Normal View Dyslexic View
Commentary
Violence and the public narratives of history of science
James A. Secord*†
jas1010@cam.ac.uk
Abstract
The value of the humanities is severely limited by outmoded chronological frameworks, which continue to dominate public discussion and educational curricula while being rejected in current research. Even in adjacent academic fields, the history of science is often understood as a series of revolutions, particularly the much-criticised ‘Scientific Revolution’ of the 17th century. The view of science as a sequence of dramatic revolutions, famously articulated in the work of Thomas Kuhn, originated around 1900 in attempts to market a Eurocentric view of science-based industrial progress. It is, however, seriously misleading. The key issue is violence. The concept of scientific revolutions locates epistemic violence within specialist communities, obscuring the role of the sciences in colonial conquest and in silencing other ways of knowing. (This article is published in the thematic collection ‘The arts and humanities: rethinking value for today—views from Fellows of the British Academy’, edited by Isobel Armstrong.)
Keywords
Scientific Revolutionhistory of scienceThomas Kuhnchronological frameworksviolencerevolution‘The revolt against brutality begins with a revolt against the language that hides that brutality.’
Rebecca Solnit, ‘Call climate change what it is: violence’ (Guardian, 7 April 2014)
How do we parcel up the past? This question, brought to a head through debates about the Anthropocene, is fundamental whenever academic researchers present their work. Literary scholars talk about ‘Romantic’ and ‘Victorian’; musicologists speak of ‘Baroque’ and ‘Classical’; art historians use these terms too, but in ways that do not necessarily overlap. And despite cogent critiques, archaeologists seem stuck with Old Stone Age, New Stone Age, Bronze Age and so forth. Some of these frameworks are widely used; others are unique to English-language traditions. At the most general level are categories that structure periodisation in the West: Antiquity, the Middle Ages, Early Modern, Modern. These public-facing chronologies frequently bear little relation to serious research. The big-picture accounts in Wikipedia, YouTube and the newspapers are often at odds with what appears in specialist journals and books.
The situation is exemplified by my own field, the history of science, which is dominated in public narratives by an antiquated roll-call of revolutions. This starts with the Scientific Revolution of the 17th century, followed by the Chemical, Darwinian, Einsteinian, Freudian, Genomic and Information revolutions. Criticisms of specific revolutions are readily available, but have largely failed to penetrate the public sphere. Often implicitly, this outdated framework pervades introductory teaching, and remains the point of reference for adjacent disciplines such as philosophy, literature and history.
The central issue, which the case of science brings out with particular clarity, is violence. The dominance of revolution within science is a form of repression in the historical record. It is displaced epistemic violence, involving a mismatch between the celebratory revolutionary breakthroughs which dominate public narratives, and the widespread acknowledgement that science—like all human activities—has been bound up with war, conquest, the exploitation of natural resources and the suppression of alternative ways of being.
Although the language of revolution is peculiarly characteristic of the history of science, the problem of displaced violence it illuminates is not. How can we dismantle chronological barriers that were created to isolate the humanities from one another and from larger themes of global history?
The place of violence
Period boundaries in the humanities were standardised during the late-19th and early-20th centuries to bolster disciplinary credibility and to mediate between emerging academic specialities and the public. Most of these new fields employed narrative divisions based on internal qualities of genre or style. Or they contributed to a progressive picture leading to the present, as in categories such as ‘Renaissance’ and ‘Enlightenment’. Clearly demarcated period labels provided marketable ‘brands’ akin to Pears Soap and Imperial Leather in the commercial realm. For most commentators, a key aim was to avoid embedding subjects such as art, music, philosophy, theology and literature in the gritty realities of economic and social history.
