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Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life
In the aftermath of the English Civil War, as people were groping for new forms of political order, Robert Boyle built an air-pump to do experiments. Does the story of Roundheads and Restoration have something to do with the origins of experimental science? Schaffer and Shapin believed it does.
Focusing on the debates between Boyle and his archcritic Thomas Hobbes over the air-pump, the authors proposed that "solutions to the problem of knowledge are solutions to the problem of social order." Both Boyle and Hobbes were looking for ways of establishing knowledge that did not decay into ad hominem attacks and political division. Boyle proposed the experiment as cure. He argued that facts should be manufactured by machines like the air-pump so that gentlemen could witness the experiments and produce knowledge that everyone agreed on. Hobbes, by contrast, looked for natural law and viewed experiments as the artificial, unreliable products of an exclusive guild.
The new approaches taken in Leviathan and the Air-Pump have been enormously influential on historical studies of science. Shapin and Schaffer found a moment of scientific revolution and showed how key scientific givens--facts, interpretations, experiment, truth--were fundamental to a new political order. Shapin and Schaffer were also innovative in their ethnographic approach. Attempting to understand the work habits, rituals, and social structures of a remote, unfamiliar group, they argued that politics were tied up in what scientists did, rather than what they said.
Focusing on the debates between Boyle and his archcritic Thomas Hobbes over the air-pump, the authors proposed that "solutions to the problem of knowledge are solutions to the problem of social order." Both Boyle and Hobbes were looking for ways of establishing knowledge that did not decay into ad hominem attacks and political division. Boyle proposed the experiment as cure. He argued that facts should be manufactured by machines like the air-pump so that gentlemen could witness the experiments and produce knowledge that everyone agreed on. Hobbes, by contrast, looked for natural law and viewed experiments as the artificial, unreliable products of an exclusive guild.
The new approaches taken in Leviathan and the Air-Pump have been enormously influential on historical studies of science. Shapin and Schaffer found a moment of scientific revolution and showed how key scientific givens--facts, interpretations, experiment, truth--were fundamental to a new political order. Shapin and Schaffer were also innovative in their ethnographic approach. Attempting to understand the work habits, rituals, and social structures of a remote, unfamiliar group, they argued that politics were tied up in what scientists did, rather than what they said.
440 pages, Paperback
First published December 12, 1985
75 people are currently reading
1800 people want to read
About the author
Steven Shapin
14 books39 followersShapin was trained as a biologist at Reed College and did graduate work in genetics at the University of Wisconsin before taking a Ph.D. in the History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania in 1971.
From 1972 to 1989, he was Lecturer, then Reader, at the Science Studies Unit, Edinburgh University, and, from 1989 to 2003, Professor of Sociology at the University of California, San Diego, before taking up an appointment at the Department of the History of Science at Harvard. He has taught for brief periods at Columbia University, Tel-Aviv University, and at the University of Gastronomic Sciences in Pollenzo, Italy. In 2012, he was the S. T. Lee Visiting Professorial Fellow, School of Advanced Study, University of London.
He has written broadly on the history and sociology of science. Among his concerns are scientists, their ethical choices, and the basis of scientific credibility. He revisioned the role of experiment by examining where experiments took place and who performed them. He is credited with restructuring the field's approach to “big issues” in science such as truth, trust, scientific identity, and moral authority.
"The practice of science, both conceptually and instrumentally, is seen to be full of social assumptions. Crucial to their work is the idea that science is based on the public's faith in it. This is why it is important to keep explaining how sound knowledge is generated, how the process works, who takes part in the process and how."
His books on 17th-century science include the "classic book" Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (1985, with Simon Schaffer); his "path-breaking book" A Social History of Truth (1994), The Scientific Revolution (1996, now translated into 18 languages), and, on modern entrepreneurial science, The Scientific Life (2008). A collection of his essays is Never Pure (2010). His current research interests include the history of dietetics and the history and sociology of taste and subjective judgment, especially in relation to food and wine.
He is a regular contributor to the London Review of Books and he has written for Harper's Magazine and The New Yorker.
From 1972 to 1989, he was Lecturer, then Reader, at the Science Studies Unit, Edinburgh University, and, from 1989 to 2003, Professor of Sociology at the University of California, San Diego, before taking up an appointment at the Department of the History of Science at Harvard. He has taught for brief periods at Columbia University, Tel-Aviv University, and at the University of Gastronomic Sciences in Pollenzo, Italy. In 2012, he was the S. T. Lee Visiting Professorial Fellow, School of Advanced Study, University of London.
He has written broadly on the history and sociology of science. Among his concerns are scientists, their ethical choices, and the basis of scientific credibility. He revisioned the role of experiment by examining where experiments took place and who performed them. He is credited with restructuring the field's approach to “big issues” in science such as truth, trust, scientific identity, and moral authority.
"The practice of science, both conceptually and instrumentally, is seen to be full of social assumptions. Crucial to their work is the idea that science is based on the public's faith in it. This is why it is important to keep explaining how sound knowledge is generated, how the process works, who takes part in the process and how."
His books on 17th-century science include the "classic book" Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (1985, with Simon Schaffer); his "path-breaking book" A Social History of Truth (1994), The Scientific Revolution (1996, now translated into 18 languages), and, on modern entrepreneurial science, The Scientific Life (2008). A collection of his essays is Never Pure (2010). His current research interests include the history of dietetics and the history and sociology of taste and subjective judgment, especially in relation to food and wine.
He is a regular contributor to the London Review of Books and he has written for Harper's Magazine and The New Yorker.
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March 2, 2014
So the three stars here is deceptive. What I really need are two separate ratings, one of which would get 1 star, the other of which would get 5 stars.
Lets begin with the whining. The book is dreadfully boring and at times disgustingly poorly written. There were descriptions of various machines and theories and ideas that I could not comprehend after reading them 10 times in a row. And these are descriptions of basic physical movements that (in theory) were aided by the diagrams that they included that, sadly, were just as if not more confusing.
What they needed was to give these explanations not in a book, but in a video format such as is available now in various e-reading platforms that can handle html5. So the clarity problem (at least for those issues) could easily be solved by having a good team of graphic artists go to town and convey the points that the authors were trying to make.
But, that will only make small headway into the tedium.
What the book really needs is summaries of each chapter's main content at the beginning as can be found in Ian Hacking's Representing and Intervening. It is nearly impossible to detect the most relevant ideas without reading the whole chapter word for word. It is as if they purposefully obscured which words are most important to attend to (save the last three words of the book) so as to emphasize their point that small things in social conventions can make major differences in the worlds of ideas. I wish if that was purposeful that they had had a more strongly willed editor so as to cut out much of the bloat that weighs down their writing.
Why would I care that it weighs down the writing though, if this is such a poorly written book? Because, it is an amazingly insightful book as well. If you've been able to slog through all that I've written so far to get to this then maybe you're the kind of person who could appreciate just how much delightful content is sprinkled in their. You'll be chewing on a piece of crust for ages and all of a sudden a burst of flavorful raisin (or something else, if you don't like raisins — I don't) will alight on your tongue and give you a delightly journey into the land of ideas. The metaphor is strained, I know, but really the book does do a good job of gradually instilling brilliant insights into the readers mind, it just takes an incredible amount of work to get there.
Rarely has there been as trenchant a critique of experimentation as Hobbes', nor a more vigorous defender from many sides as Boyle. And prior to reading this book I had no idea. The intertwining of intellectual and political assent is not an idea i'd previously contemplated, and trying to understand if intellectual or political assent are truly separable, and what the relation between science and society is (or could be) are puzzles that are still sitting with me.
Furthermore the connection between assent as seen in geometry as a model of irrefutable logic becomes even more tantalizing when you think of non-euclidean geometry as a valid foundation that necessitates assent in the context of any particular parallel line assumption but not in any other context, this points to the possibility of Hobbes both being right and wrong. That is, Hobbes' belief (according to Shapin and Schaffer) that geometry is a construction by human beings to create assent out of nothing then seems to be correct. But at the same time he assumes that that is the only way to do build such a consistent assent producing system.
So this book, its a hell to read, but its a hell of a read. And yes, Hobbes was right, but Hobbes was also wrong.
P.s. There is much more that could be said, but i don't want to say it if no one wants to hear it.
Lets begin with the whining. The book is dreadfully boring and at times disgustingly poorly written. There were descriptions of various machines and theories and ideas that I could not comprehend after reading them 10 times in a row. And these are descriptions of basic physical movements that (in theory) were aided by the diagrams that they included that, sadly, were just as if not more confusing.
What they needed was to give these explanations not in a book, but in a video format such as is available now in various e-reading platforms that can handle html5. So the clarity problem (at least for those issues) could easily be solved by having a good team of graphic artists go to town and convey the points that the authors were trying to make.
But, that will only make small headway into the tedium.
What the book really needs is summaries of each chapter's main content at the beginning as can be found in Ian Hacking's Representing and Intervening. It is nearly impossible to detect the most relevant ideas without reading the whole chapter word for word. It is as if they purposefully obscured which words are most important to attend to (save the last three words of the book) so as to emphasize their point that small things in social conventions can make major differences in the worlds of ideas. I wish if that was purposeful that they had had a more strongly willed editor so as to cut out much of the bloat that weighs down their writing.
Why would I care that it weighs down the writing though, if this is such a poorly written book? Because, it is an amazingly insightful book as well. If you've been able to slog through all that I've written so far to get to this then maybe you're the kind of person who could appreciate just how much delightful content is sprinkled in their. You'll be chewing on a piece of crust for ages and all of a sudden a burst of flavorful raisin (or something else, if you don't like raisins — I don't) will alight on your tongue and give you a delightly journey into the land of ideas. The metaphor is strained, I know, but really the book does do a good job of gradually instilling brilliant insights into the readers mind, it just takes an incredible amount of work to get there.
Rarely has there been as trenchant a critique of experimentation as Hobbes', nor a more vigorous defender from many sides as Boyle. And prior to reading this book I had no idea. The intertwining of intellectual and political assent is not an idea i'd previously contemplated, and trying to understand if intellectual or political assent are truly separable, and what the relation between science and society is (or could be) are puzzles that are still sitting with me.
Furthermore the connection between assent as seen in geometry as a model of irrefutable logic becomes even more tantalizing when you think of non-euclidean geometry as a valid foundation that necessitates assent in the context of any particular parallel line assumption but not in any other context, this points to the possibility of Hobbes both being right and wrong. That is, Hobbes' belief (according to Shapin and Schaffer) that geometry is a construction by human beings to create assent out of nothing then seems to be correct. But at the same time he assumes that that is the only way to do build such a consistent assent producing system.
So this book, its a hell to read, but its a hell of a read. And yes, Hobbes was right, but Hobbes was also wrong.
P.s. There is much more that could be said, but i don't want to say it if no one wants to hear it.
