The Historiography of the Chemical Revolution

Patterns of Interpretation in the History of Science

John G McEvoy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317324003
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This study offers a critical survey of past and present interpretations of the Chemical Revolution designed to lend clarity and direction to the current ferment of views.

1 POSITIVISM, WHIGGISM AND THE CHEMICAL REVOLUTION

Logical Positivism was a dominant paradigm in twentieth-century philosophy: it shaped ‘virtually every significant result obtained in the philosophy of science between the 1920s and 1950’.¹ Logical Positivism was itself a narrow technical expression of more general philosophical sensibilities associated with the Positivist Movement which first emerged in France at the beginning of the nineteenth century. This movement mingled with the English Whig tradition in political and general history, leading to the idea that the history of science consists in a progressive, teleological struggle between the inexorable agents of cognitive progress and their reactionary opponents. Whig historiographical sensibilities endorsed the positivist view of science as a unitary domain of value-free knowledge, hermetically sealed from metaphysics by the operation of an algorithmic method of inquiry. The mingling of these philosophical and historiographical sensibilities resulted in the hybrid, positivist-Whig historiography of science, which had a long and powerful influence on our understanding of the Chemical Revolution. This chapter relates this influence to variations, within a shared metaphysical framework, on the idea of a unique and defining method of scientific inquiry. It delineates the components of this hybrid historiography – positivism and whiggism – and relates them to deeper and broader philosophical influences associated with the essentialist doctrine of knowledge as inscribed in the nature of things and the historicist notion of an inherent logic of history. Reference to these deeper and broader considerations helps to explain the intellectual hold that the positivist-Whig interpretive model had on earlier generations of historians of science, as well as the difficulties more recent scholars have had with loosening its grip. These considerations also set up a more adequate interpretive framework for understanding the emergence and development of postpositivist and postmodernist interpretive strategies in the history of science in general and the Chemical Revolution in particular.

Whiggism

The term ‘Whig history’ was first used to refer to history interpreted from the perspective of the English Whig political party, which was formed in 1679. A clearly definable Whig historiographical tradition can be traced from Edward Coke and Paul de Rapin, in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, to Henry Hallam, Thomas McCauley, William Stubbs, Edward Freeman and John Green, in the nineteenth century. The central themes of Whig histories concerned the development of civil and religious liberties, which they associated with Protestantism and the rights of Parliament over the King. Simple in outline, the Whig interpretation of English history encompassed a range of political and ideological variations on the basic theme of the triumphant struggle of the great men of history to secure for everyone the blessings and benefits of constitutional liberties and representational institutions. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, Whig historiographical sensibilities slipped their political moorings and ‘the Whig interpretation became the national interpretation’; it survived into the early decades of the twentieth century until it no longer served the ideological needs of an imperial and oligarchic power in decline.²

English Whigs and French positivists traded in the Enlightenment currency of the progress of man, which was flexible and varied in its coinage. Celebrating the Glorious Revolution of 1688, English Whigs linked progress to the expanding constitutional liberties of the freeborn Englishman. In contrast, French positivists responded to the social dislocations in post-Revolutionary France by making progress and order ‘two aspects, constant and inseparable, of the same principle’. While French positivists wrote philosophical histories designed to elucidate the universal principles of human nature and the general laws of society, English Whigs focused more on the individual, concerning themselves with practical problems and political issues endemic to their own society. They adopted a narrative style in which the facts of history were used not to formulate a general theory of society, but to instruct and edify citizens living in a specific constitutional setting. While positivism sought to establish history as a ‘social science’, English Whigs assimilated it to the ‘moral sciences’ of psychology and ethology.³

Nineteenth-century Whigs were united in a confident possession of the past, which they celebrated and revered as a source and sanction of what they valued in the present. They balanced conservative preferences for a fixed tradition and radical demands to adapt political institutions to changing socioeconomic circumstances in a philosophy of gradual, ordered progress, in which the living past was organically linked to the vital present. By identifying a ‘teleological order in the past’, Whig historians tried to ‘create a tradition that demanded and inspired emulation in the present’. The study of history met the quasi-religious needs of the nineteenth-century Whig historian by providing ‘a source of consolation, direction, and inspiration for his flock’.⁴ But Whig (and positivist) faith in the progressive amelioration of the human condition foundered on the harsh realities of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century capitalism, collapsing almost completely in the wake of the universal catastrophe of ‘the Great War’.

Not surprisingly, theories of historical progress were challenged in the early part of the twentieth century by Spenglerian notions of the ‘decline of the west’. As fear and foreboding increased in the decades following World War One, Arnold Toynbee set to work on his multi-volume A Study of History (published between 1934 and 1954), which heralded the decline of western civilization. In a similar critical vein, Herbert Butterfield penned The Whig Interpretation of History, which was first published in 1931. Butterfield provided a definitive statement and trenchant critique of the ‘historian’s pathetic fallacy’, or ingrained tendency ‘to emphasize certain principles of progress in the past and to provide a story which is the ratification if not the glorification of the present’.⁵ This document played a central role in shaping the postpositivist challenge to positivism and Whiggism, giving the term ‘Whig history’ its generally accepted meaning among twentieth-century historians of science.

