The Wealth of Networks by Yochai Benkler

In The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom, Yochai Benkler discusses his vision of the role of technology in social change. He rejects an overly deterministic vision of technology (which he connects with Lewis Mumford and Marshall McLuhan), but also rejects a view of technology as immaterial to a society’s direction:

A view of technologies as “tools that happen, more or less, to be there, and are employed in any given society in a pattern that depends only on what that society and culture makes of them is too constrained. A society that has no wheel and no writing has certain limits on what it can do.” (17)

Instead, he adopts a “simple” idea that is “distinct from a naive determinism”:

Different technologies make different kinds of human action and interaction easier or harder to perform. All other things being equal, things that are easier to do are more likely to be done, and things that are harder to do are less likely to be done. All other things are never equal. That is why technological determinism in the strict sense–if you have technology “t,” you should expect social structure or relation “s” to emerge–is false. (17)

To illustrate the point, he describes the different impacts that new ocean-going technologies had on Spain or Portugal (their land ambitions were curtailed by strong neighbors) and China (which focused inland). He also notes how the printing press impacted Protestant countries (where individual reading of the Bible was encouraged) differently than Catholic countries (where “where religion discouraged individual, unmediated interaction with texts, like France and Spain”).

He summarizes his position by saying the following:

Neither deterministic nor wholly malleable, technology sets some parameters of individual and social action. It can make some actions, relationships, organizations, and institutions easier to pursue, and others harder. (17)

In regards to modern networking technologies (like the Internet), he warns:

The same technologies of networked computers can be adopted in very different patterns. There is no guarantee that networked information technology will lead to the improvements in innovation, freedom, and justice that I suggest are possible. (18)

Jack M. Balkin, from the Knight Foundation. CC BY-SA 2.0.

In “Digital Speech and Democratic Culture: A Theory of Freedom of Expression for the Information Society,” Jack Balkin (of the blog Balkinization) writes about what he sees as the appropriation of free speech ideals by media corporations in an effort to maximize their capital investments:

Thus, in the digital age, media corporations have interpreted the free speech principle broadly to combat regulation of digital networks and narrowly in order to protect and expand their intellectual property rights. … Invoking a property-based theory of free expression, they have rejected arguments that public regulation is necessary to keep conduits open and freely available to a wide variety of speakers. (22)

Balkin sees this as reminiscent of a similar appropriation during the first Gilded Age of the 1870s and 1880s especially, when the “robber barons” grew wealthy and strong. Corporations of the time lobbied (and won) for new property rights and new constitutional protections against employment regulations (24). The abolitionists and others had celebrated the freedom to labor for whom one chose as a rejection of slavery; the corporations reinterpreted this as the “freedom of contract,” and used it to prevent government labor regulations (24). So, for example, when Congress passed a child labor law in 1916, the courts–drawing on the freedom of contract now enshrined as a principle in the Constitutional theory of the day–struck it down two years later (in Hammer v. Dagenhart).

Bilkin writes:

In what Clinton Rossiter called the “Great Train Robbery of Intellectual History,” laissez-faire conservatives appropriated the words and symbols of early nineteenth-century liberalism–liberty, opportunity, progress, and individualism–and gave them an economic reinterpretation that served corporate interests. … By the turn of the twentieth century, the best legal minds that money could buy had reshaped the liberal rights rhetoric of the 1830s into a powerful conservative defense of property that they claimed was the rightful heir to the best American traditions of individualism and personal freedom. (24–25)

Today, Bilkin said, we’re seeing a similar move: “The right to speak has been recast as a right to be free from business regulation” (25). Corporations have moved to extend copyright, making it both broader (covering more) and longer (lasting for 70+ years instead of the original fourteen years of 1790. ) They have also argued that networks should be freer than ever of government regulation, because such regulations–passed in the name of protecting the public’s speech–infringes on their freedom of speech.

(Interesting note: this move–discussed in Balkin’s 2004 article–is very similar to what happened with corporate money and speech in the 2010 Citizen’s United decision.)

Image via Wikipedia

As I noted earlier in Civil law’s influence on American common law: the appeal, the Roman civil law tradition (which prevails in Europe) has had a larger impact on American jurisprudence than is generally acknowledged. Indeed, although the United States considers itself a common-law country, we in fact use a system that combines common (judge-made, customary, adversarial, precedent-focused) with civil (usually statute-based and inquisitorial) law, but which in England focused on “equity” or fairness and justice.

