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Darwin's Metaphor:
Nature's Place in Victorian Culture
by
Robert M. Young
[ Introduction | Preface | Chapter: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | Notes | Bibliography | Index ]
CHAPTER VI
THE HISTORIOGRAPHIC AND IDEOLOGICAL CONTEXTS OF THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY DEBATE ON MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE
A scientific worker is necessarily the child of his time and the inheritor of the thought of many generations. But the study of his environment and its conditioning power may be carried on from more than one point of view.
Joseph Needham (1935)
I
This chapter is about theory and praxis. The theory in question is that of the historiography of science, and the praxis to which it is applied is the attempt to write about the debate on man's place in nature in nineteenth-century Britain. The praxis is therefore theoretical praxis. For reasons which reflect both my own ideological position and my personal style of research, I find it meaningless to discuss ideological and historiographic questions in the abstract. I shall therefore consider these issues as they have arisen in connection with particular problems in the course of my own research.
The epigraph is based on a Marxist approach to the history of science. It was written at a time when Joseph Needham was just beginning to apply his political orientation to systematic work in the history of embryology, in an essay delivered at Yale in 1935 entitled "Limiting Factors in the History of Science, observed in the History of Embryology." Needham's research since then has continually broken new ground in the field of the history of science. I have chosen the epigraph, not only because this essay is written in his honor, but also because my main purpose is to attempt to stimulate debate on the requirements of a radical historiography of science in the current period - half a century after Needham laid out his position and the Soviet delegation to the Second International Congress of the History of Science and
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Technology came to London and dramatically introduced a version of Marxist historiography to the awareness of historians of science in Britain. The attempt to work toward a radical historiography cannot at present be based upon a settled conception of what is meant by "radical." However, certain aspects of this conception can be stated: it is concerned with an approach to history which is critical rather than custodial or ornamental; it is in the service of transcendence and liberation rather than mere reproduction, and gives insight into possibilities for achieving a society which is not alienating and repressive.
The argument falls into two main parts and a number of distinct sections. The first section is a brief exposition of my particular problem, written in relatively subjective terms. The second is a discussion of what it meant to be "a child of one's time" in the history and philosophy of science in Cambridge in the 1960s. The third is an outline of the state of the literature on the nineteenthcentury debate on man's place in nature. Taken together, these sections provide a statement of the problem. In the second half of the essay, attention is directed to the available alternative perspectives for doing research in the history of science. It begins with criticisms of the Marxist "base-superstructure" model of interpretation, with particular emphasis on the limitations of what has come to be known as "vulgar Marxism." This is followed by my own criticism of the prevailing terms of the historiographic debate in the history of science - the "internalist-externalist" distinction and the related claims of "demarcationism." Within this general context, I go on to consider the scope of, and to make objections to, the positions of those who concentrate on the role of external factors in the history and sociology of science - the Weberian-Mertonian tradition - and the debate between that and the internalist historians of ideas. The work of Lakatos, Kuhn, Merton, and Hall is briefly evaluated, and the severe limitations of their approaches are pointed out. This section is followed by an analysis of recent treatments of Darwinism by New Left authors and a tentative look at the help which various anthropological perspectives can provide for understanding my problem and, more generally, the study of science and its history. This section refers to the work of Anderson, Thompson, Marx, Lukács, Douglas, Horton, and Sohn Rethel.
In the course of the argument an attempt is made to suggest
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that we reconsider the Marxist "base-superstructure" distinction, i.e., the view that all intellectual and cultural phenomena are ultimately determined by socioeconomic conditions. In so doing, attention should be shifted toward the complex and subtle mediations between social and economic factors and the explicit content of scientific findings and theories. It is suggested that the strategy for developing a radical historiography in the current period should have two moments: first, the devotion of serious attention to the dialectic between base and superstructure; and second, the development of a theory of mediations which moves toward a concept of totality in which man, nature, and society are seen in fully relational terms. Rather than abandoning the study of the history of ideas, it is important that both ideas and their institutionalizations continue to be given serious attention. But this must be done without losing sight of their historical place in social and economic life and their ideological role in maintaining existing social and economic relations by rationalizing them. A double perspective on science as such and as ideology is advocated. This model is applied to the approach I am attempting to use in writing about the nineteenth-century debate - a debate which was itself concerned with the philosophies of man, God, nature, and society and their interactions. The role of science as ideology is relatively overemphasized in this essay in an effort to counterbalance the existing bias in the literature toward the internal history of ideas. It is hoped that when the existing approach has been sufficiently complemented by studies of the role of ideology as a material force in our views of nature, man, and society, a more balanced view will develop.
Many would argue that the base-superstructure distinction is beyond redemption, but historians of science may well need to work their way through it before they can achieve a more dialectical perspective. I should like to stress that this is offered as a working paper" in which I have attempted to bring together in the compass of a single argument a number of related issues, the relations among which have not been worked out at all satisfactorily. My aim is to raise questions and to stimulate debate. The extensive end notes are provided in order to draw attention to the wide spectrum of raw materials for that debate. A great deal of further study of Marxist and related writings must be undertaken
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if the history of science is to take its place among critical studies in the service of liberation.
II
The following two sections are written autobiographically. This style has been adopted in the belief that others working in the field have had analogous experiences. Thus, although the presentation is personal, one hopes that the argument is not merely so.
The general problem with which my research has been concerned is that of applying the categories of natural science to the study of "man." After completing a series of studies on the relationship between psychological and physiological categories - considered in the context of philosophical and biological developments in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries - the scope of the inquiry was broadened to include the intellectual context within which the scientific study of persons was undertaken. Thus, although these investigations had originally been concerned with biology (as broadly defined), it soon became apparent that the debate on evolution could not be considered in isolation from theological, philosophical, literary, social, political, and economic debates in the same period. It is a commonplace that the evolutionary debate was conducted amid heated controversies in those related areas. However, a close study of the documents has made it clear that it is difficult, and ultimately impossible, to maintain the conventional distinction between the science of the period and the factors which are usually considered to provide its context. This is as true of the boundaries between science and pseudoscience as it is of the putative boundaries between the internal history of scientific findings and ideas on the one hand, and so-called nonscientific factors on the other.
In the course of the research and in conversations with colleagues working in an earlier period, it became evident that this problem was not at all unusual among historians and in particular among those who found it increasingly difficult to do justice to developments in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries within a framework which required the separation of "science" (as retrospectively defined) from social, philosophical, and theological issues. They found it reassuring to encounter the same problem in
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the nineteenth century, since one of the ways in which their critics had dealt with their interpretations was to argue that such "confusion" was to be expected in the period when the methods and assumptions of modern science were being established. Of course, research in the nineteenth century is faced with a version of the same argument in the assertion that its domain is the period when the methods and assumptions of modern science were being extended to the biological sciences and to the study of humanity.
It would be wrong to claim that it was easy to refute the arguments of those who wanted to separate internal from external factors and to concentrate on the advancing edge of objectivity, the history of paradigms, or the progressive demarcation of real science from contextual factors and from pseudoscience. Rather, we gained confidence from each other's failure to find the accepted historiography congenial to our own inquiries and felt more at home in the company of political and social historians who thought it odd that historians of science could, with apparent confidence, claim to separate science from other developments in a given period. We were not able to offer a coherent historiography to counter the one which was derived from positivist and sociological models of science. Rather, we called the practitioners of the internalist history of ideas "Whig" historians and, as our detailed studies found sympathetic readers, we began to refer to our own approach as "relativist" and "contextualist," embracing labels which others had used as epithets. At the same time we came to ignore the official historiography, since we felt that its strictures did violence to the fine texture of the issues which we encountered in our work with primary sources.
In the same period that a group of professional historians was developing some confidence - or at least mutual comfort - I was conducting research toward a (never to be completed) work entitled Man's Place in Nature: The Nineteenth-Century Debate in Britain. This research was not being carried out according to a clearly conceived historiography. However, from the outset its scope was the interpretation of the evolutionary debate in a wide context of late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century thought. Since I had come to the research from the history of psychiatry, psychology, and neurophysiology, I was more concerned with the question of humanity than with the development of biological theory per se. The research has differed from existing work in the general area
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in that it has been concerned with geological, biological, theological, and social issues from the point of view of what I take to be the central preoccupation of the participants in the debate: a fundamental reorientation of the conception of the relations between man, God, nature, and society. As the work progressed, this reorientation became more closely defined as a change from mechanistic analogies employed within an explicitly theistic natural theology to the use of organic analogies based on a secularized, implicit natural theology.
As I have said, the research took the form of a close study of a particular line of central works, those of T. R. Malthus, William Paley, Charles Lyell, the authors of the Bridgewater Treatises, Charles Darwin, Robert Chambers, A. R. Wallace, Herbert Spencer, the authors of Essays and Reviews, T. H. Huxley, and John Tyndall. The focus of the existing literature on developments in geology and biology was complemented by placing much greater emphasis on the writings of theological, psychological, philosophical, and social theorists whose work was an integral part of the debate. As the study moved on and as an analysis was undertaken of the reception of the central figures and their works, the crucial role of a group of commentators became apparent. These were lesser men in the pantheon of the history of science and were in many cases seen as second-rank at the time. But it became clear that their role in the debate - considered as a debate in its own terms rather than as the path to current views - was as important as that of the central figures. They were the critics and interpreters of the new approaches of geology and biology to the intelligentsia, and it was their criticisms which the main writers felt they had to anticipate and to answer. The essays and the reviews of, for example, William Buckland, William Whewell, Adam Sedgwick, Baden Powell, G. H. Lewes, William Carpenter, and St. George J. Mivart were of considerable importance in this respect. There was also a substantial network of periodicals in which the views of these "lesser" writers appeared. Each of the main works was reviewed and debated in the Victorian periodicals which approached the issues from identifiable points of view. Finally, one can supplement these public documents with the reactions which were subsequently published in the voluminous lives and letters of nearly all of the significant figures involved. It will therefore be seen that a study of this debate can be based on an intricate
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network of original contributions, criticisms, interpretations, and reactions extending from the founding of the Edinburgh Review in 1802 and growing throughout the century as the periodical press expanded. If one wanted to attach a name to the resulting approach, it might be called "social intellectual history." Of course, limits must be set to any systematic goals in covering the periodical literature, but the extent of the critical discussion on particular works helps considerably in deciding how far to follow a given aspect of the ongoing debate. That is, the danger of retrospective distortion of emphasis is lessened by accepting guidance from the intensity and scope of the contemporary debate as defined by its own organs. This approach is tempered by awareness of "resounding silences" - problems which were not discussed and the reasons for this. Even so, the literature involved is very extensive indeed.
