Richard Olson. Science and Scientism in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008. 349 pp. $80.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-252-03188-5; $27.00 (paper), ISBN 978-0-252-07433-2.
Reviewed by Andrea Westermann (ETH Zurich, Institute of History )
Published on H-German (February, 2009)
Commissioned by Susan R. Boettcher
Scientistic Thinking in Modern Europe
The book under review deals with the "transfer of ideas, practices, attitudes, and methodologies from the context of the study of the natural world into the study of humans and their social institutions" (p. 1), a process Richard Olson refers to as "scientism." It does not deal, as one might expect, with the history of the natural sciences and their popular reception. Furthermore it is not, as one equally might expect, a sequel to the author's The Emergence of the Social Sciences, 1642-1792 (1993) since the book does not take up a prominent theme of their nineteenth-century development, their successful academic institutionalization. Instead, Olson traces a history of those European ideas and social theories which, relying on the authority of natural science, earned some measurable political influence at the time: liberalism, socialism, positivism, communism, and social Darwinism. As with his earlier works, Olson aims at showing that modern Western political culture, religion, and literature are beholden to the body of knowledge the natural sciences accrued over time. In short, the book argues that, from the late eighteenth century onward, a basis in science was the driving force in the reasoning about and the political development of social organization.
Starting in Revolutionary France (part 1) and continuing in Romantic Germany and Victorian England (part 2), the chapters follow the surge of scientifically informed social theorizing more or less chronologically. Part 3 explains how and why evolutionary thinking became the dominant source of inspiration for both social theoreticians and their middle-class nonscientific audiences in the second half of the nineteenth century. Giving relatively few citations of the secondary literature and quoting at length from his primary (printed) sources, Olson blends well-known historical events with biographies into a detailed survey of the contemporary models of social agency and their underlying idea of the common good. While he usually uncovers the political and social context of the works he considers, Olson limits the history of their reception to the reconstruction of their intellectual lineage. Given its narrative and style, the book makes for a very readable textbook.
Part 1 introduces the reader to two science-based teachings that tried to "bring order out of the chaos of post-revolutionary" French society (p. 41): Saint-Simonianism and Auguste Comte's positivism, each of them bearing the distinct features of a system of religious belief. Olson explains that the works of Henri de Saint-Simon are seen as "urtexts" of modern technocracy, and he names Auguste Comte the first historian of science.[1] He shows why Comte's vision of entrepreneurs serving as a country's managerial elite and fueling the economy with the private capital they are still allowed to generate was more in tune with a liberal bourgeois culture than the economic collectivism of his mentor, Henri de Saint-Simon.
Part 2 argues that in the German lands, a particular form of scientific culture and practice came to express a genuine "Germaness," a national style of intellectual reasoning and comprehension. The romantic Naturphilosophie was an openly spiritual endeavor radically departing from any central positivistic assumptions. It clung to the metaphysical foundation of science and embraced introspection as a means of knowing. Scientific materialism, as proposed by Ludwig Feuerbach and Ludwig Büchner, offered a very different version of German scientism, and popularized an urban movement of natural knowledge towards the end of the nineteenth century. By referring readers back to the first part of his book, Olson points out that Marx's and Engels's historical materialism not only drew on Feuerbach but also had a firm "Saint-Simonian background" (p. 151). The fact was acknowledged by Engels, who stated that "in Saint-Simon, we find the breadth of view of a genius thanks to which almost all the ideas of later socialism ... are contained in his work in embryo" (p. 151).
As for the political potential of the natural sciences in Britain, the British middle class was already an avid consumer of popular science in the early nineenth century. Olson unfolds the history of the adult education movement (Mechanics' Institute movement, Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge), originally intended to target workers, which found a much broader audience. With the advent of the radical working-class movement guided by the person and work of educational philanthropist, Robert Owen, Olson's book restates the appeal that science and scientism had for early socialist thinking.
By the second decade of the nineteenth century, more nuanced historical or evolutionary explanations had begun to gain currency. The hyper-rationalist assumption that all human action was motivated by either enhancing pleasure or avoiding pain, as any version of utilitarianism maintained (if only for the sake of theoretical clarity), was challenged in the name of empirical evidence. Evolutionary thinking, as it was developed by the French natural historians Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, in the late eighteenth century, and Jean Baptiste Lamarck at the turn of the nineteenth century, did much to bring about a dynamic, forward-looking political semantics. Both "history" and "evolution" became directional notions whose meaning embraced the idea of progress. Part 3 tells the intertwined history of scientific and political evolutionary theories, convincingly presenting Darwinian evolution as an intellectual highlight. Aptly enough, the book concludes with a chapter on the obsession with degeneration: that is, on the disillusionist critiques of modern fables of progress.
The history of the social sciences has evolved into a dynamic field of research in recent years.[2] Olsen largely refrains, however, from drawing on the results of newer studies. Perhaps his point of view, the history of ideas, does not resonate with "the practice turn" in the history of science, which sets out to analyze the scientific grunt-work in academic institutions, state bureaucracy, or industrial organizations. In Germany, for instance, what Lutz Raphael has termed the emphasis on the "scientific foundations of the social" is clearly aimed at providing a better understanding of how the welfare state and its institutions conceptualized society as a whole as well as particular social groups; or how it treated social problems like health or unemployment, and how it came to decide on appropriate means of intervention. It is due to the omission of these practical contexts or the (academic) institutionalization that the developments in social theory sketched are not easily conceived of as forming one topic. Olson's need to summarize specific advances in the natural sciences in order to explain what exactly had been transposed into the social realm distracts from a straightforward line of argumentation, and so does his defense of the meaning of "scientism" against the views of rather dated epistemologies (such as that found in Friedrich August von Hayek's pejorative perception of "scientistic" approaches). Nevertheless, the book deserves the attention of everyone looking for a competent introduction to European debates on the character of societies from a history of science point of view. Furthermore, the book's geographical scope should help German historians pin down discursive traditions and identify national formations.
Notes
[1]. See also Johan Heilbron, "Auguste Comte and Modern Epistemology," Sociological Theory 8 (1990):153-162.
[2]. Theodore M. Porter, Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995); Peter Hanns Reill, "The Construction of the Social Sciences in Late Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century Germany," in The Rise of the Social Sciences and the Formation of Modernity, ed. Johan Heilbron, Lars Magnusson, and B. Wittrock (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1998), 107-140; see also The Cambridge History of Science, vol. 7, The Modern Social Sciences, ed. Theodore M. Porter and Dorothy Ross (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
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Citation:
Andrea Westermann. Review of Olson, Richard, Science and Scientism in Nineteenth-Century Europe.
H-German, H-Net Reviews.
February, 2009.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=15659
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