1. Definition of Popular Culture

Henri Matissse Deux fillettes, fond jaune et rouge (Two Girls in a Yellow and Red Interior) 1947 Barnes Foundation, Merion, PA

There are two main competing traditions that carry out popular cultural studies. Those traditions differ in the periodization of history. The Anglo-Saxon tradition roots its studies of popular culture on industrialization. Peter Burke (1978), Karin Doving (1973), Robert W. Macolmson (1971) belong to that tradition. Whereas, the French tradition’s turning point is the French Revolution. Robert Darton (1985), Michael Mullet (1987) represent the French tradition. Industrialization creates a mass production of both material and cultural objects that reach a broad, however uncertain audience. Whereas, the French Revolution distinguishes between an “Anciėn Régime” mentality and a post-revolutionary one. Therefore, the purpose of understanding popular culture depends on the periodization of history that will influence on the content, the audience, and the language of popular culture studies.

The Anglo-Saxon tradition has generally drawn a relationship between popular culture and social class. Therefore, the traditional definition of popular culture distinguishes between high culture and popular culture. The former is inherent to the learned or upper classes. Whilst, the latter represents the folklore of the lower classes, or lower orders. The Anglo-Saxon tradition draws a distinction between high culture and popular culture. However, scholars such as Peter Burke, Redfield, Barbu, Fiedler, and Raymond Williams argue that popular culture studies the relationship between the learned and the popular classes.[1]

The French tradition of popular culture does not draw a distinction between the learned and ordinary people. On the contrary, the purpose is to discover and understand the mentality of the majority of the people over a long-term period of time, and a region, or culture. The French tradition analyses values, traditions, perceptions, attitudes, symbols, tastes, prejudices, and viewworlds shared by most of the people. The outcome of such approach is that there are certain values, perceptions, and attitudes that transcend both social class, and learned elite dimensions. Therefore, the French tradition dares to talk about “mentalités” of civilizations and societies.



The Marxist and neomarxist tradition argue that popular culture is the appropriation and transformation of the cultural creations of a lower strata by a learned elite. They state that the learned elite of the Enlightenment appropriated songs, ballads, sayings, plays, and stories, that circulated among the lower strata, Moreover, this learned elite transformed the “folklore” for both the high class and the lower strata. The purpose of rescuing “folklore” is for the elite, related to the idea of nationhood, aesthetics, social control, and identity. Another elite’s goal is to impart or impose the elite’s own values, and perceptions of the world upon the lower strata.

Popular culture analyzes the mentality of a certain society, and civilization focusing on the shared beliefs, attitudes, prejudices, experiences, perceptions, and traditions of the majority. The goal of popular culture is to reject the distinction between the learned and the lower orders. On the contrary, to analyze the shared values, traditions, prejudices, attitudes, and perceptions or their own civilization, or society over a long-term period of time.

Department of History

Geogetown University

[1] Bigsby, C. W. E. “The Poliics of Popular Culture”, Cultures I (1973):15-37.

Science, Politics, and Nationhood in Nineteenth Century France

Notre-Dame, une fin d'après-midi (A Glimpse of Notre Dame in the Late Afternoon) 1902 Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY

1- Background


The main goal of this paper is to study the role of popular science in the construction of French nationhood after the 1870s. The aftermath of the Prussian-French War (1871-1872) led to a political and social vacuum in France. Neither loyalists nor republicans agreed on a political project and a possible body politic for France. The third and appealing alternative was the revival of Napoleon’s inheritance. The inability to reach a political and social consensus produced competing public spheres concerned with the definition of French national identity. As well as painters and novelists, science journalists were important social actors of the public sphere. Thus, a group of science journalists led by Gaston Tissandier became part of one of those public spheres arguing that science, politics, and technology were crucial factors in shaping France’s national identity and in encouraging a new public sphere.
A group of science writers blended ideas of science, social matters, and politics into a particular construction of nationhood. The appeal of science to a broad audience encouraged the understanding of nationhood throughout science articles and visual images. In the nineteenth century, the two main French science journals were Cosmos and La Nature. Science journals and science journalists were at their highest point in terms of readership and popularity in the second half of nineteenth century France. Gaston Tissandier, a ballonist and science amateur, started La Nature in 1873. He was the director and chef de redaction of La Nature from 1873 to 1899. La Nature coverage focused on popular science. La Nature’s science writers’ conveyed the idea of nationhood in a particular way. Eventually, those science writers had a peculiar goal in encouraging a particular public sphere that blended politics, popular science, and nationhood. The articles of the science writers of La Nature reflected a notion of nationhood that blended science with politics. Furthermore, the science writers concerns shows the constant and actual concern that France had in refining its national identity, particularly if one takes into account the Economic Union integration process. This paper seeks to unveil the particular idea of nationhood that a group of science writers conveyed to the French people from 1873 to 1914.

2- Review of the Literature

This research proposal focuses on the role of popular science on the construction of France’s national identity. Popular culture is a theoretical concept that illuminates the relationships between science, politics, and ‘nationhood. Along those lines, the fundamental issue is the proper conceptual approach to the study of popular culture. Thus, this section analyzes the historiographical changes of science in popular culture studies. Popular science is understood within the context of popular culture. There have been different approaches to the study of popular culture. Scholars such as Peter Burke introduced the importance of folklore in order to study the daily life of ordinary people. Burke’s main historical sources are songs, crafts, paintings, ballads, stories, and stories, among others. Peter Burke stresses the importance of studying popular culture as opposed to high culture. The former creates and leads to the flourishing of crafts and symbols of ordinary men, while the latter privileges the learned, the cultivated, repression of popular manifestations, and seeks to impose a worldview of culture. No matter how original and large in scope, Burke’s work is; Burke’s limitation is to deal with popular culture as if it were simply a collection of cultural products.
On the same lines, Roger Cooter and Steven Pumfrey encouraged the study of science in popular culture in order to understand the meaning of science for ordinary people, middle-classes, and minorities, such as women and marginal members of society. Science in popular culture was interested in cultural resistance, struggle, and appropriation. Nevertheless, their approach leaves aside the individual agency of ordinary people.
Paolo Rossi, Edgard Siszel, Stephen Pumfrey, Maurice Slawinki, and William Eamon attempt to understand science in popular culture by emphasizing the different roles that science played in the sixteenth century. Rossi, Pumfrey, Slawinki and Zilsel altered the understanding of the Scientific Revolution. For the first time in history, natural philosophers began to take notice of the activities of the artisan’s workshops, and the methodology of craftsmen provided a model for an entirely new experimental approach to the study of nature that culminated in the philosophy of Francis Bacon. They argued that there were changes in the institution, the role, and the social need of “scientists”.[1] Rossi and Zilsel demonstrated how the scientific activity shifted from universities to princely courts, formal urban academies, and organized scientific societies in the sixteenth century. Scientists became courtiers that had to meet the needs and whims of their patrons. These authors analyzed the source of authority in the sixteenth century and the arguments to legitimate scientific endeavors. The drawback of their approach is the scarcity of historical sources written by ordinary people.
William Eamon embraces Rossi and Zilsel’s argument of how craftsmen were active actors in the construction of scientific knowledge. Eamon argued that the relationship between natural philosophers and craftsmen led to the Baconian method. Eamon also argued that the scientific elite denied the craftsmen’s contribution to their new physical understanding of natural phenomena. The scientific elite did not want to make explicit that they were engaged in “pseudoscientific” activities and denied that they had appropriated craftsmen’s traditional knowledge. Eamon argued that both the empiricism and experience of the Baconian method have their origins in craftsmen’s traditional way of solving problems. The “Book of Secrets” illustrated how widespread empiricism and experience were among craftsmen. The “Book of Secrets” had nothing to do with magic, the supernatural, or occultism; on the contrary, it was the emergence of a new genre based on a set of “recipes” that told ordinary people how to solve everyday problems of the sixteenth century. The “Book of Secrets” was written by the urban intelligentsia of diverse social status. The intention of the authors was to acquire fame, and to advertise their recipes as a means of redefining their social status by using science and noble features. They did not confront the social or political organization of the sixteenth century. Therefore, their range of interests was limited, restricted to those arts, which did not come into conflict with aristocratic sensibilities. At the very end, the authors of the “Books of Secrets” did not want to overthrow the social, political, and economic structure of the sixteenth century. They merely sought to find their role within the urban learned elites of the Italian cities of the sixteenth century.
Steven Shapin and Simon Shaeffer analyze science as part of the public sphere by bringing the middle-classes into science studies. They study the ways in which audiences are constructed and transformed in changing historical contexts. Science is perceived as “science as culture”, strongly related to social values, perceptions, and attitudes. Shapin and Schaeffer focus on how educated classes use science because of its relationships with social values, status, and morality. Their works draw relationships between middle and upper-class values and scientific legitimization.
Bruno Latour introduces the anthropological approach to the study of science, studying behaviors and power-relationships of scientists within laboratories. Nevertheless, Latour’s approach is still elitist because the production of science belongs to learned and privileged elite. Moreover, Latour’s approach misses the relationship between science and middle-class men, ordinary people, or even people outside the laboratory.
There is also a historical trend that focuses on micro-histories. Micro-histories in science also pay attention to elites, such as Mario Biagioli’s study of Galileo as a courtier. Biagioli opens the game of science to the courts, the academies, and the universities. However, he extends science to women because they happen to be strong patrons. It is difficult for micro histories to focus entirely on popular behaviors.
Roger Chartier and Robert Darnton argue that popular culture is high culture. They contend that popular culture is the appropriation of popular writings, songs, and texts by the learned elite. Eventually, they deny the existence of popular culture in the absence of texts, codes, and written sources by ordinary people. They assert the importance of intermediaries of popular cultures. Furthermore, collective action and long-term ways of thinking are the means to understanding what ordinary people thought, perceived, and wrote. Chartier and Darnton conclude that the lack of written sources enable historians to understand the individual goals and thoughts of ordinary people. Nevertheless, they assert that reading few historical sources in an imaginative way, allow historians to grasp the collective ways of understanding the world of a society in a long-term period of time.

