Abstract
As stated at the beginning, this study is not a history of scientific institutions or of practitioners within particular disciplines. It is a review of political manners: of ways of being a Whig statesman. The essay has taken a critical look at the changing aspiration of ‘statesmanship’, which consolidated its status by the turn of the nineteenth century. No pretence at comprehensiveness has been made: instead, a series of suggestive episodes have been presented to give an impressionistic view. Ideological trends and modes of display followed a rough chronology but not necessarily a continuous one: styles could re-emerge ‘out of time’ in response to certain events (Lord John Russell’s response to the Ecclesiastical Titles controversy is an example). This pointillist approach is useful mainly for suggesting lines of future exploration, though some conclusions can tentatively be drawn. The study discovers that the Whig encounter with natural knowledge was intended to capture a certain kind of liberality. In one manifestation it expressed the Whig interpretation of the georgic tradition. Such strands are to be understood as modes of public posture, or style, rather than as ideologies or purely theoretical phenomena. Whig polemic assumed a scientific liberal character when it advanced the generous and therefore emancipatory effect of certain kinds of cognition.
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
J. Bord, ‘Patronage, the Lansdowne Whigs and the problem of the liberal centre, 1827–8’, English Historical Review, CXVII (2002), 78–93, 83. See also J.C.D. Clark, English Society 1660–1832: Religion, Ideology and Politics during the Ancient Regime (2nd edn, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 5–8.
Isaac Kramnick, ‘Eighteenth-century science and radical social theory: the case of Joseph Priestley’s scientific liberalism’, Journal of British Studies, 25 (January 1986), 1–30.
Ibid., esp. p. 10, and M. Bentley (ed.), Public and Private Doctrine: Essays in British History Presented to Maurice Cowling (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
See also J.E. Cookson, The Friends of Peace: Anti-War Liberalism in England 1793–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 2–4.
R. O’Connor, ‘Mammoths and Maggots: Byron and the Geology of Cuvier’, Romanticism, 5 (1999), 26–42, esp. 26, 29.
The path-breaking work is J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, NJ and London: 2nd edn, Princeton University Press, 2003).
See L.S. Jacyna, Philosophic Whigs: Medicine, Science and Citizenship in Edinburgh, 1789–1848 (London, New York: Routledge, 1994), esp. pp. 15–29.
Manchester Guardian, 16 October 1824; see A. Mitchell, The Whigs in Opposition, 1815–1830 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), p. 56.
H. Brougham, A Discourse of Natural Theology Showing the Nature of the Evidence and the Advantages of the Study (3rd edn, London: Charles Knight, 1835), pp. 150–151.
See, for example, T. Porter, The Rise of Statistical Thinking: 1820–1900 (Princeton, NJ and Guildford: Princeton University Press, 1986); Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life (Princeton, NJ and Chichester: Princeton University Press, 1995), esp. pp. 51–53, and the general model in pp. 194–231;
M. Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998), esp. pp. 308–317.
The emblematic aphorism is ‘Words are deeds’: Q. Skinner, in J. Tully (ed.), Meaning and Context, Quentin Skinner and His Critics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), frontispiece; see also J. Tully, ‘The pen is a mighty sword: Quentin Skinner’s analysis of politics’, ibid., pp. 8, 23; Q. Skinner, ‘“Social meaning” and the explanation of social action’, ibid., pp. 79–80; ‘On meaning and speech-acts’, ibid., p. 260;
J. Farr, ‘Understanding conceptual change politically’, in T. Ball, J. Farr, and R.L. Hanson (eds), Political Innovation and Conceptual Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 24–31; H.F. Pitkin, ‘Representation’, ibid., p. 132; Pocock, ‘The state of the art’, Virtue, Commerce and History, pp. 1–37.
Skinner A, Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 101–109; Pocock, Virtue, Commerce and History, pp. 59–71, 258–260.
L. Namier, The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III (2nd edn, London: Macmillan and Company, 1957), p. xi.
Q. Skinner, ‘The principles and practice of opposition: the case of Boling-broke versus Walpole’, in N. McKendrick (ed.), Historical Perspectives; Essays in Honour of LH. Plumb (London: Europa, 1974), pp. 93–128, citation p. 128.
See also S.M. Lee, ‘A new language in Politicks; George Canning and the Idea of Opposition, 1801–1807’, History, 83, 271 (1998), 474–477.