How, then, did the history of science become a story of revolutions? (Figure 1). The issue is not when people first thought of science exhibiting some revolutionary characteristics, but when revolution emerged as a standardised shorthand in teaching, introductory writing and public debate. In the decades around 1900 there was no organised academic discipline of history of science, so scientists, philosophers and general historians deployed narratives of revolution for a diverse range of reasons, often to teach what was thought to be ‘the scientific method’. Terms such as the Chemical Revolution, the Darwinian Revolution and the Einsteinian Revolution became established. The ‘Scientific Revolution’ followed in the wake of World War I, its proponents aiming to shift the key episode of modernity from science-based industrial capitalism in the age of empire to a handful of supposedly secular ‘frontier thinkers’ in the 17th century. This somewhat motley assemblage of revolutions hardened into a consensus when history of science emerged as a university subject in the English-speaking world during the Cold War. Although the resulting canon of revolutions was challenged in the 1980s and 1990s, the 21st century has seen a revival, not least in Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens: A New History of Humanity (2014), which has sold over twenty-five million copies in sixty-five languages.
Figure 1.
‘The Scientific Revolution’, Mall of America, Minneapolis, Minnesota, 1994. Appropriately, this was a short-lived offshoot of the Nature Company. The shop assistants wore white lab coats, and potential employees were reassured that ‘The Scientific Revolution is an equal opportunity employer’. Photograph by the author.
The stress on revolution provides drama, and initially served to counter views that science simply progresses through the slow accumulation of positive knowledge. However, given the deepening divisions in our own political systems, a history grounded in irreconcilable argument and the widespread overturning of established ideas is no longer a helpful way to think about science. It encourages populist views that science is simply a matter of opinion and subject to abandonment through the power politics of an expert elite. Conversely, in heroic biographies and popular journalism, revolutions are often unrealistically associated with singular discoveries, individual genius and campaigns against entrenched dogma.
Revolution is the wrong category for telling stories about science. The fundamental reason for this is the relation of science to violence.
Violence—actual or threatened physical violence—is involved in all discussions of revolution in politics and society. Campaigns for changes in the ruling order often spill over into physical repression or public terror, and involving either violence or a reaction to it. As Hannah Arendt wrote in 1963, ‘the mere fact that revolutions and wars are not even conceivable outside the domain of violence is enough to set them both apart from all other political phenomena’ (9). Some revolutions are said to be non-violent, such as the ‘colour’ uprisings of recent decades, but are almost always responses to violence by the state. In terms of rhetoric, all revolutions are violent, characterised by denunciations, counter-claims and sharp divides between the old order and the new.
In contrast, even great controversies in science are usually conducted in measured language. Verbal battles are seen as exceptional and regrettable. The rhetorical register of science, even in controversy, is muted; and the drive to make findings universal means that terms—although always open to dispute—are typically closely defined. In democratic polities, science is supposed to serve as a model for public disputation and calm discussion even if this ideal is never fully achieved. Clearly disagreements and controversy are essential to science, but these operate in a different register from anything to be found in genuine revolutions.
An obvious focus for approaching these questions is Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Published in 1962 when history of science was being established, Kuhn was widely read as connecting the dots between a series of revolutions, and the examples he deployed (Copernican astronomy, the discovery of oxygen, the origins of relativity) did little to undermine this assumption. Most readers of Structure came away with the impression that all important developments in science were revolutionary.
Kuhn attempted to sidestep the violent implications of the revolutionary metaphor by separating science from all other human activities. Science is special, he claimed, because its revolutions occur only among self-validating groups of specialists, who guarantee competence through shared expertise and commitment to civilised values. The problem of violence could be circumvented because all members of these communities, whatever their differences, agree with an approach that developed uniquely in the West during the past four centuries: as Kuhn wrote, ‘No other place and time has supported the very special communities from which scientific productivity comes’ (9). From this perspective, without the heritage of Western civilisation we would be unable to distinguish scientific revolutions from revolutions in general.
Talk of scientific revolutions thus offers two unappetising options: either isolate science from all other cultures and the rest of history, or give disjuncture, disagreement and failures to communicate an implausible place in the scientific enterprise. The revolutionary metaphor is not just strained (as Kuhn acknowledged) but broken.