Contrary to the way it is usually read, Butterfield’s text is not primarily a ‘negative essay’, a monolithic critique of whiggism designed to tell historians ‘what history should not be, not what it should be’.⁶ Butterfield developed a positive as well as a negative, a prescriptive as well as a proscriptive, dimension to his analysis: he linked his criticism of Whiggism to an affirmation of contextualism. Although Butterfield’s contextualist notion of understanding the past in its own terms would today be rejected as philosophically naïve and illusory, he put it to good rhetorical use in highlighting the ontological, epistemological and axiological assumptions that informed the Whig interpretation of history. He argued that whereas contextualism upheld the complexity of human actions and treated historical change as a complex process of ‘interactions’ in which ‘nothing less than the whole of the [complex] past … produced the whole of the complex present’, Whig historians projected onto the past ‘an enthusiasm for something in the present’, and they sought the teleological thread connecting ‘one thing’ in the past with ‘one thing’ in the present. Interested in the agents rather than the processes of history, Whig historians replaced the contextualist view of history’s relational unity and complexity with a Manichean duality in which ‘the modern world emerge[d] as the victory of the children of light over the children of darkness’. Whig historians focused on a select number of individuals who participated in the transcendental subject, or telos, of history; they elevated these individuals above their frail and finite stations in life and placed them in the immortal ranks of the great men of history. Whereas contextualism questioned the efficacy of individual agents and the significance of historical origins, and viewed historical events as the unintended and unpredictable consequences of a complex ‘clash of wills’, Whig historians referred ‘changes and achievements to this party or that personage’. These different and opposing approaches to history involved different and opposing attitudes towards values. Whereas contextualism rejected judgements of origins and values because they overlooked the complexity of historical causation and the relativization of worth to circumstances and consequences, Whig historians used history to formulate ‘simple and absolute judgments’ about the origins of historical events and the moral efficacy of historical agents, understood in relation to the unfolding telos of history.⁷ According to this scenario, Whig historians developed an understanding of the past in terms of the present, which delineated the teleological lineage of history and described and evaluated the place of individual historical agents in relation to that lineage.

Positivism

Whig historiography encouraged historians of science to search for the origins of contemporary science in the actions and Manichean struggles of individual historical agents conceived in relation to the present state and historical telos of science. But it was only in conjunction with the positivist theory of scientific knowledge that whiggism yielded the more specific and substantive models of scientific change and development that dominated scholarly interpretations of the Chemical Revolution for so long. The emergence of positivism was one of the most significant episodes in nineteenth-century philosophy. It marked the transition from epistemology to the philosophy of science, from the analysis of science based on philosophical views of the nature and limits of knowledge to the identification of knowledge with the activities and achievements of science itself. Providing a ‘utopian’ celebration of the ‘dazzling success of science’, positivism’s scientistic sense of the pre-eminence of science was what Continental philosophers had in mind when they characterized all Anglo-American philosophy as ‘positivistic’.⁸

A full appreciation of the importance of positivism in the discipline of the history of science must take into account the complexity and variability of this protean philosophy. The term ‘positivism’ was first used by the Utopian Socialist Saint-Simon to designate the scientific method and its extension to the solution of problems in philosophy and society. Adopted by Auguste Comte in the 1840s, it came to designate a general philosophical and cultural movement which exerted a powerful influence on scholars and intellectuals in Europe and America for over a century.⁹ The Positivist Movement found its philosophical inspiration in a blend of empiricism, rationalism and utilitarian philosophies developed in the previous century. Combining ‘positive philosophy’ with ‘positive polity’, positivism deployed these philosophical resources in an optimistic response to the social and cultural upheavals generated by the Industrial Revolution that linked progress and improvement to the explosive growth of science, technology and industry. The ideological debt that positivism owed to the Enlightenment was evident throughout the Positivist Movement, which defended the liberal and rational gains made by the Enlightenment against the atavistic thrust of the Counter Enlightenment, whether in the form of obscurantist metaphysics, reactionary theologies or conservative political movements. Although this Movement passed through a number of distinct intellectual and institutional stages, it is sufficient for current purposes to highlight and clearly distinguish its initial Comtean stage of development from its final manifestations in the form of Logical Positivism in Vienna in the 1920s and Logical Empiricism in Anglo-American philosophy of science in the 1940s and 50s. By assimilating positivism to Logical Positivism (and Logical Empiricism), twentieth-century positivists and their interlocutors overlooked important differences between the formalism of the Logical Positivists (and Logical Empiricists) and the historicized epistemology of the Comtean School. A just appreciation of these differences must be factored into an accurate assessment of the role of positivism in the development of the discipline of the history of science.