It should be emphasized that the historiographic and ideological questions which are to be raised here are germane to a particular historical problem, one which is concerned with an important issue in the history of science and which is undoubtedly of interest to students in a number of related fields. In attempting to work out a clear approach to the argument I have found that the prevailing h'storiographic positions in the field are not adequate for interpreting my findings. Furthermore, the problem should not be separated from that of relating this project to the uncertain role of academic research in the current political and ideological situation. This difficulty is particularly acute in research on the nineteenth-century debate on man's place in nature, since the domain of that research is itself a widespread controversy on the relations between the interpretations of man and society and the categories of science which defined the problem for the twentieth century. We are therefore faced with the problem at two levels: (1) the interpretation of the nineteenth-century debate; and (2) the attempt to do this in a period when the relations between scientific and political categories are once again at the center of controversy among intellectuals and political activists. There is a third, more fundamental, issue: this chapter must be seen as the first step toward a critique of the project of writing social intellectual history, since a radical historiography must go beyond the history of ideas - however broadly defined - and locate the debate on those ideas
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in the history of people, events, and institutions, of which it forms a constitutive part, i.e., history as a resolution of forces.
III
The epigraph to this chapter should be applied not only to scientific workers but also to workers in the history of science: they are children of their time. That is, we are children of our time, and the issues raised by that assertion should be applied to the questions being considered here. For a historian of science beginning research in Cambridge (as in most centers in Britain and America) in the early 1960s, this truism would have conveyed no echo of the Marxist thesis on which it was based: "The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness." Rather, the apprentice scholar was faced with a set of models which implied the relative autonomy of ideas from their socioeconomic bases. The standard texts to which he was exposed in Cambridge (and elsewhere) were all concerned with intellectual history, although there were important differences between those who saw the history of scientific ideas as a relatively autonomous study, e.g., Herbert Butterfield, Rupert Hall, and M. A. Hoskin, and those who were keen to relate them to philosophical themes, e.g., N. R. Hanson, G. Buchdahl, and M. B. Hesse. A. C. Crombie represented an intermediate position, and his Augustine to Galileo was one of a relatively small number of works which students read early in their studies in the field which was not written by someone who was then, or had very recently been, on the teaching staff in the history and philosophy of science in Cambri dge (though he had worked in Cambridge for many years as a scientist). Butterfield was still active in Cambridge, although not then teaching history of science. Hall and Hanson had recently left to take up professorships in America. The approaches of the staff members in history and philosophy of science consisted of an amalgam of Hoskin's internalism, Hesse's highly disciplined mixture of current philosophy of science and history of scientific ideas, and Buchdahl's rich and allusive studies
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in the history of the metaphysics of science from Descartes to Kant, coupled with an infectious ability to explore all of the ambiguities in any apparently straightforward statement. The standard introductory texts were Butterfield's The Origins of Modem Science (1949) and Hall's The Scientific Revolution (1954), both of which were almost exclusively concerned with the internal history of scientific ideas. They were joined in 1960 by The Making of Modern Science, a useful collection of short essays edited by Hall, and by Gillispie's synoptic work, The Edge of Objectivity. (His essay has broader scope, but its title and its historiography perfectly reflect the prevailing orthodoxy.) These were soon followed by introductory works by Boas and Hall which were more detailed and limited in period but which continued the established tradition.
Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions appeared in 1962 and seemed to many to herald "a revolution in the historiography of science," but the debate about it in the intervening period and Kuhn's own replies to his critics and interpreters make it clear that his attacks on the cumulative and positivist approaches do not, in the end, transcend the established view of the history of science. The bridge between historical and philosophical issues was built by the work of Crombie, Hanson, and Buchdahl and by Hesse's Forces and Fields and Dijksterhuis' The Mechanization of the World Picture, both of which appeared in 1961 (the latter in translation). Moving closer to the philosophy of science per se, Blake, Ducasse, and Madden's collection of case studies, Theories of Scientific Method, appeared in 1960. The standard works in the (relatively ahistorical) philosophy of science were Braithwaite's Scientific Explanation (1953, paperback edition 1960) and Popper's The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1934, English translation, 1959). These were complemented by a number of volumes of collected readings with a heavy bias toward the philosophy of the physical sciences. Although these volumes included selections which were concerned with the biological and human sciences, the approaches of the editors were toward the physicochemical sciences as the model for all knowledge.
Taken together, these works - all of which appeared for the first time or in translation (or were still being widely read) in the late 1950s and early 1960s - made up a formidable orthodoxy in favor of treating the history and philosophy of science in relative isolation from their social, economic, and political contexts. Although
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many of the historical works make gestures toward society, this was their orientation. The classics which somehow came to one's attention were concerned with the history of scientific ideas in the context of philosophy, though they probed further than most of those listed above into the philosophy of nature: A. N. Whitehead's Science and the Modern World (1925), E. A. Burtt's The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science (2nd ed., 1932), A. O. Lovejoy's The Great Chain of Being (1936), and the essays of Alexandre Koyré.
It was known that Joseph Needham was working in Cambridge, that he saw himself as both a Marxist and a Christian, and that he was engaged in a massive work, Science and Civilisation in China. It was also known that he was conducting this distinguished work while continuing to hold the position of Dunn Reader in Biochemistry and that whenever the question was mooted of just recognition of his achievement in the history of science in the form of a Chair, key individuals in the University saw to it that the matter went no further. (He was able to resign his Readership in 1966, when he became Master of Gonville and Caius College. He was awarded the Sarton Medal - the profession's highest honor - at the Twelfth International Congress of the History of Science in 1968.) His legitimate preoccupation with his self-imposed task, along with its esoteric subject, meant that although young scholars perused his volumes and used his History of Embryology, his presence in Cambridge did not appear to influence the prevailing orientation of teaching and research in the history and philosophy of science. (It was later possible to discern his role in subsequent developments in the subject in Cambridge, but his stature and influence were not directly felt by most students in the 1960s.)
More importantly, the word "social" was seldom heard, and "economics," "politics," and "ideology" were never uttered with any historiographic implications, although they were obviously employed in conversation. The explicitly Marxist writings of Needham and Bernal were seldom referred to. I recall acquiring those of Bernal at bargain prices in 1965, and I sought out Needham's essays only after that. Nor were the names of Marx, Weber, Mannheim, or Merton prominent on any reading lists or in the informal reading of graduate students. One was much more likely to study Wittgenstein, Wisdom, Ryle, Austin, and Strawson in
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one's exploratory reading. While there were demarcations between those who were more interested in the history than in the philosophy of science, the continuum led from the history of scientific ideas to analytic philosophy. While relations with the History Faculty were cordial, and history of science lectures were listed in the History syllabus, there were no strong departmental or intellectual connections until 1966, when a Special Subject in the history of science was invited by the History Faculty, and this was an anomaly which caused difficulties on both sides.
The foregoing account would seem to be a necessary background for understanding a series of remarks by Rupert Hall which would otherwise appear bizarre from a later vantage point. In an assessment of the relations between the social and intellectual approaches to the history of science, published in 1963, he drew the opposite conclusion to Marx and wrote, "Thus recent historians reverse the arrow of economic inference: social forms do not dominate mind; rather, in the long run, mind determines social forms." The scientific revolution was "a phenomenon of intellectual history," and interest had been withdrawn from externalist explanations. Modern science "is the fruit of an intellectual mutation [and] its genesis must be considered in relation to an intellectual tradition."
Social and economic relations are rather concerned with the scientific movement than with science as a system of knowledge of nature (theoretical and practical); they help us to understand the public face of science and the public reaction to scientists; to evaluate the propaganda that scientists distribute about themselves, and occasionally - but only occasionally - to see why the subject of scientific discussion takes a new turn. But to understand the true contemporary significance of some piece of work in science, to explore its antecedents and effects, in other words to recreate critically the true historical situation, for this we must treat science as intellectual history, even experimental science.
Hall's conclusions were borne out by the contemporary sociology of the history of science:
Even without making a detailed review of the work of other historians of science active at the present time it is clear that the trend towards intellectual history is strong and universal. Since the journal Centaurus published in 1953 a special group of articles on the social relations of
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science no single article that can be judged to represent the sociological interpretation of history has appeared in that periodical, or Isis, Annals of science, Revue d'histoire des sciences, or the Archives internationales. There has been little discussion of the historiographical issue: indeed, it sometimes seems that the case for setting the development of scientific thought in its broader historical context is condemned before it is heard, though one knows from personal conversations that it is not neglected in pedagogic practice. Clearly, externalist explanations of the history of science have lost their interest as well as their interpretive capacity.
