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Around the turn of the twentieth century, Émile Durkheim (1858–1917) and Marcel Mauss (1872–1950) proposed that the most basic categories of thought, including space, time, class, and causality, are social in character. Their thesis — that language and experience are structured by categories that are social in character — had a profound impact on twentieth-century thought, especially in the social sciences. Among sociologists and anthropologists in particular, it was a major source of inspiration for the popular and heady doctrine that people construct culturally specific perceptual realities through the use of culturally variable sets of categories. For these social scientists, the term “category” took on a very different signification than the original meanings we find in either Aristotle or Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). They treated the categories as belonging to some sort of conceptual scheme or framework through which we perceive the world, rather than as Aristotle's highest predicables or Kant's concepts that are logically presupposed by experience. To understand how this change in the conception of a category came about, we have to consider how Kant was interpreted in the nineteenth-century philosophical tradition from which Durkheim's sociological theory of the categories emerged. That is the purpose of this book. In arguing for the social causes and origins of the categories, Durkheim was responding to the way in which Kant's philosophy was understood in the Third Republic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1775 William Pultenay suffered the loss of his childless English cousin and so acquired the charge of the estates and title of the Earl of Bath. On removing to England he left the management of his own estate of Solway Bank in his native Scotland in the hands of John Maxwell, a theoretical improver, whom he made factor. Their extensive correspondence reveals to us Maxwell's education into the nature of change in rural Scotland. He began his work with the assumption that the impediment to efficiency and economic rationality was the farmers: Country people such as we have in this place in the world, constantly accustomed to enter farms exhausted by the unrestrained licence allowed their predecessors, and to labour only to the easiest and most immediate produce, cannot by any means be brought to raise their ideas to the advantages of entering to a well-conditioned farm, nor to look upon restraints to regular husbandry, such as your tacks [leases] preserve, in any other light than as so many drawbacks to their profit. His solution to this problem was one familiar to students of landlord–tenant relations and physiocratic economic theory; he proposed that leases should more exactly specify the methods farmers should use and the powers retained by the landlord and his agent over the farms: ‘I am humbly of the opinion that the person employ'd should be daily going about the farms, observing the conduct of the tenants, and chequing abuses, which should be daily committed, or attempted to be committed.’ [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What is fact and what is fiction? This question may be philosophically vexed. Yet, we all feel confident in a day to day kind of way that we know what fact and fiction are, if not always which is which. While the categories of fact and fiction structure how we apprehend the world on a very basic level, much of what we think we know about fact and fiction may be little more than a fiction. First, these categories are historically and culturally specific, ones that are invented as we understand them sometime during the seventeenth century. Second, we have become used to thinking that what separates a lie from the truth, literature from science, is a question of content. The right dates and data can transform romance into history or alter a valid report into a scientific fraud. Literature is fiction and science is fact. Yet, as we shall see throughout this study, early modern writers recognize how knowledge involves form as well as content. The early modern period is an age of discovery: these discoveries include not simply new knowledge but new definitions of knowledge. For early modern writers, the existence of science depends on the possibility of fiction; literature acquires meaning and validity against the framework of fact. Early modern imaginative literature and experimental science are inventions of a startling new attention to knowledge: they represent new ways of thinking, new understandings of how man could create knowledge, and new ways of writing that try to recreate those ideas for readers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Professor Ayrton's galvanometer will be a great help to us electric light engineers: we are greatly in want of a trustworthy galvanometer to be carried down to the various installations as we fix them. I myself began with great faith in the ordinary electrical instruments; but, after taking readings sometimes with one and sometimes with another instrument, I began to lose it. Why did late nineteenth-century electricians decide to trust particular measurement instruments in preference to others? Was it a particular faith in the theory that informed the design of their electromagnetic mechanism? Was it their trust in the instrument-maker's effectiveness in enacting reliable designs for the devices? Or was it the fidelity with which users could take quantitative readings from performances yielded by the instrument? We need to consider these sorts of questions to recover how evaluations were made of the trustworthiness of the new species