[1] January 9 - The decline of the Republic of Letters?
Section outline
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In the eighteenth century academies and learned societies dominated the natural sciences in Europe, from the proliferating academies of the Italian peninsula, to the dominant Royal Society of London and Royal Academy of Sciences in Paris, to their epigones in Berlin, St. Petersburg, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Haarlem, and Lisbon (the last founded in 1779). It was often a point of pride that they enrolled foreign correspondents and maintained formal relations with them even in time of war. Cosmopolitanism was not simply the luxury of nascent professional scientists secure in their sources of patronage, but rather more the necessity of marginal elites whose best strategy for advancing science in their native locales lay in developing ties with colleagues abroad. For much of the eighteenth century the scholarly solidarity of the Republic of Letters was subject to repeated critiques, however, and not only due to the selective rejection of Latin. Once it came to be seen as a "tribe of compilers" (in Fichte's words), the Republic of Letters became subject to new divisions and new solidarities, both disciplinary and patriotic.
We have a surfeit of materials here, so I've recorded a short lecture which we can use as a starting point for the class discussion.
Assigned reading:
Friedrich W. von Ziemietzki, excerpts from Das akademische Leben im Geiste der Wissenschaft [The Academic Life in the Spirit of Scholarship] (1812). (Original German text.)Lorraine Daston, “The Ideal and Reality of the Republic of Letters in the Enlightenment,” Science in Context 4 (1991): 367–86.French option: Jean d'Alembert, "Réflexions sur l'état présent de la République des Lettres pour l'article Gens de Lettres," Oeuvres et correspondances inédites, ed. Charles Henry (1887 [1760]), 67-79.Bohemian option: Ignaz von Born, "Vorrede des Herausgebers an den Leser," Abhandlungen einer Privatgesellschaft in Böhmen, zur Aufnahme der Mathematik, der vaterländischen Geschichte, und der Naturgeschichte 1 (Prague, 1775): 2-4.Prussian option: Johann Christian Friedrich Harless, Der Republicanismus in der Naturwissenschaft und Medicin auf der Basis und unter der Aegide der Eclecticismus (1819). (A review) (NB: This is the same figure who wrote about the merits of women in natural science in 1830.)Hungarian option: Szily Kálmán, “Magyar természettudósok száz évvel ezelőtt,” Természettudományi Közlöny 20, no. 225 (1888): 169–78.Polish option: Stanisław Bonifacy Jundziłł, "Cudzoziemcy w Uniwersytecie," in Ludwik Janowski, "O pismach historyczno-literackich Jundziłła," Rocznik Towarzystwa Przyjaciół Nauk w Wilnie 3 (1909 [1829]), 19-52.Russian option: Nikolai Fuss, "[speech to the Free Economic Society]," Труды императорского ВЭО 59 (1807): 283-293. [It's not a great selection, but see esp. sect. 3.]Suggested reading:
Kasper Risbjerg Eskildsen, “How Germany Left the Republic of Letters,” Journal of the History of Ideas 65 (2004): 421–32.Robert Mayhew, “Mapping Science’s Imagined Community: Geography as a Republic of Letters, 1600-1800,” The British Journal for the History of Science 38, no. 1 (2005): 73–92.Gábor Almási and Lav Šubarić, eds., Latin at the Crossroads of Identity: The Evolution of Linguistic Nationalism in the Kingdom of Hungary (2015).Karol Mecherzyński, Historya języka łacińskiego w Polsce (1833).Döbrentei Gábor, “Magyar tudós társaság történetei, a nyelv országos régibb állapotjának rövid előadásával,” in A Magyar Tudós Társaság Évkönyvei 1 (1833):1–126.Arne Hessenbruch, “Bottlenecks: 18th Century Science and the Nation State,” In The Spread of the Scientific Revolution in the European Periphery, Latin America and East Asia, edited by Celina A. Lértora Mendoza, Efthymios Nicolaidis, and Jan Vandersmissen (Turnhout: Brepols, 2000), 11–31.Ryan Tucker Jones, "Petr Simon Pallas, Siberia, and the European Republic of Letters," Istoriko-biologicheskie issledovaniia 3 no. 3 (2011): 55-67.Thomas Broman, "The Habermasian public sphere and 'science in the Enlightenment'," History of Science 36 (1998): 123-150.H. Otto Sibum, “Experimentalists in the Republic of Letters,” Science in Context 16, no. 1–2 (March 2003): 89–120. (And see other articles on "scientific personae" in this issue.)Mary Terrall, "Emilie du Châtelet and the Gendering of Science," History of Science 33 (1995): 283-310.William Clark, Jan Golinski, and Simon Schaffer, eds., The Sciences in Enlightened Europe (1999).
Michael D. Gordin, “The Importation of Being Earnest: The Early St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences,” Isis 91 (2000): 1–31.John Gascoigne, “The Eighteenth-Century Scientific Community: A Prosopographical Study,” Social Studies of Science 25, no. 3 (1995): 575–81.Dena Goodman, The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (1994). (NB: The sciences do not figure much in this account.) -