April 29, 2012
This is a curious book. Enormously influential across multiple disciplines, and often cited as one of the books that started the science wars, the bulk of the text is in fact mostly concerned with a microscopic analysis of the dispute between Hobbes and Boyle over the legitimacy of the experimental approach to natural philosophy promoted by the newly founded Royal Society. In particular, the focus is on the experiments with the air-pump promoted by Boyle and his colleagues as emblematic of a new way of pursuing natural philosophy. For the most part, these detailed analyses are interesting and illuminating, though I strongly recommend reading James Conant's little monograph, Robert Boyle’s Experiments in Pneumatics, published as Volume 1 of the Harvard Case Histories In Experimental Science, beforehand.
The curiosity arises from the philosophical work these analyses are supposed to do. The general pattern of the chapters is: i) a grand philosophical claim made in the introduction; ii) reams of historical analysis that bears at best a highly indirect relationship to the claim; and iii) a summary contending that the claim has been established. For example, in Chapter 8 it is announced that "He who has the most, and the most powerful, allies wins" (p. 342). However, for the most part this chapter simply traces the way in which both Boyle and Hobbes portrayed their recommended philosophical methods as uniquely suited to generating peaceful discourse and civil harmony. There is no analysis of which people in particular Boyle and Hobbes had as allies, and no analysis of the structure of power in the society in which they are situated. Most crucially, there is no attempt to show that the consensus that formed around Boyle was produced not by the reasonableness of his arguments but rather by the political connections he had at his disposal. Without evidence of this kind, the claim that the winner was produced by the exercise of political power is completely unsupported.
So while the book contains an enormous amount of extremely interesting first order history—on the early context of the Royal Society, on the particular philosophical arguments of Boyle and Hobbes, on the social context in which they were situated, and on the new forms of rhetoric, professionalisation and institutionalisation associated with the emergence of experimental science—the constructivist claims that are supposed to follow from this history are simply not supported by it.
Moreover, sometimes the grand constructivist conclusions appear to follow as the result of a simple confusion. Both facts and knowledge are often in the book said to be made, constituted or constructed by people or by society. But in nearly all instances, at best what is shown to have been made (in some sense) by the narrative on offer is the beliefs concerning those facts, not the facts themselves. The fact that Boyle required a community of witnesses to be present before he would recognise his experiments to have produced a given result does not show that the result was produced by that community—it just shows that Boyle was carefully protecting the reliability of his observations by having them corroborated by others. It takes much more to establish a social constructivist thesis than to point out the banal truth that scientific inquiry is a collective endeavour.
The curiosity arises from the philosophical work these analyses are supposed to do. The general pattern of the chapters is: i) a grand philosophical claim made in the introduction; ii) reams of historical analysis that bears at best a highly indirect relationship to the claim; and iii) a summary contending that the claim has been established. For example, in Chapter 8 it is announced that "He who has the most, and the most powerful, allies wins" (p. 342). However, for the most part this chapter simply traces the way in which both Boyle and Hobbes portrayed their recommended philosophical methods as uniquely suited to generating peaceful discourse and civil harmony. There is no analysis of which people in particular Boyle and Hobbes had as allies, and no analysis of the structure of power in the society in which they are situated. Most crucially, there is no attempt to show that the consensus that formed around Boyle was produced not by the reasonableness of his arguments but rather by the political connections he had at his disposal. Without evidence of this kind, the claim that the winner was produced by the exercise of political power is completely unsupported.
So while the book contains an enormous amount of extremely interesting first order history—on the early context of the Royal Society, on the particular philosophical arguments of Boyle and Hobbes, on the social context in which they were situated, and on the new forms of rhetoric, professionalisation and institutionalisation associated with the emergence of experimental science—the constructivist claims that are supposed to follow from this history are simply not supported by it.
Moreover, sometimes the grand constructivist conclusions appear to follow as the result of a simple confusion. Both facts and knowledge are often in the book said to be made, constituted or constructed by people or by society. But in nearly all instances, at best what is shown to have been made (in some sense) by the narrative on offer is the beliefs concerning those facts, not the facts themselves. The fact that Boyle required a community of witnesses to be present before he would recognise his experiments to have produced a given result does not show that the result was produced by that community—it just shows that Boyle was carefully protecting the reliability of his observations by having them corroborated by others. It takes much more to establish a social constructivist thesis than to point out the banal truth that scientific inquiry is a collective endeavour.
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March 7, 2025"As we come to recognize the conventional and artifactual status of our forms of knowing, we put ourselves in a position to realize that it is ourselves and not reality that is responsible for what we know. Knowledge, as much as the state, is the product of human actions. Hobbes was right."
Only took a look at chapter 8: The Polity of Science: Conclusions
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Only took a look at chapter 8: The Polity of Science: Conclusions
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August 16, 2014
Today Boyle is considered the forefather of the experimental method, and Hobbes a titan of political philosophy. This is an artifact of history, as the two were contemporaries and competitors in that strange space called 'Natural Philosophy.' One of the most important books in the history of science and in STS, Leviathan and the Air-Pump looks at the early days of the Royal Society as a constitutional moment. In the controversy over the air experiments, the integrity of the machine, the nature of the substances contained within, and the practices of witnessing used to attest to its results, Shapin and Schaffer find the start of both science and liberalism.
This is an immense and deeply researched work of scholarship, that vividly imagines the politics and practices of the time; a very difference world where technological dissension could imply the chaos of civil war, and the idea of perfect philosophical system was still attainable. My only quibbles are that this book is denser than the subject warrants, and despite protestations to the contrary, has just the small whiff of whiggishness, as the authors are descendants of Boyle's cultural tradition rather than Hobbes, and Boyle is described as 'speaking for nature' whereas Hobbes is merely 'social'.
This is an immense and deeply researched work of scholarship, that vividly imagines the politics and practices of the time; a very difference world where technological dissension could imply the chaos of civil war, and the idea of perfect philosophical system was still attainable. My only quibbles are that this book is denser than the subject warrants, and despite protestations to the contrary, has just the small whiff of whiggishness, as the authors are descendants of Boyle's cultural tradition rather than Hobbes, and Boyle is described as 'speaking for nature' whereas Hobbes is merely 'social'.
February 13, 2012
A Moral Machine:
Measuring the characteristics of Air
in Experiment and in Society
“…an open liberal society was the natural habit of science, taken as the quest for objective knowledge. Such Knowledge, in turn, constituted one of the sureties for the continuance of open and liberal society. Interfere with the one, and you will erode the other.”
-Shapin and Schaffer, 1989; 343
Britain was filled with controversy in the 1660’s. Following a period of civil war, much of Britain was in the process of rebuilding. Referred to as The Restoration, it was during this period that the experimental sciences were born from the gasps of Boyle’s air pump (Shapin & Shaffer 1985; 14). The birth of this methodology, however, was not universally celebrated. Many philosophers, like Hobbes (170) and More (207), had established their own methodology for questioning the material world. While the acceptance of one methodology would lead to greater consistency between scientists, these new methods imposed much more than a common vocabulary. The creation of methods to investigate the physical world also created and sustained social ways of operating within that world (344). By placing the emerging experimental science in the social context of the period, Shapin and Schaffer explore the relation of social order and philosophical order in their book, Leviathan and the Air Pump. The authors argue that the main source of controversy surrounding Boyle’s air pump was due to the connection between social order and the order of knowledge (15). Conflict is inevitable when new methods of identifying objective knowledge are created, because methods correspond with new social practices. When one practice is deemed “proper” it can render other practices “illegitimate,” threatening previously established social orders (319).
Boyle’s air pump was generated as a response to an earlier experiment, where a mercury filled tube was placed into a dish filled with mercury. While the movement of the mercury into the experimenter’s body was not considered, the movement of the mercury in the tube was very important- the silver liquid slid downward, leaving an open space at the top. The discussion of what this space was, and the corresponding contingencies of matter itself, was very important. Plenists, like Hobbes, argued that there was ‘something’ still there, some ethereal essence, which pulled from the mercury and left in the tube. Others argued that there was nothing in the top of the tube, and the space was evidence for the possibility of vacuums (47). Boyle created the air pump to conduct the mercury experiment in an environment without an atmosphere to test the effect of air’s weight and spring on mercury (20). While he was not concerned with the concept of a ‘vacuum,’ the air pump not only created a chamber with less atmosphere. The experimental machine created practices and social conventions that would become the hallmark for “proper” scientific conduct (175).
For Boyle, the creation of scientific facts rested upon the ability for the phenomenon to be reproduced for others. The ability for an event to be replicated and witnessed gave the air pump a “moral character.” It was not the ambition of the experimenter that led to the phenomenon: it was the machine itself, removed from wants and desires of the human condition (36). The phenomenon of the air pump relied upon the experiences it produced for many individuals. The senses of the many were disciplined, allowing for a number of scientists to become witnesses of the phenomenon and attest to an explanation (39). The importance of witness became a cornerstone [and later a thorn when new air pumps produced different results (254)] for Boyle’s production of matters of fact. Boyle advocated the laboratory as a public space, and used literary technologies like engravings to allow those distant from the expensive machine to pay witness to its results (60). Boyle provided intricate descriptions of the working machine, and included ‘failed’ experiments. This was done for the scientific audience; Boyle was portraying what a scientist should be- humble and modest, a person whose objectivity was not distorted by his interests (66).
The use of witnesses, however, was troubling for Hobbes. Stemming from a social critique of preistcraft before Britain’s civil war, Hobbes did not trust the senses of an individual to provide witness to anything. After all, the priests had claimed they were witnesses for God, and their desires had created a system of double tribute between the state and the church. It was this double payment that Hobbes believed to have caused the social tension which led to the civil war (96). The senses, required in witnessing, were not separate from individual beliefs. Boyle’s experimental technology relied heavily on individual witnesses. Hobbes did not believe that individual beliefs could be separated from the perception of the senses, and it was this mix of factual knowledge and beliefs that Hobbes identified as a prescription of civil war (103).
Shapin and Schaffer’s discussion of Boyle’s air pump is important for current science. For quite some time, matters of fact were equivalent to solid knowledge. While theories and hypothesis may be disproven, matters of fact stood as undeniable and permanent. The critique of objectivity in science has called these once permanent facts into question. Facts are no longer ‘mirrors’ of nature (23). Just like Boyle and Hobbes, the critique of objective methods not only spells the death of a solid fact, it also kills a way of organizing the world. The social relations that correspond to that organization are bound to resist such changes… and current scientists may need a restoration after their own civil war.
Measuring the characteristics of Air
in Experiment and in Society
“…an open liberal society was the natural habit of science, taken as the quest for objective knowledge. Such Knowledge, in turn, constituted one of the sureties for the continuance of open and liberal society. Interfere with the one, and you will erode the other.”
-Shapin and Schaffer, 1989; 343
Britain was filled with controversy in the 1660’s. Following a period of civil war, much of Britain was in the process of rebuilding. Referred to as The Restoration, it was during this period that the experimental sciences were born from the gasps of Boyle’s air pump (Shapin & Shaffer 1985; 14). The birth of this methodology, however, was not universally celebrated. Many philosophers, like Hobbes (170) and More (207), had established their own methodology for questioning the material world. While the acceptance of one methodology would lead to greater consistency between scientists, these new methods imposed much more than a common vocabulary. The creation of methods to investigate the physical world also created and sustained social ways of operating within that world (344). By placing the emerging experimental science in the social context of the period, Shapin and Schaffer explore the relation of social order and philosophical order in their book, Leviathan and the Air Pump. The authors argue that the main source of controversy surrounding Boyle’s air pump was due to the connection between social order and the order of knowledge (15). Conflict is inevitable when new methods of identifying objective knowledge are created, because methods correspond with new social practices. When one practice is deemed “proper” it can render other practices “illegitimate,” threatening previously established social orders (319).