Ernst Mayr, ‘When is historiography Whiggish?’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 51 (1990), 301–309, citation 302.
A. Desmond, The Politics of Evolution: Morphology, Medicine and Reform in Radical London (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 23.
G.L. Geison, ‘Research schools and new directions in the historiography of science’, Osiris, 8 (1993), 227–238, esp. 236–238, and ‘Scientific change, emerging specialties, and research schools’, History of Science, 10 (1981), 20–40;
J.B. Morrell, ‘The chemist breeders: the research schools of Liebig and Thomson’, Ambix, 19 (1972), 1–46;
J.S. Fruton, Contrasts in Scientific Style: Research Groups in the Chemical and Biochemical Sciences (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1990). See the symposium devoted to ‘Style in Science’, comprising the whole issue of Science in Context, 4 (2) (1991), 223–447.
L. Daston and M. Otte, ‘Introduction’, Science in Context, 4 (2) (1991), 223.
The application is defended in N. Reingold, ‘The peculiarities of the Americans or are there national styles in the sciences?’, Science in Context, 4 (2) (1991), 347–366, definition 349: but see Anna Wessely, ‘Transposing “Style” from the history of art to the history of science’, ibid., 265–278, esp. 270–271. Clearly, the objection has much less force in cases where pursuit of a ‘national’ style was a self-conscious goal. See Anne Harrington, ‘Interwar “German” psychobiology: between nationalism and the irrational’, ibid., 429–447.
Surveyed by Jan Golinski, ‘The theory or practice and the practice of theory: sociological approaches in the history of science’, Isis, 81 (1990), 492–505.
See also Ian Hacking, The Social Construction of What? (Cambridge MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 63–99.
For a recent example see J.D. Mollon, ‘The origins of the concept of interference’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London A (2002), 360, 807–819: particularly the discussion of Thomas Young (1773–1829) and trichromacy, 816–818. Desmond is optimistic in thinking that ‘few historians see their task any more as reconstructing a rational lineage of ideas through time’, The Politics of Evolution, p. 21.
James A. Secord, Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).
A useful discussion of this topic is to be found in Jean Chalaby, ‘Beyond the prison-house of language: discourse as a sociological concept’, British Journal of Sociology. 47 (4) (1996). 684–697.
For example, J.C.D. Clark, ‘A general theory of party, opposition and government, 1688–1832’, Historical Journal, 23 (2) (1980), 295–325.
C. Darwin, On the Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selection [1859], in J. Carroll (ed.) (Peterborough, Ont: Broadview Press Ltd., 2003), Ch. I, pp. 99–131.
See, for example, C. Kenneth Waters, ‘The arguments in the Origin of Species’, J. Hodge and G. Radick (eds), Cambridge Companion to Darwin, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 119–127.
The concept of political selection has been used before to denote a process of naturalistic selection in political structures. In contrast, we are using it here to describe a variant of artificial selection. See M. Wohlgemuth, ‘Evolutionary approaches to politics’, Kyklos, 55 (2002), 2, 223–246;
A. Farkas, State Learning and International Change (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1988), pp. 72, 170.
Cited in Bagehot, Literary Studies (2 vols, London: Longman, Green and Company), I, p. 15. See also N.C. Smith, Selected Letters of Sydney Smith (London, Oxford University Press, 1956), pp. 312–313.
See S.J. Gould, ‘More things in heaven and earth’, reproduced in S. Rose (ed.), The Richness of Life: The Essential Stephen Jay Gould (London and New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2007), pp. 444–466, esp. p. 457. Gould argued that cultural evolution was Lamarckian in style, ibid., p. 615.
See, for example, M. Bentley, The Climax of Liberal Politics: British Liberalism in Theory and Practice, 1868–1918 (London: Edward Arnold, 1987).
J.W. Burrow, Whigs and Liberals: Continuity and Change in English Political Thought (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988).
R. Brent, Liberal Anglican Politics: Whiggery, Religion and Reform 1830–1841 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987).
See also B. Hilton, ‘Whiggery, religion and social reform: the case of Lord Morpeth’, Historical Journal, 37 (1994)’, 829–835.
Copyright information
© 2009 Joseph Bord
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Bord, J. (2009). Conclusion. In: Science and Whig Manners. Studies in Modern History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230595231_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230595231_6
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-36555-5
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-59523-1
eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)