Servants of Nature: A History of Scientific Institutions, Enterprises and Sensibilities

The philosopher Auguste Comte (1798–1857) looms as a major figure behind much writing in history of science. In Comte’s view, humanity had passed through various stages. Science, using experiment and mathematics to verify theories, would usher in a new age of prosperity and harmony. Comte established a hierarchy for the sciences, with astronomy at the apex and physiology near the bottom. Over time, he believed, all inquiries into nature would become more like mathematical physics. He also outlined how humanity had progressed from a religious worldview to a scientific one. This positivist orientation, where qualitative and prejudicial notions fell by the wayside, animated the beginnings of sociology, the quantitative science of human affairs. To bring the new golden age into being, Comte revived the French Revolution faith in Reason and established a church of positivism. Fundamental to the new doctrine was a critical examination of the evolution of science, demonstrating its grand unity and progress. To tell this story, the curators of the Collège de France (the elite institute for research and popular teaching in Paris) appointed Comte’s disciple Pierre Laffitte (1823–1903) to a chair of history of science.

Laffitte accomplished little in the course of his long tenure as the world’s most visible historian of science; he was entirely overshadowed by Paul Tannery (1843–1904), an administrator in the French state tobacco monopoly who had occasionally taught at the Collège de France. Tannery had published a large corpus on the history of the exact sciences, from classical antiquity through medieval Islam to the Renaissance and on into the nineteenth century. He established a European-wide network of colleagues who shared his passion. Developing a model that would have appealed to Comte, Tannery stated that science originated in Hellenic Greece, passed through Islamic stewardship to medieval Europe, and then blossomed in the seventeenth century. It was quite entirely an affair of the West.

In 1900, on the occasion of scholarly celebrations surrounding the grand Paris Exhibition, Tannery convened the world’s first international congress devoted to history of science. He assembled colleagues from Europe and put together an impressive programme. The congress resulted in a permanent commission to plan for future gatherings, establish an international society, and publish a periodical. The organizing epistolary activity (his correspondence was published in many volumes by his widow) contributed to Tannery’s dossier as Laffitte’s successor at the Collège de France. But politics intervened to deny him the academic position that he merited. Third Republic secularists passed over Tannery, a practising Catholic, in favour of a philosophically inclined disciple of Comte’s. When Tannery died of pancreatic cancer in 1904, the newborn discipline lost its most vocal advocate.

Tannery’s attempt to form a discipline at the beginning of the twentieth century was one of a number of initiatives for promoting Western civilization. Intellectuals sought organizations and causes that, in spanning the nation states of Europe, could project a common front against barbarism. They proudly pointed to the institution of the Nobel prizes, the creation of the world court in The Hague, and the convening of international congresses in fields of study from mathematics to history. The initiatives depended, however, on funding from national sources. The projection of scholarly and scientific excellence, based not on international assemblies but on national institutions, became a card in the game of diplomacy. Nations tallied up their Nobel laureates, art museums, libraries, and grand research laboratories. During the early decades of the twentieth century, and especially as a result of European wars and political squabbles, the discipline of history of science followed distinct trajectories in various national sectors.

Germany, the land of the research doctorate, contributed dozens of university courses and a number of periodicals. The key figure there was Karl Sudhoff (1853–1938), a medical doctor who in 1905 became director of a privately funded institute for the history of medicine and science at the University of Leipzig. Sudhoff’s successor in 1925 was the Paris-born and Swiss-educated Henry Sigerist (1891–1957), who in 1932 became director of the new Institute for the History of Medicine at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. Great Britain found an energetic patron in the Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford, the Canadian-born and American-acculturated Sir William Osler (1849–1919). Osler cultivated Charles Singer (1876–1960), who in the 1920s obtained a chair of history of science at the University of London. France continued the philosophically inclined course of Comte with Emile Meyerson (1859–1933) and Gaston Milhaud (1858–1918), which culminated in the Platonism of the Russian-born Alexandre Koyré (1892–1964). And in 1928, Italian-born Aldo Mieli (1879–1950) instituted the International Academy of the History of Science and located it in lodgings in Paris provided by Henri Berr’s (1863–1954) Centre International de Synthèse.