Boyle’s air pump was generated as a response to an earlier experiment, where a mercury filled tube was placed into a dish filled with mercury. While the movement of the mercury into the experimenter’s body was not considered, the movement of the mercury in the tube was very important- the silver liquid slid downward, leaving an open space at the top. The discussion of what this space was, and the corresponding contingencies of matter itself, was very important. Plenists, like Hobbes, argued that there was ‘something’ still there, some ethereal essence, which pulled from the mercury and left in the tube. Others argued that there was nothing in the top of the tube, and the space was evidence for the possibility of vacuums (47). Boyle created the air pump to conduct the mercury experiment in an environment without an atmosphere to test the effect of air’s weight and spring on mercury (20). While he was not concerned with the concept of a ‘vacuum,’ the air pump not only created a chamber with less atmosphere. The experimental machine created practices and social conventions that would become the hallmark for “proper” scientific conduct (175).
For Boyle, the creation of scientific facts rested upon the ability for the phenomenon to be reproduced for others. The ability for an event to be replicated and witnessed gave the air pump a “moral character.” It was not the ambition of the experimenter that led to the phenomenon: it was the machine itself, removed from wants and desires of the human condition (36). The phenomenon of the air pump relied upon the experiences it produced for many individuals. The senses of the many were disciplined, allowing for a number of scientists to become witnesses of the phenomenon and attest to an explanation (39). The importance of witness became a cornerstone [and later a thorn when new air pumps produced different results (254)] for Boyle’s production of matters of fact. Boyle advocated the laboratory as a public space, and used literary technologies like engravings to allow those distant from the expensive machine to pay witness to its results (60). Boyle provided intricate descriptions of the working machine, and included ‘failed’ experiments. This was done for the scientific audience; Boyle was portraying what a scientist should be- humble and modest, a person whose objectivity was not distorted by his interests (66).
The use of witnesses, however, was troubling for Hobbes. Stemming from a social critique of preistcraft before Britain’s civil war, Hobbes did not trust the senses of an individual to provide witness to anything. After all, the priests had claimed they were witnesses for God, and their desires had created a system of double tribute between the state and the church. It was this double payment that Hobbes believed to have caused the social tension which led to the civil war (96). The senses, required in witnessing, were not separate from individual beliefs. Boyle’s experimental technology relied heavily on individual witnesses. Hobbes did not believe that individual beliefs could be separated from the perception of the senses, and it was this mix of factual knowledge and beliefs that Hobbes identified as a prescription of civil war (103).
Shapin and Schaffer’s discussion of Boyle’s air pump is important for current science. For quite some time, matters of fact were equivalent to solid knowledge. While theories and hypothesis may be disproven, matters of fact stood as undeniable and permanent. The critique of objectivity in science has called these once permanent facts into question. Facts are no longer ‘mirrors’ of nature (23). Just like Boyle and Hobbes, the critique of objective methods not only spells the death of a solid fact, it also kills a way of organizing the world. The social relations that correspond to that organization are bound to resist such changes… and current scientists may need a restoration after their own civil war.
August 31, 2014
A. Summary: This book examines how the rules of the scientific method were established by Boyle. Hobbes protested about much more than the science. He believed that Boyle’s science would disrupt the social order. Their point is that facts are not simply revealed by nature. Instead facts are only a posteriori linked to nature. Scientific facts are established by extrascientific debate. Boyle claimed that his experiments with the air-pump were public, accessible to all, and open to replication. This was the democratic social order that Boyle and the Royal Society wanted to establish for the Restoration. Hobbes argued for an absolute government and one with no dualism that was inherent in the vacuum/plenist theory.
B. Historiographical info
1. As Koyre dominated the 40s and 50s, Yates the 60s and 70s, Shapin dominates the 80s and 90s.
2. “New” Contextualist (external HOS): Koyre was a contextualist who used all of the scientists work as the context. Shapin is a New Contextualist who considers the scientists work as part of the social, political, and economic context.
C. Key Points
1. Sociology of scientific knowledge. Social Construction. Relativist position towards nature.
2. How the experimental method was established
3. Hobbes-Boyle controversy. Hobbes: natural philosopher, plenist, metaphysical, anti-experimentalist. Boyle: vacuum, experimentalist, modern scientific methodology
4. Scientific activity as political activity
5. Hobbes in favor of absolute government
6. Boyle and Royal Society in favor of democratic society
D. Understanding experiment (2)
1. The subject of this book is experiment. What is it, how is it performed, why is experiment the privileged form of gaining scientific knowledge, how is success and failure defined.
2. To understand these questions the authors go back to the period when the establishment of experiment as a means of generating knowledge became a part of modern science. This was with Robert Boyle’s researches in pneumatics and his employment of the air-pump in that exercise. Boyle became the founder of scientific method.
3. The reason this is a new approach is because the authors are looking at science from another discipline. Unlike scientists and historians, they do not take scientific methodology as self-evident. Instead, they examine controversy. The controversy of this book (in the 1660s and 1670s) was between Boyle (experimentalist) and Thomas Hobbes (anti-experimentalist).
4. Hobbes was a natural philosopher and one of the most important mechanical philosophers of the 17th. Because he was on the losing side of the controversy, Whig historians, have ignored him.
E. How were the facts generated (ch2)
1. Three technologies of validation: material--the airpump itself, removed human agency; literary--the creation of an experimental community which created a discourse; social--the production of knowledge as a social enterprise made it more objective, the collective removed the individual bias.
F. Hobbes attacks on Boyle (ch3&4)
1. Hobbes said that Boyle’s language of a vacuum was not possible and dangerous. He contested the legitimacy of Boyle’s new discourse. In order to talk about a vacuum you had to talk about metaphysics--something Boyle did not do.
2. Hobbes’s Leviathan: Here he argues that an absolute government is the only way to ensure order. He was strongly against dualism. Dualism subverted the social order. It was precisely the dualism between vacuism and plenism which he found to be dangerous. Individual opinions (in religion and science) were dangerous to the established order. Experiments provided the possibility of individual opinion. Thus, the elimination of a vacuum would help avoid Civil War.
3. Technical reasons why the vacuum did not exist: He said Boyle’s airpump leaked. Thus, the pump was not an effective vacuum. No one could produce this vacuum without first seeing another one work. Thus the repetition of error occurred. Plenist accounts of the pump were far superior to Boyle’s. Hobbes argued on an epistemological level that Boyle’s experiments were not philosophy--the only way to understand causes.
G. Boyle responds to Hobbes (ch5)
1. Boyle argued that the air-pump was a legitimate means of generating philosophical knowledge. Boyle treated Hobbes as a failed experiemntalist--not as someone who was offering a different approach to understanding knowledge.
H. The importance of replication (ch6)
1. A fact is a social category. A fact only becomes a fact when a private sensory experience is transformed into a publicly agreed upon fact of nature. This, replication is essential to fact production since it transforms private belief into public knowledge. This chapter examines the air-pump itself. The findings were that:
a) Every pump had problems with leakage
b) There were few pumps working at any given moment
c) No one could build a pump on Boyle’s text description. Transmission of knowledge required physical presence.
d) Huygens attempted to replicate Boyle’s experiments and he claimed to have built a better pump.
I. Examination of the social context. Restoration. The end of the Civil War.
J. The polity of science
1. This book makes contributions to political history because as the authors argue, “Solutions to the problem of knowledge are solutions to the problem of social order (332).” There are 3 ways in which the history of science occupies the same area of the history of science
a) Scientific practitioners create and maintain a polity in which they operate and make their intellectual product
b) The intellectual product made has become an element in political activity of the state
c) There is a relationship between the scientific polity and the wider polity
B. Historiographical info
1. As Koyre dominated the 40s and 50s, Yates the 60s and 70s, Shapin dominates the 80s and 90s.
2. “New” Contextualist (external HOS): Koyre was a contextualist who used all of the scientists work as the context. Shapin is a New Contextualist who considers the scientists work as part of the social, political, and economic context.
C. Key Points
1. Sociology of scientific knowledge. Social Construction. Relativist position towards nature.
2. How the experimental method was established
3. Hobbes-Boyle controversy. Hobbes: natural philosopher, plenist, metaphysical, anti-experimentalist. Boyle: vacuum, experimentalist, modern scientific methodology
4. Scientific activity as political activity
5. Hobbes in favor of absolute government
6. Boyle and Royal Society in favor of democratic society
D. Understanding experiment (2)
1. The subject of this book is experiment. What is it, how is it performed, why is experiment the privileged form of gaining scientific knowledge, how is success and failure defined.
2. To understand these questions the authors go back to the period when the establishment of experiment as a means of generating knowledge became a part of modern science. This was with Robert Boyle’s researches in pneumatics and his employment of the air-pump in that exercise. Boyle became the founder of scientific method.
3. The reason this is a new approach is because the authors are looking at science from another discipline. Unlike scientists and historians, they do not take scientific methodology as self-evident. Instead, they examine controversy. The controversy of this book (in the 1660s and 1670s) was between Boyle (experimentalist) and Thomas Hobbes (anti-experimentalist).
4. Hobbes was a natural philosopher and one of the most important mechanical philosophers of the 17th. Because he was on the losing side of the controversy, Whig historians, have ignored him.
E. How were the facts generated (ch2)
1. Three technologies of validation: material--the airpump itself, removed human agency; literary--the creation of an experimental community which created a discourse; social--the production of knowledge as a social enterprise made it more objective, the collective removed the individual bias.
F. Hobbes attacks on Boyle (ch3&4)
1. Hobbes said that Boyle’s language of a vacuum was not possible and dangerous. He contested the legitimacy of Boyle’s new discourse. In order to talk about a vacuum you had to talk about metaphysics--something Boyle did not do.
2. Hobbes’s Leviathan: Here he argues that an absolute government is the only way to ensure order. He was strongly against dualism. Dualism subverted the social order. It was precisely the dualism between vacuism and plenism which he found to be dangerous. Individual opinions (in religion and science) were dangerous to the established order. Experiments provided the possibility of individual opinion. Thus, the elimination of a vacuum would help avoid Civil War.
3. Technical reasons why the vacuum did not exist: He said Boyle’s airpump leaked. Thus, the pump was not an effective vacuum. No one could produce this vacuum without first seeing another one work. Thus the repetition of error occurred. Plenist accounts of the pump were far superior to Boyle’s. Hobbes argued on an epistemological level that Boyle’s experiments were not philosophy--the only way to understand causes.
G. Boyle responds to Hobbes (ch5)
1. Boyle argued that the air-pump was a legitimate means of generating philosophical knowledge. Boyle treated Hobbes as a failed experiemntalist--not as someone who was offering a different approach to understanding knowledge.