The two-handed engine
Science is not necessarily more (or less) involved in violence than any other human activity, but the assumption too often has been that it has not been involved at all. In fact, the practices of science have always been implicated in violence, and not just during the past few centuries, but throughout human history. Mythic moments of sudden change distract attention from wider, deeper and more systematic forms of epistemic violence. The violence of science is not between different groups of investigators, but in the ways that certain practices silence other views and ways of being. Epistemic violence was defined by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak as ‘a complete overhaul of the episteme’, in which the overall system of knowledge is implicated in forced attempts to subjugate, control and repress. As she writes, ‘But what if that particular redefinition was only a part of the narrative of history in Europe as well as in the colonies? What if the two projects of epistemic overhaul worked as dislocated and unacknowledged parts of a vast two-handed engine?’ (Spivak 2010: 35).
Put another way, revolution narratives are to histories of science what for literature Fredric Jameson (1981) termed ‘the political unconscious’, occluding the relation of our stories to the economics of capitalism, empire and environmental destruction. Terms such as ‘the Darwinian Revolution’ are put in scare quotes, but remain in general circulation as the last bastions of the outmoded concept of the ‘war between religion and science’ (Figure 2).
Figure 2.
Derek Chatwood, ‘Jesus! vs Darwin!’ An imagined opening spread juxtaposing ‘True Belief Comics’ and ‘Science Action Stories’, 31 July 2014; courtesy of the artist. http://www.poprelics.com/author/admin/page/4/ [accessed 24 November 2023].
Even worse, ‘revolution’ is treated as a neutral chronological label—a period designation rather than an event. Such references can never operate as such, because the language of revolution feeds directly into assumptions about a single scientific method invented as the route to modernity. The invention of the Scientific Revolution and its successors created a geographical imbalance that could only be overcome through diffusion from Europe (Figure 3), a view of scientific communication that has been universally rejected. Every time we refer to scientific revolutions, just as when we employ terms such as ‘Victorian’ or ‘Early Modern’, we are reinforcing this Eurocentric bias.
Figure 3.
Science diffuses from Europe. From Harold Rugg’s school textbook, Changing Governments and Changing Cultures: The World’s March towards Democracy (Boston, Ginn, 1932, p. 22). Photograph by the author.
In their most dangerous form, scientific revolutions remain in academic discourse as hidden subtexts or ghosts: implicit, often even rejected, but still shaping the way in the way stories are told, taught, read and received. Many academics in the humanities (including myself) have been complicit in acquiescing in a framework for their subject that is deeply flawed and counterproductive. In a small discipline like history of science confronting a century-old consensus, this is perhaps inevitable; but it is also the result of the lack of appropriately scaled alternatives that challenge existing accounts of the longue durée. The move since the 1970s towards cultural anthropology and micro-sociology has proved immensely fruitful for the field in challenging over-generalised narratives of the filiation of ideas. However, the resulting stress on the local and particular has often led to a narrowing of horizons, a trend exacerbated by the demands of tenure committees and journal editors for discrete outputs. The situation is best summed up by the opening of Steven Shapin’s survey of The Scientific Revolution (1996: 1): ‘There was no such thing as the Scientific Revolution, and this is a book about it.’ This brilliant quip just about worked as a compromise in 1996, but that it is still invoked nearly three decades later is a disappointment.
Spivak, following Michel Foucault, tended to view knowledge as a totalising system, underpinned by structures defining what it was possible even to think at a particular time. The great virtue of recent writing has been to retain a sense of the depth of these changes, while showing how diverse and contingent they could be, and how embodied in physical practices. The language of entanglement, exchange and resistance has replaced talk of incommensurability and epistemic breaks. Subjects like history of science, originally founded to teach students about the triumph of Western civilisation, are now at the leading edge of global history. As the false drama of revolution within laboratories and learned societies is abandoned, it is being replaced by powerful and engaging stories about the entanglement of practices in trade, war, transport, colonial governance and the use of resources.
