The Nineteenth Century Problem August 15, 2011
Posted by Christopher Donohue in History of Economic Thought, History of the Human Sciences.Tags: Adam Smith, Alexis de Tocqueville, Alfred Marshall, Archibald Alison, Arnold Guyot, Arthur de Gobineau, E.B. Tylor, Emile Durkheim, Franz Boas, Fustel de Coulanges, Hans Kohn, Henry Buckle, Hippolyte Taine, Jerry Muller, John Maynard Keynes, John Ruskin, Joseph Denniker, Karl Marx, Ludwig von Mises, Martin Heidegger, Matthew Arnold, Max Weber, Mosei Ostrogorski, Philip Mirowski, R.R. Marett, W.E.H. Lecky, Walter Bagehot
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The universal historian Henry T. Buckle (1821-1862) was last subject of a serious scholarly monograph in 1958. This is the fate of any number of nineteenth-century intellectuals. The first reason for the disappearance of these writers has been the inability to connect them to the catastrophic events of the twentieth century: the World Wars, National Socialism, the deradicalization of the European right after Nuremberg, the flight of the Marxist intellectuals, and so on. Second, the nineteenth century has been the province of sociologists and literary scholars. Such attention continues to be selective, judging from the ceaseless publications on the canonical sociologists: springtime for Weber, and winter for Gobineau and Bagehot.
Third, ignoring the nineteenth century allows anthropologists to get on with their own work. Fourth, and finally, while some nineteenth century economists get attention — Alfred Marshall (1842-1924) has been accumulating more slim volumes as the months go by — the impression I get from some not so cursory reading of the literature is that the with the exception of the proponents of “evolutionary” and “heterodox” economics, philosophers of economics, and Philip Mirowski, it’s Smith, Marx, Keynes, Hayek, Mises, or monograph wilderness. (more…)
Holiday & Introductory Course August 3, 2011
Posted by Will Thomas in Uncategorized.Tags: Adam Kuper, Amy Dahan, Andrew Warwick, Anthony Grafton, C. S. Lewis, Daniel Greenberg, Edward Appleton, Jack Morrell, James Secord, Jan Golinski, John Gascoigne, John Hedley Brooke, Martin Rudwick, Neil Morgan, Noel Coley, Peter Bowler, Peter Dear, Robert Olby
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I am going to be doing some traveling for the next couple of weeks, and so there are likely to be no new posts in that time. In other news, starting in October, I will be teaching a year-long introduction to the history of science course here at Imperial. I’ve included a tentative lecture schedule and reading list below the fold. This isn’t set in stone yet, so comments and suggestions are welcome.
Primer: Joseph Banks July 26, 2011
Posted by Will Thomas in EWP Primer.Tags: Antoine-Laurent de Jussieu, Carl Linnaeus, Comte de Buffon, Daniel Solander, Earl of Bute, H. C. Cameron, Harold Carter, Humphrey Sibthorp, Israel Lyons, J. H. Maiden, James Cook, John Gascoigne, John Sinclair, Joseph Banks, Patrick O'Brian, Thomas Jefferson
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A young Joseph Banks, painted by Benjamin West, held at the Usher Art Gallery in Lincoln
Two decades ago Harold Carter, in his definitive biography of Joseph Banks (1988), and John Gascoigne, in Joseph Banks and the English Enlightenment (1994), could both suppose that Banks (1743-1820) was a neglected figure in the historiography of science. Following a surge of interest in natural history and the relationship between imperialism and the sciences, no such claim could now hold water — entire conferences are now dedicated to Banks and his milieu (.doc). This post is intended mainly for my own benefit, to fill out my side interest in the culture of improvement circa 1800, but also just to help me get a personal handle on what now must be considered de rigeuer knowledge for any competent historian of science
The task of briefly summarizing Banks’ place in history is complicated by the reach of his interests, while it is simplified by the fact that he has very little place within the history of published science. Banks was an institution builder, whose influence was derived from his ability to orchestrate the resources and interests of hereditary privilege and the state, as well as from his commitment to building and maintaining an intellectual community capable of supporting a new scale of work in natural history, estate improvement, and imperial development.