H. The importance of replication (ch6)
1. A fact is a social category. A fact only becomes a fact when a private sensory experience is transformed into a publicly agreed upon fact of nature. This, replication is essential to fact production since it transforms private belief into public knowledge. This chapter examines the air-pump itself. The findings were that:
a) Every pump had problems with leakage
b) There were few pumps working at any given moment
c) No one could build a pump on Boyle’s text description. Transmission of knowledge required physical presence.
d) Huygens attempted to replicate Boyle’s experiments and he claimed to have built a better pump.
I. Examination of the social context. Restoration. The end of the Civil War.
J. The polity of science
1. This book makes contributions to political history because as the authors argue, “Solutions to the problem of knowledge are solutions to the problem of social order (332).” There are 3 ways in which the history of science occupies the same area of the history of science
a) Scientific practitioners create and maintain a polity in which they operate and make their intellectual product
b) The intellectual product made has become an element in political activity of the state
c) There is a relationship between the scientific polity and the wider polity
September 28, 2025
This is recognized as a classic in the history of science. But I don’t think it’s a good book and I cannot recommend it.
This was written during the so-called science wars — period in which a group of scholars were trying to work out a sociology of science with the important conceit that they were not going to use scientific truth as a causal explanation.
This book specifically is a history of the debates about Boyles air pump experiments in the mid 17th century, and how boil presented his work and have his work was criticized by Hobbes, Huygens and others, and how Boyle in turn defend himself. Boyle thought he had created a vacuum by pumping air out of a glass bowl. Hobbs and other philosopher’s thought that a vacuum was impossible and criticized his work on the basis that he was making assertions unsupported by his evidence.
We hear a lot along the way about the tensions around what qualified as evidence, whether the royal society qualified as a public space for presenting evidence, how much scientists should differ to philosophical considerations and philosophical authority and so forth. Even in the 1660s, there were people who thought that it was necessary to uphold the prestige of the church. The church had tied its prestige to Aristotle. Aristotle thought of vacuum is impossible, and therefore good morals required denying the existence of a vacuum.
The point of the authors are disciplined in not saying is that Boyle was basically correct. Hobbes was basically a crank, and all of these arguments from authority were intellectual dead end. These are important facts a reader might want to know. It is an interesting exercise to imagine a world in which of those points were not be settled. But it is not interesting enough or perhaps the authors do not do enough with it to justify their book.
Maybe the most important place where their perspective breaks down is that they repeat at face value the claims of Hobbes that philosophy, including natural philosophy, should be structured like geometry as a inescapable deduction from axioms, because this is the only way to get to undisputed truth. But Hobbes was a crockpot about mathematics, and every reputable mathematician in Europe knew it. He kept explaining that he had squared the circle. His proofs were wrong, and mathematicians (especially Wallace) kept explaining that the proofs were wrong and he kept responding with angry notes, but could not make his proof work. So anybody with the patients to work through the details in the 17th century could have verified for themselves that the central epistemic claims of Hobbes were false. And here the methodological constraints of the strong programme do not save the authors: you might think that true nature is unknowable and can’t be causal on our beliefs, but mathematics is purely deductive and if you rule out logic as an explanation for people’s beliefs, you have basically no way to explain what is going on socially with human thought.
This was written during the so-called science wars — period in which a group of scholars were trying to work out a sociology of science with the important conceit that they were not going to use scientific truth as a causal explanation.
This book specifically is a history of the debates about Boyles air pump experiments in the mid 17th century, and how boil presented his work and have his work was criticized by Hobbes, Huygens and others, and how Boyle in turn defend himself. Boyle thought he had created a vacuum by pumping air out of a glass bowl. Hobbs and other philosopher’s thought that a vacuum was impossible and criticized his work on the basis that he was making assertions unsupported by his evidence.
We hear a lot along the way about the tensions around what qualified as evidence, whether the royal society qualified as a public space for presenting evidence, how much scientists should differ to philosophical considerations and philosophical authority and so forth. Even in the 1660s, there were people who thought that it was necessary to uphold the prestige of the church. The church had tied its prestige to Aristotle. Aristotle thought of vacuum is impossible, and therefore good morals required denying the existence of a vacuum.
The point of the authors are disciplined in not saying is that Boyle was basically correct. Hobbes was basically a crank, and all of these arguments from authority were intellectual dead end. These are important facts a reader might want to know. It is an interesting exercise to imagine a world in which of those points were not be settled. But it is not interesting enough or perhaps the authors do not do enough with it to justify their book.
Maybe the most important place where their perspective breaks down is that they repeat at face value the claims of Hobbes that philosophy, including natural philosophy, should be structured like geometry as a inescapable deduction from axioms, because this is the only way to get to undisputed truth. But Hobbes was a crockpot about mathematics, and every reputable mathematician in Europe knew it. He kept explaining that he had squared the circle. His proofs were wrong, and mathematicians (especially Wallace) kept explaining that the proofs were wrong and he kept responding with angry notes, but could not make his proof work. So anybody with the patients to work through the details in the 17th century could have verified for themselves that the central epistemic claims of Hobbes were false. And here the methodological constraints of the strong programme do not save the authors: you might think that true nature is unknowable and can’t be causal on our beliefs, but mathematics is purely deductive and if you rule out logic as an explanation for people’s beliefs, you have basically no way to explain what is going on socially with human thought.
Want to read
March 20, 2023The imimitable Marissa Lingen wrote:
"Are you interested in the philosophical fights about what’s useful proof and what’s useful experiment that characterized the late 17th century? I SURE AM. But if you read that and went “Uhhhh…no? why? no!” then this is definitely not the book for you. Basically you know from the title whether it is the book for you. Personally, this is like a hockey brawl for me, I am immediately more emotionally invested than I feel speaks well of my character, but there it is. Get him, Hobbes! Get him, Boyle!"
Hee hee. Another ML zinger! I love this kind of review.
1989 book. Hoopla has their weirdly-formatted online ebook, and that's it. Maybe??
"Are you interested in the philosophical fights about what’s useful proof and what’s useful experiment that characterized the late 17th century? I SURE AM. But if you read that and went “Uhhhh…no? why? no!” then this is definitely not the book for you. Basically you know from the title whether it is the book for you. Personally, this is like a hockey brawl for me, I am immediately more emotionally invested than I feel speaks well of my character, but there it is. Get him, Hobbes! Get him, Boyle!"
Hee hee. Another ML zinger! I love this kind of review.
1989 book. Hoopla has their weirdly-formatted online ebook, and that's it. Maybe??
September 24, 2025
Team Hobbes
December 30, 2022
Comps reading. Fairly enjoyable read, even if sometimes I felt I was milling about in the weeds, especially with the minutiae of 17th century experimental practice. I love watching Simon Schaffer speak, and the programmes he did for the BBC are very fun to watch. Steven Shapin I encountered only through assigned course readings on the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) and his association with the Edinburgh school and the ‘strong programme’.
This book argues that Hobbes’s Leviathan should be brought within the domain of historians of science because Hobbes is in adversarial dialogue with natural philosophers like Boyle who became foundational figures for what is now the dominant form of experimental science. In this sense, it is a book that tracks the formation of a particular demarcation that came to separate natural philosophy and religion.
Part of this book’s value is its focus on the material culture of scientific practice. As Ian Hacking put it, Shapin and Schaffer made the air-pump the protagonist of their story, creating a sort of instrumental biography. Scientific instrumentation (microscopes, telescopes, air-pumps) were perceptual extensions of the human body that enlarged the senses for Robert Hooke, who in Micrographia, referred to the use of instruments as “the adding of artificial Organs to the natural.”
The word “organ” was used in similar ways in the 19th century. This use of the word is common in Marx’s writings for example, and this has to do with the Greek etymology of the word. So for example you can see it when Marx in Volume 1 of Capital discusses Darwin and the development of both natural and human-made tools/organs:
“Darwin has directed attention to the history of natural technology, i.e. the formation of the organs of plants and animals, which serve as the instruments of production for sustaining their life. Does not the history of the productive organs of man in society, of organs that are the material basis of every particular organization of society, deserve equal attention? And would not such a history be easier to compile, since, as Vico says, human history differs from natural history in that we have made the former, but not the latter? Technology reveals the active relation of man to nature, the direct process of the production of his life, and thereby it also lays bare the process of the production of the social relations of his life, and the mental conceptions that flow from those relations.”
John Bellamy Foster in Marx’s Ecology elaborates on the etymology of ‘organ’ when discussing this passage from Capital:
“In drawing this comparison between “natural technology” and human technology, Marx was of course aware that the Greek word “organ” (organon) also meant tool, and that organs were initially viewed as “grownon” tools of animals—tools, as the artificial organs of human beings. As Engels stated, “animals in the narrower sense also have tools, but only as limbs of their body.” Human technology was thus distinguished from natural technology in that it did not consist of such adnated organs, but rather occurred through the social production of tools: the “productive organs of man in society.” Building both on a conception of the human relation to nature that was already evident as early as the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts—where he had viewed tools as the external extension of human beings, that is, “man’s inorganic body”—and on the results of Darwin’s analysis, Marx, writing in Capital, was able to define the labor process and the human relation to nature (eventually leading to his notion of the metabolic interaction between human beings and nature) in terms that were both materialist and evolutionary…”
Foster then excerpts another passage from Capital:
‘Leaving out of consideration such ready-made means of subsistence as fruits, in the gathering of which a man’s bodily organs alone serve as the instruments of his labour, the object the worker directly takes possession of is not the object of labour but its instrument. Thus nature becomes one of the organs of his activity, which he annexes to his own bodily organs, adding stature to himself in spite of the Bible. As the earth is his original larder, so too it is his original tool house. It supplies him, for instance, with stones for throwing, grinding, pressing, cutting, etc. The earth itself is an instrument of labour, but its use in this way, in agriculture, presupposes a whole series of other instruments and a comparatively high stage of development of labour-power. As soon as the labour process has undergone the slightest development, it requires specially prepared instruments. Thus we find stone implements and weapons in the oldest caves. In the earliest period of human history, domesticated animals, i.e., animals that have undergone modification by means of labour, that have been bred specially, play the chief part as instruments of labour along with stones, wood, bones and shells, which have also had work done on them. The use and construction of instruments of labour, although present in germ among certain species of animals, is characteristic of the specifically human labour process, and Franklin therefore defines man as a “tool-making animal.” Relics of bygone instruments of labour possess the same importance for the investigation of extinct economic formations of society as do fossil bones for the determination of extinct species of animals.”
Very long tangent, but framing scientific instrumentation as tools or as a sort of means of production (that is the production of scientific knowledge) is still very much an important theme in STS. For instance, Science for the People just held a panel earlier this month at 4S on socializing the lab. As one person on the panel noted, ‘labor’ is constitutively a part of the word ‘laboratory’.
One of the core issues that separated Hobbes and Boyle was the extent machines should be involved in the production of natural philosophy. For Hobbes it was vulgar to rely upon mechanics and machines to discover truths about the natural world:
“By claiming that adopting an experimental form of life changed proper physicists into "quacks," Hobbes was saying something highly derogatory about the experimentalist's role, character, and practice. Machine-minders were not, in Hobbes's view, to be accounted philosophers. Philosophers should not be identified with mechanical tricksters who produced "various spectacles of an amusing nature."
