Robert Fox
1For surveys of the early scientific societies of the seventeenth century, see Martha Ornstein, The Role
of Scientific Societies in the Seventeenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ); James E. McClellan III, Science Reorganized: Scientific Societies in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Co- lumbia University Press, ), pp. –; and several of the early chapters of David C. Goodman and Colin A. Russell (eds.), The Rise of Scientific Europe – (Sevenoaks: Hodder & Stoughton and The Open University, ).
2Roger Hahn, The Anatomy of a Scientific Institution: The Paris Academy of Sciences, – (Berke-
ley: University of California Press, ), especially pp. –, and Alice Stroup, “The Political Theory and Practice of Technology under Louis XIV,” in Bruce T. Moran (ed.), Patronage and Institutions:
Science, Technology, and Medicine at the European Court – (Rochester, NY: Boydell Press, ),
Observatory of Paris in the late s. In its utility, as in its physical grandeur and the facilities it offered, the new building would reflect the glory of the Roi-Soleil, outstripping the observatories of England, Denmark, and China and providing both a setting for all the activities of the Académie (a function that, in the event, it never fulfilled) and a focus for the astronomical, geo- desic, and meteorological work for which a century later the institution would become famous.3Older royal institutions, too, came under Colbert’s wing.
In this process, the Collège Royal, a sixteenth-century foundation that offered public lectures in a range of scientific and scholarly disciplines, and the Jardin du Roi, a botanical garden created in to cater for a facet of scientific training that the Faculty of Medicine was manifestly failing to provide, both assumed a new importance as contexts in which the conception of science as a proper responsibility of the state was reinforced.
The proliferation of academies across Europe during the eighteenth century diffused the ideal of governmental involvement in the patronage of science. In practice, however, few academies enjoyed the degree of support and prox- imity to the seats of political power that distinguished the Parisian Académie des Sciences in its early years, even though certain of their champions saw a close integration with the state as essential. When Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz elaborated his plan for a royal academy in Berlin, for example, he cer- tainly envisaged an institution that would be, if anything, even closer to the Prussian court than the Académie was to Versailles.4But the reality that fol-
lowed the creation of the Societas regia scientiarum in , under the aus- pices of the ambitious Elector who was soon to become King Frederick I of Prussia, fell far short of Leibniz’s vision. It was eight years before an adequate observatory was provided, and while the Societas performed its main public duty of publishing an official almanac at the time of the delicate move from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar, it suffered from a court that sought to exercise control (by the introduction of officials of its own choosing) with- out providing the level of financial support that had been anticipated. It was only from , with Frederick II (the Great) on the throne, that the material well-being and intellectual autonomy of the Académie Royale des Sciences et Belles-Lettres de Prusse, as the Societas now became, were assured.
In Berlin, Frederick created what contemporaries saw for more than a decade as an ideal structure that fostered governmental involvement without undue intrusiveness. Practical services, in the form of advice on the calendar and in- ventions, were expected, but when Pierre-Louis Maupertuis and Leonard Euler were brought from Paris and St. Petersburg, respectively, they came as men of science whose distinction alone justified their presence. From until
Robert Fox
3Charles Wolf, Histoire de l’Observatoire de Paris de sa fondation à (Paris: Gauthier-Villars, ),
pp.–.
his death in Maupertuis, as president, guided the Berlin Academy in di- rections that allowed it to become at once a national symbol of the benefits of enlightened monarchy and a constituent of the international Republic of Letters. In pursuit of its latter, international role, the Academy adopted French as its official language and inaugurated prize competitions open to all comers (including d’Alembert, who won the first competition, on the cause of winds). It also launched an annual volume of proceedings and memoirs, the Histoire, that allowed it to engage in the exchange of publications with other acade- mies and so to blur the boundaries between national interest and the univer- salism not only of science but also of the areas of nonscientific scholarship that were represented in the Academy.
