Artisan/Practitioners and the Rise of the New Sciences, 1400-1600

Chapter 1: Artisan/Practitioners as an Issue in the History of Science

10 | Artisan/Practitioners as an Issue in the History of Science c ha p ter 1 Artisan/Practitioners as an Issue in the History of Science In the 1920s and 1930s, just as the history of science as a discipline was taking shape, a new thesis emerged concerning the influence of artisans and artisanal culture on what was termed the “scientific revolution” of the seventeenth century. A group of scholars began to discuss the ways in which the mechanical arts—that is, the arts and crafts carried out by skilled artisans—influenced the development of the mechanical world view that emerged in the seventeenth century. The “mechanical world view” was shorthand for the idea that all motion and change was mechanical and that the universe itself functioned as a machine. The mechanical world view developed along with a complex of other ideas about the natural world and how to study it that are often grouped together under the term the “new sciences.” Four of the scholars who debated the thesis of artisanal influence adhered to one or another form of Marxism, and at least one, the Viennese physicist and philosopher Edgar Zilsel, was associated with the philosophical outlook known as logical empiricism. In addition to Zilsel, the Marxist scholars who developed versions of the thesis of artisanal influence were the Russian physicist Boris Hessen, the Viennese sociologist Franz Borkenau, and the Polish political economist Henryk Grossmann. All four were from Jewish backgrounds, and all suffered from the virulent anti-Semitism of their day. All were leftists who engaged extensively in both philosophical and political struggles. Their differing views on artisanal influence were tied to their larger philosophic and scientific outlook and to their political activities.1 Other scholars who were not Marxists also developed ideas about artisanal culture and the new sciences. One was the German-Italian Artisan/Practitioners as an Issue in the History of Science | 11 philologist Leonardo Olschki, whose three-volume study of fifteenthand sixteenth-century technical writings and their influence on Galileo, published in the 1920s, seems to have influenced at least some of the Marxists. A second, the American sociologist Robert Merton, wrote a dissertation the second half of which was devoted to technical and practical arts and their influence on the sciences. It was published in 1938 as Science, Technology, and Society in Seventeenth-Century England.2 This early work of scholars in the 1920s and 1930s focused on artisanal influence on the new sciences is worth revisiting because these discussions reflect significant interpretive issues in the discipline of the history of science as a whole. In addition, the assumptions of those decades have at times silently shaped current discussions in ways that would benefit from explicit analysis. The Marxist Tradition Several key concepts in the writings of Karl Marx (1818–1885) are relevant to this twentieth-century scholarship. Marx along with Friedrich Engels (1820–1895)haddevelopedthetenetsofhistoricalmaterialisminthe1840s in opposition to the prevailing notions of idealism. Whereas idealists argued that ideas and beliefs were the moving forces of history, Marx suggested, instead, that history was driven by economic production. “Productive forces” included both the means of production, such as tools, machines, and factories, and labor power, which involved human skill, knowledge, and experience. Marx argued that the foundation of society was its economic structure, by which he meant the relations of production. All the rest—law, politics, social consciousness, intellectual life, and science—he considered to be superstructure determined in perhaps complex ways by the underlying structure of economic production.3 Individuals and political groups modified Marx’s influential ideas in various ways during the first three decades of the twentieth century. Max Adler (1873–1937), an Austrian politician and social philosopher, 12 | Artisan/Practitioners as an Issue in the History of Science who was an important leader of the Austrian Social Democratic Party, developed a strand of Marxism referred to, in Edgar Zilsel’s Vienna, as Austro-Marxism. Adler conceived of Marxism as “a system of sociological knowledge” and argued that the economic determinism of Marxism should not be thought of as a materialist determinism; rather, economic production was mediated by consciousness. So, in a sense Adler took the materialism out of Marxism and suggested that even economic phenomena possessed a mental character. He transformed Marx’s idea of economic production, making it not the material production of goods per se, but a category of knowledge, a concept that originated in reason...