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)

It is, in a sense, a traditional historical work, and seeks to communicate “broad generalizations” about the “essences” of the “subjects and their times” (White 3). Many current historians might quibble about the possibility of such a project, but it is, I think, a fundamental pretense (at least) for any work that attempts to make sense of broad swaths of history.

Core to his entire analysis is the idea that the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, John Marshall, established a new and enduring American legal tradition that continues today. Marshall, White argues, establish three key elements:

• a “tension between independence and accountability”;
• a “delicate and unique relation to politics”;
• and a “trade-off” between the power and independence of a judge and the restrains placed on the judiciary (White 3–4).

Although Marshall helped establish an enduring American legal tradition, jurisprudential theories have changed over time. Especially important, according to White, is the shift from a nineteenth century “oracular” view of judge as “law finder” to the twentieth century view of judge as “law maker” (White 4). White ends his work with the Rehnquist Court, but I am left wondering how well this distinction continues to work today given conservative justices like Antonin Scalia, who seems opposed to law making by judges and embraces instead an “originalist” approach to constitutional interpretation. This seems, in a sense, to be more like the nineteenth century’s approach than the twentieth’s.

White’s biographical approach to history could easily fall into “great man” historiography, despite White’s assertion that he advances no such “‘great man’ theory” (White 6). But he seeks less to glorify individual judges than to use them as a means of “reflect[ing] the governing social and intellectual assumptions of various periods of American history” (White 6). White does what so many historians love to do: he rejects theory as a defining force in his work, and instead argues that he’s not pursuing one theory of history over another, but rather “convey[ing] an understanding of what it has meant to be an American appellate judge” (White 6).

White strongly suggests–and I myself have at least somewhat advocated–that the relation between the judiciary and “its social context is one of total integration” (White 6). In other words, the words of appellate judges is at least as much about larger society as it is about the specific case, controversy, or judge. This last point is a key one for any historian seeking to look at legal history as a means of access to broader historical issues, and it’s one that I look forward to developing further–and for which I hope that I can continue to find support.

I think analogy reflects a desire to economize on thought. Thus, if we construct evidential reasoning on the basis of, say, Bayesian networks, then–instead of creating a whole new network to reflect a new situation–we simply build on an old network, and replace nodes with new facts, build a few nodes, and generally spiff things up.

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I have begun to consider the utility of formal methods of evidential evidence mapping. David Lagnado has presented Bayesian methodologies to us here in Vienna for the last week. Such an approach tends to be math-intensive in its quantitative form, but is powerful as well in its graphical, non-mathematic form. It is reminiscent of Wigmore’s early 20th century graphical approach to mapping evidence, but is in many respects less complex and more powerful. Additionally, even without deep mathematical knowledge, the formulas are useful in any presentation of statistics in a courtroom, and can help avoid common reasoning fallacies (like the “prosecutor’s fallacy”).

Whether people actually think in Bayesian terms is unclear. What is more clear is that Bayesian tools help lay bare some of the heuristic shortcuts people take when dealing with complex evidence (such as in legal cases). We tend, for example, to over-value high-probability evidence by conflating, say, a fingerprint match with guilt, rather than considering alternative hypothesis (the fingerprint is a match, but was deposited at a different time). We also tend to completely ignore low probability evidence, collapse variables and possibilities into singular possibilities, leave out weak links, and downplay absent information entirely. All of this is critical knowledge for any trial attorney to keep in mind, especially when dealing with jurors.

Just always remember that evidence is “irreducibly contextual,” in the words of Hasok Chang. We simply cannot control all the variables, or even imagine all the variables. Failing to be aware of this leads to many of the logical fallacies that Lagnado discussed when explaining Bayesian approaches to evidence, since many problems emerge if one fails to take this into account (whether that’s in the public health context, a legal case, or when deciding on the best cafe in Vienna). This means that however effective your Bayesian map may be, it’s easy to leave out key aspects. Do not assume your map is complete.

