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An article by Lewis Pyenson in Louisiana University (USA) about the comparative history of science, quoting critically The Secret of the West (see p.21 below shortcut), published in March 2002 in the Cambridge, UK-based journal History of Science. PDF-version.
(Lewis Pyenson: "Comparative History of Science", History of Science, Volume 40, Part 1, Number 127, March 2002, p.1-33).
Copy from the internet version Aug 06. Source.
Other article by Lewis Pyenson on this site.
The Secret of the West
Cosandey

COMPARATIVE HISTORY OF SCIENCE
Page 1

COMPARATIVE HISTORY OF SCIENCE
Lewis Pyenson
University of Louisiana at Lafayette
Beginning a review in 1978 of a collection comparing the Mexican and United
States revolutions, Don Higginbotham observed: “Historians in general, especially
American historians, have not been notably interested in comparative studies.
Until recent years at least, Clio’s disciples have been markedly conservative in
the way they have viewed their craft — ‘conservative about everything but their
politics,’ as the saying goes.”
1
To accentuate his thesis, Higginbotham entitles his
review, “The uses and abuses of comparative history”. Comparatists are marginal
in the historical discipline, Higginbotham seems to contend. Following Friedrich
Nietzsche’s criticism of Jacob Burckhardt in the essay, The use and abuse of
history, it is a querulous topic that admits to being used and abused: who would
title an article, “The uses and abuses of economic history”, or, “The uses and abuses
of diplomatic history”?
2
Higginbotham’s impressions reinforce the appraisal of
Rushton Coulborn in 1970, that we should look to the future, when the art of literary
history shall be transformed into the science of comparative history:
The comparative study of civilized societies is at a critical juncture. Almost all
the work which has been done has been that of very able scholars: Danilevski,
Spengler, Toynbee, Sorokin, Kroeber. That some of these pioneers are
eccentrics, or have an ulterior motive, is a familiar situation. What is now
needed is the work of a large body of respectable historians. The majority
of problems which arise in studying the rise and fall of civilized societies
are historical problems which can be solved — if at all — only by synthesis
skillfully done by putting together the results of documentary research. This
is the historian’s job; yet, of the authorities on the subject named here (or
anywhere else) only one is a historian by profession.
3
More recently, Robert Gregg has compared race relations in the United States
and South Africa. In a book that deals extensively with theoretical questions, he
devotes almost no discussion to comparative history, summarizing: “The most
severe limitation of comparative literature has been its national and nationalist
bent. The unit of analysis under comparison is, generally speaking, the nation
(or proxies thereof).”
4
Michel Trebitsch, introducing a collection of essays on
the comparative history of intellectuals, shares Gregg’s opinion. Regarding
comparison, he emphasizes,
historians, notably those writing today, still remain prudent and timid, if not
distrustful. The comparative approach already has its history, its long history,
in the humanities and social sciences; it doesn’t lack for eponymous heroes
0073-2753/02/4001-0001/$2.50 © 2002 Science History Publications Ltd
Hist. Sci., xl (2002)
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LEWIS PYENSON
among historians — one need only bring to mind the invocation of the great
canonical texts of Marc Bloch or Henri Pirenne. Yet it remains, because of
national historiography, a prisoner not only of the neo-positivist tendencies
that continually confront historians who write about our time, but also a
prisoner of its own contradictions — the structural dilemma that is evident
between a micro-comparative approach to historical entities confined to one
space, group, or event and a macro-comparative approach that is laced with
universalist tendencies.
5
Comparison in the social sciences and humanities indeed has a sketchy methodologi-
cal basis, to judge from the encomium received by Charles C. Ragin’s examination
of comparison from the point of view of Boolean logic.
6
Comparison may have a difficult time in Clio’s classroom, but among writers on
tools, methods, and trends, comparative history of science is denied even the dignity
of marginality: it is off the historiographical chart. In a summary of comparative
history written by the Americanist George M. Fredrickson for a volume published
under the auspices of the American Historical Association in 1980, there is no
mention of history of science.
