge nexus in a coherent whole since it was not plagued to the same extent by the problem of internal fragmentation as a result of disciplinary specialisation.

    37Our final author is the only one to compare a range of expert practices. Robin Valenza’s study of the dynamics of popularisation, Literature, Language and the Rise of the Intellectual Disciplines in Britain, 1680–1820, does not focus on any one discipline but on the ‘public sphere’ in which all such emergent disciplines met in their more or less competitive efforts to exist in the minds of the opinion-forming elites. Taking a general discursive space rather than a specialized one for the main theatre of action allows Valenza to place each disciplinary discourse in a broader context, so that its identity is not just about carving out a comfortable niche that does not excessively disturb existing cultural norms and values, but also about the challenge of creating a coherent overall knowledge economy out of a series of more or less disparate disciplinary specialisms.22

    38Valenza’s study covers three disciplinary fields – the natural sciences, moral philosophy and English literature – the first two of which were undergoing radical changes, while the third was essentially a new creation. Starting from David Hume’s distinction between ‘learned’ and ‘conversable worlds’ (the latter effectively being Hume’s name for what Habermas later called ‘the public sphere’), Valenza shows how each of these domains dealt with the challenges of specialisation. Each field needed to develop a disciplinary identity, which implied the elaboration of a distinctive set of technical tools, including particular methods, concepts and terminology. But paradoxically, to do so was also to risk cutting the emergent discipline off from the ‘conversable world’ in which opinion was formed. This was something of a conundrum: the desire to establish unique disciplinary status implied the adoption of a technical apparatus of methods and procedures available only to the initiated, while the benefit of wide-ranging influence depended on the opposed quality of accessibility. How might this circle be squared? Valenza believes that only the natural sciences pulled it off. Using the example of Newton’s Principia, she argues that the original text was made more difficult than it really needed to be by the addition of large swathes of mathematical formulae and calculations, thus effectively closing the domain to all but those who had managed to master this erudite and distinctly foreign language. This exclusiveness was readily accepted as it resembled the more familiar notion that a mastery of the technically demanding Classical languages was the only reliable pathway to an authentic understanding of the best and highest civilisations. In this way, the popular science text became a legitimate conduit by which the contents of ‘natural science’ might be brought into the public sphere.23 In contrast, the emergent modern disciplines of philosophy and especially literature failed to achieve specific public identities of comparable clarity. This was because their attempts to effect a transition to technical specialism were rejected in the public sphere as affected obscurantism. Philosophy and literature were deemed to be the sorts of domains that ought by nature to be accessible: literature in particular would not be literature any more if understanding it required specialized training. This explains why literary criticism struggled – and for Valenza continues to struggle – to assert a distinctive identity as a valid discipline in its own right.

    39Valenza’s wider agenda is clearly anchored in twenty-first-century debates about the status of the Humanities, and her ultimate goal is to defend a conception of the modern discipline of English literature that seeks to compete in rather than withdraw from the original challenge of technical specificity. But an alternative agenda might have been pursued, remaining within the historical analysis of disciplinary functions in the eighteenth century. It is striking that even if we accept Valenza’s claim that literature failed to establish a credible independent disciplinary status, this clearly does not imply that it lost out in cultural significance or that its experts were not influential. On the contrary, as we saw Kramnick noting above, literary criticism was at this time successfully situating itself at the very heart of meaning-making efforts around modern culture. Benefitting from the disciplinary fragmentation resulting from the epistemological upsetting of matters of fact, literary experts were able to set themselves up as the guardians of feeling. Despite being better-placed than either Shapin or Kramnick to perceive these patterns, Valenza does not in the event address them since her ultimate agenda lies in the current politics of disciplinary relations more than the historical analysis of the processes of disciplinary formation.