The American legal system directly drew on the English one.  As noted above, the English legal system was really (at least) two parts: common law (the King’s Bench, Court of Common Pleas, etc.) and equity (the Courts of Chancery). The various new states, along with the federal court system, variously integrated or continued this separation–but generally emphasized the common law as the protector of the common man. This was the case even though the courts of equity had been for centuries the protector of principles of justice and fairness, while common-law courts had been seen as interested only in formal mechanisms through its rigid system of “writs.”

The relationship, though, was complex and not at all as simple as this. Common-law courts gave jury trials to those accused, and guaranteed the right to confront an accuser, while the courts of equity had no juries and took evidence in secret. Despite relying on judge-made precedents, the common-law courts became associated with Parliament against the King, while the equity courts (especially the notorious Star Chamber) dispensed royal justice (an appeal to equity was an appeal to the conscience of the king). Common-law juries refused to convict those they considered unjustly accused (especially for political reasons), regardless of the law (now called “jury nullification”). Common-law judges began to enforce both judge-made customary law and the statutes of Parliament.

Lawyers in the equity system in England were known as “civilians,” and historically had been trained in canon law. Canon law was the law of the Catholic Church, and derived from Roman civil law. With the break from Rome by Henry the VIII, the equitable system moved from an appeal to King and Pope to an appeal only to the King–but the sense of connection to Rome continued for many, and likely contributed to generally Protestant America’s suspicions of English equity.

Despite this suspicion, courts of equity were adopted into the American system in various ways. Some states kept distinct courts, others merged them, but all kept the remedies (typically, injections) afforded by the system as a necessary complement to the common-law remedies (typically, monetary awards only for non-criminal trials–though the common-law system gave us habeus corpus as a remedy against abuses of equity’s jailing of people for refusing to obey injunctions).

In effect, in both England and America, there has been an uneasy back-and-forth between courts of law and court of equity. Even when these have been merged into one body, there has been a continuing balancing and negotiation between common law’s methods and equity’s methods.

Civil law gave us the appeal to equity. Common law gave us habeas corpus and the jury. Equity gave us straightforward complaints written in the vernacular. Common law gave us the adversarial battle between attorneys. Equity gave us discovery.

In short, despite everything I was led to believe in law school, the United States (and England, for that matter) really has a hybrid civil/common-law system.

Related articles

• Civil law’s influence on American common law: the appeal (inpropriapersona.com)
• Our Inquisitorial Tradition: Equity Procedure, Due Process, and the Search for an Alternative to the Adversarial (ssrn.com)

Spreading the news: the American postal system from Franklin to Morse By Richard R. John

In Spreading the News, Richard R. John writes about the development of the American postal system in the eighteenth century, and the police choices that leverages the system as a means of newspaper distribution.

The technological devices of the post and the newspaper were not new in the eighteenth century; horses, paper, and printing presses had been around for centuries. But the new American government prioritized newspaper delivery, and utilized postage fees from merchants to subsidize the development of profit-losing rural routes in order. Of course, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries brought to Europe a new technological development of a different kind: bureaucracies and various corporate forms that more efficiently organized people and their actions.

Nonetheless, the technologies did not determine the outcome that John discusses, but rather enabled it. Instead, it was the policy choices in Washington, D.C. that determined (retrospectively, anyway) the outcome. These policies favored newspapers and avoided using the postal system (despite the fact that in the early nineteenth century it composed roughly 3/4 of the entire federal government and federal budget) to subsidize other federal activities. The result? A sense of national–and even world–identity beyond mere connection to one’s individual state or locality.

Image by spiralstares via Flickr

An article in Slate claims:

While legal automation will be a boon for those who can’t afford representation, it’s bad news for lawyers. The industry is already in a slump, and law school is no longer seen as a sure path to riches. Because software will allow fewer lawyers to do a lot more work, it’s sure to drive down both price and demand.

My opinion? Software won’t replace lawyers, but it will reduce the demand for certain routine legal services and raise the complexity of litigation. Those without the software will be at a disadvantage. It will also cut into the work of paralegals. But not lawyers.

(Part of this reminds me of the claims in the early 20th century that polygraph machines would replace juries, since machines could judge truth of falsity and revolutionize the entire legal process. That didn’t happen, of course.)

