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The Scientific Revolution cover

History

History

The Scientific Revolution

Steven Shapin

A short interpretive account of seventeenth-century natural philosophy that questions whether a single, coherent Scientific Revolution ever took place. Shapin examines what was known, how it was known, and what knowledge was for, showing how new practices of inquiry grew out of varied philosophical, religious and political commitments.

Prerequisites: No science or history-of-science background is needed; some acquaintance with early modern European history helps.

Difficulty Level
Intermediate
Academic Level
Undergraduate
history of sciencescientific revolutionearly modern europehistoriographyTextbook

01 / Reading Guide

Reading Guide

Citation

Shapin, S. (2018). The Scientific Revolution (2nd ed.). University of Chicago Press.

Chapter Summary

The book is short, about 250 pages with twenty illustrations, and has an introduction, three chapters and a bibliographic essay. Its organising idea is announced in the introduction: the three chapters deal in turn with what was known about the natural world in the seventeenth century, how that knowledge was secured, and what it was for.

Introduction: The Scientific Revolution: The History of a Term

The book opens with the sentence "There was no such thing as the Scientific Revolution, and this is a book about it." The introduction traces how mid-twentieth-century historians such as Alexandre Koyré, Herbert Butterfield and A. Rupert Hall presented a coherent, epoch-making event, and how the phrase itself was not in common use before Koyré gave it wider currency in 1939. It explains why many historians have become uneasy with the idea and why the author still thinks it legitimate to write about the period: seventeenth-century figures themselves proclaimed that they were making large changes in knowledge, and later readers have a legitimate interest in their ancestors.

Under "Some Historiographical Issues" the author sets out his position: science is treated as a historically situated, social activity, and the line between "social" and "scientific" is itself something to be explained. He says the account is selective, with a moderate bias toward the empirical and experimental sciences and toward English materials. He identifies four themes: the mechanization of nature, the depersonalization of natural knowledge, the attempted mechanization of knowledge making, and the aspiration to use reformed knowledge for moral, social and political ends.

Chapter 1: What Was Known?

The introduction describes this as the chapter that covers the standard topics of accounts of the Scientific Revolution: the challenge to Aristotelian natural philosophy and to the distinction between terrestrial and celestial physics, the replacement of an earth-centred model by the Copernican system, the mechanical metaphor for nature and its association with mathematics, and the contrast between primary and secondary qualities. It is where the first two themes, mechanization and depersonalization, are introduced.

Chapter 2: How Was It Known?

According to the introduction, this chapter departs from traditional accounts by turning from knowledge as a finished product to what it took to make and persuasively communicate a piece of natural knowledge. The aim is to show that the knowledge described in Chapter 1 had to be laboriously made and justified, and that practitioners disagreed about how to do it.

Chapter 3: What Was the Knowledge For?

The last chapter asks what purposes natural knowledge served in the seventeenth century and what its advocates thought a reformed natural philosophy could do that older knowledge could not. The introduction says that it handles almost exclusively the fourth theme, the use of reformed knowledge for moral, social and political ends, and that it asks why society's other institutions should value and support it.

Bibliographic Essay

The essay is where the introduction sends readers who want the academic state of play on the debates behind the text. The publisher says that the second edition updates this essay with the latest scholarship.

Key Concepts

Introduction

  • The Scientific Revolution as a historian's category: the phrase gained currency only in the mid-twentieth century, and the book asks what it can and cannot mean.
  • Natural philosophy: the introduction explains that seventeenth-century writers used "natural philosophy" and "natural history" for inquiry into nature, and the term "scientist" was invented only in the nineteenth century.
  • Situated knowledge: the position that science is a collective, historically embedded activity and that its ideas and social forms belong together.

Chapters 1–3

  • Mechanization of nature: the use of mechanical metaphors to understand natural processes.
  • Depersonalization of natural knowledge: the growing separation between the knower and the natural object, seen in the contrast between everyday experience and how nature "really is".
  • Mechanization of knowledge making: the proposal of explicit rules of method that would discipline the production of knowledge by managing human passions and interests.
  • Use of reformed knowledge: the hope that knowledge shown to be benign, powerful and disinterested could serve moral, social and political ends.
  • Primary and secondary qualities: the contrast, tied in the introduction's outline of Chapter 1 to mathematical ways of understanding nature, between two kinds of qualities attributed to things.

Critical Analysis

Strengths

  • A clear argument about a familiar term. The introduction explains the history of the phrase "the Scientific Revolution" and what its critics object to, and then defends writing the book anyway. This makes the book a useful first stop for anyone who has met the term in a textbook and wants to see it questioned.
  • A simple, memorable structure. The author presents the originality of the book as its organisation around what was known, how it was known and what the knowledge was for. Reviewers quoted by the publisher stress accessibility and concision: Adam Phillips in the London Review of Books wrote that it is hard to believe a more accessible, informed or concise account could exist, and David C. Lindberg in Science described the account as informed, nuanced and clear.
  • Explicit about its own selection. The author says plainly that the book is selective and partial, that it leans toward the empirical and experimental sciences and English materials, and that other specialists will disagree. Readers can therefore see which choices are being made.
  • Guidance to further reading. The introduction directs readers who want the scholarly debates to the bibliographic essay, which the second edition updates.

Limitations

  • Deliberately selective. The author's own statement that the account leans toward experiment and English material, and gives less emphasis to mathematical physics and Continental settings than older surveys, means that it does not set out to be a balanced catalogue of the period's sciences.
  • Not a reference or a full narrative. Three thematic chapters in a short book cannot give a chronological account of each science. The publisher calls it an exploration of the origins of the modern scientific worldview, and the introduction says that it is not written for professional scholars; a student looking for an event-by-event survey will need another book.
  • Dated wording in the introduction. The sample introduction of the second edition still speaks of "late twentieth-century" scientists and historians, which suggests that the main text largely keeps its original form and that the new scholarship is concentrated in the bibliographic essay, as the publisher's description indicates.
  • A concentrated period. The introduction states that the book uses "early modern" for a period ending around 1700–1730, so developments in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are outside its scope.

Where It Fits in the Course

In the history of science and technology course list, Shapin's short interpretive book works as a historiographical introduction to the period in which most science courses begin. McClellan and Dorn's Science and Technology in World History and Patricia Fara's Science: A Four Thousand Year History are broad surveys that run from antiquity to the present, so they place the seventeenth century in a much longer story. David Lindberg's The Beginnings of Western Science covers the ancient and medieval background before the period Shapin treats.

Peter Bowler and Iwan Rhys Morus's Making Modern Science is a long textbook that starts from the seventeenth century and runs to the present, and it can supply the factual narrative that Shapin does not. Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer's Leviathan and the Air-Pump examines in depth one controversy, between Hobbes and Boyle over experiment, and is the natural follow-up for readers who want to see the approach of Chapter 2 worked out in a single case.

How to Use This Book

The book is suited to undergraduates in history of science, early modern history or science studies, and to science students curious about the history of their disciplines. The publisher states no prerequisite. Because the argument is a reinterpretation, it helps to have met a conventional account of Copernicus, Galileo, Boyle and Newton first.

A practical plan:

  • Read the introduction first and slowly. It explains the argument about the term, the author's position and the four themes that organise the rest.
  • Take Chapters 1–3 in order. Each chapter answers one of the three questions, and the introduction maps the four themes across them.
  • Use the bibliographic essay to find specialised studies on the topics that interest you, and to see which debates are current.
  • Pair it with a narrative survey, so that you can test Shapin's claims against the conventional story and fill in the facts that the thematic structure leaves out.