‘History is not the study of origins …’
Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History (1931)1
This knowledge [of what happened afterwards] makes it impossible for the historian to do merely what the history-minded say he should do – consider the past in its own terms, and envisage events as the men who lived through them did. Surely he should try to do that; just as certainly he must do more than that simply because he knows about those events what none of the men contemporary with them knew; he knows what their consequences were.
Jack Hexter, ‘The Historian and His Day’ (1954)2
This book is called The Invention of Science. It is about a process whose significance can only be fully grasped with hindsight. Something close to our sense of what had happened had already been attained by William Wotton in 1694 and by Diderot in 1748, but it is striking that the modern historiography really begins immediately after the Second World war. James B. Conant, then president of Harvard, who had played a central role in the Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb, began teaching an undergraduate course ‘On Understanding Science’ in 1948 (Kuhn’s work sprang directly out of this initiative). As we have seen, Herbert Butterfield’s lectures on ‘The Origins of Modern Science’ were delivered the same year: science had won the war in the Pacific, and its history now became properly the concern of every educated person.
Given that this book relies in part on hindsight, many historians will feel justified in condemning it as an example of Whig history. Way back in 1931 when Butterfield attacked Whig history his target was the view that history had a purpose and a goal, which was to produce our values, our institutions, our culture. His attack was on those who wrote history to ratify and glorify the present, particularly present political arrangements.3 Butterfield’s solution was to advise historians to make the past their present.4
In the last half century, though, the term ‘Whig history’ has subtly changed its meaning, and the very historians who have made the most strenuous efforts to understand the past in its own terms have found themselves accused of being guilty of this intellectual crime.5 The key confusion that has bedevilled discussion of this question is expressed in the statement – made by people who present themselves as opponents of Whig history – that ‘the historian’s point of vantage on the past must necessarily be in the present’ and that consequently the choice of what to study is ‘in the end … not simply historiographic, but political’.6 If this were true then it would become extremely difficult to see how historians could avoid writing Whig history. But it is no more than a half truth.
Historians necessarily rely on the evidence which has survived from the past: in that sense their vantage point is a collection of material remains which exist in the present. Historians also necessarily write in their own language, and rely on intellectual tools and procedures which (unless they are writing contemporary history) they do not share with the people they are studying. Their choice of what to write about will necessarily be shaped by their own interests and concerns. In all these respects history is written by an historian who, inescapably, lives in the present.
But the perspective adopted by the historian need not be that of the present at all. The late Tom Mayer wanted to write a book entitled Galileo was Guilty. By that he did not mean that he thought Galileo was guilty, or that we should think he was guilty; he meant that according to the established procedures of the Inquisition which tried and condemned him in 1633 he was guilty. Mayer’s goal was to understand the trial of Galileo as just one of a vast number of trials conducted by the Inquisition, and to put himself in a position where he could assess whether the normal procedures had been followed or whether the treatment of Galileo was in any way exceptional. His project was to make the inquisitors’ past his present. His conclusion was that Galileo was guilty according to the law as then established.7
The notion that we must understand the past in its own terms, though, can place historians under a perverse pressure to find someone in the past who can act as spokesperson for their own views. Sometimes this manoeuvre can be justified; but often it gives rise to a new sort of Whig history. A striking example of this is to be found in Shapin and Schaffer’s Leviathan and the Air-pump.
Hobbes distinguishes between the knowledge we have of things we have ourselves made (geometry, the state) from the knowledge we have of things which are not of our making (natural philosophy). In the case of geometry and the state, on Hobbes’s view, we can know for sure why something is the case because neither geometry or the state would exist if we had not constructed them. But in the case of natural philosophy he argues that there is a limit to what we can know as we study nature, because various different mechanisms can produce the same effect, so, as we try to reason backwards from effects to causes, all we can do is produce a reasonable conjecture as to the cause which is likely to have produced a particular effect.8
Shapin and Schaffer, however, want to turn Hobbes into a seventeenth-century Wittgensteinian, someone who believes that all knowledge is conventional and constructed.9 Their only evidence to support this claim is a quotation from the English translation of De cive (1642), Chapter 16, §16:
But what some man may object against Kings, that for want of learning, they are seldome able enough to interpret those books of antiquity in the which Gods word is contained, and that for this cause it is not reasonable that this office should depend on their authority, he may object as much against the Priests, and all mortall men, for they may erre; and although Priests were better instructed in nature, and arts then other men, yet Kings are able enough to appoint such interpreters under them; and so, though Kings did not themselves interpret the word of God; yet the office of interpreting them might depend on their authority; and they who therefore refuse to yeeld up this authority to Kings, because they cannot practise the office it selfe, doe as much as if they should say that the authority of teaching Geometry must not depend upon Kings, except they themselves were Geometricians.