It’s true that being a lawyer today involves a great deal of drudge work, especially at the lower echelons, and certainly eliminating some of the most time-consuming parts of the profession has the potential to reduce the workload. But while computer programs to generate wills have cut back on the demand for bare-bones legal services, the general result, I think, has been to increase the number of written wills, not to reduce the people who consult a lawyer for more complex drafting. Similarly, I expect contract-writing tools to help create more written contracts, not to reduce the important of lawyers who write and review more complex deals. The result will, hopefully, be more routinized, written business processes–but may result in freeing lawyers to spend more time drafting complex documents that exceed the abilities of programs to interpret alone.

The basics of document review can already be outsourced abroad in some cases, and using machine processing is rather similar. It helps with the routine and frees up time for the more complex.

The law is a complex human construction because society is a complex human construction. As long as it stays that way (and as long as people form a society, it will), it will take humans versed in its complexities to manage it fully.

The Magic Mirror by Kermit Hall and Peter Karsten

The question of why we should do legal history at all is one that has occurred to me a number of times over the last few years. I have advocated–as I mentioned in previous remarks–the point of view that legal history provides access to more than just changes in statute or changes in judicial viewpoints. Legal history reflects broader and deeper social forces and social contexts. Each case reflects individual concerns of particular people at particular moments in time–but the judicial decisions (especially the appellate opinions) express larger social concerns beyond the specific case or controversy .

In The Magic Mirror: Law in American History, Kermit Hall quotes former Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (1902–1932) to support his version of my point:

This abstraction called the Law is a magic mirror, [wherein] we see reflected, not only our own lives, but the lives of all men that have been!

Hall sums up his perspective on what the law is by saying that “law is a system of social choice, one in which government provides for the allocation of resources, the legitimate use of violence, and the structuring of social relationships” (Hall 1). Law is part of a social context: “Without society we need no law; without law we would have no society” (Hall 1).

Hall is points out two different approaches to legal history, one internalist and one externalist (a distinction science studies scholars also make). Internalist legal history looked at the “black-box” development of legal rules in a straightforwardly–if complex–chronological fashion. Externalist legal histories address larger questions of casual relationships: “We want to know the law by what it has done, or failed to do, or by what has been done to it, rather than simply by what it was” (Hall 2).

Law, then, is individual and personal, but “its meaning reaches to the values of society” as well (Hall 2). We must, says Hall–and I find myself in agreement–pursue both an internalist understanding of the rules and processes of law as well as an externalist understanding of the laws connection to society as a whole.

But really, each of these has choices is distinct, and in many cases their use-cases do not overlap. Carrier pigeons, for example, are really point-to-point messaging mechanisms, unless you have a flock–and they take time to breed, so they are a poor choice if you have need to keep people updated on a variety of different topics. And unlike the owls of Harry Potter, carrier pigeons go to places and not people–so tracking down your significant other in either Greece or Italy–why won’t they call?–is out. (You may, of course, find different ways to make these work for you–in the digital age, square pegs can be refactored to fit in round holes, after all.)

Image via Wikipedia

Facebook

Facebook is the ideal place for keeping in touch with real people I’ve really met, especially if I’m likely to lose track of them otherwise. It’s geographically diverse, lets me share enough to give people a sense they’ve got an idea what I’m up to, and (despite its best efforts otherwise) lets me otherwise stay private (with caveats). So who do I connect with on Facebook? Friends (of various levels) from high school, college, postgrad. Friends–not professional colleagues–from work. Tricky decisions of categorization abound, of course: is this colleague enough of a friend for me to connect with them on Facebook, or do they belong on LinkedIn only? Segregating people into groups with various privacy settings help, of course, as does not sharing things I don’t want the public to possibly see. Sure, this is friend-stuff, but nothing I put on Facebook would be too embarrassing, or cost me a job. Facebook has been pushing pages (AP, PBS, BBC, business generally) that share non-personal information, but I’m increasingly finding this a distraction from the reason I use Facebook: people.

Image via CrunchBase

LinkedIn

LinkedIn has been touted as the professional version of Facebook, but that’s only partly true. LinkedIn is not really about sharing day-to-day details about me, but rather about highlighting my accomplishments and work. But beyond that, it’s mostly a Rolodex of up-to-date business cards of people I’ve dealt with professionally. I will connect with any colleague (or one of my undergrads) on LinkedIn without hesitation, unlike on Facebook. In terms of privacy, well, the point is to be visible and findable professionally. So that’s what goes up there. No home addresses, no home telephone numbers, just business contact details.