3- Original Contribution


Following the lines of Robert Darnton who analyzes popular science as a means to achieve social mobility, this proposal attempts to understand the role of popular science in the construction of French nationhood from 1873 to 1914. One chief goal is to study the interplay among politics, popular science, and nationhood. This research posits to understand the “published” idea of nationhood conveyed by La Nature. Moreover, it aims to find the relationships between science and nation. Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities are the starting point to this analysis of the ideas of nation and nationhood, particularly, his essays about print culture, mapping, and museums. How and why is science important to those science writers’ idea of nationhood? How does their idea of nationhood differ from those of others? The purpose of this research is to demonstrate the importance of popular science as an unavoidable means in creating and encouraging a particular idea of modern French nationhood.

4- Research Questions

My research questions, beginning from the general and moving to the specific are as follows: (1) how could popular culture encourage a specific idea of nationhood in which science, technology, and politics intertwine in the construction of a French national identity? (2) Are Benedict Anderson’s propositions about nationalism, print culture, mapping, and museums applicable to La Nature discourse? (3) Taking into account that those French science journalists were explicitly fostering a particular idea of nationhood, which are the debates and main issues that that public sphere perceived as important? (4) And finally, the essential proposition that I intend to test is that one of the many competing ideas of nationhood tied to science was a practical and rational approach to solving political and social differences at end of nineteenth century in France.

5- Primary Source Report

Textually, the focus of my research will be the nationhood narrative that appears in the science journal called La Nature. My criteria for preliminary selection were as follows: Identify a journal that popularized science, identify the publisher and science journalists of the journal; follow the scope of the publication and its commercial success. Such criteria will facilitate the analysis of an emerging new public sphere and nationhood identity.


Bibliography

- Ferguson, Niall, Germany and the Origins of the First World War: New Perspectives The historical Journal, vol. 35, issue 3, 1992, p 725-52.
Anderson, Benedict, Imagined communities: reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism (London: Verso, 1983) Bakhtin, M. M. (Mikhail Mikhailovich), The dialogic imagination (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981) Bakhtin, M. M. (Mikhail Mikhailovich), Rabelais and his world (Bloomington, Ind. : Indiana University Press, 1984) Bigsby, C W, “The Politics of Popular Culture” , Cultures I, 1973: 15-37. Burke, Peter, Popular culture in early modern Europe (New York : Harper & Row, 1978, 1981)

Cooter, Roger, The cultural meaning of popular science : phrenology and the organization of consent in nineteenth-century Britain (Cambridge: New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984)
Cooter, Roger and Stephen Pumfrey “Separate Spheres and Public Places: Reflections on the History of Science Popularization and Science in Popular Culture”, History of Science 32, 1994) : 237-267.

Creager, Angela N.H., Elizabeth A. Lunbeck & Londa Schiebinger, Feminism in twentieth-century science, technology, and medicine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001)

Crossland, Maurice, Popular Science and the Arts: challenges to Cultural authority in France under the Second Empire, British Journal of History of Science, 2001.

Dansette, Adrien, Naissance de la France moderne : le Second Empire (Paris: Hachette, 1976)

Darnton Robert, The Brissot Dossier, French Historical Studies, Vol. 17, No. 1. (Spring, 1991), pp. 191-205.

Darnton, Robert, Sounding the Literary Marketing Prerevolutionary France, Eighteenth-Century Studies, Vol. 17, No. 4, Special Issue: The Printed Word in the Eighteenth Century. (Summer, 1984), pp. 477-492.

Darnton, Robert, The Business of Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the Encyclopedie, 1775-1800, History of Education Quarterly, Vol. 22, No. 1. (Spring, 1982), pp. 89-98.

Darnton, Robert, The Grub Street Stule of Revolution of Revolution: J. P. Brissot, Police Spy, The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 40, No. 3. (Sep., 1968), pp. 301-327.

Darnton, Robert, Mesmerism and the end of the Enlightenment in France (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1968)
Doving, Karin, "Communication, Dissenters, nad Popular Culture in Eighteenth Century Europe" Journal of Popular Culture 7 (1973): 559-568


Eagle Russett, Cynthia, Sexual Science. The Victorian Construction of Womanhood (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1989) Eamon, William, Science and Popular Culture in the Sixteenth Century Italy: The “Professors of Secrets” and their Books, Sixteenth Century Journal, Vol. 16, No. 4. (Winter, 1985), pp. 471-485.

Francis, Demuer, La France du XIXe siecle : 1814-1914 (Paris : Editions du Seuil, 2000)

Furet, Francois, Revolutionary France : 1788-1880 (Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press, 2002)
Golinski, Jan, Science as Public Culture : Chemistry and Enlightenment in Britain, 1760-1820 (Cambridge ; New York : Cambridge University Press, 1992)

Golinski, Jan, Science as public culture : chemistry and enlightenment in Britain, 1760- 1820 (Cambridge ; New York : Cambridge University Press, 1992)

Habermas, Jürgen, The structural transformation of the public sphere : an inquiry into a category of bourgeois society (Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, 1989)


Layton, David, Diction and Dictionaries in the Diffusio of Scientific Knowledge: An . Aspect of History of the Popularization of Science in Great Britain, British Journal for th eHistory of Science 2, 1965, : 221-234.

Lightman, Bernard, The Visual Theology of Victorian Popularizers of Science. From Reverent Eye to Chemical Retina, Isis, Vol. 91, No. 4. (Dec., 2000), pp. 651-680

Lynn K. Nyhart and Thomas Broman, Science and Civil Society, Osiris, 2002.

Lynn, Michael R., Divining the Enlightenment: Public Opinion and Popular Science in the Old Regime France, Isis, Vol. 92, No. 1. (Mar., 2001), pp. 34-54.

Lynn, Michael R., Enlightenment in the Public Sphere: The Musee de Monsieur and_Scientific Culture in Late-Eighteenth-Century Paris, in Eighteenth-Century Studies, Vol. 32, No. 4, Sites and Margins of the Public Sphere. (Summer, 1999), pp. 463-476.
Macolmson, Robert, Popular Culture and Social Change “Journal of Popular Culture 4, 1971): 1039-1044.