Conclusion
The humanities are often seen as enlightening, perhaps even entertaining, but less frequently as agents of radical change. In part, this is because our studies are usually framed within larger narratives established decades ago and for dramatically different purposes. Even when contested, these discipline-specific frameworks continue to be central to academic training and teaching. In these contexts, and especially in public discussion, the history of science remains a procrustean sequence of internally generated revolutionary breakthroughs. Giving these episodes the status of ‘revolutions’ akin to major political and social upheavals encourages a misleading picture of science as an arena dominated by conflict and the overthrow of established theories. Most fundamentally, it displaces attention from the actual ways that science has been implicated in violence for thousands of years.
The problem of revolutions may be especially salient for the history of science, but similarly outdated images of the past continue to limit the civic value of the most areas of the humanities. As we face the collapse of earth systems and the associated issues of mass migration, war and pandemic, no single narrative can or should replace the story of enlightened progress towards modernity that underpinned our inherited disciplinary frameworks. There is never going to be one big picture to satisfy us all, nor would that be desirable. An assemblage of instances—revealing only localism and the potential for resistance—will not do either. Nor will an account that stresses the inevitability of biology, capitalism or any single historical force. What matters is who our narratives are for and what questions they are intended to illuminate.
In challenging outdated frameworks, the tendency to shorten the temporal range of experience needs to be resisted. There is a clear general argument: if the value of the humanities is to give perspective, then the perspective of centuries and millennia is likely to be especially worth pursuing. The two-handed engine is not another of Europe’s inventions. It has operated throughout history, evidenced in the changing ways that specialist elites are implicated in the exercise of power, and the ways in which that power is resisted. It is present in the ways in which land is measured in the ancient Middle East, sacrifices organised in Aztec temples and insurance contracts managed in 20th-century America. A claim that the recent past is what really matters is likely to end up by eliminating the need for history at all. Why not just focus on the future?
One final issue is worth stressing. Disputes about where to draw the boundary for the Anthropocene have demonstrated that the chronological divisions made in most fields largely ignore interactions between the human and non-human worlds—hence counter-proposals for the Plantationocene, the Capitalocene, the Chthulucene and so forth. It will be interesting to see whether these debates continue to have traction now that the Anthropocene has failed to gain the status of a formally constituted geological epoch. I hope they do.
Acknowledgements
This essay is based on James A. Secord, ‘Against revolutions’, British Journal for the History of Science: Themes 9, 2024 (published online 2024: 1–21. http://doi.org/10.1017/bjt.2024.3).
References
ArendtH. (1963), On Revolution (New York, Viking).
HarariY.N. (2014), Sapiens: A New History of Humanity (New York, Random House Harper).
JamesonF. (1981), The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press).
KuhnT. (2012), The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago, IL, University of Chicago Press); (first published 1962).
ShapinS. (1996), The Scientific Revolution (Chiacgo, IL, University of Chicago Press). https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226750224.001.0001
SolnitR. (2014, 7 April), ‘Call climate change what it is: violence’, Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/apr/07/climate-change-violence-occupy-earth
SpivakG.C. (2010), ‘Can the subaltern speak?’, in
RosalindC.M. (ed.), Can the Subaltern Speak? Reflections on the History of an Idea (New York, Columbia University Press), 21–78.
Further reading
Cohen, H. F. (1994), The Scientific Revolution: A Historiographic Inquiry (Chicago, University of Chicago Press).
Cohen, I.B. (1985), Revolution in Science (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press).
Goldstone, Jack A. (2014), Revolutions: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, Oxford University Press).
Secord, J.A. (2023), ‘Inventing the scientific revolution’, Isis, 144, 50–76. https://doi.org/10.1086/723630
Sewell, W.H. (2005), Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation (Chicago, University of Chicago Press).
Wilson, A. (2017), ‘Science’s imagined pasts’, Isis, 108, 814–826. https://doi.org/10.1086/695603
Cite
DOI: 10.5871/jba/012.a40
Published on: 17 September 2024
Volume: 12
Issue: Issue 3
Article view count: 73
Article download count: 7
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© The author(s) 2024. This is an open access article licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International LicenseCite this article
Secord, J.A. (2024), ‘Violence and the public narratives of history of science’, Journal of the British Academy, 12(3): a40 https://doi.org/10.5871/jba/012.a40Crossref
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Received
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July 2023
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