The modes of thought associated with the philosopher and the mechanic were different. In the Dialogus physicus Hobbes insisted upon that contrast: "Ingenuity is one thing and method [ars] is another. Here method is needed." The repeated juxtaposition in Hobbes's critiques of method or philosophy, on the one hand, and ingenuity, on the other, is significant. It is plausible that Hobbes was making a substantive point about the experimental mentality by way of etymological punning. The Latin ingenium denotes "natural ability, cleverness, inventiveness." In Latin ingenio also means a kind of mill, and, from this root, are derived the Old French engin and the Middle English gin. Thus Hobbes's identification of ingenuity with, as it were, "engine philosophy" is precisely right for the evaluation he wanted to be placed upon the experimental programme and its products: it relied upon the intellectual processes of artificers and mechanics and, therefore, it yielded an inferior grade of knowledge. That is why Hobbes contrasted "workmen," "apothecaries" and "gardeners" with "philosophers" and why he insisted that not every procurer of "jaunty devices" was a "philosopher.””
The concluding chapter goes into contestations over what constituted appropriate “intellectual space.” Was the proper domain for the natural philosopher an Apollonian one that eschewed practicalities of everyday life (for Hobbes the garden, apothecary or any other space of the ‘workmen’ was not appropriately the space within which the natural philosopher should operate), or was it an experimental space which would come to be called the laboratory. At the heart of Boyle’s experimental space was the air-pump, which attempted to make sense of the notion of empty space, vacuums, and what exactly the nature of Torricellian space really was.
Another fascinating aspect of this book concerned the theological stakes involved in the dispute between Hobbes and Boyle. A footnote in the book comments that:
“While Hobbes professed his belief in such a God, a conception of the Deity as a corporeal being, stripped of Providential power, was unusable for most clerics, and Hobbes was widely identified as an atheist.”
Hence, Hobbes was an important intellectual figure for Marx who called him “the systematiser of Baconian materialism” who “removed the theistic prejudices from” it. Fascinatingly enough, experimental practice as done by scientists like Boyle was one of the clergy’s primary tools for countering the atheism and materialism that figures like Hobbes became associated with. Shapin and Schaffer write:
“The form of persuasion used in experimentation was a powerful weapon against the atheists; products of such experimentation would reinforce a proper theology…”
And Boyle became enlisted in this campaign against materialism, as did various experiments more generally:
“A range of strategies linked experiment with the priestly efforts to win assent from unruly believers. Churchmen like More and Glanvill used experimental technologies to make ghost stories and witch testimonies into matters of fact and so convince men that extended spirits were real. This was a political task: sectarian enthusiasts saw spirits everywhere and materialist atheists saw them nowhere. It was also a juridical problem: lawyers such as Matthew Hale or John Selden allowed witch trials but denied demonic potency, while critics and radicals such as John Webster and John Wagstaffe affirmed "many thousands of spirits made of an incorporeal matter too fine to be perceived," yet denied that spirits ever made "contracts . . . with any man or woman." The experimental form of life showed how to tell between reliable and unreliable testimony; it showed how witnesses should be judged and how evidence could be made convincing.6-* In chapter 5 we indicated that Boyle collaborated in this attempt to make spirit testimonies compelling.”
Also fascinating to see that experimental philosophers made Hobbes out to be a lot cooler than he actually was. They smeared him with accusations of supporting the Republic and Cromwell, whereas Hobbes actually dedicated some of his works to the King. Hobbes was suspicious of experimental philosophers because for him their competencies dangerously were in effect holding an authority independent of the state whenever they disseminated their views. Therefore they were a threat in the same way the clergy were, and for Hobbes state power should be undivided to maintain peace.
One of the most valuable parts of this book was the preface to the new edition because Shapin and Schaffer discuss the various ways their book was received, and contextualize their work within wider historiographies prevalent before their time, including various Marxist historians who both influenced them but who also criticized their work:
"The Cold War did not end until several years after Leviathan and the Air-Pump was published, but its authors then had the sense that this relatively esoteric historiographic debate had its roots sunk deep into the great political and ideological cleavages of the century… the "externalism-internalism debate" was at once about present-day standards of legitimate historiography and present-day conceptions of legitimate social order. Indeed, the exchanges in the post-World War II period between the Marxist crystallographer and advocate of the state planning of science J. D. Bernal and one of his severest critics, the physical chemist and defender of "freedom in science" Michael Polanyi, crucially mobilized understandings of "what history showed" about the autonomy or the social responsiveness of science.
…For many British historians, Marxism was a lingua franca, not necessarily providing a theoretical foundation for political projects but certainly constituting a loosely connected set of concepts and methodological sensibilities with which many historians felt they should engage even while their political affiliations diverged.
Why did modern science develop when and where it did? What intellectual, cultural, and, perhaps, social and economic forces encouraged its development and what forces inhibited it? And, a corollary question prompting much interest from both Marxist and non-Marxist historians in past generations, why did modern science develop in Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and not in one of several non-Western settings, of which China was deemed the most pertinent instance?”
One of the more fascinating accounts of how their book was received was this description of Christopher Hill’s reception of Leviathan and the Air-Pump. Most of the critiques of their book sided on the so-called internalist side of the contestation, accusing the authors of emphasizing too much the social determinants of scientific knowledge production, but Hill lamented in the opposite direction:
“There were not many reviewers picking up the other end of the interpretative stick, but one of the major British Marxist political and social historians of the seventeenth century did just that. He was looking for a much more substantial role for social factors in the book but was disappointed to find so little, contrasting Leviathan and the Air- Pump negatively on those grounds with work more vividly displaying how seventeenth-century science "justified capitalist world domination, racialism and inequality." Shapin and Schaffer had written, so to speak, the Menshevik version of what had already been achieved by historians making a more full-blooded case for the role of the social as opposed to the intellectual.”
Anyway, there’s a lot in this book, and I will be returning to it I’m sure in the future. I snagged a copy of the first edition for $3 at the Trinity College book sale (which I was very happy rebooted this year). It doesn't have the great preface on Marxist historiography and critical reception of the newer edition I read, but happy it's on my shelf.
This book argues that Hobbes’s Leviathan should be brought within the domain of historians of science because Hobbes is in adversarial dialogue with natural philosophers like Boyle who became foundational figures for what is now the dominant form of experimental science. In this sense, it is a book that tracks the formation of a particular demarcation that came to separate natural philosophy and religion.
Part of this book’s value is its focus on the material culture of scientific practice. As Ian Hacking put it, Shapin and Schaffer made the air-pump the protagonist of their story, creating a sort of instrumental biography. Scientific instrumentation (microscopes, telescopes, air-pumps) were perceptual extensions of the human body that enlarged the senses for Robert Hooke, who in Micrographia, referred to the use of instruments as “the adding of artificial Organs to the natural.”
The word “organ” was used in similar ways in the 19th century. This use of the word is common in Marx’s writings for example, and this has to do with the Greek etymology of the word. So for example you can see it when Marx in Volume 1 of Capital discusses Darwin and the development of both natural and human-made tools/organs:
“Darwin has directed attention to the history of natural technology, i.e. the formation of the organs of plants and animals, which serve as the instruments of production for sustaining their life. Does not the history of the productive organs of man in society, of organs that are the material basis of every particular organization of society, deserve equal attention? And would not such a history be easier to compile, since, as Vico says, human history differs from natural history in that we have made the former, but not the latter? Technology reveals the active relation of man to nature, the direct process of the production of his life, and thereby it also lays bare the process of the production of the social relations of his life, and the mental conceptions that flow from those relations.”
John Bellamy Foster in Marx’s Ecology elaborates on the etymology of ‘organ’ when discussing this passage from Capital:
“In drawing this comparison between “natural technology” and human technology, Marx was of course aware that the Greek word “organ” (organon) also meant tool, and that organs were initially viewed as “grownon” tools of animals—tools, as the artificial organs of human beings. As Engels stated, “animals in the narrower sense also have tools, but only as limbs of their body.” Human technology was thus distinguished from natural technology in that it did not consist of such adnated organs, but rather occurred through the social production of tools: the “productive organs of man in society.” Building both on a conception of the human relation to nature that was already evident as early as the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts—where he had viewed tools as the external extension of human beings, that is, “man’s inorganic body”—and on the results of Darwin’s analysis, Marx, writing in Capital, was able to define the labor process and the human relation to nature (eventually leading to his notion of the metabolic interaction between human beings and nature) in terms that were both materialist and evolutionary…”
Foster then excerpts another passage from Capital:
‘Leaving out of consideration such ready-made means of subsistence as fruits, in the gathering of which a man’s bodily organs alone serve as the instruments of his labour, the object the worker directly takes possession of is not the object of labour but its instrument. Thus nature becomes one of the organs of his activity, which he annexes to his own bodily organs, adding stature to himself in spite of the Bible. As the earth is his original larder, so too it is his original tool house. It supplies him, for instance, with stones for throwing, grinding, pressing, cutting, etc. The earth itself is an instrument of labour, but its use in this way, in agriculture, presupposes a whole series of other instruments and a comparatively high stage of development of labour-power. As soon as the labour process has undergone the slightest development, it requires specially prepared instruments. Thus we find stone implements and weapons in the oldest caves. In the earliest period of human history, domesticated animals, i.e., animals that have undergone modification by means of labour, that have been bred specially, play the chief part as instruments of labour along with stones, wood, bones and shells, which have also had work done on them. The use and construction of instruments of labour, although present in germ among certain species of animals, is characteristic of the specifically human labour process, and Franklin therefore defines man as a “tool-making animal.” Relics of bygone instruments of labour possess the same importance for the investigation of extinct economic formations of society as do fossil bones for the determination of extinct species of animals.”
Very long tangent, but framing scientific instrumentation as tools or as a sort of means of production (that is the production of scientific knowledge) is still very much an important theme in STS. For instance, Science for the People just held a panel earlier this month at 4S on socializing the lab. As one person on the panel noted, ‘labor’ is constitutively a part of the word ‘laboratory’.
One of the core issues that separated Hobbes and Boyle was the extent machines should be involved in the production of natural philosophy. For Hobbes it was vulgar to rely upon mechanics and machines to discover truths about the natural world:
“By claiming that adopting an experimental form of life changed proper physicists into "quacks," Hobbes was saying something highly derogatory about the experimentalist's role, character, and practice. Machine-minders were not, in Hobbes's view, to be accounted philosophers. Philosophers should not be identified with mechanical tricksters who produced "various spectacles of an amusing nature."
The modes of thought associated with the philosopher and the mechanic were different. In the Dialogus physicus Hobbes insisted upon that contrast: "Ingenuity is one thing and method [ars] is another. Here method is needed." The repeated juxtaposition in Hobbes's critiques of method or philosophy, on the one hand, and ingenuity, on the other, is significant. It is plausible that Hobbes was making a substantive point about the experimental mentality by way of etymological punning. The Latin ingenium denotes "natural ability, cleverness, inventiveness." In Latin ingenio also means a kind of mill, and, from this root, are derived the Old French engin and the Middle English gin. Thus Hobbes's identification of ingenuity with, as it were, "engine philosophy" is precisely right for the evaluation he wanted to be placed upon the experimental programme and its products: it relied upon the intellectual processes of artificers and mechanics and, therefore, it yielded an inferior grade of knowledge. That is why Hobbes contrasted "workmen," "apothecaries" and "gardeners" with "philosophers" and why he insisted that not every procurer of "jaunty devices" was a "philosopher.””