7
Complementing Frederickson’s pessimistic view,
Robert J. Richards’s inventory of methodological approaches to writing history
of science, in 1981, is silent about comparison.
8
Comparison does not figure in
the title of any of the 67 chapters comprising a recent, gargantuan vademecum of
history of science.
9
Comparison is absent from Helge Kragh’s useful 1987 study
of historiography in history of science, which includes chapters on such themes as
biography, prosopography, and scientometrics, and it receives no mention in the
revised edition of François Russo’s disciplinary survey.
10
Shortly it will be seen that historical comparison has a long past, but a convenient
date for the crystallization of a concerted enterprise is 1958. In that year Sir Ronald
Syme, the great exponent of prosopography, delivered the third Whidden Lectures
at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada. As his topic, he compared colonial
élites in the three longest-lasting Western empires, the Roman, the Spanish, and
the British. Syme concluded with an appeal to Sir Lewis Namier and emphasized
the merits of comparison:
Henry Adams said of history that it is “in essence incoherent and immoral”.
None the less, in the phrase of Namier, a notable enemy of system and dogma,
it can be described as an “intelligible disorder”. “Intelligible” is the word. Our
occupations are not inevitably condemned to futility or pessimism. History
is discovery. It broadens the horizon and deepens the understanding. It is a
liberal and liberating force.
11
Also in 1958, the distinguished journal Comparative studies in society and history
was founded by the medievalist Sylvia Thrupp at the University of Michigan.
12
It
served to focus both sociological and historical interest on comparative questions.
The journal nevertheless followed Syme’s lead in treating marginality, in this case
situations far from imperial seats of power. Raymond Grew observed in 1980
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COMPARATIVE HISTORY OF SCIENCE
· 3
that many of the five hundred manuscripts he received for Comparative studies in
society and history, during his term as editor, concerned colonial matters: “The
colonial experience offers a degree of analytic control not usually available to social
scientists; new influences and pressures can be identified and their assimilation,
distortion, or rejection can be traced.”
13
Grew’s comments point to the importance of a longstanding international project
to compare the history of India with the history of Indonesia, animated by the
Centre for the History of European Expansion at the Rijksuniversiteit Leiden under
the watchful eye of, among other scholars, H. L. Wesseling, C. A. Bayly, D. H.
A. Kolff, P. C. Emmer, and Leonard Blussé.
14
Science is not a principal focus for
the scholars at Leiden, although in the course of their collective endeavour it has
proved impossible to neglect natural knowledge. Michael Adas, a United States
historian with ties to Leiden who has written about impressions of modernity in
modern empires, keeps science at arms’length.
15
Commenting on a series of recent
essays dealing with Manchu colonialism, Adas avoids addressing conceptions of
the natural world — even though one of the essays under consideration, concerned
precisely with maps of North-Central and EastAsia, fairly cries out for a comparative
discussion of surveying command structures, measuring techniques, and printing
practices.
16
The Leiden group did publish a brilliant comparative collection in
1991 with the Japan-Netherlands Institute in Tokyo as the third volume of the
Institute’s Journal, edited by W. G. J. Remmelink, which records the proceedings of
a conference on the transfer of modern science between Europe and Asia. Many of
the thirteen chapters radiate wide learning, but only two are explicitly comparative.
H. Floris Cohen concludes in his contribution: “To distant China’s science the West
does not seem to owe much — partly because of the ‘translation filter’, partly as
a result of the incommensurability of the natural philosophies of China and the
West”; Harm Beukers reaches a related conclusion that, in early modern times,
there was relatively little interchange of medical knowledge East and West, except
for the Western use of Eastern medicinal herbs, and with recognition of the special
case of Japan.
17
These promising explorations have remained within a relatively
small community of scholars. Because historians of science still overwhelmingly
study European and North American occurrences, they have paid little attention
to innovations emanating from Leiden and elsewhere which deal with European
expansion. History of science seems to follow the observations of the Sinologist
Craig Clunas, who emphasizes, in reviewing a history of Western consumers:
“Comparative work is all very well, but, with certain shining exceptions, it
tends for the present to take place toward the periphery, not at the center, of
the historical field.”