Relatedly, Bayesian networking–especially when one expects to actually calculate anything, rather than simply graphing–are deeply dependent on the “priors.” Priors represent the probability of an event occurring, and generally reflect subjective assessments of experts.

In a sense, needing priors simply pushes back complex and subjective calculations further, and this is a major criticism of the approach. How does one calculate how many people smother their children in the U.K. each year (a necessary prior in calculating aspects of the Sally Clark case). Lagnado has emphasized that, while a key problem, the proper Bayesian approach is to lay these subjective factors bare, and to focus not on concealing them, but rather on agreeing on shared assumptions. Bayesian calculations do not show “the truth,” but rather a mathematical truth based on shared assumptions.

Certainly Bayesian approaches have problems, but I would encourage considering the situations in which they may prove helpful, rather than focusing on attacking the approaches key problems. Systematizing decision-making may be flawed–certainly we cannot simply replace the jury with a Bayesian calculator–but thinking through  a complex web of evidence in Bayesian terms provides critical insights, and in some cases fundamental and powerful truths.

In short, I would highly recommend that any criminal defense attorney consider investigating both the mapping techniques and the basic statistics of Bayesian networks.

Related articles

• The holes in my philosophy of Bayesian data analysis (stat.columbia.edu)
• Peter Huber’s reflections on data analysis (stat.columbia.edu)

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For the last week I’ve been a part of the Vienna Institute Summer University (VISU) at the University of Vienna, at a two-week conference on “The Nature of Scientific Evidence.” The program brings together graduate students from a variety of disciplines from around the world to discuss science-related topics. Key lecturers this year include Hasok Chang (Philosophy of Science/Cambridge), David Lagnado (Cognitive Psychology/UCL) and Tal Golan (History of Science/UCSD). Interestingly for my interest in law and science, both Lagnado and Golan have focused on the legal sphere as a powerful “theater” for investigating the (ab)use of scientific evidence.

We can characterize the approaches quickly as follows: Chang discusses the theoretical underpinnings of science, including the logical reasoning process; Golan looks at the historical growth of science in the public imagination and the development of scientific experts; and Lagnado investigates the use of Bayesian networking to understand a cognitive approach to weighing evidence, both normatively and descriptively.

Given that I am an historian of law and technology, and a lawyer, what kinds of takeaways have I gotten so far?

First, that Bayesian networking could be highly beneficial to lawyers, especially in criminal defense. The approach has problems, but is a powerful way to avoid common pitfalls in evidential reasoning.

Second, that scientific evidence is not radically different from other evidence, and that the fallacies that scientists encounter internally are not radically different than when they present externally (this is more controversial, perhaps).

Third, that context is key to evidence, to the acceptance of evidence, and to the use of evidence. One cannot consider all variables, nor all potential outcomes or possibilities, so all decisions made from evidence are bound up in both one’s own context and from the context the evidence came from. (This doesn’t mean that all decisions are necessarily totally subjective and arbitrary, however).

Fourth, that many disciplines can come together and discuss common questions in a useful and powerful way, but that it isn’t always easy to speak a mutually intelligible common language (and I’m not talking about English vs. German).

I will have more to say later.

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.

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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).

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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).

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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)

Put in old-fashioned science studies terms (i.e., Thomas Kuhn), cutting-edge history is obsessed with forever escaping the bane of “normal science”–that is, of applying useful and existing theoretical frameworks to look at the past–and instead forever seeks to a Kuhnian “paradigm shift.” From Marxist history to social history to the “cultural turn,” modernist to structuralist to postmodernist, there is a fascination with the new.

Interestingly, though, this is a “newness” that is grounded in the earlier approaches and reacts directly to them. Thus, “women’s history” rejected the dominant vision of traditional (and male-dominated) history, then became to “gender history,” which then led to a further reaction: “the history of masculinity” (Wickberg). Why? Because, it seems to me, the previous approaches became ho-hum “normal history,” and historians wanted to do something new: “The fields of women’s history, African-American history, and gay history have not disappeared. Instead they have become establishment, rather than oppositional, fields, arenas in which ‘normal history’ is practiced” (Wickberg).