Harry Collins, Methodological Relativism, and Sociological Explanation, Pt. 1 July 19, 2011
Posted by Will Thomas in Uncategorized.Tags: Bruno Latour, David Bloor, Harry Collins, Karl Mannheim, Larry Laudan
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When I was at SEESHOP5 in Cardiff last month, I had an opportunity to talk a little with Harry Collins about the history of his work, its relationship to the history of science, relativism, radicalism, and STS.
People involved in Collins’ “Sociology of Expertise and Experience” (SEE) project would like their work to inform future STS scholarship. However, by their estimate, STS has been reluctant to take up SEE. This has led the SEE crowd to chart their own course, distinguishing their work as committed to a constructive deliberation about the nature and social operation of expertise, which they would contrast to an argumentation-averse, and ultimately nonconstructive critical orthodoxy prevailing in STS.
Now, STS distinguishes itself by a sort of ambivalently* radical relativist intellectual position, descending from the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) project of the late-1970s and 1980s. By attempting to define the bounds of expert authority, the SEE project is often taken to be a retreat from STS-brand radicalism to a more traditional set of ideas about expertise. It has sometimes been paired with Bruno Latour’s own apparent retreat (pdf) around the same time as the SEE project got started, in the early 2000s.
Collins denies that SEE represents any shift in his critical position: for him it is just a shift to a different methodology and a different sort of problem. (more…)
Online Humanities Scholarship beyond the Digital Humanities July 13, 2011
Posted by Will Thomas in Uncategorized.add a comment
I have been working a lot on revising my book this summer — its second major overhaul — and so I have had ample opportunity to reflect on (gnash teeth, rend garments over…) how truly heinous the process of publishing in the humanities is, and what alternatives/additions might be preferable.
Basically, I like history books. I am very eager for my work on the “sciences of policy” (operations research, management science, decision theory, systems analysis…) to appear in book form. I think the strength of the material comes out most clearly when it is presented as a synthetic picture, and I think a book might be bought by those involved in these sciences who are interested in the history but would never read historical journal articles on the topic. Plus, books are crucial to professional advancement.
However, I think the publishing process for both books and papers is incredibly stultifying to scholarly work. The key problem is delay. (more…)
How to Run a Historiography, or: Chymistry Rides High July 3, 2011
Posted by Will Thomas in Chymistry.Tags: Allen Debus, Étienne-François Geoffroy, Bernard de Fontenelle, Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs, Bruce Moran, David Brewster, F. Sherwood Taylor, George Sarton, Herbert Butterfield, Herman Boerhaave, Isaac Newton, Joan-Baptista van Helmont, John Maynard Keynes, Kevin Chang, Lawrence Principe, Pamela Smith, Paracelsus, Richard Westfall, Walter Pagel, William Newman
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Principe
I know, I know, my scholarly crush on the chymistry literature is probably getting a little embarrassing. But I want to make sure everyone is taking notes like I am, because William Newman, Lawrence Principe, and their crowd are really putting on a clinic on how to run a proper historiography. The latest lesson is in putting together a good Isis Focus section: “Alchemy and the History of Science”, organized by Bruce Moran, and available free of charge in the latest issue.
I’ve been very happy to see this specialty spring to success, receiving both scholarly praise and public exposure in places like the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Economist, and the New York Times. I am a bit worried that this success will be held up as simply a product of the virtues of historical scholarship. To an extent it should be, for reasons I will discuss, but I also think it’s important that the rest of us — including those of us working in decidedly remote terrain like 20th-century science — pay close attention to what these scholars are doing particularly right.
Lists of Wartime Operational Research Groups June 24, 2011
Posted by Will Thomas in Operations Research.4 comments
As far as I know, no one has ever assembled a list of all World War II-era operational research groups. Some of this information is available in published resources; other bits are from archival research. Bullet points under particular groups represent changes of name. Dates can be a little fuzzy, since they can refer to when a group was formally approved, or when it started work; or when one or two people arrived at a location, only later to grow and be formally recognized. I have tried to date things to when work actually began, but have probably not always been consistent in this. Some form of this list will likely appear in my book, but as a general service in the meantime, here it is:
McCumber and “Rational Choice Philosophy” June 21, 2011
Posted by Will Thomas in Ideology of Science, Operations Research.Tags: Alex Abella, G. W. F. Hegel, Hans Reichenbach, Howard Raiffa, John McCumber, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Margaret Thatcher, Oskar Morgenstern, R. Duncan Luce, S. M. Amadae, W. V. O. Quine
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I often say that the first college-level history course I ever took was the history of the Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany with Peter Hayes at Northwestern University. However, on Monday I was reminded that my first history course there was really in the philosophy department: History of Philosophy, II: Medieval Philosophy* with John McCumber. McCumber, who it turns out studies the philosophy of the German tradition, had a piece in the New York Times’ The Stone series called “The Failure of Rational Choice Philosophy” which wanders into what has come to be my favorite historical terrain.