From this they conclude that according to Hobbes ‘the force of logic … is the delegated force of society, working on the natural reasoning capacities of all men’ and that ‘the force which lies behind geometrical inferences’ is the force of Leviathan.10 This is part of a broader argument that ‘Solutions to the problem of knowledge are solutions to the problem of social order’ and that ‘the history of science occupies the same terrain as the history of politics.’11 Both Hobbes and Wittgenstein, they want to argue, grasped that a form of knowledge implies a form of social order and vice versa.
Unfortunately, their argument depends on a profound misunderstanding of Hobbes’s text. Its argument is straightforward. We all constantly employ experts to do jobs for us, and we don’t have to be experts ourselves to make a reasonable choice of an architect, or a builder, or a car mechanic, or a surgeon. In the case of the king, he makes a particular kind of choice of expert, in that he licenses people to practice – above all, in Hobbes’s world, he licenses the clergy to preach. To do this he does not need to be an expert himself, he just needs to take sensible advice. Hobbes’s point is not that expertise is whatever the sovereign says it is; it is that non-experts can be competent to select experts.
In the England of Hobbes’s day you needed to be licensed to teach in a school, and you could only teach Latin from the authorized textbook, Lily’s Grammar. This does not mean that everyone thought that Latin grammar was whatever the sovereign decreed it to be; it means that the government had consulted experts and chosen a single grammar book so that students who changed school would not be confused by having to start learning from a different book. When Hobbes says that geometricians have their authority to teach from the king, he means the king licenses people to teach geometry, and only people with a licence can teach; he does not mean that royal decree establishes what counts as a good argument in geometry. Of course the king might make a bad decision; in modern terms, he might give practitioners of homeopathy the same legal status as practitioners of the germ theory of disease, or, in seventeenth-century terms, Catholic clergy the same legal status as Protestant clergy. But his bad decision would not make bad logic or bad geometry or bad medicine, or indeed bad theology, into good logic, geometry, medicine or theology; it would simply have the effect of giving the wrong people the right to practise.
What Hobbes is writing about here is not truth, but authorization. The website of the General Medical Council of the United Kingdom states: ‘To practise medicine in the UK all doctors are required by law to be registered and hold a licence to practise. The licence to practise gives a doctor the legal authority to undertake certain activities in the UK, for example prescribing, signing death or cremation certificates and holding certain medical posts (such as working as a doctor in the NHS).’ It does not follow that the capacity to heal the sick is delegated to doctors by the GMC, or that good medicine is whatever the GMC says it is, or that doctors cannot seek to improve medicine by introducing new treatments. It simply means that you cannot practise without a licence. Hobbes was no more committed to the supposed Wittgensteinian view of truth than the GMC are.
Shapin’s and Schaffer’s misunderstanding serves a purpose: by making Hobbes’s view of truth correspond to that of Wittgenstein (as they understand him), they are able to turn the dispute between Hobbes and Boyle into a dispute which aligns with our own contemporary disputes about the nature of science and thus to make it serve their own polemical purposes. Hobbes stands for the relativists and Boyle for the realists. Had they not been able to find a spokesperson for their own views in the past they would have been open to the charge that they were making sense of the past by relying on our categories rather than understanding it in its own terms; luckily Hobbes, on their account, employs the very same categories as they want to, so past and present merge seamlessly together. Thus they legitimize a profoundly anachronistic reading of the dispute between Hobbes and Boyle by placing their own view of that dispute into the mouth of Hobbes.