This is the framework through which I see (to mix metaphors) Geoff Ely’s A Crooked Line: From Cultural History to the History of Society (and the critiques of it). Ely, in a sense, is tired of this hunt for the forever new, and proposes a kind of detente, which, essentially, draws a line in historiography and says, “Here we are–everything up to this point is what we should stick to, and get back to doing stuff.” He doesn’t seek to reject the “cultural turn” or Marxist history or anything else, but simply to focus back on “normal history.”

I am in many respects deeply sympathetic to this (much simplified) version of Geoff Eley’s position in A Crooked Line. I view theoretical approaches as useful tools, helpful when they are useful, and distracting when they are not. But at the same time, new theoretical approaches can reveal new truths about our past (and present and future). A “history of whiteness,” while in some sense an attempt to simply do something new in reaction to what has become “establishment history,” nonetheless also wrings something new out of our past that previous approaches might have missed. The past is a multilayered thing. Every shift in theoretical framework, whatever its motivation, peels back another layer. New interrogations of old things is no different from new interrogations of new things.

The fight about theory, its utility, reactions against it, fights about which is better, etc., etc., says more to me about the state of historians than it does about history at all. Theory, and theoretical discourse, is about the people who practice history, not about those we study. We fear the impression of disarray that theoretical arguments can convey to the world at large–if we cannot even agree about how to do history, how can we expect anyone to trust what we say? But, realistically, these arguments are no more specific to history (or other humanities or social sciences) than they are to any other discipline; despite this, our fears of distrust by non-historians are no less realistic. We envy the high status of science in our society, but climate scientists and vaccine researchers have all felt the sting of distrust when their internal theoretical dissensions become visible to outsiders. We should not fear theory, but we should be wary of it.

Related articles

• Considering comparative approaches in legal histories (inpropriapersona.com)
• On Wikipedia, Cultural Patrimony, and Historiography | booktwo.org (booktwo.org)
• History, historiography and Wikipedia (simoncollister.com)

One key point of Siegel is that comparative histories tend to be “international” and not “transnational,” and that this is a core problem. Instead of escaping the “boundaries of nationalist historiography” (to quote Siegel quoting Ian Tyrrell, 65), traditional comparative approaches posit two (or more) distinct units (nations) that the historian then contrasts. This tends to ignore themes, narratives, concepts, etc. which act “unconfined by national borders” (65). Such studies can “shape or even create its own data” (65).

Siegel’s points are quite valid, I think, especially for certain kinds of history, especially histories that target people or groups who cross artificial national boundaries (immigrants, for example). I am struggling, though, to integrate her critique into my work, which does not quite imagine national distinctions, but rather exists because of these national distinctions. However artificial it may be, law is bound by national boundaries, and investigating changes in law necessitates a recognition of nations.

More fruitful for me, though, is to consider how ideas, concepts, and notions within the law may escape, cross, or transcend the legal boundaries into which they are inscribed. Thus, if I am investigating a concept like the “expectation of privacy,” I should consider the transnational character of this sense, and not simple say that, for example, the French have a different sense of it without examining what that means and what the cross-national connections may be. However, I do believe that comparing and contrasting the French and American legal structures is valid and fruitful–these boundaries and domains exist independent of my analysis. I am not creating them (even if, as I said, they may be artificial). But even as I do so, I should be careful not to attribute the differences strictly to some kind of national character, or to assume they the grew that way independent of influences from beyond the nation-state. But doing that, I think, is simply doing effective history; failing to take into account supra-national influences does a disservice to the history, quite apart from Siegel’s critique.

Siegel proposes that comparative methods considered as “subjects” or historical study instead of “methods.” I think perhaps this proposal is useful in a field where comparative approaches have reigned for years (race in the U.S. vs. Brazil, for example), but its usefulness as a methodology remains vital in areas where it has been less used. Legal scholars have tended to remain parochial in their focus, and I think legal comparative approaches have yet to make inroads to such an extend that it is time to turn away from them.