Image via CrunchBase

Twitter

Twitter is for link sharing and quick conversations (very quick, and very short) with absolutely anyone I find remotely interesting. I don’t refollow anyone who follows me, only those I think are interesting. I share things I want to broadcast with the world (but am too polite to get a bullhorn). Sometimes it’s personal, sometimes professional, but always with the idea that anyone might read it. It’s great for more distant connections with people I may or may not ever meet, but who say and write about interesting things.

Image via CrunchBase

Google Plus

Google Plus is the new player, but it brings in some of the best of both Twitter and Facebook. Yes, I can put my actual friends in circles and easily limit what I share with just them (so that’s a bit like Facebook, but more focused). No, not everyone I know on Facebook is on Google Plus (and may never be). Google Plus also lets me follow people I’ve never met who say interesting things, like Twitter, but it emphasizes longer posts and more detailed, threaded conversations–without forcing me to dance with privacy settings as on Facebook, and without assuming these people are actually my friends (even if they could be). In many respects, I’m finding that it challenges quick-blogging services like Posterous and Tumblr more than Facebook or LinkedIn. It does seem a potential threat to Twitter, which I am finding myself more and more viewing as a social link sharing service as opposed to a discussion mechanism (but it’s GREAT for that).

Summary

So, here it is in short form:

Facebook: real people, real sharing of personal (but not too personal) information. If you actually know me in “real life,” friend me. If not, go elsewhere. I share semi-personal stuff here (what I had for dinner and who made it).

LinkedIn: real people doing real business networking. If I’ve met you in a professional capacity, connect with me. If not, well, tell me why we can do business! I share only professional info here.

Twitter: on the Internet, no one knows if you’re a dog, but we do care if you have something interesting to share. If you do, follow me and I might follow you back. If you don’t, follow me and I won’t follow you back. I share thoughts and links here.

Google Plus: real people (for now) sharing what they found interesting today, including articles, thoughts, stories, and photos. If you actually know me, I might add you to my Friends circle; if not, but you are interesting, you’ll make Following. Please give me commentary with your links!

Maybe next week I’ll explain how I use carrier pigeons.

Related articles

• Google+ will be squeezed out of social world, says LinkedIn CEO — Computerworld (mbcalyn.wordpress.com)
• It’s Google Plus vs. Twitter, Not Facebook (scalableintimacy.com)
• Different social networks for different purposes (inpropriapersona.com)

Image via Wikipedia

It took nearly 50 years for Justice Brandeis’ ground-breaking law review article on the right to privacy to begin to widely influence judicial decisions. By 1948, though, a dozen or so states had begun to recognize the right as a part of common law–i.e., not as a Constitutional right nor as a statutory right, but rather as part of judge-made (or, in the sense of an earlier era, judge–recognized law).

But what was the right that judges were beginning to recognize? Wilfred Feinberg’s 1948 “Recent Developments in the Law of Privacy” suggests that the doctrine had developed further even as it was applied by judges:

[I]n addition to the interest in “privacy” as ordinarily understood, at least three separate interests were protected: interest in one’s history, interest in one’s likeness, interest in one’s name.

Interestingly, none of the interests Feinberg decides encapsulates a sense of a “right to privacy” as being the right of a citizen to be free from governmental interference in their private life or as an extension of, say, the Fourth Amendment. Instead, they are quite evidently an extension of Brandeis’ original reaction against newspapers digging into an individual’s life and sharing that for the prurient interest of a growing public.

So, first, the protection of “life history” is the right of a person to “keep private life private,” but it does not extend to protection against disclosure if “the public interest in obtaining information outweighs protection of his personal interest.”

Second, Feinberg describes the interest held by a person “in his likeness [which] can be injured either by disclosure or appropriation.” Disclosure via publication of a photograph of a person in public is not actionable. He posits a theory of waiver: “by exposing your countenance to public view, you waive the right to protest disclosure to others of your likeness caught in a photograph.” (Compare this idea to the idea of a “reasonable expectation of privacy” as developed later in Katz.)

Appropriation, on the other hand, is actionable, since any waiver only implies “consent to having others see your face, not consent to having the defendant use it for his own financial benefit.” Additionally, enforcement (unlike with disclosure) is easier, and likelihood of actual harm increased, so so many more people are exposed to the image.

Thirdly, Feinberg discusses the “Interest in Name”: appropriation of a person’s name without their consent is actionable on the basis of a privacy violation. Thus, it is not merely “fraudulent” (and thus actionable on a criminal basis or on the basis of reliance or similar by the recipient), but also on the basis of violating a person’s interest in their own name per se.