How, in the face of this intellectualist orthodoxy, did the revival of the study of the social dimension of science become attractive? Its relevance began to be felt in Cambridge, not as a result of the intellectual preoccupations of the teaching staff in the history and philosophy of science, but from three main sources: the influence of the Leeds department; the approach of two philosophically oriented political historians in Cambridge, John Dunn and Quentin Skinner; and the work of a group of Oxford-trained social historians. Something very exciting was going on at Leeds under the catalytic influence of Jerome Ravetz and three young scholars whom he had attracted there: P. M. Rattansi, J. E. McGuire, and Charles Webster. None of these was from the mainstream of British academic life: Ravetz is an American emigré and an ex-Marxist whose original training was in mathematics; Rattansi is a Kenya Indian, an Ismaill, who worked as a journalist and took his first degree in economics; McGuire is an Irish-Canadian of maverick intellectual disposition; and Webster is a highly individualistic British radical who worked in education before doing graduate work in the history of science. Rattansi moved on to King's College, Cambridge, and from there to a Chair at University College, London; Webster became Reader in History of Medicine at Oxford; McGuire took up a professorship at Pittsburgh. All four of the Leeds group were placing the preoccupations of the seventeenth-century natural philosophers in theological and social contexts. They were interested in philosophical issues, but unlike Buchdahl and Hesse, this was not for the sake of the good philosophy to be squeezed out of (or read into) them. Rather, they were shamelessly relativist and contextualist and were far more interested in the social milieux and the philosophies of nature underlying the works of the scientific virtuosi than in the so-called
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mainline of the development of modern science. Their work was consonant with (and attractive to) eminent historians whose writings bore on science in differing ways but were not at the center of consciousness of the professional group of historians of science: H. Trevor-Roper, Christopher Hill, Joseph Needham, Walter Pagel, Frances Yates, E. H. Gombrich, D. P. Walker.
Although the work of Dunn and Skinner had affinities with the approach of the Leeds group - especially in their studies on Locke and Hobbes - they were also concerned to argue on philosophical and historical grounds against the legitimacy of the history of ideas as traditionally conceived. Both stressed that ideas do not beget ideas but that people do so in particular historical contexts and that the meaning of those ideas is exquisitely bound to the particularity of those contexts. They argued that the study of the genealogy of ideas divorced from close study of their social and political contexts could only lead to elaborate historical punning. Their approaches attempted to integrate the tradition of analytic philosophy (with its elitist appeal to the intellectual aristocracy) with the investigations of Duncan Forbes on the Scottish Enlightenment and Peter Laslett on the Locke manuscripts. The influence of Dunn and Skinner in the history of science led one to set ideas in their social contexts, using stern criteria of investigation and inference in the close analysis of documents. A contemporary of theirs, John Burrow, shared both their background in the Cambridge History Tripos and the influence of Forbes and wrote an important study of nineteenth-century intellectual history.
The appeal of the approach of Dunn and Skinner to social factors in intellectual history was complemented by the influence of a group of young left-wing social historians based at Oxford who were more concerned with the texture of history than with historiographic and philosophical elegance. Foremost among them was Raphael Samuel of Ruskin College. There is no direct connection between interest in the history of science and in the work of Samuel on nineteenth-century British working-class history, that of Tim Mason on the German unions under National Socialism, Gillian Sutherland on nineteenth-century primary education in Britain, or Susan Budd on the Rationalist Press Association. The connection lies rather in the fact that scholars become interested in approaches of colleagues who are doing exciting work, find themselves influenced by their perspectives, and ask how they would
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see a given problem and how they would treat it. In retrospect, the affinities felt with their work can be seen as an attempt to transcend the orthodoxy of internalist intellectualist historiography of science. Among contemporaries, theirs seemed particularly relevant research in that it was addressed to society.
It was in the atmosphere of a strong orthodoxy in the history and philosophy of science at Cambridge, alongside a network of overlapping intellectual affinities and sympathies, that in 1968 Rattansi and I brought together a number of the aforementioned scholars, and others, for a seminar (sponsored by the King's College Research Centre) which met monthly to consider the relationship between the history of science and other branches of historical studies. At quarterly intervals senior visitors gave papers to the seminar which represented established points of view in different branches of history: Joseph Needham (history of science in the Chinese culture area), E. H. Gombrich (history of art), Frances Yates (Renaissance studies), Hugh Trevor-Roper (social history), Philip Collins (English literature). The seminar continued for over a year and was very stimulating. There was, however, little pressure or inclination to attempt to integrate the approaches of intellectual history, social history, and the philosophies of nature and society. The dichotomy between internal history of scientific ideas and external or social factors was regularly found to be at odds with our respective investigations, but no framework which was remotely near to being coherent emerged to take its place. On several occasions lists of "factors" were drawn up from the discussions, but no overall approach to the issues was worked out. Most of the papers presented to the seminar were published in learned journals, but the participants felt that they in no sense formed the basis for a volume with a coherent theme. Indeed, the real work of the seminar was in the discussions, but no one had the inclination to record and edit them. It was decided that the seminar had been very successful, and there was some talk about reconstituting it around the topic of historiography, but other priorities intervened.
The striking feature of this account of the local social history of the history of science is that there was practically no discussion of, for example, economic or political history (as distinct from the history of political theory), or of the writings of Eric Hobsbawm, E. H. Carr, Christopher Hill, or E. P. Thompson. Nor was there
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any serious consideration of the domain of cultural history, for example, the writings of Raymond Williams. This list has not been drawn at random. The surprising point is that there was nothing in the general coinage of intellectual discourse or of the books which were recommended by and to colleagues - and, more particularly, there was little in the deliberations of a seminar explicitly concerned with the relations between history of science and other branches of historical studies - which said, even obliquely: confront Marxism. By this I mean that there was no serious pressure to consider the perspective of Marxism and its critical approach to the relations between knowledge and the sociopolitical world in which it exists. (Michel Foucault's neostructuralist work was just coming over the horizon of English-speaking readers and was to become an alternative to Marxism.)
I am sure that most historians of science in Britain and America who were studying or doing research in the 1960s could tell an analogous story. The particular and local influences would be different, but the general ambience and the conclusion would be the same. Internalist historians of science were reaching out uncertainly for alliances with other approaches in historical studies especially social (and in America, sociological) history. They did this with a sense of growing need for historiographic rigor. However, neither the literature nor discussions with colleagues provide evidence for any awareness that it might be worthwhile to consider the potential relevance of Marxism to our problems. Readers who have not lived through this period in the subject can gain a sense of the general atmosphere by considering the analogous situation in historical, economic, and social research in America as discussed in William Appleman Williams' The Great Evasion: An Essay on the Contemporary Relevance of Karl Marx and on the Wisdom of Admitting the Heretic into the Dialogue about America's Future. It would be an exaggeration to say that there was a conspiracy of silence, but there certainly was silence.
But this is to be unduly behaviorist. I now know that at least one member of the seminar had begun his "confrontation" with Marxism even before the seminar began and has subsequently reached the point where he regards himself as a Marxist. It is also worth noting that of the members of the seminar, Mikulás Teich is a Czech refugee and a Marxist and that George Stocking and Jerome Ravetz are ex-Marxists. That this personal grappling had
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no significant presence at the seminar can be seen as anecdotal evidence pointing to the magnitude of the task that a radical change in ideological position involves one in. The change has to have resulted in a coherence well above the level of a collection of radical intuitions before it ceases to be readily vulnerable to attack from what it seeks to counter. Another sort of indication of the size of this task is perhaps the nature of this essay - which, though offered as the beginning of a critique, nevertheless is cast to a large extent within the terms of "social intellectual history" (as defined in Section II) which the critique aims to make constitutive of a totality of relations.
IV
It would be natural for the foregoing discussion of the prevailing orthodoxy in the history and philosophy of science in the 1960s - and its failure even to raise the problem of confronting Marxism - to be followed by a discussion of Marxist historiography, along with other approaches to the history of science which give weight to the relationship between the internal history of science and social and economic factors. These issues, however, will be postponed until consideration has been given to the state of scholarship on the nineteenth-century debate on man's place in nature. My purpose is to bring these together. To introduce the specific problem first may help the discussion to avoid departing into generalities.
If we turn, therefore, from the state of general approaches to the history and philosophy of science to the literature on the nineteenth-century debate, the situation is relatively straightforward. The first point is that the topics which were central to the best work in the area were not concerned with "the debate on man's place in nature" but with particular disciplines - geology and evolutionism - especially the work and influence of Charles Lyell and Charles Darwin. The field was occupied by scholars with an impressive command of the documents. In the case of Darwin, the most precise work was being done by Sydney Smith, whose knowledge of the Darwin archive at Cambridge was (and remains) nonpareil, and Sir Gavin de Beer, who (with others) edited Darwin's Notebooks and wrote prolifically on Darwin in the context of the history of biology. Neither had the interest or the
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inclination to set Darwin's work in a sociopolitical context. Smith concentrated on Darwin's work on classification and on important bibliographical research on the Darwin manuscripts. To those who came to consult him and seek guidance through the labyrinth, he argued that Darwin's research on Cirripedes was the key to his mature work. The most important problems, he felt, lay wholly inside the scientific debates of the time. Similarly, de Beer explicitly opposed the assignment of any fundamental significance to social, political, and economic ideas in the development of Darwin's theory of evolution. In his biographical study of Darwin he reviews in detail the evidence for an important role for Malthus' theory of population - and only in detail, with no reference to broader issues - and draws a narrow conclusion followed by a very general non sequitur:
It is therefore clear that Darwin did not owe Malthus anything on the score of variation or natural selection, but only the realization that the high rate of mortality exacted by nature resulted in pressure, and while Malthus argued that this pressure was exerted against the poor members of the human race, Darwin applied the principle to plants and animals and argued that the pressure was exerted against the less well adapted ... He had already arrived at the principle of natural selection and had seen how, given variation, it would lead to unlimited change away from the ancestral type, improvement of adaptation, and eventually to the production of new species. Malthus enabled him to see how inexorably nature enforced this principle. The view that Darwin was led to the idea of natural selection by the social and economic conditions of Victorian England is devoid of foundation.