    40Shapin and Kramnick offered detailed analyses of bits of the story of the formation of specific forms of disciplinary expertise, but understandably missed out on the bigger picture because of the discipline-specific scope of their respective studies. In contrast, Valenza offers an example of how a broader-based comparative history of emergent disciplinary identities might be undertaken. Her focus on the disciplines’ attempts to inhabit the public sphere in pedagogical form – as opposed to more expert-specific spaces – also provides a useful lead. It is only regrettable for us that her work on early disciplinary relations was conceived as a backdrop for comment on the politics of disciplinary relations today, and not as a basis for more detailed historical commentary on the structural and intellectual dynamics of disciplinary emergence in the eighteenth century. The comparison of the different qualities of these existing cultural histories thus leaves us with the clear sense that there exists significant space for studies of the emergence of the disciplines that will be as broad-based as Valenza’s, as technically informed as Shapin’s and Kramnick’s, and as philosophically informed as Gaukroger’s.

    41There is at present too little interaction between the work of different varieties of cultural historians – as any broad-ranging reader in the field will easily notice from the relative scarcity of shared references in their respective bibliographies. This non-connection is partly explained by the difference in methodological orientations between concept-centred intellectual history and structuralist-inflected, practice-centred cultural history, and also by the prevalence of discipline-specific treatments of the general categories of ‘knowledge’ and ‘culture’. There is of course a need for discipline-specific studies of the sort provided by Shapin or Kramnick, but these need to be complemented by wider-ranging studies such as that of Valenza. It is ironic that contemporary cultural history tends to flatten out disciplinary differentiation in its objects of study, but remains rather strongly marked by those very differences in its own thematic orientations. However broadly-based cultural history aims to be, however effacing of artificial disciplinary differentiation, the pragmatic reality all too often is that many practitioners continue to construct their objects of study in terms set by their own disciplinary background. This tendency is exacerbated, not relieved, by the exponential growth of cultural histories, since the tendency to cluster around the practitioners’ philosophical, scientific or literary homelands effectively creates distinct critical canons for each branch. As we study the history of disciplinarity, we should be aware that our own practices are more determined by its ever-more labyrinthine structures than we might realise.

    Ordering knowledge

    42We have already noted that this book cannot aspire to comprehensive coverage of a vast potential field of study. It approaches some issues associated with the reshaping of knowledge as a result of the first emergence of disciplinary-style practices; but it does not claim to do so in a thoroughly systematic way or to address anything like the entire range of disciplinary fields that might be considered. Only a book of far larger scope could attempt anything of this sort. Instead, we propose two series of case-studies, corresponding to the book’s two parts, that come at the question of disciplinarity and modernity from opposite ends of the organizational scale already mentioned in a previous section. If we allow ourselves to think of ‘modern knowledge’ after the manner of the eighteenth-century encyclopaedists as an all-encapsulating sphere housing an intricately imbricated disciplinary structure within, then we might say that the first set of studies are situated on the system’s perimeter or conceptual framework, and from this position look inwards towards the practical challenges of the organisation of the constitutive disciplinary detail. Meanwhile the second set of studies have the opposite dynamic, looking from a particular place within the system outwards towards the framing concepts or ideals. The book’s first part is the more abstract, addressing ‘modernising projects of knowledge’ that incarnated visions of how discipline-based knowledge might work. Its second part is more locally situated, focusing on specific forms of ‘practice and expression’ which, without necessarily being explicitly theory-led, nevertheless had a role to play in the pragmatic shaping of emergent disciplinary identities and interactions. Within each part, the chapters are arranged in broadly chronological terms, or by thematic cluster where appropriate.

    43This is not a straightforward division between ‘theory’ and ‘practice’ since all chapters touch on both. Whether situated on the abstract frame looking in towards the heart of the system or the reverse, most of these studies are anchored in some particular manifestation of the underlying tensions accompanying the modernization of knowledge and knowledge structures. Such anchoring points can be found in specific disciplines whose inherent particularities constituted a challenge to the empirical logic of the modernizing spirit; but also in characteristic objects and themes that cross over incipient disciplinary divides. Incidentally, it is perhaps worth noting that the predominance of British subjects in the first part of the book and continental European subjects in the second is purely fortuitous.

    44Instances of inherently challenging fields are provided by Susana Seguin and Emilia Wilton-Godberfforde. The first treats ‘historical epistemology’ as a significant part of the early identity-constructing efforts of the Paris Académie des sciences, a strategy that struggled to manage an appeal to factuality in the essentially narrative terms imposed by the historical format. The second treats the changing relationship between surgery and medicine in seventeenth-century France which, as Wilton-Godberfforde shows, was anything but a straightforward act of colonization by the powerful medical faculty, but more of the order of an act of mutual influence involving political and conceptual realignments on both sides.

