Welcome to The HPS Podcast, where we discuss all things history, philosophy and social studies of science. I'm your host for today, Samara Greenwood.
This episode forms Part Two of our extended interview with the celebrated historian of science and master communicator, Professor Simon Schaffer. We've been so excited to see part one of the interview has already been downloaded and commented upon extensively across all our channels. Thank you so much for listening. It has been such a pleasure to put these episodes together.
Today, we continue to focus our discussion on the book Simon co-wrote with Steven Shapin in the early 80s, Leviathan and the Air-Pump. Simon reveals fascinating insights into the production of the book, including his many deep dives into the rare books collections, as well as the to and fro of typewritten pages between Simon in London and Steven in Edinburgh.
Simon also talks about the rise to prominence of Leviathan and the Air-Pump, highlighting the crucial role of two other very well-known HPS figures. You'll have to listen further to find out who they are. At the end of the interview, Simon then offers a series of reflections on the future of our wonderful field.
But to begin, I asked Simon how he and Steven Shapin first came to collaborate.
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Simon Schaffer: Right at the end of my PhD, in the beginning of my postdoc, in 1980 there was a conference in Bath in England, which brought together in a relatively unprecedented way, a group of historians of science with a group of sociologists. The focus of the meeting was to think about what the relation could be between history of science and a sociological approach to the sciences.
I was very young, and I'd just finished my PhD thesis, and I went to the conference and that's where I first saw Steve, who gave an absolutely remarkable paper on an episode which, for historians of science is extremely well known. So well-known that it seemed extremely unlikely that anybody would have anything new to say about it, which was the fight between Newton and Leibniz, and in particular the exchange between Isaac Newton's lieutenant, Samuel Clarke and Leibniz in an exchange of letters in the early 18th century – which was subsequently and very quickly published.
Steve had written an article offering a completely new reading of the debate. There was a section in my PhD on Newton about the debate; not only did I learn an immense amount from his work, but I also flattered myself that we were traveling in the same direction. By the autumn of 1980, when I had my oral exam for my PhD, Steve was one of the two examiners, and that was the first time we sat in a room together and talked. I learned a lot from his examination. We stayed in touch. We began to exchange letters – remember, no email and barely any telephones. I was living in London teaching at Imperial, he was living in Edinburgh teaching at the Science Studies Unit in Edinburgh, and we began to write to each other. Steve was working on a series of major and very exciting projects about the social use of nature, of which the exchange between Hobbes and Boyle would have been a case. It was Steve – of course it was – who located the particular controversy as significant and interesting, and it was he who invited me to help out.
[00:04:05]
Samara Greenwood: That's a really interesting backstory. What was the collaboration process like? Was it easy or were there any dramas?
Simon Schaffer: It was pretty straightforward – no doubt partly because we were living in different cities. Quite a lot of exchange took place by correspondence. I'd get sent these extraordinary groups of pages and then comment on them, probably rather inexpertly, and send them back. Occasionally, one would visit Edinburgh, and we'd spend a couple of days sitting together.
There were no major dramas. There was, as I've already mentioned, the discovery that what we'd initially thought might be a short, and then a medium sized, and then a long article was clearly going to become a book. In the preface that was inserted into the 2011 re-edition of the book, we begin by discussing the immensely important role of the typewriter in the production of the book. I think that is worth emphasising: that writing was a deeply mechanical, time-consuming act. That changing a text, if it's typed, is quite a demanding activity, and attributes to the text that you've written a kind of force that of course, it no longer has.
I'd also want to emphasise the typewriter, because it dates the period when the book was being put together; it belongs to a different mode of intellectual production completely. I'd also want to remind that this is a world in which there are no – of course there aren’t – no online resources. If you were studying 17th century writing, you had to sit typically in the rare books rooms of the library, in my case in London and in Cambridge, in Steve's case in Edinburgh. These are great collections, but the work entirely depended on them. The relation between historical work, and location – I don't think this is an exaggeration or self-indulgence – was both absolutely obvious, and extremely significant in a way that perhaps it is not now. For example, it would have been absolutely impossible for me to do the work that was done for the book in more than a few dozen places, and it would have been even more time consuming, and it would have been even more challenging. Because precisely, one of the enterprises of the book was to bring together primary material that is not normally juxtaposed. We were not just reading the material that Robert Boyle and Thomas Hobbes had written, we were also reading it alongside really quite a large collection of other 17th century texts.
That's perfectly normal for a 17th century historian, absolutely normal. It was not normal for the history of science of that kind, at that time. The great editions of Hobbes and of Boyle didn't exist at that period –they were launched afterwards. Now, we have the most remarkable resources for studying the kinds of issues that I think folks should be studying. This is a kind of defensive nostalgia; it was harder, I would say, 40 and 50 years ago.
[00:08:11]
Samara Greenwood: No doubt. I can tell you a few stories about the ease which I can find some resources when I'm looking at 16th century Italy on Tartaglia. I can't imagine how much harder that would have been 40, 50 years ago.
Simon Schaffer: Let me emphasise also that people were quite rightly rewarded at that period for completing tasks it would now take 10 minutes to complete.