Martinez, Eduardo, Flores, Jorge, La popularización de la ciencia y la tecnología: reflexiones básicas, (México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1997)

Mullet, Michael, Popular Culture and Popular Protest in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (NY: Croom Helm, 1987)
Pumfrey, Stephen, Paolo L. Rossi, and Maurice Slawinski, Science, culture, and popular belief in Renaissance Europe, (Manchester ; New York : Manchester University Press, 1991) Rossi, Paolo, The birth of modern science (Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishers, 2001)
Schaffer, Simon, Natural Philosophy and Public Spectacle in the Eighteenth Century”, History of Science, 21, 1983): 1-43

Schiebinger, Londa, The mind has no sex? : women in the origins of modern science, (Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1989)


Schiebinger, Londa, Nature's body: gender in the making of modern science, (Boston : Beacon Press, 1993)
Schnechner, Sara, Comets, Popular Culture, and the Birth of Modern Cosmology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997)

Shteir, Ann B. Gender and “Modern” Botany in Victorian England, Osiris, 2nd Series, Vol. 12, Women, Gender, and Science: New Directions. (1997), pp. 29-38.

Shteir, Ann B. Botanical Dialogues: Maria Jacson and Women’s Popular Science Writing in England, Eighteenth-Century Studies, Vol. 23, No. 3. (Spring, 1990), pp. 301-317.

Secord, James A., Nature’s Fancy: Charles Darwin and the Breeding of Pigeons. Isis, Vol. 72, No. 2. (Jun., 1981), pp. 162-186.

Seidman, Steven Jürgen Habermas on society and politics : a reader (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989)

Tombs, Robert, France, 1814-1914 (London: New York : Longman, 1996)

Topham, Jonathan R., “Beyond the “Common Context”: The Production and Reading of the Bridgewater Treatises. Isis, Vol. 89, No. 2. (Jun., 1998), pp. 233-262.

Stuart S. Blume, Perspectives in the sociology of science (Chichester: New York : Wiley, 1977)

[1] The use of scientist for the eighteenth is an anachronysm that Rossi and Silzel should pay attention to by redefining his concept of scientist.

The Popularization of Science in XIXth France: Science and the Arts

Henri Matisse Flowers in a Pitcher 1906 Barnes Foundation Merion PA

Maurice Crossland’s article about popularization of science in nineteenth century France: Science and the Arts: challenges to authority in France under the Second Empire.

Scholars have meticulously studied the cultural and social dimensions of science of the Victorian period. Maurice Crossland’s article about science and the arts under the Second Empire is an important contribution to the popularization of science in France because it readers enables to draw comparisons between the popularization of science on both sides of the English Channel. Crossland draws similarities among science journalists, Impressionists, and “realist” novelists. Crossland argues that science writers carved a new full-time occupation to which they attached a counter-culture that threatened the authority of official science embodied in the Académie des Sciences. Their counter-culture consisted on translating technical science into more understandable language for a broad public interested in science. Moreover, science popularizers undermined the authority of the Académie des Sciences because they knew they had no chances to become members of the prestigious institution. Crossland follows the careers of three popularizers of science under the Second Empire and brings to light the way they carved out a full-time occupation; they were Frederic Moigno (1804-1884), Meunir (1817-1903), and Louis Figuier (1819-1894). The Academy was an easy target and at the same time to legitimate their role as science writers. Moreover, they strengthened solidarity ties that turned them into a self-conscious group who would threaten the authority of “official science”. Crossland also analyses the aims of science writers and their counter-culture. He stresses the similarities with other innovative movements: Impressionists and science fiction writer, particularly the figure of Jules Verne.

Crossland studies three science writers’ success because their articles, journals, and books were widely read by a broad audience. Their common feature is that the three of them worked as science correspondents for La Presse. Crossland argues that working as a science journalist in La Presse served as an apprenticeship for developing science writing as a pioneering occupation in France. The first science correspondent of La Presse was Frederic Moigno (1804-1884). He was a Jesuit mathematician that had to quit the order. In the need to make ends meet, he used his math knowledge to find a new job. He worked as a journalist at L’ Epoque until he was hired as science correspondent of La Presse from 1848 to 1851. Finally, he became an editor of the weekly science journal Cosmos. On the same lines, Victor Meunir (1817-1903) was a clerk who attended the science courses of Musée d’ Histoire Naturelle and Jacques Arago’s lectures too. He supported left wing politics. He replaced Moigno as a science correspondent of Le Presse from 1851 to 1855. Later, he founded his own journal named L’ Amis des sciences. Louis Figuier (1819-1894) took the place of Meunir post as science journalist in 1857. Figuier had been a professor at the School of Pharmacy at Montpellier and suffered from the academicians’ public humiliation. He quit his position at the university and started writing biographies of chemists. In 1857, Figuier launched his own journal called L’ Anee Scientific e Industrielle that became successful commercial enterprise in 1864. Moigno, Meunier, and Figuier were pioneers in fashioning a new role for science writers whose main features were to write a about science and to have a critical approach towards official science. Moreover, they gave shape to what a science writer was; a full-time occupation of which they could make ends meet.

Crossland demonstrates that the science writers developed both a critical outlook towards the Académie of Science and solidarity ties. Crossland gives strong evidence of science writers’ role as critics. Science writers started reporting the sessions of the Comtes Rendus - 1835 - and the meetings of the Académie. Unsatisfied with the reports of the Académie, their science writer’s task turned into an explicit criticism toward individuals or theories supported by the national body of science. This critical stand increased under the elitist and authoritarian Second Empire. For example, Figuier defended Pouchet and wrote that Pasteur was an uncritical scientist who preferred to be pampered and protected by the Academy. Popularization of science began in the press and the science writer’s aim was to destroy prejudices and attack false opinions. Their role, however, went beyond instruction and turned into criticism of the prestigious Académie of Sciences. Crossland draws an interesting parallelism in the method of publishing among science writers, artists, and novelists. Figuier, Moigno, Meunier, as well as Emile Zola, Alexander Dumas, Jorge Sand and Jules Verne, first published their works in newspapers and journals, lately they would become books. However, Crossland falters by asserting that this critical stance is evidence of solidarity ties. Moreover, the evidence of the solidarity ties grown out of the practice of a shared occupation is weak. Crossland asserts the science journalist’s camaraderie due to formal organizations and the sense of camaraderie. In 1857, Figuer founded the Cercle de la Presse Scientifique together with other two science journalists nevertheless they did not keep written records of their meetings. Two fellow science journalists: Lecouturier (Le Pays) and Felix Foubaud (L’Illustration). The three shared the goal of strengthening the links between science journalism and contributing to the progress of science. On the same lines the evidence for the feeling of solidarity are difficult to trace. Crossland asserts that the tribute that Figuier paid tribute to Moigno and Berthoud as the pioneers of science popularization is good evidence of their feelings of solidarity. I contend if undermining the authority of the Académie is evidence of solidarity ties.

Crossland isolates these groups as self-conscious. Furthermore, they build up a counter-culture that clashed with the official culture. Science writers’ goals were to write and sell their works about science to a broad public rather than to become members of the Académie. They were conscious of their role of outsiders, particularly Figuier who failed at his attempt to argue against a scientific theory held by the Académie. Freedom and independence from the Academy made up for the two main features of their counter-culture. Moreover, their identity was grounded on their popularity. Freedom was further more important than political stances. Therefore, their critical stance against the Académie led them to develop their counter-culture. Meunier was a socialist. Figuier backed Louis Napoleon Empire. Moigno preferred a Christian perspective of science. However, the Académie’s defined two strategies to counterbalance the popularity of science writer’s: academicians popularized science and the Academy organized public lectures named Soirées de la Sorbonne. Eventually, their articles, journals and books sold out; ordinary people accepted uncritically their writings. They could make a living out of science journalism in France.