The concluding chapter goes into contestations over what constituted appropriate “intellectual space.” Was the proper domain for the natural philosopher an Apollonian one that eschewed practicalities of everyday life (for Hobbes the garden, apothecary or any other space of the ‘workmen’ was not appropriately the space within which the natural philosopher should operate), or was it an experimental space which would come to be called the laboratory. At the heart of Boyle’s experimental space was the air-pump, which attempted to make sense of the notion of empty space, vacuums, and what exactly the nature of Torricellian space really was.
Another fascinating aspect of this book concerned the theological stakes involved in the dispute between Hobbes and Boyle. A footnote in the book comments that:
“While Hobbes professed his belief in such a God, a conception of the Deity as a corporeal being, stripped of Providential power, was unusable for most clerics, and Hobbes was widely identified as an atheist.”
Hence, Hobbes was an important intellectual figure for Marx who called him “the systematiser of Baconian materialism” who “removed the theistic prejudices from” it. Fascinatingly enough, experimental practice as done by scientists like Boyle was one of the clergy’s primary tools for countering the atheism and materialism that figures like Hobbes became associated with. Shapin and Schaffer write:
“The form of persuasion used in experimentation was a powerful weapon against the atheists; products of such experimentation would reinforce a proper theology…”
And Boyle became enlisted in this campaign against materialism, as did various experiments more generally:
“A range of strategies linked experiment with the priestly efforts to win assent from unruly believers. Churchmen like More and Glanvill used experimental technologies to make ghost stories and witch testimonies into matters of fact and so convince men that extended spirits were real. This was a political task: sectarian enthusiasts saw spirits everywhere and materialist atheists saw them nowhere. It was also a juridical problem: lawyers such as Matthew Hale or John Selden allowed witch trials but denied demonic potency, while critics and radicals such as John Webster and John Wagstaffe affirmed "many thousands of spirits made of an incorporeal matter too fine to be perceived," yet denied that spirits ever made "contracts . . . with any man or woman." The experimental form of life showed how to tell between reliable and unreliable testimony; it showed how witnesses should be judged and how evidence could be made convincing.6-* In chapter 5 we indicated that Boyle collaborated in this attempt to make spirit testimonies compelling.”
Also fascinating to see that experimental philosophers made Hobbes out to be a lot cooler than he actually was. They smeared him with accusations of supporting the Republic and Cromwell, whereas Hobbes actually dedicated some of his works to the King. Hobbes was suspicious of experimental philosophers because for him their competencies dangerously were in effect holding an authority independent of the state whenever they disseminated their views. Therefore they were a threat in the same way the clergy were, and for Hobbes state power should be undivided to maintain peace.
One of the most valuable parts of this book was the preface to the new edition because Shapin and Schaffer discuss the various ways their book was received, and contextualize their work within wider historiographies prevalent before their time, including various Marxist historians who both influenced them but who also criticized their work:
"The Cold War did not end until several years after Leviathan and the Air-Pump was published, but its authors then had the sense that this relatively esoteric historiographic debate had its roots sunk deep into the great political and ideological cleavages of the century… the "externalism-internalism debate" was at once about present-day standards of legitimate historiography and present-day conceptions of legitimate social order. Indeed, the exchanges in the post-World War II period between the Marxist crystallographer and advocate of the state planning of science J. D. Bernal and one of his severest critics, the physical chemist and defender of "freedom in science" Michael Polanyi, crucially mobilized understandings of "what history showed" about the autonomy or the social responsiveness of science.
…For many British historians, Marxism was a lingua franca, not necessarily providing a theoretical foundation for political projects but certainly constituting a loosely connected set of concepts and methodological sensibilities with which many historians felt they should engage even while their political affiliations diverged.
Why did modern science develop when and where it did? What intellectual, cultural, and, perhaps, social and economic forces encouraged its development and what forces inhibited it? And, a corollary question prompting much interest from both Marxist and non-Marxist historians in past generations, why did modern science develop in Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and not in one of several non-Western settings, of which China was deemed the most pertinent instance?”
One of the more fascinating accounts of how their book was received was this description of Christopher Hill’s reception of Leviathan and the Air-Pump. Most of the critiques of their book sided on the so-called internalist side of the contestation, accusing the authors of emphasizing too much the social determinants of scientific knowledge production, but Hill lamented in the opposite direction:
“There were not many reviewers picking up the other end of the interpretative stick, but one of the major British Marxist political and social historians of the seventeenth century did just that. He was looking for a much more substantial role for social factors in the book but was disappointed to find so little, contrasting Leviathan and the Air- Pump negatively on those grounds with work more vividly displaying how seventeenth-century science "justified capitalist world domination, racialism and inequality." Shapin and Schaffer had written, so to speak, the Menshevik version of what had already been achieved by historians making a more full-blooded case for the role of the social as opposed to the intellectual.”
Anyway, there’s a lot in this book, and I will be returning to it I’m sure in the future. I snagged a copy of the first edition for $3 at the Trinity College book sale (which I was very happy rebooted this year). It doesn't have the great preface on Marxist historiography and critical reception of the newer edition I read, but happy it's on my shelf.
September 30, 2012
This is the first book in STS that I've read that doesn't really skimp on philosophy. I understand that Kuhn is a historian, but Shapin and Schaffer manage to show that the two accounts are not only not exclusive, but that they're deeply interdependent. The book, for those unfamiliar, focuses on the creature of what is basically British scientific empiricism and the experimental programme that developed in England during the 17th century [prior even to Hume] in response to the context of the Reformation and following civil war in England.
It lays some of the political and religious context and makes an argument that both were hugely formative for the major views of figures like Boyle, who championed this empiricist view. The arguments are compelling, especially to those who are skeptical of the sort of vacuum in which science is often purported to exist. I think that this is an important and valuable argument for the social construction of the philosophy of science and, as a result, for science itself.
There are some issues that emerge regarding how well Shapin and Schaffer actually represent the history of philosophy in the broader context. They really don't do a good job at contextualizing the full extent of the Scholastic influence on both Boyle and Hobbes, the two primary figures in the book. The way in which each of them eventually rebels against the traditional, Christian scholastic philosophical approach is hugely important; they get at this a bit with Hobbes, but explain it more as an objection to the existence of the Church in its political form than as a strong response to Scholasticism.
At any rate, the work is very thorough in its treatment of a few problems that persist in science; those two problems are not really treated separately in the work, though they're supposed to be capable of dissociation for the thinkers at the time: The problem of observation [which Hume later championed] and the problem of equipment. I think that we ought to seriously keep both problems in mind, and the way that they are historically constructed and informed, as we do Science Studies and philosophy of science. For those purposes, I strong recommend this book to those looking to start Science Studies.
It is also a very straightforward and accessible read, for those who have basically any familiarity with academic writing.
It lays some of the political and religious context and makes an argument that both were hugely formative for the major views of figures like Boyle, who championed this empiricist view. The arguments are compelling, especially to those who are skeptical of the sort of vacuum in which science is often purported to exist. I think that this is an important and valuable argument for the social construction of the philosophy of science and, as a result, for science itself.
There are some issues that emerge regarding how well Shapin and Schaffer actually represent the history of philosophy in the broader context. They really don't do a good job at contextualizing the full extent of the Scholastic influence on both Boyle and Hobbes, the two primary figures in the book. The way in which each of them eventually rebels against the traditional, Christian scholastic philosophical approach is hugely important; they get at this a bit with Hobbes, but explain it more as an objection to the existence of the Church in its political form than as a strong response to Scholasticism.
At any rate, the work is very thorough in its treatment of a few problems that persist in science; those two problems are not really treated separately in the work, though they're supposed to be capable of dissociation for the thinkers at the time: The problem of observation [which Hume later championed] and the problem of equipment. I think that we ought to seriously keep both problems in mind, and the way that they are historically constructed and informed, as we do Science Studies and philosophy of science. For those purposes, I strong recommend this book to those looking to start Science Studies.
It is also a very straightforward and accessible read, for those who have basically any familiarity with academic writing.
May 26, 2024
I got about 70% through this and couldn’t take any more. This purports to be an account of a critical moment in the history of science: the fate of empirical science hung in the balance in the dispute between Boyle and Hobbes about whether Boyle’s air pump had created a partial vacuum. As the authors put it, “the contest between Hobbes and Boyle was, among other things, a contest for the rights to mechanism. The charge that Boyle's philosophy was anti-mechanical at its core was potentially fatal.” (P. 204) This is melodramatizing, something the authors refuse to deprive themselves of. So, the reader also learns that issues between Boyle and another disputant, More, “were crucial for the survival of experimental practice, and for the different powers vested in the priesthood and in the philosophical community.” (P. 213)
Boyle, the authors say, was the avatar of experimental science, a man who wanted to demonstrate facts about the natural world without resort to metaphysical explanations and hypotheses about ultimate causes. Hobbes, his main antagonist, claimed that no worthwhile analysis of nature could be obtained except based on a priori assumptions, that is, on necessary propositions that were created by the human mind (geometry). Probable knowledge of the natural world was mere ignorance. This approach was similar to Hobbes’s social and political analyses, which the authors suggest — without offering evidence — were based on facts about human nature that Hobbes believed were known a priori (and which, if there were other facts, so dominated them that they were irrelevant to Hobbes’s analysis). Based on these purported facts, Hobbes developed a political theory that was Stalinist hundreds of years before Stalin.
The authors approach is best laid out in the concluding paragraph of the book. “We have written about a period in which the nature of knowledge, the nature of the polity, and the nature of the relationships between them were matters for wide-ranging and practical debate. A new social order emerged together with the rejection of an old intellectual order. In the late twentieth century that settlement is, in turn, being called into serious question. Neither our scientific knowledge, nor the constitution of our society, nor traditional statements about the connections between our society and our knowledge are taken for granted any longer. As we come to recognize the conventional and artifactual status of our forms of knowing, we put ourselves in a position to realize that it is ourselves and not reality that is responsible for what we know. Knowledge, as much as the state, is the product of human actions. Hobbes was right.” (P. 344)
This is similar to the issue Habermas wrestles with, unsuccessfully. To say that knowledge is a product of human actions, if it is more than a platitude, cannot possibly mean that Hobbes was “right.” The suggestion that Hobbes was right is an anachronism; Hobbes’s quasi-scholastic notion of natural science (see, e.g., pp. 88, 99, 115-116) can’t be translated into modern critical theory. By the bye, the authors assert — without evidence — that there’s a significant connection between Hobbes’s political theory and his natural science. “In Hobbes's view,” the authors say, “the elimination of vacuum was a contribution to the avoidance of civil war.” (P. 111) Apparently, the authors couldn’t find an apposite quotation from Hobbes that supports this conclusion. It seems absurd.