    45Other chapters find a similar bivalency in particular kinds of objects associated with the organisation of knowledge: encyclopaedias for Seth Rudy and Richard Somerset, mineral collections for Daria Novgorodova and anatomical models for Marieke Hendriksen. Though very different sorts of object, they share the goal of materializing an abstract order perceived as immanent in the nature of things. In the case of the mineralogical cabinet, that materialization is not merely metaphorical; and in following the evolution of the contents and the presentation of the mineral collection of the St. Petersburg Kunstkamera, Novgorodova shows how conceptual and political considerations interacted with curatorial constraints in the process by which mineralogy changed from an artificial mode of classification – limiting it to a relatively lowly position close to that of antiquarianism – to a ‘natural’ mode of classification, in which form it would be able to take on proper disciplinary status as an important member of the family of the natural sciences. Encyclopaedias and encyclopaedism face similar issues, though of a more general sort since they aim to systematise not one particular discipline but knowledge as a whole. The characteristic challenge here too is that of material organisation, applied not to objects on display but to the textual structuring of knowledge and its departments. While Rudy offers a detailed quantitative study of the material organisation of one particular encyclopaedia – Chambers’ Cyclopaedia of 1728 – Somerset’s study looks more broadly at mid-eighteenth-century attempts by enterprising writers to use the format of the periodical publication to facilitate extensive reading of encyclopaedia-like texts, in the hope that multi-layered reading strategies would tame the labyrinthine structures of modern knowledge and render it more readily accessible for influential circles of polite learning and genteel cultivation. Marieke Hendriksen’s study of the creation and utilisation of anatomical models takes a slightly different tack, focusing less on the meaning or interpretation of the models as objects than on the forms of expertise – medical and artisanal – that went into their fabrication. Treating distinct cases in Edinburgh and Philadelphia, she shows how the different practical needs of medical practitioners and instructors in each setting, working with locally available artisanal skills, resulted in a marked variation in the sorts of models produced, and how they functioned as epistemically significant objects.

    46The characteristic tensions inherent in the modern organisation of knowledge can also be explored thematically, as shown by Sorana Corneanu in her chapter on the treatment of ‘genius’ by the moral philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment. Conveniently situated at the frontier of the natural philosophical and the literary domains, genius was a phenomenon that called for special consideration. The hope was that its analysis would allow philosophers to offer an account of modern knowledge that heightened the unique cultural value of the insightful individual mind even while deriving its workings from that of general human cognition. Focusing in particular on the work of Alexander Gerard, Corneanu shows how the Scottish Enlightenment appealed to a wide range of existing disciplines – rhetoric, logic and medicine – in order to build a platform for an account of the cognitive functions of invention and creativity based on the workings of the imagination. Corneanu brings out the tensions at the heart of this account, as it sanctioned at the same time the unity of and the difference between the scientist and the poet.

    47Arguably, certain elements of the Scottish attitude were already present in the thought of Francis Bacon more than a century earlier: such at least is the argument presented in the chapter by Mickaël Popelard. Though Bacon is simplistically dubbed ‘the father of modern science’ by traditional historiography, Popelard shows that his preoccupation was with knowledge as a whole rather than with science in the narrow sense of the term. In particular, he examines the role attributed by Bacon to the creative or literary mind in holding together as a coherent ensemble a knowledge programme otherwise at risk of fragmentation as a result of the implementation of experimental procedures. Indeed, Popelard argues, Bacon’s model of knowledge would be incomplete without the input of the creative or interpretative mind, rather like a text needs to be unlocked by a reader.