Despite the promising rehabilitation of the Berlin Academy during Mau- pertuis’s presidency, the institution was soon to experience the darker as well as the benign side of patronage by the state. Following Maupertuis’s death, Frederick II assumed a degree of personal control, in the appointment of new members and the interactions with other academies, that has been held at least partially responsible for the Academy’s diminished international promi- nence between the s and Frederick’s death in .5Other academies too
were affected by the irregularity and changing priorities of the patronage they received from their various governments. For Czar Peter the Great, the Impe- rial Russian Academy of Sciences, founded in St. Petersburg in , shortly before his death, was only one element in a much broader movement to break his country’s isolation from the West and to achieve modernization through the advancement of modern knowledge, in particular of science and tech- nology.6 Governmental control was strict, and the introduction of sixteen
distinguished members from abroad reflected the calculated priorities of na- tional policy as well as the necessity of importing men of ability in a previously backward country dominated by a conservative Byzantine church. The im- posed internationalism of the St. Petersburg Academy created difficulties: the national groups within it – mainly French, German, and Russian – did not always work well together, and the failure of most of the foreign members to master Russian (Euler being a notable exception) meant that their critics could easily charge them with a preference for addressing one another and the learned world at large (usually in Latin) rather than addressing a nation in need of the kind of cultural and technical improvements that Peter expected of them. After Peter was gone, continued closeness to the government engendered an instability comparable to that of the Berlin Academy some years later. Court influence often took the form of ignorant administrative busybodying, and the struggle for intellectual autonomy, reinforced by the very real scientific achievements of such men as Euler and Daniel Bernoulli but repeatedly
Science and Government
5McClellan, Science Reorganized, pp.–.
6Ibid, pp.–, and Alexander Vucinich, Science in Russian Culture: A History to (London: Peter
undermined by phases of intrusive political conservatism, had only partial success in the form of the charter that Czarina Elizabeth granted the Academy in . Faced with new regulations that sought to direct attention from the theoretical work pursued by the most eminent foreign academicians toward activities more relevant to the material needs of Russia, Euler saw no alter- native to withdrawal.
The tribulations of the Berlin and St. Petersburg academies illustrate with brutal clarity that wherever governmental involvement was strong, there lurked the threat of an inhibiting subservience to a politically motivated conception of the national interest. Despite the dangers of unwelcome interference, how- ever, some measure of recognition by the state, extending to the allocation of a formal public role if not to lavish material support, was virtually essential if an academy was to prosper. Too often, though, recognition went little further than the granting of a name. In Sweden, the fine-sounding title of Societas regia literaria et scientiarum Sueciae in Uppsala lent dignity. But it could not conceal the fact that the society remained, like the informal group from which it sprang, little more than a coterie based in the University of Uppsala.7Nor could it prevent the decline that set in a decade after the so-
ciety received its title and royal recognition in . Similarly, the mere grant- ing of the title “Royal” to the Vetenskapsakademien of Stockholm in did little for an institution that had begun its existence two years earlier as an in- dependent body without any bonds to government.8What did transform the
Academy, on the other hand, was a parliamentary decision of to grant it the exclusive right to publish the national almanac.9This helped to bring
the institution to the center of Swedish life and to foster its initial aspiration to advance the nation’s economy and well-being in a period – the so-called Era of Liberty that began with the death of the last absolute monarch, Charles XII, in – in which mercantilism and utilitarianism converged to advance the interests of science. Since the almanac sold , copies in its first year () and well over twice that number annually by , the decision also presented the Academy with a bestseller that ensured a substantial income and allowed it to embark, independently, on the construction and fitting out of its own fine observatory. Opened in the presence of the king and queen in , the observatory was the focus for regular expenditure over the years and for a particularly handsome donation of instruments from the royal collection by
Robert Fox
7McClellan, Science Reorganized, pp.–. On the Society and more generally the background to sci-
ence in eighteenth-century Sweden, see also Colin A. Russell, “Science on the Fringe of Europe: Eigh- teenth-Century Sweden,” in Goodman and Russell (eds.), The Rise of Scientific Europe, pp.–.
