A Social History of Knowledge: From Gutenberg to Diderot (review)

Burke says that the purpose of his book "may be described in a single word: 'defamiliarization.'" Oddly, though, he accomplishes the opposite. He makes the past look very familiar indeed, showing our modern idea of research—academic, professional, disciplinary—to be a routinization of seventeenth- and eighteenth- century aspirations. This is a history of the footnote, the bibliography, the revised edition, the questionnaire, dossier, and book review, the index (and the Index), and alphabetical order (Bayle wrote his dictionary in alphabetical order). Philosophically, Burke's book is less a history of knowledge than a history of disciplines taking control of knowledge, the disciplinary pursuit of knowledge for the sake of control.