And finally, Feinberg returns to discuss what is meant by the more “normal” definition of a “right to privacy”: “i.e., not to be looked at, not to be followed, not to be written to, etc.” (He refers to Pritchett v. Board of Comm’rs (1908), Hawks v. Yancey (1924), and Shultz (1913) to support his description.)

This right does include protection from eavesdropping devices, “entirely apart from trespass” (see McDaniel v. Atlanta Coca-Cola Bottling Co. (1939)). Nonetheless, Feinberg’s discussion situations the right as being quite similar to trespass in many respects.

Feinberg’s discussion is an intriguing look into the state of privacy law as of 1948, and situate it squarely in line with Brandeis’ article, which also reacted to prevent the potential harm of new technologies:

The possibilities of injury to the interests [the privacy doctrine] protects will increase with wide commercialization of such new means of communication as television and facsimile newspapers.

Related articles

• Law of privacy vs. confidentiality in the nineteenth century (inpropriapersona.com)
• Stepping stone to Internet privacy: the telegraph (inpropriapersona.com)
• Do We Have a Right to Privacy? (socyberty.com)

Cassirer’s work on the Enlightenment is quite unlike many of the other works of science studies I have worked on over the last couple of years. Most strikingly different, I think, is his focus on nearly-pure intellectual history. This focus, especially after reading texts like those of Bruno Latour, appears remarkably devoid of social, political, or economic factors. Partly, of course, this is due to Cassirer writing in 1932, with the attendant stylistic and linguistic differences from works today, but much of the sense of being “old fashioned” comes from the lack of discussion of forces acting on his narrative from outside of the intellectual sphere. From our perspective today, some 75 years after Cassirer, his work seems to lack the historical context which so fascinates us today.

Cassirer’s approach, though, brings forward a different kind of historical verity than can be found through an examination of cafe culture, or gender, or class conflict. His approach highlights a sense of the unity of the Enlightenment, the unifying focus on how we know things. Thus, Cassirer says in his introduction that he will discuss the Enlightenment “in the light of its unity of its conceptual origin and of its underlying principal rather than of the totality of its historical manifestations and results.” This kind of “high-level” historical unity can easily be concealed by more detailed studies of context, materiality, and so on, but it was the kind of unity of thought that self-consciously bound many in the Enlightenment together into a “Republic of Letters,” and its the “myth” of this unity helped shape our understandings of Enlightenment thought for centuries. Failing to engage with the Enlightenment as Cassirer did would be to do a disservice to a fundamental aspect of history, just as much as failing to go beyond his approach alone would also do history a disservice. In a sense, Cassirer approached the Enlightenment in the way those who lived it did, and while the result may have neglected other forces at work in the time period, his intellectual focus on “the universal method of reason” reflected a sense common to the philosophes, at the very least (see pages 7–9).

But even if I can value Cassirer’s high-intellectual approach, and see its utility in approaching and understanding a certain spirit of the times, I think he imposes to great a unity of thought in the period. Not everyone during the Enlightenment–even the literate–were French philosophes. Where, for example, does the Scottish Enlightenment come into play?

That said, Cassirer is not focused specifically on the thought of specific French philosophers, but rather, in some sense, on a kind of zeitgeist of the time. He writes, “The real philosophy of the Enlightenment is not the simply … what its leading thinkers … thought and taught [as] it consists less in certain individual doctrines than in the form and manner of intellectual activity in general” (see Cassirer’s introduction). His “unity” is thus a kind of idealized version of the epoch, not a recounting of its component parts.

Compare this approach with that of Dorinda Outram and Peter Gay. Otram never gives us a single, unified definition of what the Enlightenment means. She distinguished, for example, between different national Enlightenments, where the term came to identify distinctly different things. Gay, who Outram contrasts her on work with, operates much more in the tradition of Cassirer: for him, as for Cassirer, the great thinkers of the Enlightenment were primarily French philosophers: Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau, for example. Gay too viewed the Enlightenment as a “unity,” and measures it in “terms of the lives of the great thinkers” (see Outram, p. 3).

Cassirer focused on “rationality” as the defining unity of the Enlightenment. Outram, and other “new” historians, tend to emphasize the social and political contexts of Enlightenment ideas, and include global connections between Europe and the rest of the world—something that never emerges in Cassirer, who is distinctly Euro-centric in his approach and understanding. Even staying within France, historians like Jessica Riskin seek to “show that these sciences [of the Enlightenment] were embedded within the contemporary culture, rather than acting upon it from outside” (Riskin, p. 5). Cassirer approach, in contrast, tends to position the intellectual elites as somehow “outside” the culture upon which they exerted a profound influence.