8McClellan, Science Reorganized, pp.–. The standard history of the society covering this period
is Sten Lindroth, Kungl. Svenska Vetenskapsakademiens Historia –, vols. (Stockholm: Kungl. Vetenskapsakademien, ); see especially the two parts (continuously paginated) of vol. .
9Lindroth, Kungl. Svenska Vetenskapsakademiens Historia, vol. , pp. –; McClellan, Science Reorga-
nized, pp.–, and Ulf Sinnerstad, “Astronomy and the First Observatory,” in Tore Frängsmyr (ed.),
the enlightened, well-traveled King Gustav III in .10So long as Gustav,
the “crowned democrat” and admirer of the French philosophes, was on the throne, science, like other cultural pursuits, was well served, in the context of a policy that yoked, on the one hand, the strengthening of the monarchy and the defense of Sweden against the expansionist menace of the Russian Empire to, on the other hand, the promotion of Enlightenment thought, in particular in the forms in which it had emanated from France. But Gustav’s death in and the subsequent weakening of royal favor provided yet an- other illustration of the vulnerability of state-sponsored science. Although it is true that Sweden’s diminished position as a scientific nation by the end of the century had other causes as well, the indifference of Gustav III’s successor, his son Gustav IV, clearly played a part.11
The accelerating pace with which academies were founded from the s and the resulting diversity make it difficult to move from the specific in- stances already mentioned to a generalization about the role of government in a movement that now swept from the major European capitals through pro- vincial France, the German-speaking parts of central Europe, and the Italian peninsula, as well as (more unevenly) Scandinavia, Britain, North America, and Iberia.12But monarchs virtually everywhere were readier than ever to
pay at least lip service to the convergence of potentia and scientia by acting as patrons or protectors, granting royal letters patent (given particularly freely to the provincial French academies),13and looking to the institutions under
their sway for evidence of the kind of usefulness that was appropriate to so- cial and economic circumstances very different from those of the first half of the century. The quickening pace of industry presented the most entic- ing challenge, although it proved to be one to which the system of state- supported academies offered a disappointing response. They could cope well enough with the proffering of advice on mechanical inventions and improve- ments in traditional machinery and on agricultural implements and practices; all these called for a relatively modest level of scientific input and rested on a large existing stock of craft knowledge that changed slowly. But it proved far more difficult to harness the science of the academicians to the under- standing and improvement of the new areas of manufacturing in textiles, chemicals, and metallurgy.
In this respect, the Royal Academy of Turin was the setting for a revealing disappointment. Founded in as a private society (società privata) but
Science and Government
10Sinnerstad, “Astronomy and the First Observatory,” pp..
11For a comment on the possible causes of the decline of Swedish science after the s, see Russell,
“Science on the Fringe of Europe,” pp.–.
12The movement and the circumstances that distinguish it from the earlier development of academies
and societies during the first half of the century are discussed in McClellan, Science Reorganized, pp.–.
13On the academies of provincial France, see Daniel Roche, Le siècle des lumières en province: Académies
bound ever more closely to the Piedmontese throne by its transformation into the Società Reale della Scienze (by Vittorio Amedeo II in ) and then into the Accademia Reale delle Scienze (by Vittorio Amedeo III in ), the Academy was asked, in , to undertake an investigation of the processes of dyeing, in particular on wool.14The request, transmitted by Count Graneri,
the king’s newly appointed chief minister and leading advocate of free trade, stressed the importance of reducing Piedmont’s dependence on foreign mar- kets and rehearsed the benefits that were to be anticipated if only savants would “deign to enter the workshop in order to combine practice with theory, instead of leaving it to artisans.”15The union of patriotic sentiment with a
vision of an economy invigorated by science evoked a ready response from members who, for thirty years since the founding of the società privata, had repeatedly sought an involvement in the technological improvement of their country. For eighteen months, a committee of nine academicians with ap- propriate interests (representing almost half of the Academy’s total resident membership) addressed the task of publishing a comprehensive digest of the art of dyeing and of the legislative and economic context as it affected Pied- mont. The plans were grandiose: a library of books and journals on dyeing, mainly in Italian and French, was assembled, a questionnaire was distributed to manufacturers and artisans involved in all the stages of the production and finishing of woolen goods, and a laboratory was fitted out. The reality, though, fell far short of the high initial expectations. The laboratory was never used, the gathering of information about practices proved far more difficult than Graneri’s initial request had anticipated, and the chemical knowledge that the academicians had at their disposal proved impotent before the complexities of the technology they were seeking to understand and advance.