All these efforts produced mixed results. Scholarship in Germany was generally compromised by war and political savagery; Sudhoff, in his eighties, willingly embraced Adolf Hitler’s National Socialism. Willy Hartner (1905–1981), one of the brightest lights in Germany, studied at Harvard and became a rare opponent of Hitler in Germany. Singer and his wife Dorothea Waley Cohen (1882–1964) generated scholarly surveys and collections, but they produced few students; Osler’s querulous disciplinary successor at Oxford, biologist Robert T. Gunther (1869–1940), found a passion in scientific instruments. Mieli fled Vichy France for Argentina, just as he had fled fascist Italy for Paris; he died there in obscurity, a victim of Perón’s wrath. Koyré left Paris for Egypt and then New York; he subsequently received an appointment at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. The change was unmistakable. Talented scholars moved from Europe to the New World.

Notwithstanding his unceasing propaganda in favour of medical reform (he was a consultant for the establishment of socialized medicine in the Province of Saskatchewan in Canada), Sigerist promoted significant scholarship at Johns Hopkins. He found two singular disciplinary fellow travellers in émigrés Otto Neugebauer (1899–1990) and George Sarton (1884–1956).

In the 1920s, Austrian-born Neugebauer was the brilliant student of mathematician Richard Courant at the University of Göttingen. Neugebauer elected to focus his scholarly interest on history of mathematics, rapidly becoming the most accomplished interpreter of mathematical antiquity, from the Babylonian clay tablets to Ptolemy’s astronomy. He earned his living, however, as the paid editor of a major journal of mathematical abstracts. Fascism drove him to a position at the University of Copenhagen, and in 1939 to a chair in the history of mathematics at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. Neugebauer’s unparalleled scientific authority and his access to scholarly resources led to a school of disciples based on mastery of languages, primary and secondary literature, and above all the technical details of the exact sciences.

If Neugebauer was wary of generalizing and popularizing, Sarton revelled in the broad sweep. Born and educated in Belgium, Sarton used his inheritance to create, in 1913, what has become the leading scholarly periodical in history of science, Isis. Following the German invasion of Belgium in 1914, he fled to London with his British wife and infant daughter. There he lived on the brink of starvation until in 1915 he sought his fortune in the United States as a promoter of Tannery’s vision of history of science. He found willing listeners in university administrators and capitalists who were interested in appropriating European culture. In 1918 Sarton obtained a salary from the Carnegie Institution of Washington for maintenance at Harvard University’s Widener Library as a special researcher. The arrangement continued over the next thirty years, during which time Sarton gradually acquired professorial privileges, edited Isis, and produced a grand outline of the history of science up to the Renaissance. He envisioned history of science as the privileged intersection of the natural sciences and the humanities. In his view, history of science was the true record of human achievement.

Sartonian generalizing and Neugebauerist specialization often find expression today in writings about science past. It might be said, indeed, that Sarton’s vision lived on for nearly a half century after his death, in 1956, through the enterprise in chronicling the history of science in China conceived and directed by Joseph Needham (1900–1995) at Cambridge. At mid century, however, the emphasis on encyclopaedic chronicle, ponderous biography, and antiquarian curiosity began to recede in favour of methodology. Whereas Sarton and Neugebauer did not often justify the particular focus for their energies (beyond, say, noting something about every science writer in the twelfth century or transcribing and interpreting all known coffin lids with astronomical cyphers), the middle third of the twentieth century demanded relevance. That is, the new generation of scholars found themselves called to consider the end of their vocation. What did Renaissance astronomers or Puritan experimentalists have to do with human suffering and political change? Did the power and prestige of social institutions determine the shape of ideas about nature? How could specialist, scholarly apparatus illuminate the deep structure of human thought?