The question of the role of Malthus' theory in the actual formative process of Darwin's mechanism of natural selection is, as we have seen, very complex and open to a number of interpretations. Nevertheless, de Beer's sweeping conclusion about the irrelevance of social and economic conditions does not follow from his argument, even if it were the case that such questions could be meaningfully discussed in such a narrow context. The approach is simplistic, as is the conclusion. However, de Beer subsequently discovered new evidence which showed that Malthus' theory of population had played a much more intimate part in the process of the formulation of Darwin's theory than had been supposed. A number of scholars who have considered this issue have attempted
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to reinterpret Malthus' role and have pointed out the significance of de Beer's new evidence. He, however, has stood firm in attempting to separate the scientific issues from the socioeconomic context and even from direct, acknowledged influences. In a subuent essay, he cites the relevant passage from Darwin's Autobiography (not the more significant passage from the Notebooks) and concentrates on making claims for how much Darwin had sorted out before reading Malthus. He once again reduces the issue to whether Darwin got the idea of natural selection from Malthus:
From this passage some commentators have deduced that it was from Malthus that Darwin derived his principle of natural selection. As I have said above, this is quite false: Malthus had not the slightest idea of natural selection and would have been horror-struck at the notion of evolution. What Darwin got from Malthus was something that Malthus knew nothing at all about, and about which he was not writing: how natural ,.selection is enforced on plants and animals in nature.
It was certainly right to move on from the extreme claims of those who attempted to deduce Darwin from Malthus, but the reaction subtly falsifies both the origins and the context of the evolutionary theory of Darwin and, for that matter, of his codiscoverer A. R. Wallace. To move in this argument from the questions of origin and context of the theory, the internalist approach does not address itself to the sociopolitical context into which the theory was received and which set the terms of the debate on its reception in periodicals and public debate of the time. To move further, there has been little tendency to consider the various extrapolations which were based on different versions of evolutionary theory.
The point of this extended example is not to assert that it is illegitimate for scholars to concentrate on one aspect of the history of science at the expense of others. Rather, it provides a basis for suggesting that the approach of internalist history impoverishes the understanding of its own subject matter and that its interpretive bias isolates evolutionism from its social, political, and ideological articulations. The most comprehensive study of the reception of Darwin's work in the period 1859-72 concentrates heavily on philosophical and theological issues at the expense of social and political ones. Similarly, the best work being done on
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evolutionism by younger scholars concentrates on internal theoretical issues, applications to physiology, problems of demography, and methodology. (A decade later, this situation remains true.)
The case of Charles Lyell's uniformitarian geology is somewhat different. It would be absurd to argue that the uniformitarian-catastrophist debate could be studied in a purely internalist way. It is just about plausible - though, as I have suggested, ultimately distorting - to concentrate on purely scientific issues in tracing the development of Darwin's theory. But theological issues were explicitly central and crucial in the geological debate. These other aspects have been explored in detail by Cannon, Hooykaas, Haber, Coleman, Wilson, Herbert, and Porter. Rudwick has shown that as time went on, the geological debate became relatively internalist, and he has set new standards of research in studying the positive science of geology in the period. However, all of those who have contributed significantly to the literature in the history of geology have found it necessary - for their own purposes - to understand the theologies and philosophies of nature of the participants in the controversies which raged over the history of the earth and its laws.
Similarly, the authors of the general works which attempt to provide a broader view of the geological and evolutionary debates paid due attention to the interaction between the theological and scientific issues. It can be argued that their perspectives, based as they were on an interactive model, prevented their seeing that the theological and scientific issues were constitutive of each other's domain. However, the point to be made here is that none of them looked very far outside science to its social and economic context. The argument of Eiseley's Darwin Century is laid out like a detective story or a jigsaw puzzle, in which the clues or pieces are seen exclusively in the light of their contribution to the "solution," the picture on the cover of the box. It is very cleverly put together, but the contemporary contexts of issues and the different perspectives in which they were seen at the time - let alone the different interests (social, economic, and political, as well as intellectual) that these perspectives served - are regularly sacrificed in favor of their contribution to the view of scientific truth as seen in the light of current science. Gillispie's pioneering work Genesis and Geology gives full weight to the theological context, but his basic approach
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is to show how the advancing edge of objectivity came to relegate theology to the prefaces and conclusions of geological works as it had earlier done in the physicochemical sciences. The reader knows from the first page that theology is on its way out. Greene's The Death of Adam is less elegantly written than the other standard works, but its looser structure makes it a more attractive work, since the reader can retain some sense of the multiple perspectives in which the issues were viewed in their contemporary context.
It is a commonplace that Darwin's achievement stood above that of the other evolutionists, but even if one considers the nineteenth-century debate on its own terms, the significance of the writings of Robert Chambers, Herbert Spencer, and A. R. Wallace was far greater than has been reflected in writings about the debate. None of them has been given his due. Millhauser's monograph on Chambers is significantly entitled Just Before Darwin. Its subject is relegated to the subtitle: Robert Chambers and " Vestiges." The author has obviously done a great deal of research into the contemporary debate, as he did for an earlier study of "The Scriptural Geologists," but he remains curiously diffident about Chambers' achievement. Chambers leaped over the inhibitions and reservations of his scientific contemporaries and conveyed the whole sweep of naturalism, embracing man, his mind, and society. Like Spencer, he suffers at the hands of scholars from the retrospective judgment that he was a "bad scientist." That is a fair, if blinkered, judgment, one which was made vehemently at the time by nearly everyone who was sufficiently well informed to express a sound opinion. Yet the application of current standards to the contemporary situation has helped to obscure the fact that it was Chambers' admittedly speculative theory which provided the basis for the British debate on evolution (or the "Development Hypothesis") for fifteen years before the theory of Darwin and Wallace was made public. Similarly, Chambers' book helped to stimulate Wallace's inquiries, was the subject of debates between Lewes, Spencer, and Huxley, and was important in the thought of a number of other scientists, philosophers, and theologians in the period. Indeed, the public controversy over the anonymous Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation was far more heated than that over Darwin's Origin of Species. Darwin was right to say in a later edition of his book that
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the work, from its powerful and brilliant style, though displaying in the earlier editions little accurate knowledge and a great want of scientific caution, immediately had a wide circulation. In my opinion it has done excellent service in this country in calling attention to the subject, in removing prejudice, and in thus preparing the ground for the reception of analogous views.
Chambers was also like Spencer (and indeed like Wallace) in his overriding interest in the implications of evolutionary theory for social and philosophical issues, yet these have not been explored in depth in the literature. Writings about Wallace have focused on his zoogeographical work and theories of the mechanism of evolution, not on his socialism, his work on land nationalization, or his spiritualism, even though these interests were determinate in the course of his changing views on evolution. Once again, restriction of the context of the inquiry impoverishes the elucidation even of the issues which interest internalist historians. By now few historians of science would consider an account of Newton's work to be adequate if it excluded analogous interests which played an important part in his philosophy of nature and his science.
The respective literatures on Chambers, Wallace, and Spencer represent three sorts of narrow treatment of the issues. Chambers is neglected because of the weak evidential basis for his theory, leading to ignorance of his influence (both positive and negative) and the sweep of his vision. Wallace is included in the standard accounts, but aspects of his work which were highly integrated at the time are treated in isolation, and the deeper political, economic, and philosophical ones are excluded. Spencer is hardly mentioned at all, except by historians of the social sciences. He was neither scientifically reputable nor politically radical, but his theory, along with the generalizations and extrapolations based on it, was probably more influential in the general debates of the late nineteenth century than those of any of the other evolutionists. We make a sharp distinction between the evolutionary theories of Darwin and Spencer, but their ideas were routinely conflated in the public mind. Moreover, the participants in the scientific debate itself considered their ideas to be far closer together than our tidy categories seem prepared to allow.
Spencer was, at bottom, entirely preoccupied with the social and ethical implications of evolution. Indeed, he became interested in the subject as a result of his failure to find a sound basis
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for the integration and progress of society. He has received considerable and growing attention from historians of social and political theory, but almost none from historians of science. Two of the most important books which integrate scientific issues with social and economic ones and which have considered the evolutionary debate, are importantly concerned with his work: John Burrow's Evolution and Society: A Study in Victorian Social Theory and John Peel's Herbert Spencer: The Evolution of a Sociologist. The former relates Spencer's work to the intellectual tradition of the Scottish Enlightenment and Utilitarianism in the domain of anthropology; the latter provides an excellent study of Spencer's social and sociological theories in their contemporary social, economic, and theoretical contexts. Significantly, neither author is centrally interested in the history of science as practiced by the specialists or is considered to be a member of "the profession of the history of science." Burrow is an intellectual historian of political theory, and Peel is a sociologist. Both works are defective in their appreciation of the narrowly scientific issues, but these defects are far less severe than the failure of historians of science seriously to consider Spencer at all. Their books are symptomatic of the mutual isolation between the study of the history of science and the study of social theory, while their subject is someone who never made that distinction.
