Abstract
Two strands emerge in the early nineteenth-century debates over the reform of science and democratization of society. Both believed firmly in the moral and practical value of science to society. However, proponents of a professional, elite science faced off against those who believed the broadening of the base of participation would more readily deploy its reforming effects. Here I will explore those arguments, and their implications for science policy today, in relation to Charles Babbage, the inventor of the first analytical calculating engine, and George Birkbeck, the founder of the first Mechanics Institute. Babbage and the nineteenth-century Romantics were radical Whigs who wanted to establish science as a gentlemanly profession which would reform society by creating a meritocracy and supporting technological innovation in manufactures. George Birkbeck was a doctor and an educator who believed that science could become the most powerful democratic social force if all were given access to it through mass education.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Anthony Hyman, Charles Babbage (Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1982), 1–86.
M. V. Wilkes, ‘Herschel, Peacock, Babbage and the Development of the Cambridge Curriculum’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 44 (1990): 205–19.
Jack Morrell and Arnold Thackray, Gentlemen of Science. Early Years of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981).
S. S. Schweber, ‘Scientists as Intellectuals. The Early Victorians’, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 360 (1981): 8–13.
C. Babbage, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher (London, 1864).
See also H. P. Babbage, Babbage’s Calculating Engines (London, 1889);
H. W. Buxton, Memoir of the Life and Labours of the Late Charles Babbage Esq. F.R.S. (Los Angeles, CA, 1988);
J. M. Dubbey, The Mathematical Work of Charles Babbage (Cambridge, 1978);
P. Morrison and E. Morrison, Charles Babbage and his Calculating Engines (New York, 1961).
S. Shapin and B. Barnes, ‘Science, Nature and Control: Interpreting Mechanics’ Institutes’, Social Studies of Science 7 (1977): 31–74.
D. M. Cannell, George Green: Mathematician and Physicist 1793–1841: The Background to His Life and Work (London: Athlone, 1993).
David Stack, Nature and Artifice: Life and Thought of Thomas Hodgskin (1787–1769) (London: Royal Historical Society, 1997).
Thomas Kelly, George Birkbeck: Pioneer of Adult Education (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1957), p. 79.
Dorothy Hodgkin, Birkbeck, Science and History. First Bernal Lecture, delivered at Birkbeck College, 1969 (London: Ruddock and Sons, 1969).
Adrian Desmond, The Politics of Evolution (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1990).
Irvine Loudon, Medical Care and the General Practitioner (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986).
Sir Alexander Fleck, Birkbeck’s Ideas in their Modern Setting. Foundation Oration delivered at Birkbeck College, 1960 (London: Ruddock and Sons, 1960), p. 4.
Dorothy Porter, ‘Stratification and its Discontents: Professionalisation and the British Public Health Service, 1848–1914’, in E. Fee and Roy Acheson, eds, Health that Mocks the Doctors’ Rules. A History of Education in Public Health (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 83–113.
See Gary Werskey, The Visible College. Science and Socialists in the 1930s (London: Viking, 1978).
Lancelot Hogben, Mathematics for the Millions (New York: Norton, 1938).
Julian Huxley, The Uniqueness of Man (London: Chatto and Windus, 1941), pp. 34–83.
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (London: Chatto and Windus, 1932).
Dorothy Porter, ‘Social Medicine and Scientific Humanism in mid-Twentieth Century Britain’, Journal of Historical Sociology 9 (1996): 168–87.
Dorothy Porter, ‘Communism and Crystallography: J. D. Bernal’ The Bernal Lecture, Birkbeck College, 1994.
Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialektik der Aufklärung (Amsterdam: Querido, 1947).
J. D. Bernal, The Social Function of Science (London: Routledge, 1939).
Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialektik; T. Adorno, Der Positivismusstreit in der deutschen Soziologie (Berlin: Luchterhand, 1969).
Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man. Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964).
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Tavistock, 1970).
Francis Fukuyama, Our Post-human Future: The Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution (New York: Picador, 2003).
Jürgen Habermas, Legitimationsprobleme im Spätkapitalismus (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1973).
Jürgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, transl. Jeremy J. Shapiro (London: Heinemann Education, 1978).
Editor information
Copyright information
© 2007 Dorothy Porter
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Porter, D. (2007). Charles Babbage and George Birkbeck: Science, Reform and Radicalism. In: Bivins, R., Pickstone, J.V. (eds) Medicine, Madness and Social History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230235359_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230235359_6
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-35767-3
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-23535-9
eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)