Physicians in classical antiquity knew that art is long and exhausting, while life is short and demanding. One must gradually build up an intellectual arsenal to attack significant problems. Practical results can certainly be obtained by ingenuous debutants, but even here method and knowledge are everything. Three scholars – Thomas S. Kuhn (1922–1996), Derek J. de Solla Price (1922–1983), and Robert K. Merton (b. 1910) – mixed appropriate quantities of innocence and experience to transform our vision of history of science. They did so by interpreting the prosaic side of scientific endeavour.

Inspiration and method

In the twentieth century, Thomas Kuhn is widely recognized as the most influential commentator on the meaning of science. Derek Price is seen as the guiding spirit behind the quantitative measurement of scientific development. Robert Merton identified the normative criteria for scientific activity and the institutional constraints that guide the life of scientists. Their achievements are the more remarkable because their careers encompassed much else. In an age of specialization, they were polymaths – people able to innovate in diverse ways.

Across the decades spanning the middle of the century, the three interpreters of science share a common modus operandi. Most apparently, each is a brilliant stylist. At a time when academic writing discouraged use of first person singular, their intensely personal sentences leap off the page. Kuhn, Price, and Merton each formulated a seminal theoretical overview that was based on a close reading of critical episodes in science. Kuhn examined Copernican astronomy, energy conservation, and quantum physics; Price scrutinized medieval astrolabes, Chinese horology, and measuring and calculating devices from classical antiquity; Merton placed the early years of the Royal Society of London under a microscope and then examined the career of elite American scientists. Each sought general truths by extrapolating from definitive studies of carefully selected examples.

The men who transformed history of science avoided encyclopaedic studies of the kind pursued by Sarton, Neugebauer, and Needham. Common concern with the social dimensions of scientific enterprise led to books about science in society at large – Merton’s early treatment of science in seventeenth-century England; Kuhn’s analysis of the Copernican revolution; Price’s lectures about measuring scientific growth. But their appeal to learned precedent (a distinguishing characteristic of the scholarly life) was based on the advice of personal informants, rather than on systematic bibliographic travail. Lack of scholarly apparatus notwithstanding, each man expressed intense interest in organizing documentation for the next generation of scholars. Kuhn animated the international effort to assemble interviews and private correspondence known as the Sources for the History of Quantum Physics, a project more than any other that has alerted the scientific and scholarly world to the importance of preserving the record of recent science. Price was the most vigorous academic promoter of the quantitative measurement marketed by Philadelphia’s Institute for Scientific Information and now used extensively by countless agencies and analysts. Merton collaborated intensively with Paul Lazarsfeld (1901–1976) at the Institute for Applied Sociology in Columbia University, where he assembled sociological documentation on a wide range of phenomena.

They were products of elite universities and all enjoyed the privileges of accumulated honours, but they lent their voices to new institutions and assemblies. Kuhn was entirely Harvard educated, obtaining a doctorate in theoretical solid-state physics under John Hasbrouck Van Vleck (1899–1980); he sat in uneasy harmony between history and philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley (where an inheritance allowed him to reduce his teaching obligations) until in 1964 he moved to a programme at Princeton tailored to his measure. He helped Charles C. Gillispie (b.1918) steer the signal achievement of American scholarship, the Dictionary of Scientific Biography. Price obtained a doctorate in experimental physics from the University of London in 1946. A second doctorate in history of science came from Cambridge in 1954, following which he joined the singular company of scholars in history of science at Yale. He energetically supported new societies and new periodicals. Merton went from Temple University to Harvard, where he obtained a doctorate in sociology. He participated in launching the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences at Stanford.

The three found their earliest and strongest voice in the seminal article, rather than the weighty tome, but all mastered general presentations as well as specialized analysis. Following a number of monographs (among which was his brilliant doctoral dissertation), in early middle age Merton produced collections on the sociology of science and social structure. After the profound but general study of Copernicus and the appearance of the Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), Kuhn issued a searching, technical analysis of the birth of quantum physics. Price published meticulous studies of clocks and calculators as well as collections of essays on measuring science.