Image via Wikipedia

As another contrasting example, Outram points out that along with the new ideas of the Enlightenment came an changes in social integration and class distinctions. Recent historical research, breaking away from Cassirer’s approach, has highlighted major societal shifts in the access to ideas, perhaps most especially due to the growth and greater dissemination of print media. Additionally, new social institutions were constructed based on the interchange of these ideas, not just to show off wealth or rank distinct from intellectual pursuits. The growth of scientific societies, public lectures, cafes and even lending libraries illustrates this societal trend, which breaks down some of the separateness of intellectual ideal illustrated by Cassirer’s treatment of the Enlightenment. In short, Cassirer neglects the entirety of the public sphere that Outram considers critical to developing a more nuanced and complex understanding of the epoch.

But Outram, despite her attempts to add complexity to previous scholarship of the Enlightenment–like that of Cassirer and Gay–nonetheless still gives her book a title in the singular: “The Enlightenment.” So, despite social context, political complexities, and so on, there is nonetheless something unifying about what occurred during this period of time or, at least, something useful about the unitarian view of Cassirer and Gay. Yes, the period was more complex that is indicated by reference merely to a few French intellectuals, but nonetheless, the expressions and ideas of these intellectuals are exactly what historians and intellectuals then and now drew on to form their own ideas. Cassirer captures this in a powerful and influential way.

But returning to the limitations of Cassirer, one of the key aspects of the Enlightenment that he neglects is that of the connection–mentioned briefly above–between the intellectual and the public sphere. There is no room in Cassirer for Mary Terrall’s discussions of “sociability,” for example. She consideres sociability to be one of the most fundamental aspects of the Enlightenment (see Terrall, p. 3), but Cassirer neglects it almost entirely, concerned as he is with the thoughts of the eighteenth century. Thus, there is no room in Cassirer for the growth of public lectures, or even for scientific academies—he does not share Terrall’s belief that men of science had to link sociability with “private reading and writing” (see Terrall, p. 4). Terrall thus links the private (or intellectual) with the public, and considers both critical to a full understanding of the Enlightenment.

Many other important historical questions are left out if one relies strictly on Cassirer’s approach. Thus, Outram asks if the French Revolution was a consequence of the Enlightenment? Or if the Enlightenment was a consequence of revolution? The answer is not clear in her work, but nonetheless one can see that revolutions—French, American, or colonial—were clearly associated with, if not caused by, Enlightenment ideas. Cassirer’s vision of the Enlightenment, though, is divorced from such political and social considerations.

Despite devoting a chapter to the topic, Cassirer neglects religion. The focus on rationality and reason, which was identified by Cassirer, also led to the questioning of religious traditions, not just theological positions. Cassirer does bring this up in the realm of ideas, writing: “The lust for knowledge, the libido sciendi, which theological dogmatism had outlawed and branded as intellectual pride, is now called a necessary quality of the soul as such and restored to its original rights” (page 14). But the challenging of “theological dogmatism” did not mean the disappearance of religion, as it continued to be a major factor in society, philosophy, and what would become science. But though Cassirer delves into the religious or theological issues at the same high level as he does philosophical ones, he neglects–again, as he does in other aspects–the more practical ramifications of the Enlightenment’s challenge of religion, and religion’s influence back on eighteenth century ideas and practices.

As Cassirer makes abundantly clear, the Enlightenment focused on rationality and reason: “If we were to look for a general characterization of the age of the Enlightenment,” he writes, “the traditional answer would be that its fundamental feature is obviously a critical and skeptical attitude toward religion” (page 134). Religion, of course, had to adapt this new Enlightenment discourse. Terrall notes that–and Cassirer too discusses–Deism as one way out of the apparent contradiction between religion and rationality, with its total hostility to revelation as truth. Cassirer suggests, though, that Deism was checked, not by the resistance of priest or parishioners, but rather by “radical philosophical skepticism which repelled the attacks of deism and stalled its advance” (page 177). Maybe, but I suspect there were battles of power in the non-ideological realm that played roles as well, along with individual resistance by the masses. Terrall points out that another approach to integrating the ideas of the Enlightenment and religion, one less clearly discussed by Cassirer, was to reject the attempt to make Christianity “reasonable,” and return to a view of religion which emphasized faith, trust in revelation, and personal witness to religious experience (see Terrall on p. 122).