It would be wrong to claim that the standard sources utterly fail to mention the role of social, economic, and political issues in the evolutionary debate. It is nevertheless true that their treatment of these issues would never lead a reader to appreciate the importance of giving due weight to the roles of, for example, Adam Smith, Malthus, Owenite socialism, the Philosophical Radicals, phrenology, the Positivists, Essays and Reviews, Bishop Colenso, G. H. Lewes, George Eliot, the Mechanics' Institutes, the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, John Draper, Walter Bagehot, the Metaphysical Society, the X Club. Nor would the standard sources lead him to focus on a number of other figures, works, and societies which played important parts in the wide debate on man, nature, God, and society which, after all, did lead people in the nineteenth century and in the present to interest themselves in the movement summarized by the terms "Darwinism" and "evolution." Moreover, in case the reader has not noticed (which would be understandable in the circumstances), my list of categories - "figures, works, and societies" - is significant for what it
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leaves out. It is at most tangential to the concerns of, for example, Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class or Hobsbawm's Industry and Empire.
Although it is not central to my present purpose, it should be mentioned that, conversely, the authors of standard works in the social, political, economic, and literary history of the period make little or no attempt to include the influence of science and scientific naturalism in their accounts. In the history of theology the issues are considered, but at a relatively superficial level. Even the question of the relationship between science and technology in the economic and social history of the period has been sorely neglected. The gap between the internalist history of science and the perspective of writers in other branches of historical studies means that there is little impetus to investigate their relations. The thesis that they were part of a single debate does not even arise if one works backward from the secondary literature to nineteenth-century documents. There are, however, two other paths to that thesis. The first is to place oneself in the midst of the periodical literature of the period and to discover the highly integrated network of issues in all these spheres. The second lies in applying certain fundamental assumptions of the sociology of knowledge or of one of its parent traditions - Marxism.
The existing literature in any field sets very strong constraints on how one finds it possible to conceive of a problem. There is no neutral naturalism in historical research any more than there is in science itself. Science is a social activity, born of society, and mediating its structures and values, at least as much as it is born of nature. The same is true of the history of science. In both cases there is some domain of data, and there is a "natural" world somewhere out there, but the interaction of the historically constrained subject with these objects is as much involved in determining what will be called a datum as it is in discovering one. Without an adequate theory to explain these interrelations and determinations, a historical account will take shape in a determinate but relatively undisciplined way. Some philosophically inclined historians have attempted to solve this problem in the abstract, but it remains to be shown that the philosophical approach to historiography, divorced from actual historical research, will lead us very far toward a more adequate theory.
The consequence of this situation for a study of the debate on
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man's place in nature in nineteenth-century Britain was that when one began to see a pattern of interrelations and multiple perspectives in the writings of those who took part in the overlapping controversies, it was difficult to put the issues in a single framework. Chapter 2 took Malthus' Essay on the Principle of Population as a matrix and showed that widely varying interpretations of that work were seemingly equally justified by what Malthus wrote. These interpretations - by William Paley, Thomas Chalmers, Darwin, Spencer, and Wallace - were themselves interacting, so that the problem of interpretation and influence became impossibly complicated. Similarly, Chapter I, which discussed the debate from the point of view of natural theology and the concept of progress, followed later by a study of the relationship between natural theology, the periodical press, and the development of scientific specialization (Chapter 5), produced a different reading of the debate. Other exercises in this vein leave one feeling that research in the history of science is rather like literary criticism, there competing interpretations of a work are complementary, illuminating different aspects rather than leading progressively to a consensus among scholars. If this model - or some version of it - were to be found persuasive by scholars in the history of science, they would finally cut themselves off decisively from seeing their subject as an extension of the positivist, progressive view of science itself. Let us consider a number of figures whose writings call for the use of more than one mode of interpretation.
Insofar as historians of science have considered Malthus, they have concentrated on his abstract, Newtonlan model of science, one which he was a pioneer in applying to man. They have also stressed his quasi-mathematical argument on the consequences of the potential disproportion between geometrical growth of population and arithmetical development of food production. This provided a natural law purporting to explain poverty, misery, theft, famine, war, and death. His concepts of "pressure" and "struggle" were undoubtedly fundamental in both the origins and exposition of Darwin's theory of natural selection. Darwin wrote the introduction to the Origin that his theory was "the doctrine of Malthus, applied to the whole animal and vegetable kingdoms" Historians of science concentrate on these aspects when they give weight to Malthus at all. However, his theory was just importantly a decisive intervention in the eighteenth-century
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debate on progress, written in the wake of the French Revolution and in reply to the sanguine writings of Condorcet and Godwin on inevitable, unlimited social progress. Similarly, his argument must be seen as an extension of Adam Smith's theory as presented in The Wealth of Nations (1776), explaining the natural causes of poverty, where Smith had focused on harmonious, progressive production of wealth. Once again, Malthus' own perspective on his theory was explicitly natural theological, and the last two chapters of the first edition of his Essay were devoted to this topic, while his natural theological assumptions became more diffusely spread through the text in later editions. (Darwin read the sixth edition of 1826.) The political and economic debate which followed the publication of Malthus' theory raged throughout the nineteenth century and is still with us. These aspects find no place in the writings of historians of science. Conversely, Darwin and evolutionism are not mentioned in the standard account of The Malthusian Controversy.
It is well known that the nineteenth-century debate on parish relief and the Poor Laws centered around Malthus' theory. It became the fundamental touchstone of the debate on the relationship between human industry and provision for the indigent. At its own basis lay a view of nature and human nature which was deeply pessimistic and offered progress only through painful struggle, in which human inequality was taken as given, the result of God's wisdom and benevolence. This image of nature and society was carried over into the evolutionary debate, and the resulting fusion was the basis for debates on the social meaning of evolutionary theory. The line from Malthus to Darwin and on to so-called Social Darwinism is unbroken and continues to the recent writings on biology and society of, for example, Morris, Ardrey, and Darlington. From start to finish, this has been a reconciling approach. It has served as the basis for the secular theodicy of industrial society and depends on a class doctrine. Malthus wrote in 1798, "If no man could hope to rise or fear to fall, in society, if industry did not bring with it its reward and idleness its punishment, the middle parts [i.e., the middle class] would not certainly be what they now are." Thomas Chalmers echoed this doctrine in even sterner language. The use of natural law as the basis for a given view of society became a commonplace in social, political, and economic theory, and the theory of evolution was
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employed as a new, more powerful, justification for industrial capitalism. It is no wonder that Marx and Engels wrote some of their most vehement polemics against Malthus and that Marxists and other sociologists came to see the union of evolutionary theory and Malthusianism (and various racist and eugenic corollaries extending to the present) as fundamental obstacles to believing that the existing society could be transformed into a just one. These aspects of the debate on man's place in nature are inseparable. To sequester the social and political debate from the scientific one is to falsify the texture of the nineteenth-century debate and to mystify oppression in the form of science.
William Paley is another writer who is given a small place in the work of historians of science on Darwinism. His Natural Theology (1802) and his Evidences of Christianity (1794) were very important in Darwin's education, and Darwin later admitted that even in overthrowing Paley's world view, he was surprised to discover how many of Paley's most basic assumptions he had retained. Paley is seen as the representative of the eighteenth-century natural theology based on Design and harmony which was set aside by scientific naturalism and industrialism. His conception of natural theology was shown to be untenable in a period of growing scientific detail and finally collapsed in the Bridgewater Treatises, the reductio ad absurdum of parading the details of all the sciences seriatim as a cumulative series of proofs of the wisdom, goodness, and benevolence of God. His was also the last plausible effort to speak of natural harmony without giving serious weight to the dimension of time and to the evidence of geology. The example with which his Natural Theology begins illustrates this point: finding a stone on a path implies nothing, while finding a watch implies a watchmaker. No literate person could make that simple contrast two or three decades after 1802, as the meaning of rocks became the central issue in the geological debate on the nature of God's relationship with the history of the earth. Attempts were, of course, made to integrate natural theology with the new evidence of geology, but it was no longer possible to do so on the model of a Newtonian Heavenly Clockmaker.
The existing literature in the history of science fails to give sufficient weight to some of these aspects of Paley's thought, just as it fails to indicate how much of the nineteenth-century debate was conducted within the context of natural theology. Having made
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these points, it is important to see that historians of science reveal an almost total lack of awareness of Paley's significance in the tradition of Utilitarian ethical and social thought. Going beyond this in ways which are parallel to the points made earlier about Malthus, there is no awareness at all of the political aspect of Paley's theodicy of harmony. Malthus went beyond Paley and set the stage for nineteenth-century rationalizations of slow change through struggle. In the area of population theory, Paley had at first considered population growth an unmixed blessing. On reading Malthus, a slight frown appeared on his brow and remained there until he could absorb pain and suffering into his theodicy and could even regard himself as an adherent to Malthus' theory.
In the area of politics, Paley was also able to absorb pain and suffering within his generally sanguine theory. The last chapters of his Natural Theology (1802) were explicitly concerned with reconcilng people with the status quo. He wrote, "The distinctions of civil life are apt enough to be regarded as evils, by those who sit under them; but, in my opinion, with very little reason." A decade earlier, during the height of Robespierre's dictatorship and the consequent anxieties among the bourgeoisie in Britain, he had spelled out the basis for this view, in a pamphlet called "Reasons for Contentment Addressed to the Labouring Part of the British Public":
The wisest advice that can be given is, never to allow our attention to dwell upon comparisons between our own condition and that of others, but to keep it fixed upon the duties and concerns of the condition itself.
But Providence, which foresaw, which appointed, indeed, the necessity to which human affairs are subjected (and against which it were impious to complain), hath contrived, that, whilst fortunes are only for a few, the rest of mankind may be happy without them.
The labour of the world is carried on by service, that is, by one man working under another man's direction. I take it for granted that this is the best way of conducting business, because all nations and ages have adopted it.