18
Philosophers have analysed science from first principles, and even Thomas Kuhn
in his last writings sought to follow this path, but understanding also arrives through
examination of many concrete examples taken from the natural world. Some
knowledge — religious or artistic — may come directly from divine inspiration,
but an apprehension of the world in the undertaking called natural knowledge is
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LEWIS PYENSON
won through a process of sorting things out into kinds. The disturbing sabotage of
this view opens Michel Foucault’s book, Les mots et les choses, where Foucault
recounts Jorge Luis Borges’s description of the animal kingdom in a medieval
Chinese bestiary, organized in an apparently fabulous and nonsensical fashion.
19
Foucault, whose methodological animadversions seem guided by anarchist impulse,
nevertheless places things in diverse heaps.
20
If generalization is granted to
historians (the matter is contested), it comes following sustained reflection of
comparable instance and example.
Notwithstanding the underground status of comparative history generally, the
following pages contend that comparison has been a persistent feature of the
discipline of history of science. Comparative studies have been among the most
innovative and the most durable of scholarly undertakings in our field, and they
have been carried out from a number of locations around the world. They have
generated significant discussion, and they have stimulated new areas of inquiry. At
the present time, when postmodernism has run its course and when scholars are
looking to formulations based on constructive labour and clear prose, comparative
history of science offers direction and inspiration. The very range and richness of
what has appeared over the past generation, especially, recommend comparison as
a solid foundation for research in the present decade.
21
A particular merit of comparison derives from its ecumenical presence in the
world of scholarship. Persuasive and original studies have issued from Cambridge
and Berkeley, as well as from São Paulo and Tokyo, from the hand of doctoral
students as well as distinguished professors. Today the application of comparison
harbours no eponymous “school”, whether deriving from a university town or a
philosopher. It displays neither secret agenda nor code words, and it is intolerant of
muddle-headed prose. By its nature, it resists appropriation by bonzes or Gelehrter.
Comparative history of science may provide a path to scholarly reconciliation
in a fissiparous discipline.
22
* * *
Comparison is implicit in nineteenth-century historical studies, which not
infrequently sought to establish contrasting racial or regional styles. In the New
World, comparison appeared explicitly in the two great commentators on democracy,
Alexis de Tocqueville and Henry Adams, and in Domingo Faustino Sarmiento’s
novel about civilization and barbarism, Facundo. The French polymath Pierre
Duhem contrasted British model-building to French mathematical abstraction.
23
In
his history of European science, the Anglo-German wonder John Theodore Merz
characterized the ideal type of German scientist by an attention to thoroughness, an
awareness of the larger picture, a desire to create acolytes, and a predilection to deal
with philosophy; English scientists were idiosyncratic and practical-minded; French
scientists were analytical and pedagogical. This interpretive device has proved
remarkably resilient.
24
The Swiss naturalist Alphonse de Candolle, in his work on
foreign memberships in national academies, was explicitly comparative.
25
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COMPARATIVE HISTORY OF SCIENCE
· 5
Johannes Paulmann recently suggested that historical comparison is most
effective on a European scale, where on occasion science is present.
26
The origin
of this restriction lies in the faint presence of Western historical inquiry beyond
the North Atlantic World. The asymmetry is acute: there are many treatments of
Argentina and Indonesia by North Atlantic scholars, but very few in the reverse
direction. A sense of the poverty may be obtained from a collection edited by Ivan
Vallier in 1971, where a Eurocentric focus, from Karl Marx to Talcott Parsons,
weighs heavily in the historical footnotes — in clear contrast to the extra-European
discussion of anthropology.
27
When reason and enlightenment come into play,
Europe still takes centre-stage. Indeed, in his comparative social history of the
Enlightenment, Thomas Munck portrays Benjamin Franklin only as a kite-flying,
masonic, American politician, rather than, more optimistically, a printer, diplomat,
and American natural philosopher. Munck asserts: “Natural philosophy remained
throughout the eighteenth century primarily in the hands of non-specialists”,
apparently mistaking physics for philosophy dealing with “basic scientific
methodology”.