    48The evolution of educational theories and practices also provide a useful indicator of the conceptual and cultural challenges posed by intellectual modernization, as they inevitably mirror the tensions inherent in the knowledge systems they help to incarnate. However, since education has always served the purpose of social advancement at least as much as that of philosophical instruction, the field is also interesting as the platform upon which the characteristically modern relationship between knowledge and power is most explicitly addressed, and a number of rival attitudes worked out. If the English educational establishment tended towards the conservative end of the spectrum, alternative opportunities for more modern forms of educational provision were increasingly on offer throughout the eighteenth century and into more recent times. One familiar setting for such provision was offered by the Dissenting Academies, which are addressed here in the chapter by Matthew Smith. Comparing the curriculum of Joseph Priestley’s Warrington Academy to that of contemporary grammar schools, Smith argues that although these establishments were ultimately drawn into the Anglican mainstream, they nevertheless exerted a decisive influence in facilitating the shift in philosophical and political attitudes that would permit the acceptance of a modernised curriculum by emergent bourgeois elites looking for their own characteristic form of social standing. But education was not only offered in institutional settings: by the end of the eighteenth century, it was also increasingly on offer as a textual encounter, in books designed for the specific purpose of educating the young. Laurence Talairach’s chapter visits this world, presenting the work of a range of late eighteenth-century writers collectively responsible for shaping a genre whose importance would grow exponentially in the following century. Covering a range of primarily female authors, Talairach foregrounds the material challenge they faced in finding ways to make the technical matter of the new disciplines seem pedagogically pertinent. The very neutrality of empirical factuality played against its integration into a genre whose respectability depended primarily on its capacity to carry a clear moral message. Talairach shows how the combination was initially managed by the partial separation of informative content from moral message in narratives capable of responding to both needs separately; but also suggests that the package as a whole would play a significant role in normalising the empirical attitude in the public sphere, downplaying and reshaping its fundamentally amoral posture.

    49So all of these studies share an attempt to relate the detail of theories and practices within the sphere of emergent disciplinarity to a more general abstract conception as to what modern knowledge could or should be, and how it might continue to cohere. A short collection of individual studies obviously cannot aspire to a comprehensive coverage of the history of disciplinarity in all its variety and complexity; yet it is our hope that, by bringing together a selection of like-minded studies that attempt to address both the finer textures of disciplinary differentiation and the broader cultural backdrop of meaning-making, we will be able to look in a particularly informative way at the complex of issues that accompanied the transition from a classical model of knowledge based on the taxonomical ordering of rationally-determined categories of thought to a modern knowledge economy based on politicised relations of problematic communicability between pragmatically determined disciplines. We are interested in the renewed ordering of knowledge in a setting which rendered impossible a self-sufficient rational framework capable of defining the project as a whole, and imposed instead a more flexible stance for handling more aleatory conditions and relations. In particular, we are interested in the relational dynamics characterising the disciplinary economy as it emerged; the shifting patterns of internal sympathies and tensions that accompanied attempts to enable empirically-based knowledge practices collectively to talk to an ultimate sense of unified meaning.

    Notes de bas de page

    1 A few arbitrary examples might include: Toby Young, ‘The Truth about “post-truth politics”,’ The Spectator (16 July 2016); Robert Darnton, ‘The True History of Fake news,’ New York Review of Books (13 February 2017); David Robson, ‘Why Smart People are more Likely to Believe Fake News,’ The Guardian (1 April 2019); Colin Burrow, ‘Fiction and the Age of Lies,’ London Review of Books (20 February 2020).

    2 For examples of political theorists anaylsing the political present as marked by anti-rational emotiveness, itself the unresolved legacy of the Scientific Revolution or the Enlightenment, see William Davies’s Nervous States: How Feeling Took Over the World (London: Jonathan Cape, 2018) and Pankaj Mishra’s Age of Anger: a History of the Present (London: Allen Lane, 2017).

    3 Will Hutton, ‘Emily Maitlis’s “sin” was being compared with real, deliberate assaults on truth,’ The Observer (31 May 2020).

    4 Adam Shatz, ‘Palestianianism,’ review of Places of Mind: a Life of Edward Said, by Timothy Brennan, London Review of Books, May 7, 2021, 26.