Crossland’s main contribution is the similarities he finds among science writers, the Impressionist movement, and “realist” novelists. Crossland says that novelists, artists, and science writers shared lots of common places where they debated about politics, economics, art, science, literature and so on. Crossland focuses on the Impressionist movement and the figure of Jules Verne. The Académie des Beaux Arts rejected paintings that did not followed certain artistic standards. The Académie des Beaux Arts refused to exhibit Manet, Pissaro, Sisley, and Degas’ paintings. To counteract that, Louis Napoleon acted as a mediator between the academicians and the refusées and he requested the opening of a Salon des Refusés in 1863. In response, Manet suggested an Anti-salon in 1873. They refused to exhibit their painting in the Salon des Refusés because they had organized themselves under the name of Impressionists and had their own exhibition called Anti-Salon. Despite this, the Impressionists as well as the science writers undermined the official authority. They believed in their work and they turned to the public to legitimate their work rather to the traditional authorities. What is more, both artists and science writer were eager to relate to the public. They had found a new source of legitimacy. Despite the fact that there were similarities with novelists, Crossland argues that novelist had more independence than artists or science writers. Crossland emphasizes the figures of Emile Zola and Jules Verne despite the differences between them. Emile Zola was a strong critic of different kind of authorities: art, military, politics, and literature. Zola wrote articles supporting Manet’s works of art and also Cézanne’s. On different lines, Jules Verne (1828-1903) is important in Crossland’s eyes because of his ability to blend literature and science. Verne wrote science fiction. He was aware that his work would not be considered by the Académie. On the contrary, Zola presented his candidacy to the Academy, however he was always rejected. Zola’s case demonstrates that the Académise were still an important source of national recognition. Crossland highlights Verne’s coming across with Jacques Arago in 1850. He also asserts that Verne was a popularizer of science even if he did not intended to be so. Finally, Crossland asserts that Verne, the Impressionist, and science writers had in common to publish their first articles in newspapers and to have a strong belief that science led to progress. Despite all the political and purpose difference among the three groups, Crossland argues that for all of them science was a model to follow. Science led to progress; therefore ordinary people should be aware of science’s potential so as to improve their living standards and situation. The nineteenth century strongly believed that science equaled progress. Science hence became a symbol of civilization, progress, improvement, and future. Despite the opposition of science writers towards official science, their work could not be undermined because they popularized science as civilization and order.

Crossland’s science-writers distinguished from their English counterparts because they made a living out of their writings in the press and in print. A broad audience both read and was marveled by both English and French science writers. Furthermore, Crosland argues that science writes were a self-conscious group who developed solidarity ties and also undermined the scientific official culture. Crossland, hence argues that science writers moved forward into creating their own counter-culture which part of it was shared with novelists and artists. Their counter-culture opposed official science. Science writers found their legitimacy on its broad audience. On the contrary, official science’s legitimacy was grounded on their respective science communities and on the Académies’s recognition. Eventually, Crossland’s main contribution is to show the intermingling among science writers, Impressionists, and novelists in France’s Second Empire. However, he does not convey the social atmosphere of French society: the importance of meeting in cafes, literary circles, social gatherings, or artistic exhibitions. Crossland mentions how Arago could have influence Verne, however their meeting and influencing each other is not the important issue to convey. Humanistic entertainment flowed France’s intellectual life. Intellectual life was not divided into scientific division; on the contrary novelist feed and learns from science writers and artists in a common ground such a café or a party. Sometimes, intellectual events get mixed with social events; a tradition that goes back to the salons of the seventeenth century. Rather than breaking up novelists, Impressionists from science writers, Crossland could have portrayed them as an intellectual counter-culture devoted to different interests. On the other hand, he makes a sharp distinction between official-culture and counter-culture. Nevertheless, he could have related a growing counter-culture and the politics of the Second Empire. The Seconde Empire created new images and representations of science, art, government, and science. If the Académie was state-sponsored, what was the academician’s purpose: change, innovate, or go back to previous artistic movements? What are the relationships with Louis Napoleon both conservative but also liberal government? Why would Louis Napoleon become a broker between the Académie des Beaux Arts and the Impressionists? Crossland misses the values and norms of science of both the intellectual life and the government. What were science writers, novelists, and Impressionists reaction to? Crossland asserts that most of them were undermining the authority of the National Institutes. However, the National institutes were state-sponsored so the link among state, academic bodies and new artistic and scientific movements deserves further research.

Georgetown University
Department of History

What are the salient features of the popularization of science in Great Britain?

Henri Matisse Two Figures Reclining in a Landscape 1921 Barnes Foundation

Why is it so difficult to find the salient features of the popularization of science in nineteenth century Great Britain? There is no question that there was a growing appeal and fascination about science all over the social spectrum in Britain. The popularization of science had a strong religious dimension that aimed to convey “right” morality and ethics to ordinary people. Hence, the message was that science was providential and God-ordained. Furthermore, the religious dimension of the popularization of science was one strategy to exercise social control upon society. Finally, the popularization of science sought to legitimate scientific disciplines. This essay aims to show the salient features of the popularization of science in the nineteenth century in Great Britain through the following five-case studies: Layton’s specialized and general dictionaries, Lightman’s popularizes of natural theology, Cooter’s popularization of phrenology, Shaffer’s public spectacles, and Topham’s Bridgewater Treatesis.

The five case-studies of popularization of science are organized according to the author’s methodology and definitions of popular science, academic science, and popularization of science. In their respective studies, David Layton (1965), Bernard Lightman (2000), and Roger Cooter (1984) assert that there are two distinct spheres in science: popular science and academic science. Their goal is to analyze the popularization of science within popular culture. Despite the fact that Simon Shaffer (1983) does not assert the existence of such two spheres in science, he takes it for granted when he argues that public lectures served two purposes. On the one hand, public lectures instructed and conveyed a moral message to a popular audience. On the other hand, public lectures amused the British upper-classes. However, Shaffer’s study of the production of science as a performance is much more sophisticated because his goal is to find the values and norms those scientists, the upper-classes and the ruling class shared. Finally, Jonathan R. Topham (1998) studies the entire social actor involved in the communication circuit of the Bridgewater Treatises. In opposition to Layton, Lightman, and Cooter, Topham argue that it is impossible to distinguish popular culture from high culture. Moreover, he asserts that popular culture is high-culture. Topham solves the dichotomy between popular culture and academic culture by focusing on all the actors involved in the communication circuit.

David Lightman’s article on “Diction and Dictionaries in the Diffusion of Scientific Knowledge” shows the growing literacy rates in eighteenth century England. Moreover, Lightman builds the grounds for the “marvelous” interest on science and its popularization in the following century. Layton argues that specialized and general dictionaries played a crucial role in the dissemination of scientific knowledge in eighteenth century England - a time when scientific knowledge was accessible to only a few and when classical education prevailed. Moreover, Layton asserts that these dictionaries opened the window to self-education for persons of humble origins. Layton argues that the role of dictionaries changed over time. Republished in 1706, “The New World of Words’ ” was a general dictionary written by a non-scientist named Edward Phillips. The main role of the “The New World of Words” was to instruct and compile a definite code of scientific knowledge. The “Lexicon Technicum” was a general scientific dictionary published in 1704. Finally, the “Encyclopaedia” was a work of reference whose goal was to lay the authority and legitimate certain scientific ideas and disciplines. These dictionaries explained in non-technical language Newtonian mechanics, mathematics, astronomy, botany, and medicine. Layton’s aim is to study the popularization of science throughout the spread of general and specialized dictionaries. However, his definition of popularization – “as the existence of a reading public interested in science”[1] - does not match with the studies of his dictionaries. He does not explore the thoughts, values, norms, and views of ordinary people. Finally, Layton remains focused on members of the elite: those who wrote the dictionaries.

Along the same lines, Bernard Lightman analyzes how both natural theology and chemical retina were popularized in nineteenth century Great Britain. Following, the careers of three popularizes of natural theology: J. G. Wood, Richard Proctor and Agnes Clerke. Their articles of natural theology, in which science went together with religion, were the strategy to reach a broad audience. Lightman argues that those three popularizes of science transformed natural theology tradition by using mass visual culture and by ignoring the meanings that their audiences gave to their sermon-like lectures. Lightman’s important contribution is that he articulates the relationship between natural theology and religion. Lightman purports to analyze popular culture; however he fails to do so. For example, Lightman presents Agnes Clarke as a popularizer of science; however she was part of the scientific establishment. She became an honorary member of the Royal Astronomic Academy in 1903. Agnes Clerke was useful to the astronomers and Royal Astronomy’s interests because she popularized the astronomy they wanted to be conveyed to ordinary people. On the other hand, Lightman does not provide a definition of popularization of science. What does he mean by the use of that term? His idea of both “popularization” and “science” are unclear and diffuse. Lightman believes that by the means of depicting the spectacles and by the use of mass visual culture as a strategy to reach the popular audience, he is able to reach the cultural and social implications of the natural theology of ordinary people. Finally, Lightman’s study focuses on the intermediaries of science, rather than on ordinary people or the popular audience.