28
Robert H. Robins has traced the early development of the discipline from which
comparative history derives. The inspiration for disciplined comparison comes from
the enterprise of comparative linguistics. Appearing explicitly in the Renaissance
through the work of scholars like Joseph Justus Scaliger, comparison of languages
proceeded under the watchful eye of Leibniz, mindful of the practical translations
upon which European expansion was predicated. Then, late in the eighteenth
century, the field exploded with the labors of Sir William Jones, Jacob Grimm,
Rasmus Rask, Franz Bopp, and Alexander von Humboldt, whose book, Die
Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaues appeared posthumously in 1836.
29
The notion behind comparative linguistics was simple: by comparing existing
languages and thereby reconstructing extinct antecedents, it would be possible to
extend historical reasoning back to a time before written documents.
Anthropology provided a second scholarly focus for comparison in the nineteenth
century and early twentieth century, and, inspired by Auguste Comte’s writings, it
led into ambitious programs for analysing the evolution of civilization. Franz Boas
and Alfred Lewis Kroeber, for example, wrestled with comparison throughout their
career, and anthropologists still provide many of the most interesting comparative
studies with relevance to historical themes, for example, Tadataka Igarashi’s study
of astronomy in the Malay Archipelago.
30
The centre of comparative history at
the University of Wisconsin owes a great deal to anthropological inspiration.
31
Roland Axtmann has observed that the nineteenth-century comparatists, whether
anthropological or sociological, were evolutionist; they sought to classify cultures
and societies and aimed “towards assigning cultural traits (or whole countries) to
a specific stage of development”. The comparative method “allowed investigators
to see social and cultural differences as simply representing various stages of
evolution”.
32
The lines between anthropology, sociology, and history have been
blurred for more than a century (a notable early example is found in the writings
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LEWIS PYENSON
of Pitirim Sorokin), despite the caution against such mésalliance in the controversy
around Karl Lamprecht.
Fritz Ringer observed a generation ago that Lamprecht was at the centre of a
controversy that became known as the Methodenstreit, the struggle over method.
In the 1890s, Lamprecht, ordinarius of history at Leipzig, was publishing a multi-
volume history of Germany which had a wide readership. Borrowing eclectically
and carelessly from political historians, economic historians, and psychologists,
Lamprecht enlisted a “rather turbulent mixture of anthropological information,
imaginative portraiture, and embarrassingly superfluous rhetoric about psychosocial
laws” to describe cultural epochs in terms of fundamental psychological resonances.
Lamprecht’s writings generated intensely negative feelings in the German historical
community, for whom the aim of history remained the elaboration of decisive
individual action in the development of the state. There was, however, no general
agreement about Lamprecht’s basic orientation, whether he was, indeed, idealist,
materialist, or positivist. The Lamprecht controversy, Ringer concludes, “helped
make German historians acutely conscious about their methods during the late
1890s and thereafter”.
33
Cultural history and its comparative focus fell into disrepute in Germany, but they
enjoyed a rebirth in France during the late 1920s through the School of the Annales,
founded by Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch. To Marc Bloch falls the distinction of
proposing a method for comparative history.
Elaborating remarks by Henri Pirenne, Bloch described comparative history as
the process of identifying two or more phenomena that seem analogous and that
appear in one or more social settings, and then considering how these phenomena
resemble and differ from each other. A historical comparison required similarity
between the observed phenomena as well as “a certain dissimilarity between the
environments in which they occur”. Bloch noted that there are two different ways
of applying the comparative method. One may consider societies widely separated
in space or time, like those in Sir James Fraser’s Golden Bough, or one may take
as unites of comparison societies that are geographical neighbours or historical
contemporaries, as in the method of comparative linguistics. In either case, the
comparative method helps the informed historian formulate questions to ask the
documents that he confronts. The comparative approach allows the historian to
discover phenomena that a first glance seem to be lacking in one geographical area
or society. The comparative method can illuminate divergent evolution, when a
phenomenon becomes extinct in one place but persists in another. It is sometimes
indispensable in the search for historical causes.