    5 Shatz, ‘Palestianianism,’ 28.

    6 For historical overviews see Nicholas Fisher, ‘The classification of the sciences,’ in Companion to the History of Modern Science, ed. R. C. Olby, G. N. Cantor and M.J.S. Hodge (London: Routledge, 1990), 853–868; Donald R. Kelley, ed., History and the Disciplines: the Reclassification of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 1997). On the influence of Enlightenment thought for disciplinary organization, see George S. Rousseau, ‘Science, Culture and the Imagination: Enlightenment Configurations,’ in Eighteenth-Century Science, vol. IV of The Cambridge History of Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 762–799. On later German influences see Elinor S. Shaffer, ‘Romantic Philosophy and the organization of the disciplines: the founding of the Humboldt University of Berlin,’ in Romanticism and the Sciences, ed. Andrew Cunningham and Nicholas Jardine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 38–54. On the specific case of the Humanities, see Rens Bod, Japp Maat, and Thijs Weststeijn, ed., From Early Modern to Modern Disciplines, vol. II of The Making of the Humanities (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012). For the emergence of modern philosophical disciplines against the background of an Aristotelian academic culture, see Danilo Facca, Early Modern Aristotelianism and the Making of Philosophical Disciplines: Metaphysics, Ethics and Politics (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020).

    7 For overviews from different theoretical perspectives of important trends in the history of science since the watershed 1990s see Pamela H. Smith, ‘Science on the Move: Recent Trends in the History of Early Modern Science,’ Renaissance Quarterly 62, no 2 (Summer 2009): 345–375; and Donald R. Kelley, ‘Intellectual History in a Global Age,’ Journal of the History of Ideas 66, no 2 (April 2005): 155–167. On the interdisciplinary challenges attendant upon the attempt to study the history of science as the history of culture see Lorraine Daston, ‘Science Studies and the History of Science,’ in The Fate of Disciplines, ed. James Chandler and Arnold I. Davidson, special issue, Critical Inquiry 35, no 4, (Summer 2009): 798–813; and Peter Dear, ‘What Is the History of Science the History Of? Early Modern Roots of the Ideology of Modern Science,’ Isis 96, no 3 (September 2005): 390–406. For a current map of the relationships between intellectual history, cultural history, the history of science, the history of literature, and the histories of particular disciplines, see the two volumes edited by Richard Whatmore and Brian Young, Palgrave Advances in Intellectual History, (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006) and The Blackwell Companion to Intellectual History (Wiley Blackwell, 2016).

    8 James Secord’s Victorian Sensation (2000) is an early high-profile example of a cultural history of science that programmatically refused to engage with content. The work is a study of the material conditions of the production and dissemination of Robert Chambers’ The Natural History of Creation (1844) without ever discussing the proto-evolutionary theories that the book expounded.

    9 Stephen Gaukroger, The Emergence of a Scientific Culture: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1210–1685 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); Stephen Gaukroper, The Collapse of Mechanism and the Rise of Sensibility: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1680–1760 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Stephen Gaukroper, The Natural and the Human: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1739–1841 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).

    10 Ayesha Ramachandran, The Worldmakers: Global Imagining in Early Modern Europe (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2015), 17.

    11 On the establishment of English Literature as a university discipline, see D. J. Palmer, The Rise of English Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965). On the relationship of literature to other disciplines, see Jorge Bastos da Silva and Miguel Ramalhete Gomes, ed., English Literature and the Disciplines of Knowledge, Early Modern to Eighteenth Century (Leiden: Brill Rodopi, 2017). For a multidisciplinary treatment of the transformation of the university curriculum in the nineteenth century, see T.W. Heyck, The Transformation of Intellectual Life in Victorian England (Chicago: Lyceum Books, 1982). The view that the academic discipline of English Literature was first developed in Scottish Universities in the late-eighteenth century is developed in Robert Crawford, ed., The Scottish Invention of English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

    12 Gaukroger, The Collapse of Mechanism, 438.

    13 Gaukroger, The Collapse of Mechanism, 451.

    14 Gaukroger, The Collapse of Mechanism, 453.

    15 Gaukroger, The Collapse of Mechanism, 453.

    16 John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (London: HarperCollins, 1997), 98–122.

    17 Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination, 90.

    18 The theme of ‘sensibility’ is a commonplace for historians of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century moral philosophy or late eighteenth-century and Romantic period literature. In contrast, few commentators have recognized its significance to the history of science. A notable exception is Jessica Riskin, Science in the Age of Sensibility: the sentimental empiricists of the French Enlightenment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).