Building upon Layton and Lighman, Roger Cooter draws the difference between popular science and academic science as separate spheres of science. Cooter prefers to analyze the cultural and social meanings of phrenology in popular culture. In contrast, in academic science, phrenology became a vehicle of liberal ideology that led to major reforms in criminology, education, the treatment of the insane in the Anglo-Saxon world. His narrative is not easy to follow. His attempts to define concepts and draw ideas from outside of the Anglo-Saxon tradition make his English awkward to read. However, Cooter’s prosopographical study of phrenology is superb. He distinguishes phrenologists from antiphrenologists with the following categories: age, prestige, power, income, religion, and identity. Cooter asserts that phrenologists were in their forties, lacked sufficient power or prestige within academia, did not belong to the established Church, and had a sense of “social worth”.[2] Nevertheless, they were neither political nor economic radicals, they were professionals trying to legitimate a new discipline and struggling to find a place within academia. Cooter faces the same problem as Lightman: their concept of popular culture is high-culture. Cooter explains how phrenology moved from academic social circles to popular audiences in the middle of the nineteenth century. Once phrenology entered the realm of the popular audience, scientists regret its popularization. Because the use of phrenology by a popular audience automatically makes it loose status in the eyes of academic science. What is more, phrenology becomes vulgar once in the hands of a popular audience. Moreover, antiphrenologist lamented the degeneration of a discipline rooted on physiology and anatomy. Cooter carries on an excellent study of the social and cultural meanings of phrenology focusing on both scientist and its intermediaries. He has difficulties of understanding the codes, texts, meanings, and significance of phrenology for ordinary people.

Simon Shaffer writes a short masterpiece about the importance of the public spectacle in the production and legitimatization of experimental natural philosophy in the eighteenth century in England. He deploys rigorous definitions of audience, rhetoric, scientific production, and natural philosophy. The most interesting piece of the article is his explanation of the significance of public spectacles, both due to its educational role and its role of turning into a theatre for the upper-classes. Shaffer thoroughly unveils values and accepted social conventions in the form of “powers of matter”, the sublime, the aesthetics of the sublime and the beautiful, and the epistemology of controlled experience. Natural philosophers as well as the educated and wealthy English society shared the above mentioned values and norms. Shaffer highlights why the public spectacles were so important to legitimate experimental natural philosophy. Moreover, Shaffer argues that experimental natural philosophy’s legitimacy was based on norms and values of the eighteenth century English gentlemanly society.


Jonathan Topham highlights the significance of the popularization of Bridgewater Treatesis in the 1930s in England. Topham contends Robert M. Young’s “common intellectual context”[3]. Young argues that at the beginning of the nineteenth century, British intelligentsia shared a homogenous intellectual context due to the broad circulation of literature books and a strong belief on natural theology. In opposition to Young, Topham argues that the Bridgewater Treatesis had multiple meanings rather than a homogenous interpretation. Each reader invested its own meaning to the Treatesis, and thus he studies the different actors of the communication circle of the production of books. His goal is to disclose how those authors, publishers, booksellers, bookbinders, printers, and readers influenced the readership. Topham makes a subtle distinction among readers: gentlemen of science, middle-class domesticity, the public arena, and radical artists.

Jonathan R. Topham (1998) asserts the need to study the whole range of social actors of the communication circle to understand the popularization of science. Lets start with the authors of the Bridgewater Treatesis. The authors of the Bridgewater Treatesis did not have a clear purpose. On the contrary, an ambiguity regarding the author’s purpose, the content, the intention, the audience, and the genre was an outstanding feature of the Bridgewater Treatesis. The Treatesis’ genre did not fit into a traditional one; it was reviewed both by religious and specialist journalists. In addition, the readership was wide. The readership varied from experts to lay people. Neither were the Treatesis intended for a particular audience which could vary from Oxford educated men to artisans. The unclear strategy of the authors widened its readership.

The following three paragraphs will analyze the publishers, printers, and booksellers’ purposes with regard to the price, format, and content of the Bridgewater Treatesis. The publishers’ had control over the choice of the material form and upon the purpose of the Treatesis. The publisher's main purpose was to dignify the Treatesis. The authors of the Bridgewater looked for the best publishers in London. The first publisher was John Murray who offered a better commercial offer in comparison to Longman. Murray’s presented them as a new genre called popular science. On the contrary, Pickering, who published the second edition, had a clear-cut commercial purpose. Therefore, the Bridgewater Treatesis had an expensive price and were presented as theological works. Pickering’s buyers were wealthy and educated: the aristocracy, the gentry, and the upper-classes. Topham argues that despite the publisher’s purposes, the Treatesis turned into a commercial success because they were sold and read by a wide audience.

Printers, booksellers and bookbinders. The printers played a key role because Whittingham provided credit to Pickering. Moreover, both printer and publisher agreed on high-quality typography and were against a cheap edition of the Treatises. Nevertheless, as the audience broadened, they had no alternative but to sell a cheap edition. The booksellers were retailers. Pickering sold the Treatesis to antiquaries, bibliophiles, and to buyers of the country-market. The commercial success of the Treatesis empowered Pickering. Finally, bookbinders chose the presentation of the publication: the coloring, cotton-cloth, and the leader binding. The bookbinding tells us about the wealth of the readers rather than the durability of the books.

Topham divides the readership into four dimensions: gentlemen of science, socialites, middle-class domesticity, and radical artists. Each group invested a particular meaning and meaning to the Bridgewater Treatises that led to competing ideas of nature and the place of science.

Topham’s goal is to recreate the social world of the readers. His main historical sources are reviews, conversations, sermons, lectures, and addresses. The gentlemen of science read the Treatesis for the sake of maintaining their reputation as scientific experts. Topham focuses on Buckland’s geology. He argues that Buckland fought for his reputation as an author creating expectation, spreading rumors, carrying on intimate conversations, and writing reviews about the future publication of this geology.

It became fashionable to read the Bridgewater Treatesis because their role was to preserve the existence of a select readership. It was a way to reject the fact that ordinary people were interested in reading the Treatesis. Another important role of the fashionable society was to create a public opinion after "soires", "converzationes", and dinner parties. Buckland’s geology also provided a topic of conversation not only within the heart of middle-class domesticity, but also between young men and women. Buckland’s science was morally safe; moreover it highlighted the importance of sublime and wonders.

Both geologists and radical artists threatened the cultural and social authority of the arts and scientific academic bodies. Gentlemen of science consolidated their cultural authority through the British Association. The religious tendency of Buckland’s geology led to a conflict with the British Association. The conflict became a public spectacle. Topham argues that the public spectacle between the geologists and the British Association demonstrate how books turn into contested objects. Topham gives evidence of the multiple meanings given to the Treatesis. Artisans undermined gentlemen’s scientific authority because they had a materialist understanding of science. At the same time, gentlemen of science hold to the idea of providential nature of science. Carlileans, Owenites, and Chartists shared the antireligious end of science.

Layton, Lightman, and Cooter’s flaw is their belief in the split between popular culture and high-culture. I argue that popular culture is high culture because of the impossibility of finding texts, historical sources, and codes that tell us what ordinary people thought. The three scholars study popular culture focusing on intermediaries who devoted part of their lives to preaching, instructing, and publicizing science. However, those intermediaries do not tell us about the meaning that ordinary people gave to science. What is more, those intermediaries were literate and were even recognized members of scientific circles. The attempt to study the cultural and social meanings of science upon ordinary people is worthwhile and necessary. However, I contend with the methodology and the historical sources to reach that goal. Shaffer has a much more sophisticated analysis of the historical sources. He concentrates on values shared by both natural scientists and gentlemanly society: sublime, beauty, wonder, spectacle, and aesthetics are the main characters of the scientific stage. Shaffer’s contribution is to define scientific production as spectacle. Thus, he questions the authority of certain disciplines and shows their strategies to become legitimate fields of study. Topham broadens the actors and its purposes within the popularization of science. Topham claims that radical artists and scriptural geologists threatened and undermined the scientific authority of English gentlemen of science. Morrell and Thrackray argue that the gentleman of science’s central ideology was an emphasis on the relationship between science and religion. At the same time, Chartists, Carlileans, Owenists, and scriptural geologists challenged that view of science. The former ones supported a materialists and non-religious worldview of science. The latter conveyed a religious understanding of geology. The conclusion is that the concept of science had different meanings depending on who read it.