Masters in the realm of ideas, from the time of their youth they were no strangers to practical matters. All three men were schooled in the arts of manual dexterity, and all three knew the vagaries of fortune in commerce. Thomas Kuhn’s father Samuel was a Harvard-and-MIT educated hydraulics engineer from Cincinnati, a veteran of the US Army Corps of Engineers who established himself in New York City, worked for a bank, and was active in the New Deal recovery. Samuel Kuhn was also a master woodworker, who trained his son in the use of hand tools; a perfectionist, he urged Thomas Kuhn to excel, and the scholar son recalled that he was influenced most by his father and Harvard’s James B. Conant (1893–1978). Derek Price’s father owned a clothing and haberdashery establishment in London’s West End. At the age of sixteen in 1938 Price was appointed physics laboratory assistant at the new South-West Essex Technical College, where in 1942 he received a bachelor’s degree. He taught evening classes in adult education while carrying out his own research for an external doctorate at the University of London. Robert Merton, the son of an immigrant carpenter, grew up in working-class South Philadelphia; while a teenage professional magician, he chose the name by which he is now known after considering other variations on ‘Merlin’. These tactile sensibilities are common themes among leading twentieth-century intellectuals. In their autobiographies, none less than physicist Albert Einstein (1879–1955) and philosopher Sir Karl Popper (1902–1994) have emphasized the importance of manual training.

Although they were not pacifists, Kuhn, Price, and Merton, like Einstein and Popper, avoided bearing arms during times of conflict. In the Second World War, Kuhn and Price, duly certified with an undergraduate degree in physics, carried out technical research – Price with South-West Essex’s Principal Harry Lowery (1896–1967, an expert in musical acoustics) on the optics of hot metals, Kuhn in the American-British Laboratory of the Office of Scientific Research and Development. Merton worked on military-related propaganda and psychological profiles in Columbia University’s Office of Radio Research and its successor institute, the Bureau of Applied Social Research.

Each master rose to the summit of the academic world after a short period of ministering in partes infidelium. Kuhn arrived at Berkeley in 1956 when the university there was still in the process of overcoming its provincial heritage. Merton left a lectureship at Harvard to become professor of sociology at Tulane University in New Orleans, from which he fled to Columbia in 1941. A postdoctoral Commonwealth Fund fellowship allowed Price to study theoretical physics at the universities of Pittsburgh and Princeton. From 1947 to 1950 the newly married physicist taught applied mathematics at Raffles College in Singapore, where he was briefly the colleague of the historian Cyril Northcote Parkinson (1909–1993).

Parkinson is famous for studying the flow of people at cocktail parties and for proposing laws regulating bureaucracies, for example, ‘work expands to fill the time available for it’. Parkinson’s search for social laws and mechanisms finds a counterpart in the life work of Kuhn, Price, and Merton. Kuhn’s description of scientific revolutions as an abrupt change from one worldview to another has brought the word paradigm (proposed earlier by Merton) to nearly the same level of recognition as Sigmund Freud’s (1856–1939) repression and Einstein’s relativity.3 Price’s revival of the term invisible college (first used to describe a group of seventeenth-century natural philosophers) and his discussion of exponential growth (known to historian Henry Adams [1838–1918] around 1900) have led to a large industry involved with quantifying scientific achievement.4 Merton’s elaboration of scientific norms and accumulated advantage (the Matthew Effect), his analysis of anomie in working-class America, and his pioneering development of such notions as the focus group, have made him the most widely known sociological thinker of our century.