Like Malthus', Paley's later writings contained the same reconciling doctrines but in muted form. The theme which is here mentioned explicitly - that of the basis for the hierarchical division of labor in society (with feudalistic echoes) - is justified on the combined bases of divine ordinance and efficiency in the writings of
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Adam Smith, Paley, and Malthus. In the course of the nineteenth century, its basis changes from a theological theodicy to a biological one in which the so-called physiological division of labor provides a scientific guarantee of the rightness of the property and work relations of industrial society. Although it also had other roots in Continental thought (e.g., Saint-Simon, Comte, and German organic theories of the state), this doctrine is carried on in social and political writings up to and including the current orthodoxy.
Once the apologetic and reconciling aspects of writers such as Malthus and Paley come to the fore, the ideological basis and implications of the orthodox dichotomy between science on the one hand and social and ideological functions on the other begin to become clear. One finds that these investigations lead to the ideological foundations of the modern scientific view of the earth, living nature, man, and society but that the same structures support the modern rationalizations of industrial capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism. In the existing literature discussions of the scientific debate in terms of theological positions are routine, but there is almost no full-blooded attempt to include the social, political, and ideological roles played by the debate itself. These were to rationalize the existing social and political order, and to reconcile people to it. The famous controversy in the nineteenth century between science and theology was very heated indeed, and scholars have concentrated on this level of analysis. However, at another level the protagonists in that debate were in fundamental agreement. They were fighting over the best ways of rationalizing the same set of assumptions about the existing order. An explicitly theological theodicy was being challenged by a secular one based on biological conceptions and the fundamental assumption of the uniformity of nature.
Once one begins to see the debate in this double perspective of science and ideology, it becomes necessary to keep both of its aspects constantly in the forefront and to maintain simultaneous awareness of both. It would be misleading to suggest that they are in tension, since they are mutually consistent and support one another. Rather, the tension lies in the mind of the scholar whose training leads him habitually to separate his subject matter into "science" and "contextual factors," treating one and then (if he is
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so inclined) the other. It is therefore very difficult indeed to refrain from treating the materials in terms of the model of "internal" and "external" factors, science and society.
It is very striking how we blinker ourselves and separate intellectual history from its ideological dimension. We have seen that the same Malthus who pioneered the scientific treatment of man was engaged in an important ideological task which dominated the perception of the mood of nature and society throughout the century and has remained prevalent to the present. Paley's theodicy was the best summary and popularization of an older, more harmonious, view but the theme of a higher harmony persisted in the doctrine of progress through struggle which replaced his equilibrium model. Similar accounts can be given of the writings of all the major and minor participants in the debate in the main periodicals of the early decades - Edinburgh Review, Quarterly Review, and Westminster Review. Indeed, there have been political analyses of these, notably Benthamite Reviewing, Nesbitt's study of the early years of the Westminster. Later generations of periodicals have received similar treatment, for example, Everett's study of the Fortnightly, The Party of Humanity. The literature on the Victorian periodicals is central to the understanding of the political meaning of the major vehicles for the conduct of the debate. Approaching the problem from this point of view leads one to find it natural that the periodicals interpreted the findings and theories of the scientists from a political perspective. Moving on to the end of the period it is also significant that the most eminent scientists, theologians, philosophers, men of letters, politicans, and editors of periodicals met together in the period 1869-80 to consider all of the aspects of the ascendancy of scientific naturalism as it bore on morality, society, and the social order. As I have shown, Gladstone, Walter Bagehot, John Ruskin, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Leslie Stephen, F. D. Maurice, Cardinal Manning, John Tyndall, and T. H. Huxley all saw the point of their meeting together. I hope that it is becoming increasingly clear why we seem unable to see the point of their Society.
The group which came together in the meetings of the Metaphysical Society shows how highly integrated the debate in the nineteenth century was. The social and intellectual milieu in which these men moved extended beyond science, philosophy, and theology to include politics and literature. One of the most
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prominent members of this intellectual elite was George Eliot. Her milieu was that of nineteenth-century naturalism; she had close relations with Spencer and was, of course, living with Lewes. Before she met him she had developed her naturalistic philosophy under the influence of Bray, Hennell, and Combe, along with members of the Positivist circle of the period. For three years she was virtual editor of the Westminster. Her writings integrated aspects of the prevailing naturalistic ethical, scientific, and social philosophies. Implicit in this integration was a reconciling political philosophy which becomes explicit in her support for the conservative radicalism of Felix Holt. Felix states his position in a nomination-day meeting:
But I should like to convince you that votes would never give you political power worth having while things are as they are now, and that if you go the right way to work you may get power sooner without votes. Perhaps all you who hear me are sober men, who try to learn as much of the nature of things as you can, and to be as little like fools as possible. A fool or idiot is one who expects things to happen that never can happen . . .
The way to get rid of folly is to get rid of vain expectations, and of thoughts that don't agree with the nature of things.
Lest this position be seen as one which George Eliot developed only in the service of fiction (a hypothesis which would miss the whole point of her intentions in writing novels), it should be added that she willingly enlarged upon its reconciling message in a didactic essay, published separately in Blackwood's Magazine: "Address to Working Men by Felix Holt."
Well, but taking the world as it is - and this is one way we must take it when we want to find out how it can be improved - no society is made up of a single class: society stands before us like that wonderful piece of life the human body, with all its various parts depending on one another, and with a terrible liability to get wrong because of that delicate dependence. . . . Now the only safe way by which society can be steadily improved and out worst evils reduced, is not by any attempt to do away directly with the actually existing class distinctions and advantages, as if everybody could have the same sort of work, or lead the same sort of life (which none of my hearers are stupid enough to suppose), but by the turning of Class Interests into Class Functions or duties.
The nature of things in this world has been determined for us before-hand.
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She again refers to "this society of ours, this living body in which our lives are bound up." The combination of organic analogies and the reduction of social change to the uniform action of natural laws has the effect of pure reconciliation:
The solution comes slowly, because men collectively can only be made to embrace principles, and to act on them, by the slow stupendous teaching of the world's events.
But now, for our own part, we have seriously to consider this outside wisdom which lies in the supreme unalterable nature of things, and watch to give it a home within us and obey it.
George Eliot's interpretation of the social meaning of scientific naturalism is of a piece with the ideological statements of Paley and Malthus.
The argument, as presented so far, is easy prey to the distinctions of an internalist, who would simply argue that the aspects of Malthus, Paley, the periodical press, and certainly George Eliot which I have discussed are external to the history of science as an internalist understands it. I am, in effect, lending credence to the reasons for largely ignoring their relevance, except in contextual terms. In order to make my case stronger, we must move closer, knowing that we are many steps away from figures whose writings would touch his definition of science. Although I am profoundly out of sympathy with the idea of a continuum from contextual to internal factors, if we take that approach it is still a matter of relative indifference where we place ourselves on it or the related one extending from allegedly pure scientists to marginal figures. It is also obvious that the case can be developed more easily on the basis of evidence from some figures than from others. After all, there must have been some basis for the development of the orthodox distinction between internal and external factors.
Robert Chambers' Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation provides a relatively easy example, both for my position and for the internalist's. That is, it is a commonplace that his science was very shaky. At the same time, his generalizations were of fundamental importance in the development of the debate on man's place in nature. He had no well-developed mechanism for explaining evolutionary change; several were mentioned, but they were not mutually consistent. He confused the general principles of scientific
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naturalism with the specific, then-unknown causes of evolution. He was heavily criticized for these failings by his contemporaries, notably by Herschel and by Huxley, whose review of a later edition of Vestiges was so vituperative that even Huxley came to regret its tone. Chambers did not even become aware of the scientific weaknesses of his work until he reflected on the almost universal criticism which it received at the hands of "better-qualified" scientists. He then wrote a sequel, Explanations, and appended apologetic passages to later editions of Vestiges, in which he made it clear that he had not aimed or claimed to spell out the specific causes of evolution but to establish the general principles of scientific naturalism in the realms of life, mind, and society. In doing this he struck the keynote of contemporary scientific naturalism and drew general conclusions which "the experts" reached only decades later.
For present purposes, however, it is important to note that Vestiges was in a direct lineage from Malthus and Paley, and indeed from the Bridgewater Treatises, which could also be used to develop the general thesis. Chambers' final chapters were expressions of the developing theodicy of naturalism, and once again, the message was social progress through reconciliation with the laws of nature:
To secure the immediate means of happiness it would seem to be necesary for men first to study with all care the constitution of nature, and, secondly, to accommodate themselves to that constitution, so as to obtain all the realizable advantages from acting conformably to it, and to avoid all likely evils from disregarding it.
... we must endeavour so to place ourselves, and so to act, that the arrangements which Providence has made impartially for all may be in our favour and not against us; such are the only means by which we can obtain good and avoid evil here below.
It may be that, while we are committed to take our chance in a natural system of undeviating operation, and are left with apparent ruthlessness to endure the consequences of every collision into which we knowingly or unknowingly come with each law of the system, there is a system of Mercy and Grace behind the screen of nature, which is to make up for all casualties endured here, and the very largeness of which is what makes these casualties a matter of indifference to God . . . To reconcile this to the recognised character of the Deity, it is necessary to suppose that the present system is but a part of a whole, a stage in a Great Progress, and that the Redress is in reserve.
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Thinking of all the contingencies of this world as to be in time melted into or lost in the greater system, to which the present is only subsidiary, let us wait the end with patience, and be of good cheer.