Image via Wikipedia

Beyond the (ideological) battles between religion and reason, the general notion of power–religious, revolutionary or otherwise, except perhaps in the sense of “intellectual power”–is lacking in Cassirer. Terrall notes this when she points out that ideas such as “natural law” and “reason” created new ways to define and legitimate power. And the new idea of “public opinion” (identified by Kant as requiring tight control to avoid disrupting order) and the “public sphere” (developed further by Habermas). New power relations partly resulted from intellectual ideas, but these ideas were not created, developed, and promulgated in a vacuum. Analyzing them as such leaves out too much and changes the fundamental nature of what the Enlightenment was.

From my perspective, and for my interests, Cassirer leaves off entirely too much of the materiality and detail of the Enlightenment. I myself am simply not fascinated by the intellectual back-and-forth of the philosophes without the grounding context of their individual personal feuds, political wrangling, public spectacles, and technological innovations.

I can understand, as I noted above, that understanding and engaging with the intellectualism of the Enlightenment at the level Cassirer approaches it, is important to understanding, at the very least, the historiography of the eighteenth century. His approach is fundamental to approaching and dealing with the Enlightenment as a modern historian–but for me, my true interests remain less idealistic than Cassirer’s. In short, his is an overly intellectual history of ideas, one that provides useful, but limited, insights into some aspects of the Enlightenment.

Related articles

• Dorinda Outram on the Enlightenment (inpropriapersona.com)
• Science and Sociability in Mary Terrall’s The Man Who Flattened the Earth: Maupertuis and the Sciences in the Enlightenment (inpropriapersona.com)
• Ideological Archeology: The Counter-Enlightenment (I) (politeia-station.net)

For the enlightened of the mid-eighteenth century, the most fundamental aspect of their enlightenment was “sociability,” according to Mary Terrall in The Man Who Flattened the Earth (3). Sociability of the time consisted of public lectures, cafe discussions, salons, and scientific academies; the successful man of science had to link sociability with “private reading and writing” (4). Maupertuis, by Terrall’s account a master manipulator of his own image, utilized these “interlocking practices” of public and private sociability to build his persona and his reputation (4). Today, such self-conscious image building is often disparaged by “real scientists,” who consider such activities to be reserved for writers of so-called “popular science,” but at the time the connections between men of science and men of letters was less disputed and arguably more normal.

Maupertuis positioned himself as both a “man of science” and a “man of letters.” During the Enlightenment, men of science began to serve practical (that is, state) ends, and not just philosophical ones. But what did it mean to be a man of science in the time of Maupertuis? While such a man did seek practical ends with their work, he “was not yet a bureaucrat, nor a professional, as his nineteenth-century descendants would be, nor even an expert in the modern sense of the word” (166). Still, the state—through instututions like the Académie, had increasingly found utility in such men. Still, although men like Maupertuis “made their work useful to the state, and to absolutist rulers, … they also pursued knowledge in the service of the more idealized goals of human progress, rationality, and critical engagement.” (165). These idealized goals connected the men of science to the world of letters or philosophy, as Maupertuis most effectively demonstrates.

Maupertuis was, in Terrall’s account, the quintessential man of science of his period, and his geodetic expedition to Lapland became the mechanism by which he combined his social connections and publications to create and enhance this image. He thus portrayed himself as not just a man of science, but also as a man of letters: “Maupertuis himself was one of a small number of members of the science academy who was also elected to the elite literary academy, the Académie française, which in turn was closely linked to the salons of powerful aristocratic hostesses.”

Maupertuis was not the only man of science of the time to also venture into the realm of letters, and Terrall points out that the “successful man of science … was also a man of letters (369). It seems that the institutionalized world of the Académie was not so very separate from the social world of talk and discussions. Dialog and other social interactions found their way into the more private world of print, while letters and published books were read and discussed in social situations. Terrall writes:

Traces of dialogue and exchange abound in printed works, in footnotes, prefaces, dialogues, and critical reviews; this literary angle was essential to the connection between science and sociability. Reading might seem a solitary and unsociable activity, but discussion and debate about books dominated many social gatherings and epistolary exchanges. To be sociable meant, among other things, to converse and correspond about books, their authors, their attackers, their supporters, and any attendant scandal. (7)