Comte’s Historicized Epistemology

Nineteenth-century historicism – which interpreted man, nature and reason as developmental processes in time – and scientism – which identified knowledge with the methods and content of science – shaped Comte’s historicized philosophy of science. Rejecting traditional models of science based on philosophical visions of the nature and limits of knowledge, Comte and his followers sought to explicate the norms and criteria of knowledge implicit in actual scientific practice. They replaced epistemology and metaphysics with the philosophy of science and articulated the meaning and significance of science in terms of the progressive nature of its historical origins, development and impact on ‘the entire context of life’.¹⁰ Assuming that the past progressed towards the present, positivist and Whig historians of science deployed the principles and criteria of modern science to describe and evaluate past science and to distinguish it from metaphysics, religion and the pseudo-sciences of magic, alchemy and astrology.

The point of departure for Comte’s historicized epistemology was his famous law of the ‘three stages of human progress’, according to which the general history of humanity, the specific history of the individual and the particular history of each cognitive discipline, all pass through a theological and metaphysical stage before entering the era of the ‘positive spirit’. These stages are distinguished by a characteristic mode of thought. The stage of the ‘positive spirit’, or the stage of science, was reached when earlier attempts to discover the hidden underlying causes of natural phenomena, whether gods or forces, gave way to the careful observation of phenomena and the formulation and predictive application of lawlike relations between them.¹¹ Comte used the law of the three stages of human development to outline a ‘historical and systematic’ classification of the basic disciplines of science, insisting that the hierarchy of astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology and sociology constituted a ‘necessary and invariable subordination’ which determined not only the order of their epistemic dependence and historical development, but also the order in which they were to be taught. Comte excluded mathematics and psychology from this order because he regarded the former as the basis of all the sciences and the latter, insofar as it used the method of introspection, as not a science at all.

Comte’s developmental view of history was both deterministic and teleological, resulting in an ambiguous historiography of science. Comte’s deterministic view of the organic development of knowledge and society encouraged a relativistic respect for the developmental stages of the different disciplines of science; but this respect was mitigated by his teleological view that all the sciences are moving towards the same basic mode of knowledge. The fundamental orientation of the positivist interpretation of science was teleological: it consisted in a presentistic historiography of progress and a strong sense of the unity of the disciplines of science and their essential demarcation from metaphysics.¹² Logical Positivists like Rudolph Carnap and Otto Neurath embraced these views with particular enthusiasm, linking the unity of science to the deployment of a single international method and language of science grounded in the theory-neutral protocols of individual experiences. The ‘goals and rhetoric’ of the Positivist Movement, from Comte to the Logical Positivists, ‘dovetailed with the larger movements of architectural, literary, and philosophical modernism’ which were concerned with the ‘simple basis’, ‘international unity [and] progressive nature of their disciplines’.¹³ The link between positivism and modernism will be explored more fully in Chapter 4, where its demise will be related to the celebration of complexity, multiplicity and specificity associated with the rise of postmodernism in the 1980s and 90s.

Positivism linked the ‘positive spirit’ to the methodological rules and procedures that guarantee ‘scientific objectivity’. The positivist notion of objectivity combined empiricism, rationalism and Enlightenment epistemological principles and appropriated them to the goal of a methodological definition of science.¹⁴ At the core of this definition was the distinction between the unreality of speculative metaphysics and the objectivity of factual science. Accepting the empiricist principle of the epistemological primacy of sensation and the Enlightenment notion of the methodological nature and unity of rational inquiry, positivists related the ‘certainty’ of scientific knowledge to the ‘sense certainty of systematic observation’ and the ‘methodological certainty’ of an algorithmic and ‘obligatory unitary procedure’. In accord with rationalism’s emphasis on theory, positivists called not only for the accumulation of facts but also for their theoretical systematization.¹⁵ The rationalist orientation of positivism shaped the influential Covering Law Model of Explanation, developed after the World War Two by the Logical Empiricists, with its emphasis on the formal structure of scientific theories and arguments.¹⁶ At the same time, however, positivists rejected the rationalist or metaphysical notion of an ‘absolute’ knowledge of the ultimate origins or essences of things. Like Locke, they replaced the metaphysical notion of ‘real essences’ with the notion of ‘nominal essences’, understood as objective lawlike relations or regularities among observable phenomena. They also insisted that, in contrast to metaphysics, the scientific investigation of the laws of nature was always unfinished and incomplete. In this non-epistemological sense, scientific knowledge is, for the positivists, ‘relative’ to the historical situation in which it is generated. Once generated, however, scientific knowledge is ‘objective’ and cumulative in its development.

Positivism found a middle ground between empiricism and rationalism in the method of hypothesis.¹⁷ Comte rejected the naïve inductivism associated with Bacon and Newton, which insisted that theories are acceptable in science only if they are generated from the phenomena by an infallible logic of discovery. Comte argued that the origin of a theory is irrelevant to its credibility, which depends entirely on its deductive conformity with the phenomena. Embracing a Kantian notion of the theory-lad...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Introduction: The Philosophical and Historiographical Terrain
• 1 Positivism, Whiggism and the Chemical Revolution
• 2 Postpositivism and the History of Science
• 3 Postpositivist Interpretations of the Chemical Revolution
• 4 From Modernism to Postmodernism: Changing Philosophical Images of Science
• 5 The Sociology of Scientific Knowledge and the History of Science
• 6 Postmodernist and Sociological Interpretations of the Chemical Revolution
• 7 The Chemical Revolution as History
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index