Dynamic Equilibria

William Clark’s engrossing and illuminating study of the genealogy of the modern university bears on its dust-jacket lines of praise from other scholars. The reader who has perused Clark’s anatomy of the centuries of institutional life that produced the routines academics now take for granted is likely to be acutely aware of what these words, in this position, on this object (a bound volume of extremely high quality) do. They tell us that the book has been judged worth reading and worthy of inclusion in a scholarly canon by people (in this case, as it happens, men) whose judgement we ought to respect (because even if we have never heard of them we have heard of the research institutions from which they come: Harvard, the University of Chicago, the French National Centre for Scientific Research, and the Swiss National Technical University). They tell us that this William Clark himself has been welcomed as a member of a (virtual) community of scholars, and more than that, has been certified by those already in possession of academic charisma as being himself charismatic (of this more later). By their location, they also betray something of the material conditions that underpin the circulation of charisma (or the construction of reputation) in this ‘virtual’ scholarly community; pre-publication comments bespeak a well-networked author and/or editor.

Beyond this, though, the thumbnail reviews on the dust-jacket are a neat indicator of where this book sits in a developing field of research. Clark’s ‘referees’ are Adrian Johns, Christian Jacob, Michael Hagner and Peter Galison. All are scholars who have made important contributions to what is best described as the history of the production of knowledge. Their work exemplifies the way in which approaches originally developed by historians of the natural and physical sciences have been extended to other fields of human activity whose intended outcome is that people know (and/or believe) things that they didn’t before. The key to the new approach, which originated in what is now called ‘science studies’, is a move away from the simple genealogy of ideas, with an emphasis on discoveries and ‘breakthroughs’ and the achievements of heroic individuals. Taking further the insights of Thomas Kuhn on the nature of scientific revolutions, both sociologists and ethnographers interested in how science is being made now and historians of science have turned to analysing the social relations and material practices which constitute ‘science’ and define ‘the scientist’ in any given period. In science studies, this has meant among other things a close attention to the routines of laboratory life and laboratory culture, and Peter Galison has led in this field with his studies of the material culture of physics.¹ Johns, Jacob and Hagner have applied this approach beyond the laboratory, to the wider worlds of scholarship and knowledge production. Jacob has developed ways of rethinking the history of map-making. Johns’s work re-examined the origins of print culture in Britain in terms of the material conditions for the production of knowledge, knowingly applying the term ‘literatory culture’ to a detailed account of what got printed and how. And Hagner has contributed to a growing literature on how the scientific or scholarly personality has been constructed in the past, with studies of (among other things) the history of attention and the nineteenth-century fascination with the size and shape of scientists’ brains.²

Historians writing in this mode must strike a convincing balance between exploring the minutiae of everyday social practice and untangling the issues of changing mentality that constitute the objects of Historywith- a-capital-H, or what the Germans call Universal History (that is: the history that ‘matters’). Undisguised fascination with artefacts, manuals, and other material components of social practice may provoke blank incomprehension or the accusation of antiquarianism. Anthony Grafton’s history of the footnote, Markus Krajewski’s study of the birth of the card catalogue, Béatrice Fraenkel’s history of the signature, and even the volume...