34
The program of the Annaliens brought them to study long-term economic trends,
which eventually took them into the terrain of science and technology.
35
Two critics
have identified a restriction that in their view is fundamental to Bloch’s program:
“What ought to be compared in any study that claims to follow the method used in
comparative historical linguistics is all and only the phenomena in a related group.”
36
That is, just as the construction of Proto-Romance requires studying all living
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COMPARATIVE HISTORY OF SCIENCE
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descendants of this extinct language, so understanding the origins of feudalism
requires an analysis of all its later, medieval manifestations.
Comparative history has gone beyond Bloch’s prescriptions. Theda Skocpol
and Margaret Somers identify three different kinds of comparative history:
macro-causal analysis, which resembles multivariate hypothesis-testing; the
parallel demonstration of theory; and the contrast of contexts.
37
Charles Tilly,
after examining the state of global, historical comparison, divides scholarship
into four categories: individualizing comparisons, universalizing comparisons,
variation-finding comparisons, and encompassing comparisons. In general, he notes,
“Historically grounded huge comparisons of big structures and large processes
help establish what must be explained, attach the possible explanations to their
context in time and space, and sometimes actually improve our understanding of
those structures and processes”.
38
A. A. van den Braembussche points to the value
of comparison operating in three “mixed” forms which he calls generalizing (where
differences between instances move to centre-stage), macrocausal (hypothesis-
testing), and inclusive (where the instances to be studied are found within one
large context, for example, a world economy).
39
Maurice Mandelbaum classifies
comparative history into the evolutionary approach (for example, the sociology
of Auguste Comte), the genetic approach (tracing similarities among societies
through their lines of descent), and the analogical approach (further divided into a
phenomenological form of carrying out direct description and an analytical form
of identifying implicit resemblances).
40
A sense of the many moods of comparatists
and also of the heavy theoretical machinery invoked to put a compass to them may
be obtained from a forum on comparative historiography at the second European
Social Science History Conference in 1998.
41
Levels of theory cascade one upon
the other in Jörn Rüsen’s discussion of comparative historiography.
42
By way
of temperamental and literary contrast, Robert Darnton, an historian working
with primary sources, has offered a practical agenda for a comparative history of
the book.
43
An understanding of comparison certainly differs from one historian
to another, but nearly all writers would agree with Christophe Charle, in his
comparative study of intellectuals in the nineteenth century, that the merit of
comparison is not to confirm propositions that are in essence tautological, of the
kind: “French intellectuals behave in a certain way because they are French.”
44
Just
as in other parts of history, comparison allows for generating deeper explanatory
hypotheses.
45
* * *
Sophisticated, comparative history of science appeared through the labour of four
scholars in the 1950s: Edward Shils, Ludwig Fritz Haber, Joseph Ben-David, and
Derek J. de Solla Price. Shils, a conservative sociologist at the University of Chicago
and the founder of the periodical Minerva, focused on élites in academia; Haber
stayed close to the record of technology; Ben-David compiled historical statistics
to sustain his thesis about the vitality of free-market, competitive academia;
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LEWIS PYENSON
and Price sought to transform the history of science into a science itself, where
quantitative indicators could map vitality and torpor.
46
The 1960s saw additional
interest. Hrothgar John Habakkuk published a comparison of invention in American
and British technology, a comparison later reconsidered by Nathan Rosenberg.
47
Background to the issue of professionalization of science came from John J. Beer
and W. David Lewis; scientists as political actors formed the subject of an analysis
by W. H. G. Armytage; Donald Cardwell compared scientific research at British
and German universities.
48
The most interesting of comparative studies related
to science on a world scale: Donald Fleming and then George Basalla compared
early science in the New World with that of other developing nations. Basalla’s
three-stage model for the evolution of an independent scientific community has
become a classic in the field of science and imperialism.
