The metaphysical club: A story of ideas in America

✍ Scribed by Paul Jerome Croce

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 2002
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 199 KB
• Volume: 38
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0022-5061
• DOI: 10.1002/jhbs.10044

✦ Synopsis

The case of Francis Bacon offers rich opportunities for exploring the interface of science with politics and rhetoric, and for doing so at a critical juncture in its development. Standing at the threshold of modern science, Bacon was a preeminent spokesman for science and a polymathic writer on politics, law, history, and rhetoric. Ever concerned with power and its relation to knowledge, he lobbied for the expansion of both the British empire (through shrewdly wielded political power) and the human empire (through the power of science to control nature). His New Atlantis, depicting a utopia led by a secretive but benevolent scientific elite, arguably made him the first architect of science-government collusion; and his self-conscious deployment of rhetoric for advancing scientific, as well as political, ends established modes of defending science that are still practiced.

Zagorin's book claims its niche in the vast literature on Bacon by offering "a broad survey and analysis of the whole range of his ideas in their historical context" (p. x). Despite its brevity, the book excels at this task. Bacon's writings are painstakingly summarized and situated against those of his predecessors and contemporaries, including Machiavelli, Paracelsus, Ramus, and a host of lesser known figures. Along the way, Zagorin offers an unusually lucid account of Bacon's difficult doctrine of forms, as well as surprising insights about his belief in divination and a naturalized astrology that would allow predictions of civil unrest.

However, the book also aims to provide an "integrated understanding" of Bacon's thought (p. xi), thus raising a reasonable expectation that an account of his life's work will shed light on the early interplay of science, politics, and rhetoric. Alas, this expectation is not met. In carefully tracing out Bacon's scheme for the organization of knowledge -with its branches neatly compartmentalized -Zagorin seems to assume that Bacon's own thought processes actually respected those divisions. As a result, he consistently refuses to discern linkages, however implicit or analogical, between Bacon's political and scientific views: "Bacon's moral and political reflections were . . . independent of his natural philosophy and must be understood in terms of their own principles" (p. 129). Predictably, the supposed absence of cross-talk between these realms requires some finesse in handling the apparent science-politics link in New Atlantis. Reminding his readers that the work was unfinished at Bacon's death, Zagorin urges agnosticism about the implications of its fusion of science and politics (for a more adventurous interpretation, see Leary, 1994). The principle of secrecy that Bacon counseled in political matters and then incorporated into his scientific utopia is traced to his habitual concealment of his homosexuality rather than to any design for the retention of power by scientific and political elites. Similarly, attempts by other scholars to link Bacon's scientific and legal writings are dismissed as grounded on "specious verbal analogies" (p. 192), while feminist attacks on Bacon's use of misogynist imagery for depicting the interrogation of nature are rejected as unjust anachronism. The author's interpretive cau-