Maupertuis marshaled this connection between the printed word and the social world, making his way through the salons and cafés while writing numerous works that “range across an encyclopedic variety of topics, belying anachronistic notions of specialization or expertise” (6). “Reputation,” writes Terrall, “was crucially important in this world of gossip, performance, and reading” (7). Maupertuis masterfully developed his reputation as he “systematically crafted his public identify by building relations with a variety of constituencies and patrons, and by writing for several overlapping audiences” (8). According to Anne Vila, Maupertuis wrote frequently, and did so in a manner designed to keep himself in the public eye (118). He sought to balance his appearance in print before the reading public of the time with higher-level connections “with top mathematicians like Johann Bernouilli, powerful French ministers such as Cardinal Fleury, leading intellectuals like Voltaire, Emilie du Châtelet, and Denis Diderot, and eventually, Frederick the Great of Prussia, who invited Maupertuis to head the Berlin Academy of Sciences and Belles-Lettres in 1746″ (Vila 118). It was through his writings, especially his various accounts of the Lapland expedition, to portray himself as “adventurer, wit, and philosopher, equally comfortable in salon and academy”(Terrall 8–9).

Maupertuis’ personality appeared well-fitted for taking advantage of his voyage to Lapland. He appealed effectively to the reading public with his persona as an “eccentric yet important savant,” according to Andrew Simoson. As Terrall points out, Maupertuis “had a reputation as a libertine man-about-town, equally happy to consort with duchesses and their maids,” and he built on this image for his literary persona. The scientific data brought back from Lapland was important, and the trip helped Maupertuis within the Académie, but his publications for the literary world at large helped to establish him as more than an academic or servant of the crown (367–69).

Image via Wikipedia

In fact, it was his literary productions that helped gain Maupertuis the fame he sought, more even perhaps than that available through the state (367). According to Terrall, this is in many ways unsurprising, as the “boundaries separating the official institutions from the less differentiated public were never impermeable; indeed, the learned pursuits of savants gained a measure of legitimacy by appealing to this readership” (368). This ties in nicely with Dorinda Outram’s discussion of the marked increase in literacy rates during the Enlightenment, with a concurrent increase in social integration. Maupertuis took advantage of these dramatic shifts in the production and accessibility of ideas, especially via the new world of printed literature. He tied this into the new social institutions based on the exchange of ideas (the salon and the coffee houses), but did so without ignoring existing institutions that did mark and display social and political rank (like the Académie). The public sphere–to tie into Habermas’s discussions–developed and expanded in Maupertuis lifetime, and he effectively took advantage of this expanding social sphere, including new readers of his literary science.

But who was this new readership? Outside of state and official institutions, who granted Maupertuis his fame and reputation? Who was the reading public he so carefully developed and targeted?

The relation between writer and public developed in the interstices of the many overlapping hierarchies of the old regime; hence, the fluidity of reputation derived from published works, and the many kinds of strategies that might lead to visibility and fame. All sorts of writers—journalists, novelists, playwrights, philosophers, chemists, mathematicians, travelers–referred to “the public” as the consumer and beneficiary of their works.” (367)

Maupertuis was hardly alone in seeking public fame. He joined others–novelists, playwrights, and other scientists–in this effort to appeal to the growing power of a public audience, an effort only made possible by the spread of literacy and the growth of printing technologies.

But if Maupertuis was targeting the public as part of his literary efforts to establish himself, what kind of science was he presenting? According to Terrall, “[i]t was not the entrepreneurial science of the instrument makers and public lecturers, flourishing in the shops and cafés of London and Paris in the same period.” Instead, it seems, Maupertuis avoided a kind of “vulgarizing” his science, instead “retail[ing] an elite science and philosophy to a literary public” (369).

Presented with a scientist today in the model of Maupertuis, we would, I think, be likely to dismiss him as a “mere popularizer“of science, and see his literary and pubic ambitions as tainting his scientific achievements. But if Terrall is right, and Maupertuis sold “elite science” to the public, then it is, I think, unfair to denigrate in any sense the “scientificness” of his achievements on the basis of his literary persona. In fact, perhaps Maupertuis unification of the world of science and of letters is one that modern-day scientists could learn from. Perhaps by sharing and explaining “elite science to a literary public,” we can move beyond the paralysis of doubt that many feel when faced by scientific experts today. If Maupertuis were explaining global climate change, would we skeptics still hold such a sway on the public? Perhaps a bit more of Maupertuis’ sociability would be of benefit to today’s scientists.

Related articles

• Dorinda Outram on the Enlightenment (inpropriapersona.com)
• The “Lost Women”: science popularizers and communicators of the 19th century [bioephemera] (scienceblogs.com)