49
The comparative euphoria of the 1960s, where scholars elaborated broad themes
over long periods of time, took new shape in the 1970s. One of the last of the broad
treatments was Odin Waldemar Anderson and Ronald Andersen’s comparative
treatment of health care in the United States, Sweden, and England.
50
The 1970s
may be, to borrow from David S. Landes’s expression for the decades after the
dramatic expansion of the First Industrial Revolution, a time of “short breath and
second wind”. Scholars sought clear and careful comparisons over a short range.
Leading the way was Stanley Goldberg’s doctoral dissertation at Harvard University
comparing the reception of special relativity in Europe and the United States,
completed in 1969.
51
Following this approach came Thomas F. Glick’s collection
of essays about Darwinism in various cultural settings and Sal P. Restivo and
Christopher K. Vanderpool’s collection of comparative essays on science and
society.
52
Charles Weiner studied cylotrons in European, American, and Japanese
settings; R. G. A. Dolby investigated nineteenth-century physical chemistry in
Great Britain and the United States, and Dieter B. Herrmann examined astrophysics
in Germany and the United States. Stephen G. Brush considered a number of
scientist revolutionaries circa 1905 in an attempt to evaluation the notion of a
scientific revolution.
53
Analytically, three texts stand out. First is Nathan Reingold’s
characterization of the American national style in science, read in 1978 at the
International History of Science Congress in Edinburgh, with its remarkable,
comparative tables.
54
Second is Russell McCormmach’s original and penetrating
comparison of the general attitudes of scientists in Wilhelmian Germany and in the
United States during the 1960s.
55
The major comparative effort of the 1970s is the
Dreimännerarbeit of Forman, Heilbron and Weart, published as a separate volume
in McCormmach’s Historical studies in the physical sciences.
56
The Dreimännerarbeit, or three-man work, followed the major archival project
of the 1960s, Sources for the History of Quantum Physics, led by Thomas S. Kuhn
and conducted with the help of Heilbron and Forman.
57
The Sources project sought
to assemble letters from and interviews with the major actors in the revolution of
twentieth-century physics. The project led to the extraordinary resources available
today through the Center for the History of Physics at the American Institute of
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COMPARATIVE HISTORY OF SCIENCE
· 9
Physics. The material allowed Kuhn, Heilbron and Forman to produce remarkable
works of scholarship, notably Kuhn and Heilbron’s tracing of Niels Bohr’s path to
his atomic model and Forman’s thesis that the reception of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty
Principle in Germany was a response by physicists to a cultural environment that was
hostile to traditional reason and causality.
58
Forman in fact elaborated the contrast
between Germany and England in this regard.
59
Stimulated in part by the work of
the Institute for Scientific Information in Philadelphia and its Science citation index,
in part by the indefatigable optimism of scholars like Price, quantitative analysis
was on the agenda for historians of science in the 1970s.
60
Forman, Heilbron and Weart set out to provide a comparative, statistical picture
of physics at academic establishments around the world in the year 1900, the
eve of the quantum revolution. They compared physical size, budget, and staff
of laboratories and institutes, as well as the literature output of national sectors.
The information was assembled from a wide variety of published sources, and it
appealed to the extensive archival record. They concluded that Germany dominated
physics, although the United States was rising rapidly in the discipline; France was
declining. The study is remarkable for having resolved many issues that confound
comparison, for example, fluctuating currency exchanges and distinctive command
structures. Other persuasive comparisons on related material have appeared, but the
Dreimännerarbeit remains unique in scale and sophistication.
61
Complementing the master-work of Forman, Heilbron and Weart were other
significant comparative studies in the 1970s. Jack B. Morrell provided a paradigmatic
study comparing the success of Liebig’s school of organic chemistry in Germany
and the relative eclipse of Thomas Thomson’s chemical school in Scotland, a
form of institutional comparison that continues to generate fruitful results.
62
Loren Graham studied how eugenics came to Germany and Russia in the 1920s.
63
John Heilbron presented a comparative picture of physicists in seventeenth- and
eighteenth-century Europe in his definitive early history of electricity.