The readership interested in science broadened. Moreover, there were groups – dictionary authors, science popularizers, phrenologists, and scriptural geologists – that both popularized science and even challenged the place of science. Science had become marvelous, beautiful, and mysterious in the eyes of both upper-middle classes and ordinary people. In addition, the religious dimension of science becomes more important. The English gentlemen of science related science to a providential idea of religion. On the contrary, radical artists developed a materialist and non-religious view of science. The popularizers of natural theology – J. G. Wood, Richard Proctor and Clerke – also conveyed a moral and religious message. Finally, the popularization of science sought to legitimate scientific disciplines. Phrenologists fiercely fought to legitimate their new field. Nineteenth century Britain marveled at scientific spectacles and discoveries. The unsolved problem is which was the best way to explain and interpret science popularization; does academic culture belong to a distinct sphere from popular science? Is the communication circuit an interesting approach to understand the popularization of science? Are there relationships that link academic science to popular science? Where intermediaries of science should be placed?

Georgetown University
Department of History
[1] David Layton, “Diction and Dictionaries in the Diffusion of Scientific Knowledge” , British Journal for History of Science, 77 (September, 1965): 226.
[2] David Lightman, “The Visual Theology of Victorian Popuarizers of Science: From Reverent Eye to Chemical Retina”, Isis, 91, No 4 (Dec., 2000): 679
[3] Jonatham Topham,”Beyond the “Common Context”: The Production and reading of Bridgewater Treatesis”, Isis, Vol. 89, no 2 (June, 1998): 234

An Example of the Chemistry Community and the Construction of Public Sphere

Henri Matisse Robe violette et Anemones 1937 Cone Collection, Baltimore Museum of Art

Taking Jan Golinski’s work as the primary example, explain what this group of historians means when it refers to “science as public culture”. Pay particular attention to how this group of historians defines the public.


This paper explores the relationship between the development of science in the Eighteenth Century and its audience. Sociological approaches to the history of science emphasize the fact that local contexts and history define the outcome of the cognitive content of certain scientific disciplines. Golinski’s analysis of the social shaping of chemistry is an excellent starting point to study how social values, behaviors, education, and social status of the audience shaped other disciplines in the eighteenth century. The following paragraphs explore who was the audience or the public culture of the divining rod, and women’s popular science writing in England.
Jan Golinski argues that particular communities that supported British chemists shaped the ways research was conducted and findings were presented. Moreover, Golinski demonstrates the differences between the Scottish and the British communities that supported chemistry. In Scotland, chemists were accepted because of the importance of chemistry to technology and regional identity. In Britain, chemists won their acceptance by supporting a political, social, and economic order of the Eighteenth Century. Eventually, Golinski asserts that social values, political and social concerns of the audiences shaped chemistry’s cognitive content. Moreover, Golinski illustrates how science adjusted to the shifting composition and value-system of its audience. As the audiences changed its social components, the discourse and the cognitive content of chemistry shifted to conform the new audiences.
Golinski uses the sophisticated term of public culture to refer to his audience. His definition of public culture is rooted on Jürgen Habermas’s definition of the “public culture” as an arena for political discourse that is not under immediate control of the state. The existence of public culture allows redefinitions of political, economic, and social values and behaviors within a historical and regional context so as to gradually reform or abruptly change its status quo. Joseph Priestly embodies the active civic role for chemistry, a moral dimension to the science and the democratic diffusion of socially useful research by egalitarian cadres of practitioners. However, the public culture that supported the chemistry community shifted from having an active role related to political reform in the 1790s to a passive one motivated by economic interests in the 1810s. In the 1810s, the public chemistry deployed the discoveries of great men to a more passive audience in ways that underscored social, political, and theological conservatism. The main institution was the Royal Academy and its main practitioner was Humphry Davy. The new passive audience founded Davy’s chemical scientific pursuits by becoming his patrons because his chemistry did not threaten the social, political, and economic order of the 1810s.
Michael Lynn studies the changing public culture that supported the legitimacy and social recognition of the divining rod during the Enlightenment in France. In the 1690s, the diving rod’s practical use was to find minerals or water, as well as, criminals, especially murderers. In the Seventeenth Century the divining rod’s practice attracted a large audience. Theologians, doctors, physicians, natural philosophers and even astrologers had their own opinion about the cultural meaning and the utility of the divining rod. Later in the 1770s and the 1780s, the divining rod captured the imagination of the French again but from a more conservative perspective. The battle over the divining rod focused on where authority lay. The education and social status of the witness determined the validity of the divining rod.
Ann B. Shteir argues that the audience for women’s popular science writing in England was children. Shteir focuses on Maria Jackson’s writings on popular science. Shteir demonstrates that women cultivated a market for popular botanic books from the 1790 to the 1840. Maria Jackson had scientific interests but she had to leave them aside to conform to the social rules of British society in the Nineteenth Century. Jackson discovered that popular botanic book-writing was one of the few ways women could participate in scientific discourse. However, it was bounded by the literary conventions of social and political restraints. That is to say, the role of women in science writing was restricted. So was her audience. Jackson was expected to write mainly for children, and she thus fulfilled the expectations of her society.
The chemistry community in Britain and Scotland, the divining rod in France, and women’s popular science writing in England, were shaped by the value-system of their audiences. Golinski, Lynn, and Shteir’s purpose is to illustrate the historicity of the audiences. The audiences of the Enlightenment period were critical and were engaged in social, political, and economic reform. Therefore, such active audiences led to a creative and audacious science. As the counterrevolutionary political movements settled in the 1810s, the audiences did not want neither political nor social change. The main goal of the passive audiences was to support the economic and technological purposes of science. The relationship between an audience’s political, social and economic concerns and the shaping of scientific knowledge is excellently articulated by Golinski, Shteir and Lynn. Their stress on the local construction of scientific knowledge is superb. However, their approach ignores the cognitive content of the various disciplines because of the over determination of history upon scientific knowledge. The three scholars forget to show the different ways of how such a local construction of scientific knowledge turns into “universal” scientific knowledge. The relationship between the local construction of science and its introduction into mainstream scientific knowledge remains unexplored.


Georgetown University
Department of History

Problems in the definition of public sphere: Jürgen Habermas’s definition of Public Sphere.

Henri Matisse Le Rifain assis (Seated Riffian) Late 1912 or early 1913 Barnes Foundation, Merion, PA

Jürgen Habermas argues that the definition of public sphere is a social and historical concept that changes its form depending on the economic, political, and social structure it belongs to. The public sphere is part of civil society defined as realm of commodity exchange and social labor governed by its laws. Habermas’s main concern is to define the bourgeois public sphere that emerges in the eighteenth century in Europe. The bourgeois public sphere is the coming together of private persons as a public to discuss political issues. Habermas asserts that the bourgeois public sphere is entirely detached from the state because their power lies on the market rather than on politics. The independence of the bourgeois public sphere relies on a commercial capitalist economy that emancipates them from political power, state rules and the law. This economic independence leads them to challenge the laws of the state throughout a rational-critical polite discourse. Salons and literary societies are the new institutions of the bourgeois public sphere where the bourgeoisie discusses and challenges the old economic and political order. Habermas contends that the bourgeois society of the eighteenth century undermines its old rulers and takes over them by means of the market and the use of reason. Habermas agrees with Marx and Hegel that the emerging bourgeoisie is conscious of the political role of the public sphere as an ideology to impose their own interest to the whole people. The bourgeoisie will impose their own laws throughout a rational-critical debate, such as the enforcement of property rights and family structure. Eventually, Habermas asserts that the public sphere is the organizational principle of the bourgeoisie.

Habermas studies the changes of the public sphere as a part of civil society over time. He traces the public sphere’s changes following economic, linguistic, and political criteria. He particularly emphasizes the capitalist system and the linguistic use of the categories of both private and public. Habermas’s different forms of public sphere root on the early, conservative capitalist system, mercantilism, commercial capitalism, liberal capitalism, and monopolized capitalism. Habermas’s analysis of the relationship between public and private lead him to conceptualize the different forms of public sphere and allows him to define the bourgeois public sphere of the eighteenth century. The classical conception of public is embedded in the polis. At the same time, the oikos or the household was private. The Middle Ages is a puzzling historical period in which the Roman Law could was quite detached of what actually happened either in fiefs of manorial lands. The public sphere’s name is “res publica”. The most important feature of feudalism was the lack of distinction between public and private. The modern state allows the emergence of a public sphere detached from the state. The modern state conceives the conformation of a bourgeois public sphere whose aim is to impose its own interests by means of universal laws. Therefore, the bourgeoisie needs to convince the political structure to make such changes as if they were for the sake of the people rather than for the bourgeoisie social class’ interests. Habermas studies the decomposition of the bourgeois public sphere at the end of the nineteenth century along with the emergence of a monopolistic capitalism. This new fashion of capitalism gives importance to global companies and leaves aside individual profit-makers. Hence, the political function of the bourgeois public sphere fades away and becomes insignificant. Its social composition changes, the old eighteenth century bourgeois society recognizes and strengthens its ties with the state. Hence, the political function of the public sphere transforms into publicity, consumption, and marketing.