One question attracted the interest of the three masters in the 1950s. This was the extent to which science depended on the unique contributions of isolated geniuses. They delved deeply into the phenomenon of simultaneous and multiple discoveries. A persuasive argument in favour of a social history of science would stem from the contention that notions or ideas were independent of the personal circumstances of a researcher, that particular interpretations of nature were in some sense the product of their time. The historical evidence the three men had assembled by the early 1960s demonstrated just this contention. The confluence of learned opinion, noted in Price’s book Little Science, Big Science, marks a turning point in the discipline of history of science.5

By the late 1960s, the search for a general understanding of science, stimulated by the work of Kuhn, Price, and Merton, led to renewed interest in quantitative measurement and close scrutiny of scientific institutions and specialties. What were the pathways of authority in diverse disciplines located in special cultural settings? Did all disciplines and technologies function in one way? What were the practical conditions for consolidating a new discipline? How did the constraints on and opportunities for funding generate new research programmes? Do civil unrest and war stimulate or retard the generation of new ideas? Who is qualified as a researcher in science? How have educational institutions set the pattern for scientific research? Careful attention to these questions produced scores of sophisticated analyses and monographs. As the decade of the 1960s closed, history of science, as a learned enterprise, achieved an intellectual vitality envied by many and diverse commentators.6

The end of science

In Thomas Kuhn’s understanding of science, major changes can occur within a particular discipline. That is, new visions of the world do not necessarily destroy the social structures that may have nurtured them. Kuhn also wrote about how disciplines change form, capturing problem areas from neighbouring fields of study and abandoning special pursuits to a new group of researchers. The late twentieth century has witnessed unusual ferment in the evolving taxonomy of scientific disciplines. New disciplines like computing and cognition have taken away large areas of mathematics and psychology. Physicists lament hard times much as classicists complained about declining interest in their discipline a century ago. Most of all, we see the proliferation of an astonishing variety of technical discipline, complete with trade journals and academic programmes. Science is not a victim of its own success, as has been claimed; rather, the times promote technology.

Today science is threatened with absorption by technology, in the way that Hellenistic learning eroded under Roman domination. Roman architects and administrators used existing knowledge to produce monuments of temporal authority – roads, aqueducts, markets, and public buildings. The durable monuments of Roman civilization, however, were its laws. Romans used what worked to establish what was right. Abstract truth was an affair for Greek tutors.

The early twentieth-century desire to establish truth was an outcome of the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment, which led into modern times. But today, echoing Roman sentiment, morality is the watchword. Public servants, for example, are castigated for failing one or another standard of ethical purity. However, since we have no universally accepted notion of goodness, we are surrounded by an appeal to eclectic principles and credos. Eclecticism appears in architecture, with whimsical adornments alluding to diverse precedent. Eclecticism is revealed in the way that orchestras focus on compositions before around 1960, largely bypassing living composers. In the world of letters, all expressions have been called into question. The evidence suggests that we have gone beyond the modern.

The ‘postmodern’ approach to ideas has extended to science. In postmodernist quarters, it is sufficient to assert that all ideas are expressions of power relations. In the view of postmodernist commentators, scientific writings are merely codes for reinforcing the authority of people in charge. Knowledge, according to Michel Foucault (1926–1984), is ‘not made for understanding – instead it is made for cutting’.7 For Foucault, knowledge is about commanding people incisively. It is about separating things. It concerns morality and values. But it has no privileged claim to truth.

Historian of technology Leo Marx locates postmodernism in the political pessimism of the 1970s. In his view, postmodernists reject the Enlightenment ideal of progress and human perfectability. Sceptical in the extreme, they repudiate all large-scale interpretations of culture and history. The human condition is held hostage by vague, universal forces called power relations, borrowing a metaphor from the Scientific Revolution. But ‘unlike the old notion of entrenched power that can be attacked, removed, or replaced, postmodernists envisage forms of power that have no central, single, fixed, discernible, controllable locus. This kind of power is everywhere but concentrated nowhere’.8 As a result, in Marx’s view, postmodernists focus on microscopic manifestations of power. These writers are typically uninterested in long projects that systematically document large populations. Vague, impressionistic surveys share the billing with narrow, idiosyncratic discussions of printed texts.