    19 Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 193–242.

    20 Shapin, A Social History of Truth, 243–309.

    21 Jonathan Brody Kramnick, The Making of the English Canon: Print Capitalism and the Cultural Past, 1700–1770 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 43–53. See also Lee Morrissey, The Constitution of Literature: Literacy, Democracy, and Early English Literary Criticism (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2008).

    22 Robin Valenza, Literature, Language and the Rise of the Intellectual Disciplines in Britain, 1680–1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 37–53.

    23 Valenza, Language and the Rise of the Intellectual Disciplines, 58–66.

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    1 A few arbitrary examples might include: Toby Young, ‘The Truth about “post-truth politics”,’ The Spectator (16 July 2016); Robert Darnton, ‘The True History of Fake news,’ New York Review of Books (13 February 2017); David Robson, ‘Why Smart People are more Likely to Believe Fake News,’ The Guardian (1 April 2019); Colin Burrow, ‘Fiction and the Age of Lies,’ London Review of Books (20 February 2020).

    2 For examples of political theorists anaylsing the political present as marked by anti-rational emotiveness, itself the unresolved legacy of the Scientific Revolution or the Enlightenment, see William Davies’s Nervous States: How Feeling Took Over the World (London: Jonathan Cape, 2018) and Pankaj Mishra’s Age of Anger: a History of the Present (London: Allen Lane, 2017).

    3 Will Hutton, ‘Emily Maitlis’s “sin” was being compared with real, deliberate assaults on truth,’ The Observer (31 May 2020).

    4 Adam Shatz, ‘Palestianianism,’ review of Places of Mind: a Life of Edward Said, by Timothy Brennan, London Review of Books, May 7, 2021, 26.

    5 Shatz, ‘Palestianianism,’ 28.

    6 For historical overviews see Nicholas Fisher, ‘The classification of the sciences,’ in Companion to the History of Modern Science, ed. R. C. Olby, G. N. Cantor and M.J.S. Hodge (London: Routledge, 1990), 853–868; Donald R. Kelley, ed., History and the Disciplines: the Reclassification of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 1997). On the influence of Enlightenment thought for disciplinary organization, see George S. Rousseau, ‘Science, Culture and the Imagination: Enlightenment Configurations,’ in Eighteenth-Century Science, vol. IV of The Cambridge History of Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 762–799. On later German influences see Elinor S. Shaffer, ‘Romantic Philosophy and the organization of the disciplines: the founding of the Humboldt University of Berlin,’ in Romanticism and the Sciences, ed. Andrew Cunningham and Nicholas Jardine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 38–54. On the specific case of the Humanities, see Rens Bod, Japp Maat, and Thijs Weststeijn, ed., From Early Modern to Modern Disciplines, vol. II of The Making of the Humanities (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012). For the emergence of modern philosophical disciplines against the background of an Aristotelian academic culture, see Danilo Facca, Early Modern Aristotelianism and the Making of Philosophical Disciplines: Metaphysics, Ethics and Politics (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020).

    7 For overviews from different theoretical perspectives of important trends in the history of science since the watershed 1990s see Pamela H. Smith, ‘Science on the Move: Recent Trends in the History of Early Modern Science,’ Renaissance Quarterly 62, no 2 (Summer 2009): 345–375; and Donald R. Kelley, ‘Intellectual History in a Global Age,’ Journal of the History of Ideas 66, no 2 (April 2005): 155–167. On the interdisciplinary challenges attendant upon the attempt to study the history of science as the history of culture see Lorraine Daston, ‘Science Studies and the History of Science,’ in The Fate of Disciplines, ed. James Chandler and Arnold I. Davidson, special issue, Critical Inquiry 35, no 4, (Summer 2009): 798–813; and Peter Dear, ‘What Is the History of Science the History Of? Early Modern Roots of the Ideology of Modern Science,’ Isis 96, no 3 (September 2005): 390–406. For a current map of the relationships between intellectual history, cultural history, the history of science, the history of literature, and the histories of particular disciplines, see the two volumes edited by Richard Whatmore and Brian Young, Palgrave Advances in Intellectual History, (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006) and The Blackwell Companion to Intellectual History (Wiley Blackwell, 2016).