Shapin and Schaffer end Leviathan and the Air-pump with the statement: ‘As we come to recognize the conventional and artifactual status of our forms of knowing, we put ourselves in a position to realize that it is ourselves and not reality that is responsible for what we know. Knowledge as much as the state is the product of human actions. Hobbes was right.’12 My argument has been that responsibility for what we know lies both with ourselves and reality. Science is not like the state, which is entirely of our own making, though unmaking it would, like unmaking money, be far from easy. Columbus was not ‘responsible’ for the existence of America, nor Galileo for the moons of Jupiter, nor Halley for the return of Halley’s comet, although certainly the credit for these discoveries belongs to them. Reality had its own part to play. And this was precisely Hobbes’s point when he maintained that natural philosophy depended on both ‘appearances, or apparent effects’ (we would say ‘reality’) and ‘true ratiocination’.13
But for the moment let us concentrate on the last phrase: ‘Hobbes was right.’ Shapin and Schaffer would never say, ‘Boyle was right.’ They would never say, ‘Galileo was right’ or, ‘Newton was right.’ That would be Whig history. What, then, makes it permissible for them to say ‘Hobbes was right’? The answer is simple. Hobbes was not right about science: in science, as far as they are concerned, there is no right or wrong. He was right about the conventional nature of knowledge. Here their relativism breaks down and they offer us their own version of Whig history. How do they know Hobbes was right? Because they think they can make him into a supposed seventeenth-century Wittgensteinian.
Making the past our present, as Butterfield advocated, is one thing. It is quite another to condemn all use of hindsight and to insist that the past should only be presented ‘in its own terms’. Thus we are told ‘the one and only error of general principle which the historian can commit … is to read history not forwards, as it happened, but backwards.’ii14 As we saw in Chapter 2, this is nonsense, in that we have to read history both forwards and backwards. Robespierre had no intention of bringing Napoleon into existence, but if we want to understand Napoleon we have to look backwards and see how the combination of French absolutism and the French Revolution made Napoleon possible. What has happened here is that Butterfield’s strictures against a particular sort of hindsight (hindsight used to glorify the present) have been turned into a condemnation of hindsight in general.
Failure to recognize that history can, indeed must, be read backwards leads to a whole series of historical questions being outlawed. Thus Quentin Skinner, the most influential historian of ideas of the second half of the twentieth century, has apologized for writing his landmark book The Foundations of Modern Political Thought (1978). He was, he said in an interview in 2008,
wrong … in using a metaphor that virtually commits one to writing teleologically. My own book is far too much concerned with the origins of our present world when I ought to have been trying to represent the world I was examining in its own terms as far as possible. But the trouble with writing early-modern European history is that, although their world and our world are vastly different from each other, our world nevertheless somehow emerged out of theirs, so that there’s a very natural temptation to write about origins, foundations, evolutions, developments. But it’s not a temptation to which I would ever think of yielding in these postmodern days.15
Note that what is being condemned here is not just any history which relates the past to the present (a temptation apparently always to be resisted), but any history which deals with origins, evolutions, developments, any history which is written with the outcome in mind.
It might be thought that this is just a slip (Skinner was, after all, speaking not writing), but it follows inevitably from the project of representing the past ‘in its own terms’. The fundamental feature of all human history is that people cannot see into the future, and this is because the future, although it is the result of innumerable deliberate actions, is, for everyone, an unintended outcome.16 Nobody gets exactly what they planned, expected, intended. To write a history which presents the past in its own terms must inevitably be to write a history in which the process of change is utterly incomprehensible, for the simple reason that it cannot be foreseen.iiii It is important here to distinguish between teleological history – the notion that history has a purpose or goal – and retrospective history, which seeks to study history as a process of development. Human history has no purpose or goal; but there are plenty of origins, foundations, evolutions and developments, and if you leave them out then you leave out any possibility of understanding change.iiiiii
This enterprise of reading the past backwards need not involve any assumption that the participants knew where they were going or that the end result was foreordained. A. J. P. Taylor (The Origins of the Second World War, 1961) did not imagine that it was possible for German politicians to see the Second World War coming – indeed he was trying to escape from the assumption that the war was the result of deliberate planning and was looking for a better explanation. Skinner, when he wrote Foundations (if I may take the liberty of defending early Skinner from late Skinner) did not imagine that Machiavelli, Bodin and Hobbes were deliberately trying to lay the foundations of modern liberalism or of the modern theory of the state. Donald Kelley (The Beginning of Ideology, 1981) did not for a moment imagine that sixteenth-century French intellectuals foresaw the modern -isms.iviv The writing of retrospective history is (I know some historians will find this shocking) a perfectly sensible intellectual enterprise.17 Historians who refuse to engage in it narrow the intellectual scope of history unnecessarily and arbitrarily; indeed history written without the benefit of hindsight (if such a thing were possible) would not be history at all, but rather, to adopt Foucault’s term, ‘genealogy’.