In his piece, McCumber begins by citing Hegel to the effect that “history is idea-driven,” and then makes the common historical and critical move of connecting the rise of theories of rational decision with the present dominance of a market-oriented polity, authorized by a selfish ethics implicit to a purportedly neutral analytical framework. In another move that is itself common enough to have been brilliantly parodied by the Simpsons in 1994, McCumber identifies the RAND Corporation (est. 1946) as the key vector for the translation of intellectual work into the realm of political and social ideas “(aided in the crossing, to be sure, by the novels of another Rand—Ayn)”:
Functionaries at RAND quickly expanded the theory from a tool of social analysis into a set of universal doctrines that we may call ‘rational choice philosophy.’
Schabas on Economics and the Engineering Mentality June 15, 2011
Posted by Will Thomas in EWP Book Club.Tags: David Ricardo, John Maynard Keynes, Leon Walras, Margaret Schabas, Max Weber, Milton Friedman, Richard M. Goodwin, William Stanley Jevons
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The central argument of Margaret Schabas’s The Natural Origins of Economics (2005) is that, over the course of the 19th century, economic thought abandoned links to natural science and began to concentrate on the object of “the economy” which was perceived as being purely social in character. In a previous post, I observed that Schabas makes the argument well, but that it remained unclear that nature was ever central to economic thought, and thus it was unclear why a shift away from nature should be a key concern in assembling a history of economics.
I think the best case to be made is that Enlightenment-era political economy attempted to establish explanations for a diverse set of perceived phenomena, which would attribute them to the interplay of basic processes. As Chris’s posts on this blog illustrate so nicely, this project continued through the 19th century in literatures spanning political economy, history, ethnography, and biology. However, the analysis of constrained but precisely defined economic phenomena as products of patterns of human thought and choice branched off from this project in a process playing out from David Ricardo (1772-1823), to the analyses of Léon Walras (1834-1910) and William Stanley Jevons* (1842-1924), to the revolt of the social science of Max Weber and others (1864-1920) against the German “Historical School”. What Schabas calls the “denaturalization of the economic order” is certainly a part of that process, but it is far from its defining characteristic.
Schabas does not go into great depth about her reasons for placing the question of nature at the center of her story, but she does offer some brief hints. (more…)
Margaret Schabas on the Concept of Nature in Economic Thought June 6, 2011
Posted by Will Thomas in EWP Book Club, History of the Human Sciences.Tags: Adam Smith, Carl Linnaeus, Christopher Lawrence, David Hume, David Ricardo, Francois Quesnay, John Stuart Mill, Margaret Schabas, Maurice Dobb, Montesquieu, Philip Mirowski, Pierre-Samuel Du Pont de Nemours, Victor Mirabeau
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In my first post on the need for historical studies of the relationship between scientific and economic thought, I was greatly remiss in not discussing a scholar who has done a great deal to develop and organize work in exactly this area: Margaret Schabas of the UBC philosophy department. Thankfully, a quick reference by Tiago Mata over at History of Economics Playground set me aright. For a first pass through the existing literature, I’d like to take a look at her book, The Natural Origins of Economics (2005).
The book is a critical-intellectual history. As an intellectual history, it sticks to an analysis of the published works of (mainly) canonical authors. Where a straight intellectual history might recount the arguments that historical authors explicitly made, critical-intellectual histories draw out continuities and breaks over time in authors’ lines and methods of argumentation. Like many intellectual historians, Schabas is mindful of detailed arguments in the secondary literature, and does a good job of acknowledging, consolidating, communicating, and building on the gains of that literature.
Schabas argues that where 18th-century philosophers of political economy understood their subject to connect deeply to nature and natural philosophy, economics began to explicitly frame itself as a science of peculiarly social phenomena following John Stuart Mill’s Principles of Political Economy (1848), the rise of the idea of “the economy” as an object of study, and the rise of neoclassical economics in the late-19th century.
Ether Wave Propaganda 