    8 James Secord’s Victorian Sensation (2000) is an early high-profile example of a cultural history of science that programmatically refused to engage with content. The work is a study of the material conditions of the production and dissemination of Robert Chambers’ The Natural History of Creation (1844) without ever discussing the proto-evolutionary theories that the book expounded.

    9 Stephen Gaukroger, The Emergence of a Scientific Culture: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1210–1685 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); Stephen Gaukroper, The Collapse of Mechanism and the Rise of Sensibility: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1680–1760 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Stephen Gaukroper, The Natural and the Human: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1739–1841 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).

    10 Ayesha Ramachandran, The Worldmakers: Global Imagining in Early Modern Europe (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2015), 17.

    11 On the establishment of English Literature as a university discipline, see D. J. Palmer, The Rise of English Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965). On the relationship of literature to other disciplines, see Jorge Bastos da Silva and Miguel Ramalhete Gomes, ed., English Literature and the Disciplines of Knowledge, Early Modern to Eighteenth Century (Leiden: Brill Rodopi, 2017). For a multidisciplinary treatment of the transformation of the university curriculum in the nineteenth century, see T.W. Heyck, The Transformation of Intellectual Life in Victorian England (Chicago: Lyceum Books, 1982). The view that the academic discipline of English Literature was first developed in Scottish Universities in the late-eighteenth century is developed in Robert Crawford, ed., The Scottish Invention of English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

    12 Gaukroger, The Collapse of Mechanism, 438.

    13 Gaukroger, The Collapse of Mechanism, 451.

    14 Gaukroger, The Collapse of Mechanism, 453.

    15 Gaukroger, The Collapse of Mechanism, 453.

    16 John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (London: HarperCollins, 1997), 98–122.

    17 Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination, 90.

    18 The theme of ‘sensibility’ is a commonplace for historians of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century moral philosophy or late eighteenth-century and Romantic period literature. In contrast, few commentators have recognized its significance to the history of science. A notable exception is Jessica Riskin, Science in the Age of Sensibility: the sentimental empiricists of the French Enlightenment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).

    19 Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 193–242.

    20 Shapin, A Social History of Truth, 243–309.

    21 Jonathan Brody Kramnick, The Making of the English Canon: Print Capitalism and the Cultural Past, 1700–1770 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 43–53. See also Lee Morrissey, The Constitution of Literature: Literacy, Democracy, and Early English Literary Criticism (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2008).

    22 Robin Valenza, Literature, Language and the Rise of the Intellectual Disciplines in Britain, 1680–1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 37–53.

    23 Valenza, Language and the Rise of the Intellectual Disciplines, 58–66.

    Ordering Knowledge

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    Somerset, R. (2023). Introduction. In J.-J. Chardin, S. Corneanu, & R. Somerset (éds.), Ordering Knowledge. Strasbourg: Presses universitaires de Strasbourg. https://doi.org/10.4000/books.pus.32715
    Somerset, Richard. « Introduction ». In Ordering Knowledge, édité par Jean-Jacques Chardin, Sorana Corneanu, et Richard Somerset. Strasbourg: Presses universitaires de Strasbourg, 2023. doi:10.4000/books.pus.32715.
    Somerset, Richard. « Introduction ». Ordering Knowledge, édité par Jean-Jacques Chardin et al., Presses universitaires de Strasbourg, 2023, https://doi.org/10.4000/books.pus.32715.

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    Chardin, J.-J., Corneanu, S., & Somerset, R. (éds.). (2023). Ordering Knowledge. Strasbourg: Presses universitaires de Strasbourg. https://doi.org/10.4000/books.pus.32660
    Chardin, Jean-Jacques, Sorana Corneanu, et Richard Somerset, éd. Ordering Knowledge. Strasbourg: Presses universitaires de Strasbourg, 2023. doi:10.4000/books.pus.32660.
    Chardin, Jean-Jacques, et al., éditeurs. Ordering Knowledge. Presses universitaires de Strasbourg, 2023, https://doi.org/10.4000/books.pus.32660.
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