The source of much of this confusion derives from two apparently problematic features of the historian’s enterprise. The first is that people in the past do, to a considerable degree, understand what is going on and react intelligently in response to it. It is thus easy to think that one could write history from Galileo’s point of view. But it is an elementary truth that the full significance of his actions was hidden from Galileo. Galileo, for example, despite performing exquisite experiments, never fully grasped the power of the experimental method, dismissing Gilbert’s work as not sufficiently philosophical. Correcting for his limitation in this respect need not involve adopting a present-centered view; we need only look on Galileo from the vantage point of Mersenne, who quickly set about replicating Galileo’s experiments with a view to producing more accurate measurements. (Of course there is always the danger here that we will simply turn Mersenne into the spokesperson for our own views, as Shapin and Schaffer do with Hobbes, so we have to proceed carefully.)
The second apparently problematic feature of the historian’s enterprise is that some important developments are quite simply invisible to the participants.vv Sometimes people really do not have any sense of the significance of what they are doing, or if they do they fail to put their thoughts on paper. Newton kicked up a fuss about the use of the word ‘hypothesis’; but there was no comparable debate about theories, facts, or laws of nature. The new terminology was adopted quietly, casually, carelessly. Yet it marks the birth of a new way of thinking, a way of thinking that continues to be our own. Identifying that way of thinking and identifying it as still ours are both proper tasks for the historian – this can be called intellectual archaeology, if one wishes, in so far as it deals with developments which were not the result of conscious deliberation.18 I don’t think that either of these two types of historical perspective ought to be problematic, although they must seem so to anyone who seeks to present the past in its own terms, nor do I think they deserve the title of Whig history.
Let us now turn to an example of Whig history as that term is generally understood. When Sir George Cayley published ‘On Aerial Navigation’ (1809–10), an analysis of the physics of heavier-than-air flight, he could not imagine a modern aeroplane; but he had invented the cambered aerofoil and what we would now call the propeller,vivi and he was confident that heavier-than-air flight was possible; indeed he went on to successfully construct a glider that could carry a person. What he lacked of course was a suitable power source: he tried to imagine an aeroplane powered by a steam engine, but the difficulties were obvious.
It is perfectly sensible to say that Cayley laid the foundations of modern aeronautics. Cayley was convinced that he had made an important breakthrough; but it would be more than a century before the significance of what he had achieved would become apparent. Thus we find in the journal Science for 1912 an article on ‘The Problem of Mechanical Flight’ which begins ‘The scientific period in aviation began in 1809 when Sir George Cayley published … the first complete mechanical theory of the aeroplane,’ but then quickly adds ‘[t]his memoir passed unnoticed until unearthed some sixty years later.’19 What are historians to do with Cayley? I see no reason why they should pretend to ignore his existence, even though any discussion of him is liable to be dismissed as Whig history. There is nothing peculiarly present-centered about regarding Cayley as important, unless the present is extended to include the period of the first flying machines. Nor does writing about Cayley involve glorifying modern air travel or (for example) denying its contribution to global warming. Cayley is a minor but not insignificant figure in the history of science and technology; but there is no doubt that our sense of his significance derives entirely from hindsight.