of ‘direct-reading’ current-measuring instruments that came onto the market in the 1880s. In contrast to the idealist tradition common in the history of science that treats instruments as essentially theory-laden devices, I consider measurement instruments from the perspective of users as technologies that had to be read. As in the previous chapter, my aim here is to show that pressing problems of trust were generated by the recalcitrance and fallibility of instrumental readings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The scientific community is morally superior to every other form of human association since it enforces standards of honesty, trustworthiness and good work against which the moral quality of Christian civilization in general stands condemned. The scientific laboratory is also populated by a wide variety of inanimate agents: experimental apparatus, oscilloscopes, measuring instruments, chart recorders and other inscription devices. At any time, the culture of the laboratory comprises an ordered moral universe of rights and entitlements, obligations and capabilities differentially assigned to the various agents. Whom and what should people trust or distrust? This question has long been a prominent concern not only in everyday human transactions but also in the most abstruse domains of science, commerce, and technology. Both Steve Shapin and Ted Porter have shown the significance of this question in the complex relationship between trust and quantification. They demonstrate that, to a certain extent, Restoration natural philosophers and nineteenth century engineers were able to win greater trust for their claims by giving them quantitative expression. At the same time, though, Shapin and Porter map some of the important historical contingencies of the subject. Quantification has not always been achieved to the satisfaction of all, nor has it necessarily made claims uniformly more highly trusted by all parties. Therefore, to avoid facile transhistorical generalizations about the relations between trust and numerical work, the historian has to ask questions rather more socio–historically specific in nature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

“Don't make a legend of me.” Occultist, Scientist, Prophet, Charlatan, Philosopher, Racist, Guru, Anti-Semite, Liberator of Women, Misogynist, Freudian Apostate, Gnostic, Post-Modernist, Polygamist, Healer, Poet, Con-Artist, Psychiatrist and Anti-Psychiatrist – what has C. G. Jung not been called? Mention him to someone, and you are likely to receive one of these images. For Jung is someone that people – informed or not – have opinions about. The swift reaction time indicates that people respond to Jung's life and work as if they are sufficiently known. Yet the very proliferation of “Jungs” leads one to question whether everyone could possibly be talking about the same figure. In 1952, Jung responded to the fact that he had been variously described as a theist, an atheist, a mystic, and a materialist by noting: “When opinions over the same subject differ widely, according to my view, there is the well-founded suspicion that none of them is correct, i.e., that there is a misunderstanding.” Nearly fifty years later, the number of divergent views and interpretations of Jung has prodigiously multiplied. He has become a figure upon whom an endless succession of myths, legends, fantasies, and fictions continues to be draped. Travesties, distortions, and caricatures have become the norm. This process shows no signs of abating. From early on, Jung was subject to a welter of rumors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The history of science is usually told in terms of experiments and theories and their interaction. But there is a deeper level to the story – a slow change in the attitudes that define what we take as plausible and implausible in scientific theories. Just as our theories are the product of experience with many experiments, our attitudes are the product of experience with many theories. It is these attitudes that one usually finds at the root of the explanation for the curious delays that often occur in the history of science, as for instance, the interval of 15 years between the theoretical work of Alpher and Herman and the experimental search for the cosmic microwave radiation background. The history of science in general and this conference in particular naturally deal with things that happened, with successful theories and experiments, but I think that the most interesting part of the history of science deals with things that did not happen, or at least not when they might have happened. To understand this sort of history, one must understand the slow changes in the attitudes by which we are governed. But it is not easy. Experimental discoveries are reported in The New York Times, and new theories are at least reported in physics journals, but the change in our attitudes goes on quietly and anonymously, somewhere behind the blackboard. The rise of the Standard Model was accompanied by profound changes in our attitudes toward symmetries and toward field theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When we think about modern states we often envision statistical aggregates. Area, population, size of the gross national product, the level of the national debt, these are identifying features that we take for granted, as an obvious way of representing territorial entities. Yet numbers have not always enjoyed this position, and in fact their rise as a fundamental mode of representation is a relatively recent process. Although the first systematic attempts to provide numerical evaluation of the population and wealth of states can