The large quantity of accumulated notes and draft reports indicates the seriousness with which the inquiry was pursued. But the abrupt cessation of the work in inexorably signaled its failure. At least in the local Piedmon- tese context, the cost of the failure was high. The government’s overriding aim of engaging science in the promotion of the use of locally grown woad as a substitute for imported indigo (the coloring material for the blue military uniform of Piedmont) had been poorly served, and the academicians’ hopes of demonstrating the importance, for the Piedmontese economy, of their en- gagement in the international world of learning had come to nothing.
What occurred in Turin is telling as an example of the late flowering of governmental confidence in an academy as a potential servant of the national
Robert Fox
14Luisa Dolza, “Dyeing in Piedmont in the Late Eighteenth Century,” Archives internationales d’histoire
des sciences, (), –, and Dolza, “The Struggle for Technological Independence: Textiles and
Dyeing in Eighteenth-century Piedmont” (University of Oxford M.Litt. thesis, ), especially chap. , which deals with the academy’s investigation into dyeing. On the history of the Turin Acad- emy, see also Tra Società e Scienza. Anni di Storia dell’Accademia delle Scienze di Torino. Saggi,
interest (manifested most enduringly in Vittorio Amedeo III’s installation of the Academy in a fine seventeenth-century palace in ). However, it also points to the difficulty, in practice, of achieving the union of understanding and utility that was expressed in the Academy’s motto, “veritas et utilitas.” Examples of a similar disparity between aspiration and realization can be found in many other parts of Europe. Nevertheless, what James McClellan III has called the “scientific society movement” of the later eighteenth century con- tinued and in certain cases even prospered.16Several academies with national
status, for example, maintained a significant public function in the editing of almanacs and in the approval of inventions and the assessment of requests for patents and other forms of privilege, and most of them laid implicit claim to an economic and patriotic role by redoubling their efforts in the mounting of prize competitions on applied subjects. But the accumulating record of disappointment in the attempts to apply science, reinforced by the growing indifference of manufacturers, agriculturalists, and men of science toward the prizes and other incentives that the academies offered, inexorably exposed the fragility of the academicians’ utilitarian rhetoric. The greatest challenge to the status of academies, however, arose from the changing nature of the tech- nological innovations that characterized the incipient Industrial Revolution, especially in large machinery and chemical and metallurgical processes.
In Britain, where the impact of the Industrial Revolution was greatest, the governmental structures that might have responded to the new challenge were few and weak. John Theophilus Desaguliers was just one of a number of in- dividual Fellows of the Royal Society who displayed an interest in manufac- turing and the education of artisans almost from the time of his election to the society in .17But the tone of the society remained metropolitan and
aristocratic, and even in the years of its intellectual reinvigoration under the long presidency of Sir Joseph Banks (–), the concern for industrial technology remained muted. In this respect, the Royal Society of Edinburgh, founded in , was no different,18and only the Society of Arts, from its foun-
dation in London in , offered a national setting in which the interests of manufacturing and commerce could be aired. However, like the local literary and philosophical societies that were established in the industrial North and Midlands in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the Society of Arts fulfilled this role in the absence of any royal or other state recognition, the prefix “Royal” only being added in .19
In continental Europe, the national academies, with their strong traditions
Science and Government
16McClellan, Science Reorganized, pp.–.
17Larry Stewart, The Rise of Public Science: Rhetoric, Technology, and Natural Philosophy in Newtonian
Britain, – (Cambridge University Press, ), especially pp. –.
18Steven Shapin, “Property, Patronage, and the Politics of Science: The Founding of the Royal Society