64
Comparison
continued into the 1980s with major, new statements by David Landes on clocks
and clockmaking, Daniel J. Kevles on eugenics in Great Britain and the United
States, and Thomas P. Hughes on large networks of electrical power in Europe and
America.
65
In Hughes’s nuanced study, he shows that there was no inevitability to
the development of electrical power, for technological choices (such as direct
versus alternating current) abounded; the architecture of networks derived from
social, not technological, imperatives; that technologists sought to resolve thorny
problems, rather than remand them to scientists; that electrical power came as
part of a vertical integration of banks and factories; and that when established,
technology acquires a ‘momentum’ of its own, which shapes and constrains
many social enterprises.
66
In the 1980s, generalizations emerged based on extensive comparison, notably
Gerald L. Geison’s classification of specialties and research schools.
67
Sal
Restivo’s broad characterizations of science, East and West, and Margaret Lock’s
characterization of Japanese and Western medicine found a complement in the
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LEWIS PYENSON
contributions to the proceedings of the Ninth Annual Conference of the Center
for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies at the State University of New
York at Binghamton, devoted to “Islam and the medieval West”, where George
Makdisi compared the college in Islam and the West and Albert Dietrich compared
pharmacology in Islam and the West.
68
Jonathan Harwood compared genetics
in Germany and the United States, and Erik Baark, Andrew Jamison and their
colleagues at the University of Lund examined national styles of administration of
science and technology.
69
In his doctoral dissertation at Johns Hopkins University,
Louis Barry Rosenblatt compared early Victorian geology with early Victorian
classical history.
70
Two enterprises based extensively on both primary and secondary sources merit
special attention. Jens Høyrup undertook to reformulate the social conditions for
mathematics in Antiquity and the medieval period, an enterprise complementing
the technical analyses of Otto Neugebauer’s school and in any case appealing
to a good number of ancient and modern languages. His approach was modest.
He sought
to investigate how the character of mathematical thinking depends on the
institutional situation in which mathematics is practiced as knowledge —
perhaps as theory, perhaps as techniques one should know in order to apply
them — in interplay with the wider cultural settings and societal determinants of
institutions. The method is cross-culturally and cross-historically comparative,
but no effort is made to find the same parameters in all cases, apart from
the choice of teaching as a critical factor.... Nor do I, indeed, believe that
a schematization aiming at finding a rigid common grid of explanatory
factors makes much sense in cultures as widely divergent as those dealt
with here.
71
For the modern period, Susan Sheets-Pyenson undertook a pioneering comparative
study of popular-science publications in London and Paris during the middle of the
nineteenth century, concluding that French science popularizers were “high-science
watchers” while English science popularizers were “high-science boosters”. The
French popularizers reported passively on academy and laboratory, while the
English amateur scientist could and did contribute to academic science.
72
She
then published a landmark study comparing nineteenth-century natural-history
museums in Argentina, Australia and New Zealand, and Canada. Sheets-Pyenson’s
approach was an integrating one, in the manner of social historians. Her book on
colonial natural-history museums avoids superfluous appeal to methodology. The
five institutions considered in her book constitute type specimens of the “colonial
museum”. She writes: “The patterns of development drawn from the five cases ...
are typical of the more successful among colonial museums.” Generalizations are
omnipresent, whether on matters of personnel, funding, or institutional organization,
and they are presented inobtrusively to draw the reader in; just as with Høyrup’s
study, absent is rhetoric about abstract constructions such a role-set, ideology, and
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COMPARATIVE HISTORY OF SCIENCE
· 11
power, of the kind displayed in sociology of science.
