The Social History of Skepticism: Experience and Doubt in Early Modern Culture (review)

The Social History of Skepticism: Experience and Doubt in Early Modern Culture. By Brendan Dooley (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999) 213 pp. $39.95

The social history of knowledge is à la mode. After Shapin's controversial Social History of Truth (Chicago, 1994) and Johns' new account of the scientific revolution from the standpoint of politics and printers in the Nature of the Book (Chicago, 1998) comes an elegant new work by Dooley that seeks to explain the seventeenth-century crisis of skepticism through a study of Italian avvisi (newsletters), letters by readers, works of historical propaganda, and books on political theory. Dooley's thesis is that Italian avvisi created a climate of doubt. In Italy, as well as in every other major European center, there emerged a profusion of easy-access journalism, which Dooley calls the "information underground." At one level, these works criticized political authority, and at another, they undermined the authority of the written word.

A crisis was in the making. This classic thesis by Hazard is brilliantly illustrated by Dooley's archival research. ¹ The author has scoured the Italian archives, pasting together a never before seen tableau of newsletters, patrons, authors, printers, and readers. Dooley examines what he calls the "new skepticism" and how new modes of verification were developed by both natural philosophers and historiographers. He explains that Antiquarianism--that ultimate form of the presentation of historical evidence--was the historical response to the inroads of Pyrrhonism, a philosophical movement that advocated doubt and the search for absolute proofs.

Perhaps the most compelling argument in this book is that political reason of state led to skepticism. If princes used all and any means to promote their own interests, then individuals needed new critical "eyeglasses" to see through their ruses. Thus political criticism has its origins in the circulation of information and royal propaganda. This novel reading of the significance of reason of state theory merits further investigation.

In the end, readers may wonder whether the book's title is entirely appropriate. Is this a social history, or instead a seventeenth-century version of Roger Chartier's Cultural Origins of the French Revolution (Durham, 1991), mixed with a Darnton-like interest in underground information networks? ² Furthermore, is this book really a history of skepticism? The author gives only two examples of contemporaries who used the word. The term that Pierre Bayle used was "critic." Dooley's examples create the impression that the readers of avvisi were becoming a critical public rather than a group of skeptics. Political cynicism was already an old tradition by the seventeenth century; the tools developed by historians to turn existing skepticism into effective political criticism were the features new to the era. Bodin's work in the sixteenth century inaugurated a concerted effort by legal and political scholars to make the use of historical proof a reliable practice. Indeed, this tradition of legal and inductive history, more than a skeptical reaction to unreliable newsletters and cut-rate historical propaganda, laid the foundation for the political criticism of the eighteenth century. One cannot deny that the circulation of avvisi deepened the culture of political criticism.

Overall, Dooley's subtly crafted work is of major importance for early modern cultural and intellectual historians. It sheds light on unknown facets of seventeenth-century political culture and shows that the cultural origins of the Enlightenment reach further back than has been previously considered.

Jacob Soll
Rutgers University, Camden

Notes

1. Paul Hazard, La crise de conscience européenne (Paris, 1961).

2. Robert Darnton, The Literary Underground of the Old Regime (Cambridge, Mass., 1982).

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