Chambers has here reconciled the Malthusian conception of progress through struggle with a calm sense of Paleyan harmony. In preparing his views he relied heavily on the doctrines of phrenology, particularly the work of George Combe, whose popularizations of the doctrines of Franz Joseph Gall and J. C. Spurzheim were immensely popular in the period as a vehicle for ideas of social welfare, self-improvement, and progress. Combe, along with Charles Bray, also influenced the views of nature of George Eliot. If we wish to relate these doctrines directly to the theory of reconciliation to industrial capitalism, we can do so by two paths. The first is through the wide current of Calvinism running through all these works, leading us to Weber's thesis in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. The second path leads to the theory of which Weber's thought was in important ways a bourgeois transformation, i.e., to Marxism. The same year in which Chambers extolled a faith in progress and harmony based on a partially secularized theodicy embracing the entire physical and living universe, Friedrich Engels (a twenty-four-year-old German whose family owned a cotton mill in Manchester) wrote The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844. His reaction to Malthusianism and the legislation which was enacted under its influence was very different:
Meanwhile the most open declaration of war of the bourgeoisie upon the proletariat is Malthus' Law of Population and the New Poor Law framed in accordance with it. We have already alluded several times to the theory of Malthus. We may sum up its final result in these few words, that the earth is perennially overpopulated, whence poverty, misery, distress, and immorality must prevail; that it is the lot, the eternal destiny of mankind, to exist in too great numbers, and therefore in diverse classes, of which some are rich, educated, and moral, and others more or less poor, distressed, ignorant, and immoral. Hence it follows in practice, and Malthus himself drew this conclusion, that charities and poor-rates are, properly speaking, nonsense, since they serve only to maintain, and stimulate the increase of, the surplus population whose competition crushes down wages for the employed; that the employment of the poor by the Poor Law Guardians is equally unreasonable, since only a fixed quantity of the products of labour can be consumed, and for every un-employed
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labourer thus furnished employment, another hitherto employed must be driven into enforced idleness, whence private undertakings suffer at cost of Poor Law industry; that, in other words, the whole problem is not how to support the surplus population, but how to restrain it as far as possible. Malthus declares in plain English that the right to live, a right previously asserted in favour of every man in the world, is nonsense. He quotes the words of a poet, that the poor man comes to the feast of Nature and finds no cover laid for him, and adds that "she bids him begone," for he did not before his birth ask of society whether or not he is welcome. This is now the pet theory of all genuine English bourgeois, and very naturally, since it is the most specious excuse for them, and has, moreover, a good deal of truth in it under existing conditions. If, then, the problem is not to make the "surplus population" useful, to transform it into available population, but merely to let it starve to death in the least objectionable way and to prevent its having too many children, this, of course, is simple enough, provided the surplus population perceives its own superfluousness and takes kindly to starvation.
Engels argues, in short, that poverty is a political - manmade - and not a natural phenomenon. The contrast between the sweet reconciling reason of Chambers' passage in his chapter "Purpose and General Condition of the Animated Creation" and the polemical agitation of the passage from Engels' chapter on "The attitude of the Bourgeoisie towards the Proletarist" helps to point out the two perspectives on the debate on man's place in nature which must be seen if we are to move from loose contextual references (e.g., to "the social dimension") to a genuinely radical historiography.
The continuum through Malthus, Paley, and Chambers leads on to Herbert Spencer, perhaps the most influential of all the interpreters of the philosophical, ethical, social, and political meaning of Victorian scientific naturalism. The case for an intimate mixture of sociopolitical and scientific considerations in his thought has been made out many times and hardly needs rehearsing, especially since the appearance of Peel's biography and Macrae's edition of his essays. There is no need to reveal Spencer's motives as primarily sociopolitical, since he repeatedly makes the point himself. He turned to phrenology, to psychology, and then to biology-as we have seen-in search of new guarantees to replace those which had been found wanting in theism and in Utilitarianism. The problem with Spencer is not that of showing that he
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conforms to the position being argued here. Rather, it is to get historians to see how central his work and influence were to the nineteenth-century debate, both among scientists and the broader public. His reputation has suffered most among the leaders of thought in the period because subsequent scientists (followed dutifully by historians) have anachronistically dismissed him for holding a "Lamarckian" theory of the mechanism of evolution. Two things should be recalled about his position. First, that it was a theory which, though embattled, was taken seriously throughout the nineteenth century and, indeed, was given increasing weight by Darwin (just as Spencer allowed an increasing role for natural selection). This point should lend perspective to the dismissal of Spencer as a serious figure. Second, he was unequivocal in pointing out that he attached great weight to the question of the mechanism of evolution precisely because of its ethical, educational, social, and political consequences. Throughout his mature life he was seeking a scientific basis for a doctrine of inevitable progress which would justify his belief in an extreme form of laissez-faire economic and social theory.
A. R. Wallace held a different theory of the mechanism of evolutionary change, one which was initially based on a fusion of ideas drawn primarily from Lyell and Malthus. When he saw that this theory had implications which were in conflict with his more fundamental belief in socialism, it was not socialism which yielded, but his belief in the Malthusian mechanism of natural selection. Important exceptions were made to his earlier belief in the total adequacy of natural selection to account for man and his mind. It should be remembered that he came to feel that not only his socialism but also his spiritualism and his belief in phrenology were in conflict with total adherence to natural selection. This is not the place to develop an analysis of the relationships among these influences (and their own deeper political meaning) and the biological findings which worried him. The point which I wish to make here is merely that they were all mixed up together.
Similar cases can be made out for each of the significant figures in the mainstream of the evolutionary debate and the wider debate on man's place in nature. In each case - e.g., those of Buckland, Whewell, Wilberforce, Sedgwick, Powell, Chalmers, Lewes, Carpenter, Mivart - scientific, philosophical, theological, and explicitly political considerations form a closely woven network of
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factors in their own theories and in their considerations of the theories of others. Interpreters of evolutionary theory such as the Duke of Argyll, William Graham, Ernst Haeckel (who was influential in translation) followed the same pattern. But what of Lyell and Darwin, the real scientists whose ideas were at the heart of the debate as it occurred and whose theories dominate the secondary literature to an even greater extent? Part of the answer has been given already in chapters which point out the importance of theological, philosophical, and other nonpositivist factors in their work. In the case of Lyell, new evidence about the overriding role of his concerns about man's special status has recently come to light in Wilson's edition of Lyell's hitherto unpublished Scientific Journals on the Species Question; and Rudwick has argued forcefully that this evidence calls for an orderly retreat on the part of those who formerly argued that Lyell could be studied along relatively internalist lines. Even so, the role of social and political factors in the work of both Lyell and especially of Darwin is a highly mediated one. Having got part of the way by showing the centrality of theological and philosophical questions in the origins, substance, and vicissitudes of their theories, one is left with the need for a subtle and complex theory of mediations if it is to be possible to make a strong case for them as figures who should be viewed in the simultaneous perspectives of science and sociopolitical ideas. It is beyond doubt that their theories were central to others' reconciling and apologetic doctrines. It is also becoming increasingly clear that orthodox accounts which stress the growth of scientific naturalism as a development away from traditional theological and social doctrines must be fundamentally reconsidered. In their place we require an interpretation which shows the deeper continuities. Rather than focus on the overthrow of the relatively static theistic cosmology by a secular and progressive one, an interpretation must be worked out which stresses the development from one theodicy - in both its scientific and its social aspects - to another. The first was suitable for a relatively static and rural economy while the other was developed for a rapidly changing and industrializing society. Although the theories of Lyell and Darwin were at the center of the role of science in this change of rationalization, it may be necessary in the short run to overemphasize the breadth and texture of the wider movement of which their work was but a part, however essential their particular contributions
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were to it. Once we have gained a broader view of the general movement of nineteenth-century naturalism, it will be a much less daunting task to place their work in it, without unduly exaggerating or minimizing their respective and related roles.
It should be granted that the work and influence of Lyell and Darwin were less intentionally and obviously an expression of more basic socioeconomic forces and structures than, for example, the work and influence of Chambers, Spencer, and Wallace. Similarly, their greater scientific prestige meant that those who employed their theories for sociopolitical purposes could claim a sounder foundation in the nature of things - in scientific laws - for their extrapolations and generalizations. A scholar who interprets the history of science in terms of internal and external factors or some related model would make a sharp distinction between their work and the contexts in which it developed and into which it fed. Rather like Lyell and Darwin, who withdrew from the political issues raised by their work, he would not want to get involved in that sort of thing.
A radical scholar would make two replies, one on the internalist's ground and one on his own. The first is that, by the internalist's criteria of understanding, his historiography unnecessarily blinkers his own perspective and impoverishes his understanding of the very problems which interest him. Second, a radical approach requires that the sociopolitical basis and its relations with the putatively autonomous scientific results be explored in depth and detail. He must make this effort in order to understand the role of scientific rationality and its technological expressions (and affiliations) in maintaining the established order of society and in sustaining the false consciousness which prevents people from believing that it can be transformed into a society in which the division of labor need not be hierarchical and exploitative, one in which inegalitarian structures are no longer maintained by being mystified and justified by a spurious foundation in the laws of nature. Put simply, a radical and critical historiography of science is required so that it can be seen that the present order of society is a fundamentally political, not merely a natural, and much less an inevitable, one and that it is therefore open to change through political struggles, once people's consciousness is freed from the fetters of deference to a natural basis for the present social order.
However, in order for this change of consciousness to occur, it
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will be necessary critically to evaluate the model of science and its history which considers the substance - the findings and theories - of intellectual development to be relatively autonomous and independent of sociopolitical determination.