Such is the fear of being accused of writing Whig or teleological history that it is difficult to find an historian making simple and elementary points of this sort. Fortunately the philosopher Richard Rorty can come to our assistance. Rorty pounced on a remark by Steven Weinberg, who had written:
What Herbert Butterfield called the Whig interpretation of history is legitimate in the history of science in a way that it is not in the history of politics or culture, because science is cumulative, and permits definite judgements of success or failure.20
Here Weinberg had inadvertently confused three separate issues: cumulation (all history, indeed all human activity, is cumulative); success or failure (there are many human activities that permit definite judgements of success or failure); and progress (a unique feature of modern science and technology). And so Rorty attacked:
Does Weinberg really want to abstain from definite judgements of the success or failure of, say, the constitutional changes brought about by the Reconstruction Amendments and by the New Deal’s use of the interstate commerce clause? Does he really want to disagree with those who think that poets and artists stand on the shoulders of their predecessors, and accumulate knowledge about how to write poems and paint pictures? Does he really think that when you write the history of parliamentary democracy or of the novel that you should not, Whiggishly, tell a story of cumulation? Can he suggest what a non-Whiggish, legitimate history of these areas of culture would look like?21
History is a cumulative record of success and failure, and the pretense that it can be something other than that is a peculiar shibboleth of historical writing over the last fifty years. (Rorty and Weinberg would have had, one may imagine, little difficulty in agreeing with each other if only they could have agreed on the language to use.)
The important thing about the science of Galileo and Newton, Pascal and Boyle is that it was, in part, successful, and that it laid the foundations for future successes. They did not know what the future would hold; but they did have a clear sense of what they were trying to achieve. They were confident that they were making progress, and we cannot leave that progress out of our history, any more than we can leave out the influence they had on those who came after them. Nor can we leave success out of the history of parliamentary democracy or the novel; but democracies sometimes fail, and sometimes the novels get worse not better. The remarkable thing about science is that the process is not only cumulative but, it would seem (to make a distinction the dictionary does not recognize), accumulative. The past not only shapes the present; in science, gains made in the past are only ever given up (except where there is censorship or religious or political interference) in order to be exchanged for greater gains made in the present.viivii It is this peculiar feature of modern science which makes the history of science since 1572 uniquely a history of progress, and makes it inappropriate to write history of science in the same sceptical way that one might write the history of democracy or of the novel.
This book has therefore been deliberately written in opposition to certain conventions which have become established in ‘these postmodern days’. Soon, I trust, those conventions will be every bit as mysterious as the ones that governed the writing of Whig political history. What is the driving force behind relativism and postmodernism? Some think it is fundamentally a political commitment to multiculturalism, a commitment that needs re-examination when cultures clash. Broadly speaking, this seems to me true. An alternative view is that postmodernists do not want to recognize the existence of ‘reality’. The problem with this view is that it takes the concept of ‘reality’ for granted, whereas what we need is a history of the changing nature of reality. But still, this second view has also, I think, a kernel of truth. To insist, as postmodern historians of science do, on radical contingency, on the idea that there is no such thing as path dependency, that we might still be practising alchemy or riding penny-farthings, is to claim that there was never a reality-based logic which led certain theories and technologies to succeed while others failed.22 Alongside the political commitment to multiculturalism, honourable in intention though profoundly problematic in practice, we must also acknowledge a powerful fantasy, the fantasy that we can remake the world in any way we choose, and, equally powerful, the fantasy that no one can tell us that what we are trying to do can never be done. Multiculturalist politics had a real referent in post-colonialism and immigration. But postmodernist epistemology also has a fantasy referent in what we may call the politics of wish-fulfillment, according to which there are no obstacles to our remaking the world as we choose, apart from the ideas in our minds. The world can be anything we want it to be, because thinking makes it so. When Shapin and Schaffer say ‘it is ourselves … that is responsible for what we know’ they seem to imply that knowledge can be whatever we choose to make it; and if we do not like science as we find it, then all we need do is wish for it to be otherwise.
Concealed within relativism there thus lies a dream of omnipotence, a fantasy recompense, perhaps, for the impotence and irrelevance of academic life. During the years 1919–20 Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Marxist, adopted as his own the maxim ‘pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will’.23 Foucauldian politics is the opposite of this: optimism of the intellect, pessimism of the will. It declares that we are trapped in a world not of our making, while insisting that the obstacles to our remaking the world are indeed all of our own making. This is a vision of politics first invented by Montaigne’s beloved friend Étienne de la Boëtie. Montaigne, although his love for his friend knew no limits, was never taken in by it.