Un pubblico per la scienza: La divulgazione scientifica nell'Italia in formazione (review)

Despite its obvious links with political and economic change, the popularization of science and technology has only recently come under scrutiny by historians, who used to view this subject as a redundant gloss on the history of science as ideology. In this book, Paola Govoni sets out to restore to the popularization of science its complexity and dignity as a subject of historical inquiry. She convincingly argues that many of the activities grouped under the heading of popularization should be examined as integral components of scientific and technological change rather than as mere appendages. The sharing and borrowing of ideas across disciplinary boundaries, the debates over research funding and teaching, and often the very direction taken by technological systems and scientific programs strongly depend on how specialized knowledge is articulated for a larger public. And in trying to make themselves understood, scientists and engineers actively construct the public they address. This recursive process is indeed at the core of the ongoing redefinition of the boundaries between technoscience and society.

Govoni applies these theoretical insights to the specific case of postunification Italy from the 1860s to the 1890s, the era of positivism and nation building. After reviewing some of the attempts at popularizing science in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Govoni examines the daunting challenges faced by the proponents of "positive" knowledge in the aftermath of Italy's unification. In the face of illiteracy rates of 75 to 80 percent and the overt hostility of the Catholic Church, the Italy of the early 1870s hardly appeared as a fertile terrain for the popularization of science and technology. However, the creation of an integrated national market for books, pamphlets, and almanacs, combined with the enthusiasm for the untested opportunities offered by the new political environment and a profound sense of inferiority vis-à-vis northern Europe, militated in favor of the emerging "apostles" of science—upper-middle-class men eager to marry idealism and self-promotion—and their largely bourgeois public. Thanks to their efforts, the share of books published on scientific and technical subjects increased from a little more than a fifth in the early 1870s to a full third in 1900, even though the share of explicitly popular books peaked in the mid-1880s and declined afterward.

Prominent in Govoni's narrative are three characters, all committed to fighting the prejudice and ignorance that they believed continued to rule the new country, and to making a profit while they were at it. The first is Emilio Treves, who—by pioneering several printing and marketing techniques south of the Alps—became the largest publisher in late-nineteenth-century Italy. Treves had a keen interest in popular science, and many of his early commercial successes belonged to this genre. The second character is Michele Lessona, a physician-turned-botanist who spent much of his life translating and popularizing Darwin's work, in addition to becoming the president of the University of Turin and a powerful academic administrator. Though Lessona is best known for his version of Samuel Smiles's Self-Help, entitled "Will is Power" ("Volere E' Potere"), Govoni presents a complex and compelling portrait of his multifaceted activities and cultural world, heavily inflected by positivism but also open to other traditions.

The strongest section of the book is probably the portrait of the third character, Paolo Mantegazza. Also a physician by training, Mantegazza became the first academic anthropologist in Italy and one of several scientists in the Italian Parliament. He was also instrumental in introducing the new discipline of hygiene to Italian readers, and he wrote extensively—mostly for Treves's publishing house—on topics as diverse as the "physiology" of love and the necessity of preventing tuberculosis patients from reproducing (this in a widely read and translated novel, A Day in Madera). A precursor of eugenics, Mantegazza partook of the milieu that gave...