[00:08:35]
Samara Greenwood: Like what? What do you mean by that?
Simon Schaffer: Oh, I mean it was absolutely crucial when a new text was identified. It was absolutely crucial when even a printed copy that one had believed lost was not only located, but also made more widely available. I don't think we should be deluded about the empire of the digital. There are all sorts of crises and problems that we know, ranging from the climate crisis implications of the ubiquity of the digital, all the way to the sheer difficulty of showing folk that encountering early modern print is not the same as looking at a screen.
The emphasis – it's not unique, not at all – to Leviathan and the Air-Pump, on technologies, including literary technology. In other words, the extraordinary importance of particular kinds of writing, particular kinds of print: particular kinds of display on the page, particular kinds of juxtaposition of image with letterpress, and so on. All of that was no doubt partly nourished by the brutal facts of everyday scholarship – and now it's harder, I think, to register that.
[00:10:03]
Samara Greenwood: I remember the first time I went to our old books collection to look at one of Tartaglia's books and it was a revelation because I'd been studying it already for a couple of years before actually seeing the material original. What about the reception to the publication – did its success or any particular criticisms perhaps of the book surprise you?
Simon Schaffer: I don't think there was surprising criticisms. I think it's very important to remember that for at least the first decade I would say, after the book appeared – which takes us to the mid 1990s – the book was deeply obscure. It didn't have many readers, and most reviews were hostile, and there wasn't an enormous number of reviews. The reasons for the hostility, I'm sure, were all justified. They ranged from some creatures that we've already talked about – the interdisciplinarity: ‘This is not proper history’; ‘This is not proper history of science’; ‘This uses resources that shouldn't be used or aren't very helpful’; There's too much jargon’; There's all this terminology that we don't recognise and can't really understand’. That was quite a common response.
That was mixed with, no doubt, responses which were – again in retrospect – and again it's starred in the introduction to the 2011 reprint, where we attempted to summarise a lot of those reviews as fairly as we could: the sense that a book that examines a passage of 17th century science like this should either be internalist and tell us more about the science involved, or it should be honestly externalist and just focus on the political, economic, and social features that drove the fight. But problematising that distinction and actually analysing its origin – that actually seemed quite hard to read.
The complementary point, which we've also discussed elsewhere, is the – as one might say – striking but slightly bizarre status of the expression: the Scientific Revolution. The Scientific Revolution had for quite some time been an organising principle. For a lot of work in the history of science, to be far too simplistic, the general claim that at some stage between the middle of the 1500s and the early 1700s, there was a set of dramatic, sudden, and irreversible shifts that summoned into existence modern science in Europe. That's a pretty inadequate definition of the Scientific Revolution as its onset, but it'll do for these purposes.
Given that this book is about a moment within that period, that it includes one of the protagonists of the Scientific Revolution story, Robert Boyle, that its topic is experiment, many of the critics suppose the book was about the Scientific Revolution. They didn't seem to notice that the phrase does not occur in the book. They didn't seem to notice that the problematic of the Scientific Revolution is not the problematic of the book. They certainly, therefore, mainly condemned the book because it completely fails to give an adequate account of the process of the Scientific Revolution. I didn't find that surprising at all, because of the overwhelming dominance of that category within the professional field of history of science.
Then by the mid-90s, one started to notice that the book was being more widely read. I think it helped that it had appeared in paperback, eventually – because initially it was just hardback. It certainly helped – I mean more than helped, it absolutely changed the status of the book – that at least two dominant figures in the field of history and philosophy of science, and science studies more generally: Ian Hacking and Bruno Latour, used the book in their own work to make really powerful claims about the character of the sciences.
Latour's intervention, I think, was very important. He organised, and I remain extremely grateful to him, a French edition in the early 90s, which sold hardly any copies at all, and he changed the subtitle completely in a very interesting way; the original subtitle is: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life. Just amongst all the other things, it is a gesture towards the work of Wittgenstein and his notion of forms of life. Latour changed the subtitle to: I'll Translate Hobbes and Boyle Between Science and Politics – a completely different model of what the book is about. Latour wrote an entire book, which is called: We Have Never Been Modern (Nous n’avons jamais été modernes), which was very widely read, and which began by defining what he called the modern constitution, on the basis of what Leviathan and the Air-Pump says. I think that cultivated a new, different, and of course, much larger readership. By the end of the 90s, the book, I reckon, had achieved more or less the status that it seems to have.
[00:16:06]
Samara Greenwood: You've already mentioned that in the 2011 edition, you and Steven included this wonderful reflective piece, which is putting your own work in its own historical context – which I must say I loved, and I would highly recommend to anyone who has found this conversation interesting, please do go out and read it.
It's 2024, over a decade later. Are there any further reflections you might have?