The authors, astonishingly well-read as they are, strike me as not really understanding the point they think they’re making. They cloak it in Wittgenstenian palaver that falls apart as soon as the reader steps back and questions it. They argue that Boyle’s “experimental programme was, in Wittgenstein's phrases, a ‘language-game’ and a ‘form of life.’ The acceptance or rejection of that programme amounted to the acceptance or rejection of the form of life that Boyle and his colleagues proposed.” (P. 22) What can these terms possibly mean? Boyle and Hobbes disagreed but debated; both were English gentlemen. Boyle also debated with Cambridge Platonist Henry More. Their differences “centred on different conceptions of the function of Boyle's programme, different patterns of exploitation of matters of fact, and therefore different forms of life in experimental philosophy and in religion.” (P. 212; see pp. 49, 52) But Boyle and More agreed on many things and supported some of the same causes. Nothing is gained by calling disagreements over the interpretation of experiments “different forms of life.”
Of course, in Wittgenstein-talk, different forms of life always correlate to language games. Because Boyle disagreed with More over the form of life in experimental science, (p. 49) “Boyle argued that because More's [divine] spirit was not a physical principle it could not be part of the language of organized experimenters.” (P. 217) One just has to throw this kind of analysis out the window. “Forms of life” and “language games” are quasi-metaphysical entities that add nothing to the discussion.
At the conclusion of 345 pages, three things relating to the narrative are notable. One is that Galileo and Kepler had already established empirical science on a firm foundation. It seems unlikely that any of the debates the authors belabor threatened the survival of experimental science. Relately, the authors never discuss the prestige of the Royal Society and the fact that its membership included the greatest and most famous British scientists. If Boyle had the Royal Society behind him, as he did, experimental science could hardly have been threatened.
Finally, the authors seem to be unaware that one of the key issues they identify — that of witnesses — actually became a major issue in the debate over miracles that began around the turn of the 18th century. (See, e.g., Sherwood, Annet, Hume; see generally Burns (The Great Miracles Debate) The authors report that “Boyle's collaborator Hooke codified the Royal Society's procedures for the standard recording of experiments.” They also snarkily comment that the Society’s standards for “credibility of witnesses followed the taken-for-granted conventions ofthatsetting for assessing individuals' reliability and trustworthiness,” (id.) and feel it necessary to point out that people weren’t able to just walk into Boyle’s laboratory off the street. (P. 39) Qualifying witnesses wasn’t, and isn’t, of any moment.
A number of incidental observations also struck me. One is that the authors’ tone was consistently hostile to Boyle. Another is the use of affectedly modern termology. In addition to actual witnesses, Boyle used “virtual witnessing,” (p. 60) and he used “literary technology to assure his readers that he was such a man as should be believed” (p. 65). Virtual witnessing means reading about an experiment rather than seeing it; literary technology means persuasive rhetoric.
What should have been an interesting book of, say, 200 pages ballooned into a something more than half again as long, plumped out by exaggeration and written in a consistently unpleasant tone.
Boyle, the authors say, was the avatar of experimental science, a man who wanted to demonstrate facts about the natural world without resort to metaphysical explanations and hypotheses about ultimate causes. Hobbes, his main antagonist, claimed that no worthwhile analysis of nature could be obtained except based on a priori assumptions, that is, on necessary propositions that were created by the human mind (geometry). Probable knowledge of the natural world was mere ignorance. This approach was similar to Hobbes’s social and political analyses, which the authors suggest — without offering evidence — were based on facts about human nature that Hobbes believed were known a priori (and which, if there were other facts, so dominated them that they were irrelevant to Hobbes’s analysis). Based on these purported facts, Hobbes developed a political theory that was Stalinist hundreds of years before Stalin.
The authors approach is best laid out in the concluding paragraph of the book. “We have written about a period in which the nature of knowledge, the nature of the polity, and the nature of the relationships between them were matters for wide-ranging and practical debate. A new social order emerged together with the rejection of an old intellectual order. In the late twentieth century that settlement is, in turn, being called into serious question. Neither our scientific knowledge, nor the constitution of our society, nor traditional statements about the connections between our society and our knowledge are taken for granted any longer. As we come to recognize the conventional and artifactual status of our forms of knowing, we put ourselves in a position to realize that it is ourselves and not reality that is responsible for what we know. Knowledge, as much as the state, is the product of human actions. Hobbes was right.” (P. 344)
This is similar to the issue Habermas wrestles with, unsuccessfully. To say that knowledge is a product of human actions, if it is more than a platitude, cannot possibly mean that Hobbes was “right.” The suggestion that Hobbes was right is an anachronism; Hobbes’s quasi-scholastic notion of natural science (see, e.g., pp. 88, 99, 115-116) can’t be translated into modern critical theory. By the bye, the authors assert — without evidence — that there’s a significant connection between Hobbes’s political theory and his natural science. “In Hobbes's view,” the authors say, “the elimination of vacuum was a contribution to the avoidance of civil war.” (P. 111) Apparently, the authors couldn’t find an apposite quotation from Hobbes that supports this conclusion. It seems absurd.
The authors, astonishingly well-read as they are, strike me as not really understanding the point they think they’re making. They cloak it in Wittgenstenian palaver that falls apart as soon as the reader steps back and questions it. They argue that Boyle’s “experimental programme was, in Wittgenstein's phrases, a ‘language-game’ and a ‘form of life.’ The acceptance or rejection of that programme amounted to the acceptance or rejection of the form of life that Boyle and his colleagues proposed.” (P. 22) What can these terms possibly mean? Boyle and Hobbes disagreed but debated; both were English gentlemen. Boyle also debated with Cambridge Platonist Henry More. Their differences “centred on different conceptions of the function of Boyle's programme, different patterns of exploitation of matters of fact, and therefore different forms of life in experimental philosophy and in religion.” (P. 212; see pp. 49, 52) But Boyle and More agreed on many things and supported some of the same causes. Nothing is gained by calling disagreements over the interpretation of experiments “different forms of life.”
Of course, in Wittgenstein-talk, different forms of life always correlate to language games. Because Boyle disagreed with More over the form of life in experimental science, (p. 49) “Boyle argued that because More's [divine] spirit was not a physical principle it could not be part of the language of organized experimenters.” (P. 217) One just has to throw this kind of analysis out the window. “Forms of life” and “language games” are quasi-metaphysical entities that add nothing to the discussion.
At the conclusion of 345 pages, three things relating to the narrative are notable. One is that Galileo and Kepler had already established empirical science on a firm foundation. It seems unlikely that any of the debates the authors belabor threatened the survival of experimental science. Relately, the authors never discuss the prestige of the Royal Society and the fact that its membership included the greatest and most famous British scientists. If Boyle had the Royal Society behind him, as he did, experimental science could hardly have been threatened.
Finally, the authors seem to be unaware that one of the key issues they identify — that of witnesses — actually became a major issue in the debate over miracles that began around the turn of the 18th century. (See, e.g., Sherwood, Annet, Hume; see generally Burns (The Great Miracles Debate) The authors report that “Boyle's collaborator Hooke codified the Royal Society's procedures for the standard recording of experiments.” They also snarkily comment that the Society’s standards for “credibility of witnesses followed the taken-for-granted conventions ofthatsetting for assessing individuals' reliability and trustworthiness,” (id.) and feel it necessary to point out that people weren’t able to just walk into Boyle’s laboratory off the street. (P. 39) Qualifying witnesses wasn’t, and isn’t, of any moment.
A number of incidental observations also struck me. One is that the authors’ tone was consistently hostile to Boyle. Another is the use of affectedly modern termology. In addition to actual witnesses, Boyle used “virtual witnessing,” (p. 60) and he used “literary technology to assure his readers that he was such a man as should be believed” (p. 65). Virtual witnessing means reading about an experiment rather than seeing it; literary technology means persuasive rhetoric.
What should have been an interesting book of, say, 200 pages ballooned into a something more than half again as long, plumped out by exaggeration and written in a consistently unpleasant tone.
December 4, 2025
Dec/4/2025 -- coming back to this after having to read some of it for class. Moving from three stars to five stars, this book is amazing.
This book is "about" the air-pump the same way Moby Dick is "about" a whale. Really what's at stake was the delineation of authentic and authoritative knowledge: How was it made? Who could make it? What was it for? The dispute was more than one between Boyle's experimentalism and Hobbes's rationalism, for at issue as well was the constitution of the social order itself in Restoration England.
Also thinking about this in terms of boundary work, this debate is kind of a classic involving science, where contending parties carve up the intellectual landscape in discrepant ways, each attaching authority and authenticity to claims and practices of the space in which they also locate themselves, while denying it to those placed outside. What makes this book such a useful guide to the controversy is its sustained attention to places and spaces, borders and territories, insiders and outsiders—as the authors note, "the cartographic metaphor is a good one" (p. 333).
This book is "about" the air-pump the same way Moby Dick is "about" a whale. Really what's at stake was the delineation of authentic and authoritative knowledge: How was it made? Who could make it? What was it for? The dispute was more than one between Boyle's experimentalism and Hobbes's rationalism, for at issue as well was the constitution of the social order itself in Restoration England.
Also thinking about this in terms of boundary work, this debate is kind of a classic involving science, where contending parties carve up the intellectual landscape in discrepant ways, each attaching authority and authenticity to claims and practices of the space in which they also locate themselves, while denying it to those placed outside. What makes this book such a useful guide to the controversy is its sustained attention to places and spaces, borders and territories, insiders and outsiders—as the authors note, "the cartographic metaphor is a good one" (p. 333).
November 14, 2010
Aside from its turgid composition and poor cross correlation, the material is fairly well discussed and presented.The level of insight is frequently obliterated by a periodic vapidity but occasionally a striking measure off insight and association sneaks through. After reading this I well understand why so many critics say that science writing is flat awful, although in this case it is history of science. How something as exciting as the experimentation of the early Royal Society in association with Boyle could be made so gritsish is confounding. This is truly a work that only a mother or a creditor could love although a scientist with some familiarity of the real substance can plow through with the ease of an icebreaker in the middle of the Younger Dryas. Definitely not suited for bogs.
Read
August 23, 2022I didn't finish this book. Midway through the third chapter, I realized that I was out of my depth. This is a scholarly book; without a background in 17th century European history, and the politics/theology/philosophy of that period, I floundered.
No sense in plowing through something this far above my abilities, so I'm going to shelve it for another day, perhaps.
No sense in plowing through something this far above my abilities, so I'm going to shelve it for another day, perhaps.
July 28, 2012
Marred by a writing style that is opaque, so I can't recommend it for the general reader. But a truly profound and important book.
If a non-specialist wants to know what Shapin is all about, I'd recommend starting with A Social History of Truth.
If a non-specialist wants to know what Shapin is all about, I'd recommend starting with A Social History of Truth.
March 5, 2019
Shapin and Schaffer's book details a remarkably fertile and decisive moment in intellectual history where a new experimental scientific hegemony arose through the linking of several social and political factors. Through my own scholarship data aggregation in the history of science field, this is perhaps the most widely cited book in the entire discipline. It is not difficult to see why.
