A Social History of Knowledge II: From the 'Encyclopédie' to Wikipedia by Peter Burke (review)

The first volume of Peter Burke's A Social History of Knowledge, published in 2000, covered the period from Gutenberg to Diderot (c. 1450 to 1750). It was a relatively brief overview (200 pages) arranged around several major themes: institutions involved in maintaining and disseminating knowledge; patterns of geographical distribution; readers and books; the classification of knowledge (through libraries, encyclopaedias, and curricula); and its ownership and control. It also noted some of the problems of definition and scope inherent in the title, through an introductory discussion drawing on the sociology of Durkheim and Weber and the postmodern perspectives of Foucault and Bourdieu. Burke used a definition of knowledge that focused on the 'dominant forms of knowledge, particularly the knowledge possessed by European intellectuals'. But he also noted the plurality of 'knowledges' during this period and offered some thoughts on the relationship between 'academic' knowledge and practical and oral forms of knowledge.

The second volume brings the story up to the present, beginning from Diderot's Encyclopédie and finishing with Wikipedia. It retains a similar focus - 'western academic knowledge' - but refers more explicitly and frequently to 'knowledges' in the plural. Once again, the approach is mainly thematic; Burke looks at methods of gathering, analysing, disseminating, and employing knowledge across this period and ends by looking at the subject from geographical, sociological, and chronological perspectives. Two particularly interesting chapters examine the phenomena of 'losing' and 'dividing' knowledges, designed to get away from the idea of the cumulative growth of a single body of knowledge.

In all, this is an effective overview and orientation to the subject, with pointers to the key issues and developments. The emphasis on methods of communicating, storing, and controlling knowledge (rather than on the knowledge itself) is particularly valuable. Burke does his best to avoid the 'the common assumption of continuous progress' (p. 7) and to minimise the inherent chronological perspective of the title. But the limitations of the definition of 'knowledge' employed are more evident than they were in the first volume, and the acknowledgement of postmodernist pluralities in the first volume seems to have been lost.

Although noticeably longer than the first volume, this second volume is still a high-level synthesis based on secondary sources. Burke covers an enormous amount of ground, but at times does little more than note significant people and events. An alternative might have been to identify and discuss a small number of representative people and institutions in more detail, rather than trying to cover everything. Developments since 1990 - which have frequently been touted as the most significant since the invention of printing - are dealt with in ten pages at the end of the book, with only occasional references to them in the thematic chapters. While the Web and Wikipedia are discussed briefly, there is no treatment of contemporary phenomena like social media and ubiquitous computing.