They way he characterizes the definition of bourgeois public sphere is problematic. Two problems arise from his definition. First, Habermas’s accurate definition of bourgeois public sphere is astounding. How can a historical category become so defined and constant? His definition of bourgeois public sphere detaches economics from economics. He assumes that the commercial capitalist system influences on the political structures. However, his transition from economics to politics is as sophisticates so as to use the bourgeois public sphere as a link between both. The problem is that his definition of bourgeois public sphere perpetuates the detachment between economics and politics. He argues that the bourgeois public sphere is detached from politics. However, Habermas takes for granted by what means did the bourgeoisie achieve its economic wealth How could that bourgeoisie emerge without a weakness of the ruling political and economic structures. Habermas argues that the capitalist system is determining the political and the structures of the eighteenth century. Second, Habermas gives a short account of the exclusion of women from the bourgeois public sphere. However, he does not focus on the consequences of their exclusion on the formation of a new public sphere, political structure, and capitalist dynamic. Despite his acknowledging that the bourgeois public sphere was ideological, he does not relate the bourgeois ideology with the rational-polite discourse.




Why is the bourgeois public sphere important for studying the popularization of science? Science becomes one of the most fashionable and appealing issues within the bourgeois public sphere. One of the main concerns of the eighteenth and, particularly, the nineteenth century is the importance of science upon daily life and the capitalist system. Science becomes an increasingly important topic to leave aside from the bourgeois public sphere. The problem is that the bourgeois mentality influences on scientific conception and data. The ideas of the bourgeois public sphere permeate the data of scientific ideas. Prejudices and biases about gender and public/private affairs will be borrowed as scientific data. The discourses and its variety of forms in salons impose social and historical distinctions between the following opposites: public/ private, and female/male. The problem is that the bourgeois public sphere takes for granted as natural both oppositions. The bourgeoisie denies the social and historical constructions of both oppositions. Thus, the bourgeois public sphere gives predominance of male upon females. Consequently, male activities, duties, public affairs and even opinions become increasingly important. The male behavior and discourse is predominant upon females’. The main distinction is that females take care of the private sphere, particularly the bourgeois family structure while men address public affairs. This division of labor is based on the belief system that public activities are more relevant than private ones. Therefore, the bourgeois public sphere emphasizes the gender difference in a way that females are inferior to men. Women are excluded from public realms, mainly from science. Therefore, women who want to become members of the scientific enterprise will do it by paying a high price: they are the invisible and non-recognized aids of scientists.


Why is the concept of bourgeois public sphere important for studying the role of science in popular science? The emergence of a bourgeois public sphere emphasizes the difference between social classes and its roles and functions within society. One of the main concerns of the bourgeoisie is to distinguish themselves from the working-classes, Thus science becomes a way of distinguishing from the working-classes. The bourgeoisie looks down on the working-classes. The bourgeoisie has to make clear that they own the means of production whereas the proletariat does not. The proletariat is transformed into an object that works for its weekly-wage. Marx and critics of the overtaking of a capitalism system that did not care for social problems, highlight the alienation of the worker under the capitalist system at the end of the nineteenth century. The class distinction leads to a cultural distinction; the science of the bourgeoisie and that of the proletariat. Science is a very important cultural distinction that will increase the gap between the bourgeoisie and the working-classes. The role of science in popular culture looses importance and becomes looked upon before the “scientific” discoveries that lead to progress and the development of society. The role of popular science looses ifs capacity of social mobility, political change, and influencing upon the scientific mainstreams ideas.

Georgetown University

Department of History

4. How does popular science play a role in gender construction?

Henri Matissse Deux fillettes, fond jaune et rouge (Two Girls in a Yellow and Red Interior) 1947 Barnes Foundation, Merion, PA

Londa Schlesinger’s “Nature’s Body” and Cynthia Russet Eagle’s “Sexual Science and the Construction of Victorian Womanhood” are two welcome books that show how both scientific ideas and race constructed a particular idea of womanhood in the nineteenth century. Most of the scientific ideas they analyze do not root on empirical data, but rather than on popular beliefs of what a woman should be. Those popular beliefs are part of popular science. The “scientification” of popular beliefs leads to a “naturalization” of gender. Londa Schiebinger makes an excellent use of the categories of gender and race to analyze a serious of scientific ideas of the nineteenth century. Schiebinger emphasis the importance of the joint study of gender and race because the scientific ideas she analysis aim to show the inferiority of women over men. Schiebinger asserts that the naturalization of gender imposes the construction of gender due to nature rather than to nurture as John Stuart Mill. Thus, women are inferior to men due to nature. John Stuart Mill’s idea of the construction of gender due to nurture gets lost. Eventually, Schiebinger argues that the construction of gender was based on biased “scientific observations’ that were rooted on the chauvinist idea of the inferiority women upon men. These popular beliefs are defined as social and popular beliefs of gender. Russet Eagle argues that a large number of scientific ideas of the Victorian era were based on popular beliefs of the idea of woman and men rather than on empirical data. She asserts that problem was that the “scientific’ “data that those scientists had was interpreted through the lenses of popular beliefs and prejudices. Moreover, Russet Eagle adds an interesting distinction depending on professions. She demonstrates that scientists were had a tendency to emphasize the inferiority of women and the importance of the private activities. Meanwhile, lawyers, writers, and others did not make such a strong distinction between men and women. What is more, the latter supported the suffragist movement of American and Great Britain. The nineteenth century’s scientists were obsessed in studying the differences between women and men in a large variety of both social and scientific disciplines. The bias of most of nineteenth century scientists was to take for granted their misogynistic arguments about gender differences. They transformed their popular beliefs into empirical data. Therefore, their construction of gender was rooted mostly on popular beliefs rather than on empirical data and observations. Through an examination of Darwinism, Darwinism, race, anatomy, physical anthropology, and physics it becomes clear that the construction of gender has been historically been influenced more by popular beliefs than by empirical data.

Darwin’s evolutionary theory demonstrated how in the evolution from apes to men, women were the link between the two. His evolutionary theory postulated the inferiority of men based on brain faculties, such as intelligence and smartness.

Department of History
Georgetown University

3. The Role of Science in Popular Culture

Henri Matisse La leçon de musique (The Music Lesson) 1917
 Barnes Foundation, Merion,

The Role of Science in Popular Culture

Throughout the 20th Century, the elitist approach of history of science shifted to the study of science in popular culture. Elitist analysis of history of science, such as the “Scientific Revolution”, the “Renaissance”, and the “Enlightenment”, studied the popularization and diffusion of science among certain elite groups. Roger Cooter and Steven Pumfrey encouraged the study of science in popular culture in order to understand the meaning of science for ordinary people, middle-classes, and minorities, such as women and marginal members of society. Science in popular culture was interested in cultural resistance, struggle, and appropriation. Robert Darnton, Paolo Rossi, Edgard Siszel, Stephen Pumfrey, Maurice Slawinki, William Eamon, and Sarah Schechner Genuth attempted to understand science in popular culture emphasizing the different roles that science played in the Sixteenth Century. .