The cases of Lyell and Darwin are thus part of a much wider problem. They are, relatively speaking, the purest of the scientists in the Victorian debate and as such are nearer to the positions of physicists, chemists, and mathematicians. If one is studying the writings of town planners, political scientists, sociologists, anthropologists, economists, psychologists, ethologists, physiologists, geneticists, molecular biologists, chemists, physicists, or mathematicians, one finds oneself at different points on a continuum, between writings which obviously reflect sociopolitical assumptions and those which do not obviously do so. In studying disciplines which are near the beginning of that list, ideological assumptions appear, as it were, on the surface of the page. At the other extreme, a student of the history of physics or mathematics - or indeed of recent molecular biology - would be very incredulous if faced with an interpretation of his data which stressed ideological assumptions which appeared to play no part in the data before him. Of course, there are those who defend the positivist purity of the woolliest of the social sciences and model them on the physicochemical sciences. At the other extreme are those who have attempted to account for findings in so-called pure science by claiming that they are direct, unmediated expressions of economic forces in the period or, alternatively, of the psychopathology of the scientist as seen from a psychoanalytic point of view. Isaac Newton is generally considered to be the paradigm scientist of the scientific revolution, and Boris Hessen's classical essay "The Social and Economic Roots of Newton's 'Principla"' is an example of the former approach, while Frank Manuel's A Portrait of Isaac Newton is a notable example of the psychoanalytic view.
What is required in the first instance, it seems to me, is a radical historiography which goes far beyond these simplistic approaches and which is based on a sufficiently flexible theory of mediations between socioeconomic base and intellectual superstructure, so that it can take account of scientific developments at any point on the continuum of "purity" of the sciences. This approach to the concept of mediation is not new. It is a revival of views which were expressed by Marx and Engels. However, the concept has
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degenerated in the hands of those who have reduced Marxism to "vulgar Marxism" The theory of mediation must include not only concepts for working along that continuum but must also address itself to the assumptions on which the continuum rests, that is, the paradigm of explanation of modern science which was elaborated in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in specific sociopolitical conditions and which forms the basis of the orthodox practice of scientists and of historians who study the advancing edge of objectivity. The development of such a historiography is a fundamental desideratum both for those who have found themselves working with a relativist and contextualist approach which is not well articulated, and for those who seek to make the historical study of science play a part in changing the world into one which is genuinely liberating, socialist, and egalitarian. Of course, many historians of science will wish to continue - as one put it - "working in my own corner," either implicitly or explicitly making a contribution to the maintenance of the existing order of society. They will argue that a call for a "radical" historiography of science is "dragging politics into the classroom" and that the status quo in the subject is apolitical. Others would argue on political grounds that the present approach to the subject is political and that it has the right politics.
What are the available perspectives for a Marxist historiography of science, and what is wrong with them?
V
Reverting once again to Needham's Marxist thesis about men and their ideas being born of their time, it is important to add the corollary that changed men with changed consciousness are the products of changed times. This is as true of the present as it was of the nineteenth-century debate on man's place in nature. It was also true of Joseph Needham's development. In his essay "Metamorphoses of Scepticism" (1941), he reports that "The process of socialisation of my outlook, however, really began with the general strike in 1926 [in which he was on the government's side] and was completed by the rise to power of Hitlerite fascism in 1933." Between these two events there occurred the Second International Congress of the History of Science and Technology in London (1931), at which the Soviet delegation put forth the version of
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Marxist historiography of science which inspired the approaches of Needham and Bernal, and which influenced Crowther and others. Needham later wrote in "Limiting Factors in the History of Science",
In sum, we cannot dissociate scientific advances from the technical needs and processes of the time, and the economic structure in which all are embedded.
.......The history of science is not a mere succession of inexplicable geniuses, direct Promethean ambassadors to man from heaven. Whether a given fact would have got itself discovered by some other person than the historical discoverer had he not lived it is certainly profitless and probably meaningless to enquire. But scientific men, as Bukharin said, do not live in a vacuum; on the contrary, the directions of their interests are ever conditioned by the structure of the world they live in. Further historical research will enable us to do for the great embryologists what has been well done by Hessen for Isaac Newton . . .
Similar tributes to Hessen can be found in writings of the other two major Marxist historians of science in England. Bernal wrote that "Hessen's article on Newton . . . was for England the starting point of a new evaluation of the history of science." This tribute appears in his The Social Function of Science, a work which was one of the most notable expressions of the new Marxist historiography. J. G. Crowther did not identify himself as a Marxist to the extent that Needham and Bernal did, but he was influenced by Marxist historiography. The acknowledgments of his The Social Relations of Science began as follows: "The views of B. Hessen and T. Veblen have provided much inspiration for this book." In the course of the book he gives an account of the Congress and its influence.
Hessen gave the first concrete example of how science should be interpreted as a product of the life and tendencies of society... Hessen's demonstration of the depth and range of Newton's dependence on the ideas promulgated by the epoch in which he appeared, made a profound impression on some of the younger members of the congress. It transformed the study of the history of science, and out-moded the former conceptions of the subject, which treated it as governed only by the laws if its internal logical development. Henceforth, no satisfactory history of science could be written without giving adequate attention to the dependence of science on social factors.
... The movement, of which Hessen's essay was the most stimulating
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expression, transformed the history of science from a minor into a major subject. It showed that a knowledge of the history of science was not only of entertaining antiquarian interest, but was essential for the solution of contemporary social problems due to the unorganized growth of the technological society.
Clearly, Needham, Bernal, Crowther, and others who were very inspired by the interpretation of the history of science which the Soviet delegation brought to the Congress, and their subsequent work in the field (though in the cases of the three persons mentioned it was a part-time activity, albeit a prolific avocation) continued to adhere to the model of intellectual work in science as a direct and relatively straightforward superstructural expression of the socioeconomic base in a given society. This model proved useful in its time, but I do not propose to discuss it in detail. It is noteworthy that its basic documents remain in print, and many of them have been reprinted, in particular the papers presented by the Soviet delegation to the London Congress in 1931. The reprint contains an excellent analytical introduction by R. G. Werskey, "On the Reception of Science at the Cross Roads in England." The revival of interest in this historiographic approach is significant, but it is basically pointless to attempt to recapture an atmosphere which played no part in the education of younger historians of science in the present generation and which, when recovered, is clearly to be set aside. Werskey's introduction, his book, and his related studies of the period and the genre are reliable guides for those interested in this topic, but it is a historical topic, and I propose to discuss it only as reflected in criticisms of its limitations.
Conservative and radical historians are understandably united in the belief that the base-superstructure model, as advocated by Hessen and his followers, led too easily to crude economic reductionism. It is, frankly, difficult to recover the enthusiasm generated by Hessen's essay. He makes a gesture to the complexity of his problem:
It would, however, be too greatly simplifying and even vulgarising our object if we began to quote every problem which has been studied by one physicist or another, and every economic and technical problem which he solved..... the above general analysis of the economic problems of the epoch would not be sufficient. We must analyse more fully Newton's epoch, the class struggles during the English Revolution, and the political,
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philosophic and religious theories [that] are reflected in the minds of the contemporaries of these struggles.
Even so, no amount of disarming qualification can prevent the reaction one feels against the simple one-to-one correlations beween economic and technological problems on the one hand and scientific ideas on the other, of which the bulk of his argument :consists. For example,
The above specified problems embrace almost the whole of physics. If we compare this basic series of themes with the physical problems which we found when analysing the technical demands of transport, means of communication, industry and war, it becomes quite clear that these roblems of physics were fundamentally determined by these demands ....We have compared the main technical and physical problems of the period with the scheme of investigations governing physics during the period we are investigating, and we come to the conclusion that the scheme of physics was mainly determined by the economic and technical tasks which the rising bourgeoisie raised to the forefront.
In the face of this approach, one can only feel sympathy and understanding on being told that in the 1940s young Anglo-American historians of science turned to the internal history of ideas as practiced by Koyré and Meyerson with a sense of relief, excitement, and liberation. This is not, however, to say that the base-superstructure model could not be skillfully applied to yield subtle historical work, as it undoubtedly did in the major writings of Needham and Bernal. However, in their zeal to follow Marx and Engels in deploring the practice of writing the history of the sciences "as if they had fallen from the skies," many practitioners of the Marxist historiography of the period after 1931 fell into the opposite error of writing it as if it always rose directly and straightforwardly from the base, without mediation. Moreover, they did not even entertain the possibility that the metaphors of that model - base, superstructure - might need to be complemented, if not finally superseded. Hall was entirely correct when he wrote in 1963, "In its crudest form at any rate the socioeconomic interpretation of the scientific revolution as an offshoot of rising capitalism and mercantile militarism has perished without comment." A decade later it can be added that its revival is a mistake, except as a basis for developing a more subtle version of the fundamental Marxist thesis. This is precisely what the most
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sophisticated of the historians who have been influenced by Marxism have recently been doing. Eric Hobsbawm, a Marxist economic historian, provides an exposition of the initial effects and of the debasement of Marx's fundamental insights.
Yet those of us who recall our first encounters with historical materialism may still bear witness to the immense liberating force of such simple may simple discoveries [relating ideas to economic conditions]. However, if it was thus natural, and perhaps necessary, for the initial impact of Marxism to take a simplified form, the actual selection of elements from Marx also represented an historical choice ...The bulk of what we regard as the Marxist influence on historiography has certainly been vulgar-Marxist ...It consists of the general emphasis on the economic and social factors in history which have been dominant since the end of the Second World War in all but a minority of countries (e.g. until recently West Germany and the United States), and which continues to gain ground. We must repeat that this trend, though undoubtedly in the main the product of Marxist influence, has no special connection with Marx's thought. The major impact which Marx's own specific ideas have had in history and the social sciences in general, is almost certainly that of the theory of "basis and superstructure"; that is to say of his model of a society composed of different "levels" which interact.
At this point the historian of science begins to feel the primitive state of discussion on these issues in his own discipline, and the historian of the biological and human sciences is in a particular difficulty. He or she is still striving to apply certain of the most basic insights of Marxism as a corrective to positivist approaches bo