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In “Islam and Science,” an article written for the Oxford Handbook of Religion and Science, Nasr attempts to give a broad overview of the relationship of Islam to modern science and technology.

First, he criticizes the approach of viewing Western science as a continuation of Islamic science, and therefore accepting it uncritically as fitting in well with Islamic thought. Nasr points out, however, that this perspective ignores the “agnostic science of nature” in the Western tradition, along with the “shift of paradigm” during the European Scientific Revolution that sharply distinguishes modern Western science from Islamic science.

Second, in a related manner, he criticizes the acceptance of Western science as “value-free,” as opposed to contemporary perspectives of science — even in the West — of science as based “on a particular value system and a specific world-view.” The implicit value system of Western science, he suggests, needs instead to be criticized “from the Islamic point of view.”

Importantly for Nasr is the question of the values and especially the ethics of science. He believes that “knowledge and its implications cannot evade ethical implications.” Modern science attempts to relegate alternative claims to knowledge, especially ethical claims and most especially knowledge based on religion, to “poetry, myth, or, even worse, superstition.”

He suggests that Islam needs to realize that modern science is but “a science of nature,” not the science of nature. He posits a “positive Islamic critique of modern science” that “maintain[s] the traditional Islamic intellectual space … to which Islamic ethics corresponds, withing denying the legitimacy of modern sciences within their own confines.”

Most importantly for Nasr, Muslims should not look to science to confirm metaphysical beliefs, but rather leave to science claims only about the natural world, not the supernatural one. He asks Muslims to be wary of “the prevalent view … from which God is simply absent, no matter how many modern scientists believe individually in him.” Modern Islamic scholars, he argues, unlike their traditional counterparts in the past, are “particularly bereft of responses” to the question of Transcendent Cause and the role of God. For him, older Islamic though had better answers to such questions, and this is why so many scholars are more interested in older relations between Islam and science than in contemporary ones.

So what should be done? First, he wants Muslims to stop seeing themselves as inferior to Western science and technology, and to instead approach it as at least an equal. Again, he especially suggests that Islam and its ethics has a powerful rejoinder to Western science, which while it may put a man on the Moon still cannot stop teenagers from killing each other.

Second, he recommends there be an in-depth study of traditional Islamic sources, from the Qur’an to the traditional works on the sciences and philosophy. The goal, he argues, is to create an “Islamic world-view and especially [an] Islamic concept of nature and the sciences of nature.” He wants scholars to do this within the framework of Islamic tradition, not through simple readings of decontextualized Qur’anic verses. Third, he suggests that more Muslim students should study “pure” sciences and not technology. He believes the Muslim world already has sufficient numbers of engineers, but that what it really needs are more scientists who can see beyond immediate utility.

Fundamentally, Nasr believes that “[o]nly a science that issues from the source of all knowledge, from the Knower … and cultivated in an intellectual universe in which the spiritual and the ethical are not mere subjectivisms but fundamental features … can save humanity.” He suggests that Islamic science has the potential to not only create a “veritable Islamic science” that would help the Muslim world, but also to create a science for “those all over the globe who seek a science of nature and a technology which could help men and women to live at peace with themselves, with the natural environment, and above all, with that Divine Reality Who is the ontological source of both man and the cosmos.”

A few questions to close up this synopsis of Nasr’s article:

• Which Islam and whose Islamic ethics does Nasr mean? (It’s not like Islam is one thing to all people.) Who decides?
• Does the distinction between “pure” science and technology hold up? Is it a useful distinction?
• Is there a whiff in Nasr’s writing of the “inferiority complex” he wants Islamic science to rid itself of?
• There is a certain resemblance in Nasr’s article to positions of some evangelical Christians — he is, for example, critical of Darwinian evolution (an “hypothesis parading as scientific fact”) and aligns himself with the Pope in regards to “protecting the unborn” — is this resemblance more than simply on the surface?

These are questions I may pursue further in future reading and research, but if anyone has any thoughts, please share them.

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