Darnton explains the role of science as a means of both social mobility and political radicalism in the 1780s in France. Due to the popular appeal of science in the late Eighteenth Century a group of bourgeois supported mesmerism so as to improve their social status. These bourgeois lacked “birth” and “title” had been rejected by the elitist scientific institutions of France’s late Eighteenth Century despite their wealthy and education. (Therefore, their strategy was to counterbalance their lack of birth and connection with their education and their wealth). They joined the “Harmonique Sociétés” that adhered to mesmerism. Mesmerism was an alternative system to understand and explain natural phenomena, particularly physical human being’s illnesses. This group of bourgeois moved from a medical circle that embraced mesmerism to a political radicalism that participated actively in the French Revolution. Their political radical emerged once they broke up with Mesmer because these bourgeois did share Mesmer’s purposes. Mesmer attempted to win a place within French leading scientific institutions, however he found he could become wealthy and popular within the upper and middle-classes. The group of bourgeois’s purpose was political rather than social and economic. Thus, the “Harmonique Sociétés” achieved political and social relevance in France’s “campagne”, particularly in the south-east of France, from Strasbourg, Lyon, Grenoble, Nîmes to Montpellier. Darnton argued that the political radicalism based on the “scientific idea” of mesmerism was an alternative and competing system of understanding the world to the “Enlightenment ideas” spread by elitist proponents, such as Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas de Carit Condorcet, Francois Marie Arouet Voltaire, Jean Jacques Rousseau, and Jean Le Rond D’Alambert. Mesmerism’s revolutionary message was to reform institutions by physically regenerating Frenchmen. According to mesmerism, the improvement of bodies would elevate the morality of the Frenchmen, and better morals would produce political effects. The elite’s ideas of “Enlightenment” were rooted on the relationship between physical-moral causality which from Darnton’s point of view would keep the status-quo rather than lead to social and economic change.
Rossi, Pumfrey, Slawinki and Zilsel altered the understanding of the Scientific Revolution. For the first time in history, natural philosophers began to take notice of the activities of the artisan’s workshops, and the methodology of craftsmen provided a model for an entirely new experimental approach to the study of nature that culminated in the philosophy of Francis Bacon. They argued that there were changes in the institution, the role, and the social need of “scientists”.[1] Rossi and Zilsel demonstrated how the scientific activity shifted from universities to princely courts, formal urban academies, and organized scientific societies in the Sixteenth Century. Scientist became courtiers that had to meet the needs and whims of their patron. These authors analyzed were authority lied in the Sixteenth Century and the arguments to legitimate scientific endeavors.
William Eamon embraces Rossi and Zilsel’s argument of how craftsmen were active actors in the construction of scientific knowledge. Eamon argued that the relationship between natural philosophers and craftsmen led to the Baconian method. Eamon also argued that the scientific elite denied the craftsmen’s contribution to their new physical understanding of natural phenomena. They did not want to make explicit that they were engaged in “pseudoscientific” activities and denied that they had appropriated craftsmen’s traditional knowledge. Eamon argued that both the empiricism and experience of the Baconian method have their origins in craftsmen’s traditional way of solving problems. The “Book of Secrets” illustrated how widespread empiricism and experience were among craftsmen. The “Book of Secrets” have nothing to do with magic, the supernatural, or occultism; on the contrary, it is the emergence of a new genre based on a set of “recipes” that tell ordinary people how to solve everyday problems of the Sixteenth Century. The “Book of Secrets” was written by the urban intelligentsia of diverse social status. The intention of the authors was to acquire fame, and to advertise their recipes as a means of redefining their social status by using science and noble features. They did not confront the social or political organization of the Sixteenth Century. Therefore, their range of interests was limited, restricted to those arts which did not come into conflict with aristocratic sensibilities. Because of this, mechanical arts were not among their interests. Their attitude towards arts was that one of “virtuosity”. Their ultimate goal was to construct a new model of nobility that was more appropriate to urban classes that lacked both birth and title, while possessing wealth and education. Therefore, the urban intelligentsia aspired to redefine the urban nobility in terms of virtue and personal merit. The “Book of Secrets” illustrated how widespread and appealing empiricism and experience were among ordinary people. And the bourgeois people capitalized on their large audience in order to elevate their social status. At the very end, the authors did not want to overthrow the social, political, and economic structure of the Sixteenth Century. They merely pursued to find their role within the urban learned elites of the Italian cities of the Sixteenth Century. .
Schechner Genuth argued that ancient folklore, religious ideas, magic and popular beliefs influenced the learned elite’s development of cosmology. She challenges the traditional explanation that Newton and Halley swept away the superstitious beliefs of comets in two ways. First, she argued that neither scientific theories nor philosophical debates were sufficient to dispel the widespread belief in commentary divination. Second, she showed that natural philosophers – such as Newton - retained something of the traditional lore because they never linked comets with changes in the state or the church. The “Scientific Revolution’s” ideas were conservative because they did not challenge the social or political order but rather reinforced important values, behaviors, and beliefs of those structures. Schechner Genuth analyses the meaning of comets in the Seventeenth Century. The roots of those beliefs lied in ancient folklore, which had been appropriated by both early Christians that interpreted folklore as signs of God’s wrath, and the “Reformation.” She explores the interplay between the superstitious dread of comets shared throughout the ages by peoples at all levels of society, and the role of comets in the birth of cosmology. She also highlighted the contradictory meaning of comets in the Seventeenth Century, while Newton gave comets a benign purpose; ordinary people acknowledged the catastrophic consequences to be expected if a comet were to collide with the earth. Nineteenth and Twentieth Century ideas about comets conformed to the naturalistic and uniformitarian principles that governed geology. Meanwhile, popular comet lore retained its own power that was shown by the fear, uncertainty, and vulnerability that learned and non-learned people shared towards the effects of Halley’s Comet in 1910. Schechner Genuth carries on an excellent and knowledgeable historical study of cultural responses to comets from the Antiquity to the present.

Department of History

Georgetown University

[1] The use of scientist for the eighteenth is an anachronysm that Rossi and Silzel should pay attention to by redefining his concept of scientist.

2. Popularization of Science: Its Categories

Henri Matisse La Musique 1939 Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY

Popularization of science. Categories to analyze popularization of science.

Throughout the Twentieth Century, the definition of science has changed while the perception of the role of science has transformed its place in culture. For historians of the 1940s and 1950s, science was a product of the learned elite. Science was reproduced exclusively for and within those elite, detached from the broader culture and society. Those scholars believed that science could influence social and political structures. For example, the “Scientific Revolution’s” impact on industrialization. As an attempt to incorporate lower strata in the construction of scientific knowledge, science can also be perceived as the consumption of learned products by the lower strata. However, this approach denies agency to the lower classes because they are given no role in the production of science.

Steven Shapin and Simon Shaeffer analyze science as part of the public sphere by bringing the middle-classes into science studies. They study the ways in which audiences are constructed and transformed in changing historical contexts. Science is perceived as “science as culture”, strongly related to social values, perceptions, and attitudes. Shapin and Schaeffer study the impact of science on middle-classes. They focus on how educated classes use science because of its relationships with social values, status, and morality. Bruno Latour introduces the anthropological approach to the study of science, studying behaviors and power-relationships of scientists within laboratories. Nevertheless, Latour’s approach is still elitist because the production of science belongs to learned and privileged elite. Moreover, that science has no connections to middle-class men, ordinary people, or even people outside the laboratory. There is also a historical trend that focuses on micro-histories. Micro-histories in science also pay attention to elites, such as Mario Biagioli’s study of Galileo as a courtier. Biagioli opens the game of science to the courts, the academies, and the universities. However, he extends science to women because they happen to be strong patrons.

William Eaman, Paolo Rossi, Steven Pumfrey, and Robert Darnton provide a different approach to eradicate eliticism in the studies of science. They suggest that the so called “scientific revolution” was an outcome of the interaction between the learned and the craftsmen’s knowledge. Rossi and Edgar Zilsel altered the understanding of the “Scientific Revolution.” They argue that for the first time in history, natural philosophers began to take notice of the activities of the artisan’s workshops and discovered that the methodology of craftsmen provided a model for an entirely new experimental approach to the study of nature that culminated in the philosophy of Francis Bacon. In Darnton’s attempt to analyze science popularization in the last half of the Eighteenth Century France, he argues that middle-class men used science as a vehicle for social mobility. Darnton highlights that those middle-class bourgeois appealed to ordinary people with the use of science because it was one of the main concerns and attractions of ordinary people. However, Darnton relates science to the radicalism of middle-class men in France and takes for granted ordinary people’s appeal to “science”.

Roger Cooter and Steven Pumfrey encourage the study of culture in popular culture as an alternative to science popularization. Science in culture’s goal is to understand the mechanism of how the lower strata influenced the construction of scientific ideas. Cooter, and Pumfrey suggest the main categories to study science in popular culture. Those categories are the following: mediators, audiences, diffusion of knowledge, modes of production and reproduction of knowledge and science, transmission of knowledge of science, the press, texts, museums, the impact of science on both men and women, the commercial and ideological impact of science, science as an entertainment, as social mobility, or as education, the relationship between the learned elite and its audience, the hegemonic functions of science, and the resistance of science popularization.

Department of History

Georgetown University