Up until the last few years, science experiments have been regarded as the most certain way we can discern facts and truths. (However, most recently it seems that internal sensibilities and narratives of self hold the greatest epistemic sway in the social order.) Science experiments did not always hold this sway.
Considered one of the first science experiments of the modern era, Boyle's air-pump was met with its own set of controversies. Thomas Hobbes--one of the greatest philosophers of all time who is also one of the most misunderstood--took it upon himself to lacerate the truth-claims of experimental science. He accused this new community of scientific experimentalists of creating a falsely "public" space where they could conduct secret experiments and force their truth-claims upon the world in the name of science. Hobbes expressed concern for the shifting power dynamic this would create by giving scientists ultimate epistemic authority.
This was made doubly worse by the scientists ineptitude with metaphysical language and their claims that common sense language was not already loaded with metaphysical assumptions. There are many ways to interpret scientific results, how can one interpret an experiment correctly if one's language remains unexamined. These are only a few of the arguments Hobbes employed against this brand of science (it cannot be forgotten that Hobbes was himself an accomplished scientist who employed a different methodology). It is remarkable that Hobbes was able to foretell the disastrous effects of this new scientific culture when he was writing in the mid-1600s. Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Foucault would have to wait a few centuries for their turn.
This is an extremely detailed book about the design of the machine, the back-and-forth debate on the machine and the philosophy of experiment, but it is extremely elucidating all the same.
Up until the last few years, science experiments have been regarded as the most certain way we can discern facts and truths. (However, most recently it seems that internal sensibilities and narratives of self hold the greatest epistemic sway in the social order.) Science experiments did not always hold this sway.
Considered one of the first science experiments of the modern era, Boyle's air-pump was met with its own set of controversies. Thomas Hobbes--one of the greatest philosophers of all time who is also one of the most misunderstood--took it upon himself to lacerate the truth-claims of experimental science. He accused this new community of scientific experimentalists of creating a falsely "public" space where they could conduct secret experiments and force their truth-claims upon the world in the name of science. Hobbes expressed concern for the shifting power dynamic this would create by giving scientists ultimate epistemic authority.
This was made doubly worse by the scientists ineptitude with metaphysical language and their claims that common sense language was not already loaded with metaphysical assumptions. There are many ways to interpret scientific results, how can one interpret an experiment correctly if one's language remains unexamined. These are only a few of the arguments Hobbes employed against this brand of science (it cannot be forgotten that Hobbes was himself an accomplished scientist who employed a different methodology). It is remarkable that Hobbes was able to foretell the disastrous effects of this new scientific culture when he was writing in the mid-1600s. Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Foucault would have to wait a few centuries for their turn.
This is an extremely detailed book about the design of the machine, the back-and-forth debate on the machine and the philosophy of experiment, but it is extremely elucidating all the same.
December 31, 2025
I picked up "Leviathan and the Air‑Pump" after the book was referenced in another book, "Epic Disruptions" when talking about the "epic disruption" of the Scientific Revolution. "Leviathan and the Air‑Pump" zooms in on a surprisingly heated 17th‑century fight between Robert Boyle and Thomas Hobbes over what should count as “real” knowledge. Boyle (following Francis Bacon) was arguing for a new science consisting of experimentation, observation, and replication — using the brand‑new air pump technology to show you could create a vacuum. Hobbes, meanwhile, hated this approach. This is the same Hobbes who wrote "Leviathan", the famous book arguing that society needs a powerful sovereign to impose order on naturally chaotic humans. Unsurprisingly, Hobbes wanted science to look similar: clean, deductive, airtight, and geometric—more like Euclid than a noisy lab full of fragile equipment.
What’s fascinating is how unsettled everything still was. Hobbes thought Boyle’s experiments were unreliable, socially contingent, and undermining real philosophy. Boyle thought Hobbes’s approach was detached from nature itself. Shapin and Schaffer try very hard to write as if the outcome isn’t known in advance, treating both sides as plausible. Along the way, you see arguments over what counted as evidence, whether the Royal Society really qualified as a public space, how much authority philosophers should have over scientists, and even how much deference still had to be paid to the church. Aristotle had claimed vacuums were impossible, the church had tied its prestige to Aristotle, and suddenly a bunch of gentlemen with an air pump were saying otherwise.
Reading this with hindsight can be a bit frustrating. I already know Boyle's approach won. But the authors are stubborn in not saying the obvious — that Boyle was basically right and Hobbes was mostly wrong. In places it reads more like a PhD in Philosophy than something aimed at casual readers. Still, I learned a lot. I went in knowing almost nothing about Boyle or Hobbes, and came out with a much sharper appreciation.
What’s fascinating is how unsettled everything still was. Hobbes thought Boyle’s experiments were unreliable, socially contingent, and undermining real philosophy. Boyle thought Hobbes’s approach was detached from nature itself. Shapin and Schaffer try very hard to write as if the outcome isn’t known in advance, treating both sides as plausible. Along the way, you see arguments over what counted as evidence, whether the Royal Society really qualified as a public space, how much authority philosophers should have over scientists, and even how much deference still had to be paid to the church. Aristotle had claimed vacuums were impossible, the church had tied its prestige to Aristotle, and suddenly a bunch of gentlemen with an air pump were saying otherwise.
Reading this with hindsight can be a bit frustrating. I already know Boyle's approach won. But the authors are stubborn in not saying the obvious — that Boyle was basically right and Hobbes was mostly wrong. In places it reads more like a PhD in Philosophy than something aimed at casual readers. Still, I learned a lot. I went in knowing almost nothing about Boyle or Hobbes, and came out with a much sharper appreciation.
September 14, 2020
A fascinating approach to the history of science which also involves the history of philosophy, political thought, religion and the political developments of the time.
So often history of science can become a triumphalist account of how right conquered. The authors here - step by step - tease out all the contemporary elements of a particular moment in the history of science, mostly concentrating on the dispute between Boyle and Hobbes over the value of Boyle's air pump and the justification of assumptions based on it. It is a dense text (every element is referenced and analysed) and clearly shows how contemporary Boyle's (and the Royal Society) ideas were. He was not a modern 'scientist' with modern assumptions. How the experimental approach related to Aristotelianism and Platonism; how it could be (and was) seen to relate to current religious and political issues; how it could be seen as subverting the social order or reinforcing it.
In the end you are drenched in the ideas, presumptions and prejudices of the time while still being able to overview it all. Brilliant.
So often history of science can become a triumphalist account of how right conquered. The authors here - step by step - tease out all the contemporary elements of a particular moment in the history of science, mostly concentrating on the dispute between Boyle and Hobbes over the value of Boyle's air pump and the justification of assumptions based on it. It is a dense text (every element is referenced and analysed) and clearly shows how contemporary Boyle's (and the Royal Society) ideas were. He was not a modern 'scientist' with modern assumptions. How the experimental approach related to Aristotelianism and Platonism; how it could be (and was) seen to relate to current religious and political issues; how it could be seen as subverting the social order or reinforcing it.
In the end you are drenched in the ideas, presumptions and prejudices of the time while still being able to overview it all. Brilliant.
September 16, 2018
"Our present-day problems of defining our knowledge, our society, and the relationships between them centre on the same dichotomies between the public and the private, between authority and expertise, that structured the disputes we have examined in this book. We regard our scientific knowledge as open and accessible in principle, but the public does not understand it. Scientific journals are in our public libraries, but they are written in a language alien to the citizenry. We say that our laboratories constitute some of our most open professional spaces, yet the public does not enter them. Our society is said to be democratic, but the public cannot call to account what they cannot comprehend. A form of knowledge that is the most open in principle has become the most closed in practice. To entertain these doubts about our science is to question the constitution of our society. It is no wonder that scientific knowledge is so difficult to hold up to scrutiny."
October 4, 2025
Steven and Simon ate with this I fear. wish they talked about labor and gender but for a social constructivist history of science published in 1985 one can only hope for so much. there’s just SO much potential to think about how a society is organized via its knowledge production when the labor of knowledge production and knowledge organization is invisibilized. I know Steven Shapin wrote more about this later in his career but grrrr I wish it was in the book. anyway. solutions to the problem of knowledge are always also solutions to the problem of the social order!
November 26, 2023
How did we come to believe that hypothesis/experimentation was the way to ferret out truth, to "do" science? Shapin and Schaffer point out that our very methods for constructing truth were themselves constructed, and that we should very much question the assumption of their validity as tools. Fascinating read that really opened my eyes, although I didn't read the whole thing--I can see why others who did may have felt frustrated.
June 28, 2017
I'm almost not giving this stars because I'm in no position to do so. Read this in graduate school and all I remember is this takeaway: seemingly "natural" and systemic transmission of knowledge is neither natural nor systemic--and that even the way we think of the inherent "rightness" of the scientific method has many problems.
July 12, 2017
A riveting account of the debate between Hobbes and Boyle over the appropriate means of establishing matters of fact.
July 8, 2018
Bit of a slog. Nice look into science in middle 17th century.
November 20, 2018
Hobbes was right!
December 14, 2021
Brilliant arguments concealed within barely comprehensible academic prose.
April 12, 2022
Science studies with a historical materialism
April 6, 2024
Excellent book on the early discussions of the scientific method.
March 10, 2010
I'm only halfway through this, and it's difficult to read because the UMD library copy is missing, so I have to read chapters at a time at the Library of Congress. But this is one of the best books I've ever read - fictional or non: a compelling, impossibly sophisticated account of history, science, philosophy, and epistemology. A continuing project of Shapin, he hopes to tease out what we now call "knowledge" based on its originating arguments. The writers find a helpful debate and metaphor for their project that guides us through these complex exchanges: air. Simply put, can their actually be such a thing as nothing? Thomas Hobbes argued no, while Robert Boyle argued more persuasively that yes, there could be, and used his air pump to show it.
If you had told me that a book about debates between 17th Century plenists and vacuists would hold my attention, I would have laughed. It's not why I chose to study the period. But LEVIATHAN AND THE AIR PUMP does it in such a way that's engaging and profound, reminding us of the significance of the figures involved and the way the implications of their quarrel continues to affect us today. It is, indeed, the "modest witness" who is the precursor to what we now understand as scientific objectivity; it continues to be so, and its privileged status is rarely questioned in the way that Hobbes chose. And yet this quarrel is not lacking in political and spiritual inhibitions.
This is an exciting book, one that any academic should hope to write. Its influence is large and has spawned a sub-field that has continued Shapin's original inquiry.
If you had told me that a book about debates between 17th Century plenists and vacuists would hold my attention, I would have laughed. It's not why I chose to study the period. But LEVIATHAN AND THE AIR PUMP does it in such a way that's engaging and profound, reminding us of the significance of the figures involved and the way the implications of their quarrel continues to affect us today. It is, indeed, the "modest witness" who is the precursor to what we now understand as scientific objectivity; it continues to be so, and its privileged status is rarely questioned in the way that Hobbes chose. And yet this quarrel is not lacking in political and spiritual inhibitions.
This is an exciting book, one that any academic should hope to write. Its influence is large and has spawned a sub-field that has continued Shapin's original inquiry.
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