be traced back to the consolidation of modern states in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it is particularly when the form of the nation-state imposed itself in Europe and America, in the late eighteenth and during the nineteenth century, that statistics became a widespread practice and attracted the solicitous attention of ruling elites and reformers alike. Since Harald Westergaard's studies on the history of statistics, historians have been aware of the “enthusiasm” for social counting that gripped several European countries in the 1830s–1840s. This enthusiasm led to the launching of specialized journals, the formation of statistical societies for the purpose of collecting numerical information on the most diverse social facts and phenomena, and the establishment and consolidation of state bureaus for the collection, classification, and analysis of increasing quantities of data which administrators and political leaders deemed essential for the guidance of political decisions and for the governing of society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

All the people of this lonely world, have a piece of pain inside. (Eurhythmies, ‘When the day goes down’) Introduction During the last decade an increasing number of high quality biographies of scientists have appeared on the book market1 – Richard Westfall's Newton study, Never at Rest, William Provine's Sewall Wright and Evolutionary Biology, Crosbie Smith and Norton Wise's study of Lord Kelvin and Victorian England, David Cassidy's Heisenberg biography, Geoffrey Cantor's study of Faraday, Adrian Desmond and James Moore's Darwin tome, and Frederic Holmes's first volume on Hans Krebs – just to name some of the most admirable works. Athough still within the traditional confines of the genre, these and similar biographies are more detailed, better researched, more stylishly written, and more penetrating than almost any biography written just a generation ago. Each new biography seems to be unrivalled. For someone who browses through the history of science shelves of an academic bookstore these works indicate that science biography stands out as a most – if not the most – impressive genre of the discipline. In spite of the recent flourishing state of science biography, however, there is a widespread ambivalence and uncertainty as to the role and place of biography among historians of science. Biographical studies have dominated the history of science for most of its existence: [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Biography today occupies an unusual, perhaps even an uncomfortable, place in our culture, being one of the most popular and yet least studied forms of contemporary writing. Readers in their tens of thousands consume biographies avidly and offer publishers a sure market for the life stories of writers, musicians, film stars and sporting heroes. ‘The Age of Biography is Upon Us’ announces a recent article (Bowker 1993), as anyone will know who steps into a bookshop or glances at the year's best-seller lists. A 1994 poll on reading habits in Britain showed biography to be the most popular category of non-fiction book, selected as their favourite by 19 per cent of readers, a number matched by the most popular category of fiction, ‘romance’, and considerably ahead of contemporary fiction, read by just 14 per cent of readers (D.S. 1994; see also Beauchamp 1990 for US data). The market for biography is by no means restricted to the ‘popular’ end of the spectrum: a typical issue of the Times Literary Supplement (21 October 1994) carried a lead review devoted to a biography of William Tyndale, an extended review of a biography of Mrs Dorothy Jordan, and reviews of biographies of Kremlin wives, and Nikolai Bukharin's widow: in its listings, there were more entries under ‘Biography’ than under ‘Fiction’, ‘Polities’, ‘Literature and Criticism’, more than in any other category. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last decade, there has been a veritable explosion of Anglo-American interest in the works of Weimar constitutional and political theorist, Carl Schmitt. Even before joining the National Socialist party in 1933, Schmitt launched incessant theoretical assaults against liberalism in the twenties and early thirties. He depicted the principles of pluralism, publicity, discussion, and representation; the practices of separation of powers, judicial review, and majoritarian elections; and such institutions as the Western European parliament as misguided and dangerous endeavors that ultimately only paralyze the modern state. Such principles and practices inhibit a state's ability to decide on the unavoidable question of friend and enemy, what he termed “the political,” as well as leave it vulnerable to an unforeseen emergency, which he called the “exception.” Almost concurrently there has been a revival in the treatment of technology as a subject worthy of social-philosophical inquiry. Attention is again being devoted to the theoretical and political implications of technology's seemingly ever-expanding role in contemporary Western postindustrial societies and to the arguments developed to address this issue in twentieth-century German theoretical traditions: recent efforts explicitly draw on Edmund Husserl and phenomenology, Martin Heidegger and existentialism, Georg Lukács and critical theory, as well as the thought of Hannah Arendt. Yet the two scholarly movements have surprisingly passed each other by. Surprisingly because, as I will demonstrate, the German critique of technology is crucial for understanding the works of Carl Schmitt, especially his criticisms of liberalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]