Simon Schaffer: Probably the single most important thing that's said in the 2011 introduction is that one's expectation and one's intent, for good or ill, was to hope that this did function as an example – and that there would be more work like this coming along. To a limited extent that happened but mainly it didn't, and that's probably a good thing, because a field that simply reproduces itself is in trouble. What strikes me most, and indeed has characterised a lot of the subsequent work that I've done, that Steve's done, that many others have done, is that that problematic, that kind of approach – yes, I hope has provided useful resources – but it's also extremely striking how much the agendas of the field of history of science, of science studies in the West have developed, have expanded, have been enriched, and have changed. I still find myself going back to the work of 40 years ago, and thinking: “Well, are there some resources I can use in these cases?”. Resources like a naturalistic, non-evaluative approach to past material, so that one is not ending up simply justifying the current state of affairs. That is a really difficult set of issues within, not just the sciences themselves, but also of course, the politics of science and the history of science.
I think that the emphasis on geography, on space, on location, remains for me anyway, extraordinarily important – precisely because much of the work that I've been doing more recently has been in very different regions of the world, and very different areas, and for very different periods. So the current work that I'm involved in is on the climate sciences of the 19th century and on the colonial sciences of that period, especially in South Asia. Understanding the role of location and of, not just the geography of knowledge but also the knowledge of geography, has been extraordinarily important for that.
Similarly, the immense significance that the Leviathan and the Air-Pump book grants to the particular role, status and social position of the author of a claim, has proved, I think, really helpful for me. So that if I can understand a bit better what the map of authority and trust and alliance, but also exploitation and aggression and power actually is, then one can make more sense of what's going on in the sciences. There are features that I think were absorbed; I do not – and I want to underline this – I do not think, of course I don't, that that work is the unique source of these kinds of approaches – that's not true; it's sometimes been claimed, but it's clearly nonsense. However, the work has perhaps proved to be quite a useful way of encapsulating some of those. It's as if, bizarrely as one might think, an entire field from a particular moment four and five decades ago can be summarised by naming a particular work. That's not a surprising move, we do that all the time, but it's very surprising for its authors.
[00:20:43]
Samara Greenwood: I love that. So to end on a slightly different note, I would love to know any thoughts you have on the future of HPS. Are there any particular directions you'd like to see the field head?
Simon Schaffer: It seems to me that there are obviously issues about the survival of the field, because there are issues about the survival of universities, major issues about the survival as such of any approaches that derive their work from the humanities and social sciences.
The crises that are massively affecting institutions of higher learning and of research affect these fields, not more intensely than any other, but very intensely indeed. So when one's thinking about the future of this kind of inquiry, you've got to begin by saying the material conditions of being able to pursue this work are in deep trouble because of, to be very specific, marketisation: the imposition of a market model onto what counts as important to ask and important to pursue.
I live in a country where, at least until extremely recently, the value of a degree is the earning potential of its graduates; not like, not comparable with – that's what it is. Under those circumstances, we do have to ask the question: is this going to be an academic field that is actually going to last?
I hope no one is studying History and Philosophy of Science because of its earning potential. If so, they're going to be quite disappointed, even though I think it's one of the most important sets of questions we can ask about the world: what are the claims of science, technology, and medicine in our world? Where do they come from? What do they mean? What are their implications? How have they emerged? Those seem to me to be absolutely fundamental questions. We need people who are trained properly to ask those questions and to understand reliable and effective stories that make sense of those urgent questions. So that's where I would begin.
Clearly, on the other hand, developments which were, I think, strangely nascent when Leviathan and the Air-Pump was being put together, that are now extremely significant and exciting and important, I would point to three.
Issues around gender, obviously, and its historical and political formations, its status both as a topic of knowledge and intervention, but also a social basis for different kinds of expressions of knowledge; to questions of colonial and imperial forms of knowledge and practice, which were obviously highly developed at the period when the Leviathan and the Air-Pump book was being put together – but at that point seemed to have almost no connection with it; and now it would be completely impossible to address those issues in such cheerful and silly ignorance, at least I hope it will. That set of concerns obviously has preoccupied my work and that of many others ever since. And finally, the climate crisis, which on the one hand is of course the most important crisis that technoscience and science and technology are recognising, and dealing with, and responding to – and in some terrible respect, producing.
It's been, at the second level, this is a bit of a euphemism, interesting to watch the relation between the field's development and the emerging recognition of the parameters of the crisis over the last 25, 30 years. That's been absolutely crucial. There are clearly ways in which all history is the history of the present, and that needs emphasis. I suppose, the take home lesson of this is that a proper historical approach to the sciences has to begin with the material conditions of the kind of activity it wants to pursue. Those kinds of issues I think are urgent and pressing both in order to secure the continuation of this kind of work, but also to make it the topic of our own inquiry too.
[00:25:32]
Samara Greenwood: Thank you so much. That's a fantastic spot to finish up. Thank you again for coming on the podcast, Simon. It has been an absolute privilege to have you on.
Simon Schaffer: You're very welcome. It's been fun and a delight to meet you.
Thank you for listening to season four of the HPS Podcast. If you're interested in the detail of today's conversation, you can access the transcript on our website at hpsunimelb.org. Stay connected with us on social media, including Blue Sky, for updates, extras, and further discussion. We would also like to thank the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies at the University of Melbourne for their ongoing support. And thank you for joining us in the wonderful world of HPS.
We look forward to having you back again next time.