73
As Sheets-Pyenson’s work demonstrates, in addition to encouraging a certain
economy of explanation, comparison discourages triumphal writing, for in any
historical comparison, even the most successful example carries less than desirable
traits. (Otto Neugebauer remarked, for example, that while Babylonian science
was clearly more sophisticated than Egyptian science, he would certainly have
preferred to live in Egypt over Babylon.) Comparison cautions enthusiasm. Early
in the 1980s, Joseph Needham published his Ch’ien Mu Lectures at the Chinese
University of Hong Kong. The book is an accessible meditation on science East
and West, continually comparing figures, inventions, and understandings. To cite
one of a very great many examples, Needham holds that “the centralised feudal
bureaucratic style of social order was in the early stages favourable to the growth of
applied science”. This social order, controlled by the shih, or scholar-bureaucratic
meritocracy, departed from the “aristocratic military” feudalism of the West, and it
permitted grand enterprises like the “Big Science” of the twentieth century:
Chinese society in the Middle Ages was able to mount much greater expeditions
and much more organised scientific field work than was the case in any other
society of that time. A good example of this is the survey of the meridian arc
carried out early in the +8th century under the auspices of I-Hsing ... and the
astronomer Nankung Yüeh. This was a geodetic survey covering a line no less
than 2500 km long, ranging from Indo-China to the borders of Mongolia. At
about the same time an expedition was sent down to the East Indies for the
purpose of surveying the constellations of the southern hemisphere within
20° of the south celestial pole.
He reviews the complex development of gunpowder, concluding: “While gunpowder
blew up Western military aristocratic feudalism, the basic structure of Chinese
bureaucratic feudalism after five centuries or so of gunpowder weapons remained just
about the same as it had been before the invention had taken place.” He reconsiders
the origin of Islamic alchemy, observing Chinese antecedents in macrobiotics and
the invention of automata. Needham concludes: “Arabic alchemical theory was a
marriage between the Taoist idea of longevity or immortality, brought about by
the ingestion of chemical substances, and the Galenic rating of pharmaceutical
potency, in accordance with the krasis, the mizaj, and ‘adal — the balance of the
four primary qualities, the natures.” The attempt of Jabir ibn Hayyan to create life
in an alembic is the union of Chinese medicinal alchemy and Greek metallurgical
chemistry, and “If nothing living was really ever seen to step forth from Jabir ibn
Hayyan’s cosmic incubators, chemotherapy with all its marvellous achievement of
today was certainly born from the Chinese-Arabic tradition with Philippus Aureolus
Theophrastus Paracelsus Bombastus von Hohenheim as its great midwife”. And
it was neither William Harvey nor the Damascus physician of the thirteenth
century, Ibn al-Qarashi al-Nafis, who originated the circulation of the blood:
it was the Chinese, although to Harvey fell the notion of the heart as a pump.
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LEWIS PYENSON
Needham’s eye for detail did not prevent him from issuing broad generalization.
The preceding extracts suggest the extent to which his project is animated by
a comparative urge.
74
Needham’s comparison finds an extension in other syntheses. Shigeru Nakayama,
in a comparative work first appearing in Japanese in 1974, proposes that East Asian
knowledge derived from documentary scholarship, while Mediterranean knowledge
stemmed from rhetorical learning, and he examines why, “among the multitude
of theories and arguments afloat in classical Greece and Warring States China,
those of Aristotle and Confucius assumed the paradigmatic mantle”. Aristotle and
Confucius achieved the status of an authority in part as a result of a tradition of
“manuscript-centered, classics-oriented scholarship”. The tradition, which in each
case lasted more than 1500 years, required an originator of some sort: “The question
of authorship was not a significant issue. The name of the progenitor and the texts
associated with him were used first of all as an invisible yet commonly understood
badge of identity by which scholars knew themselves and were known to others.”
Nakayama’s text is unusually rich in its comparative style; that is, comparative
discussion often occupies many consecutive paragraphs, for example, distinguishing
the classificatory mode of Chinese science, which easily accommodates Kuhnian
anomalies, from the Western science of unitary, nomological explanation, which
eventually breaks under the weight of growing numbers of anomaly.
75
Toby E. Huff has reconsidered science from the perspective of the social
philosopher Benjamin Nelson and through the impetus of Joseph Needham.
“Without doubt”, Huff writes, “Joseph Needham’s monumental study, Science and
civilisation in China, did more than any other work in the twentieth century to draw
attention to the need for a comparative, historical, and sociological study of the rise
of modern science”. Huff’s appeals to sociology detract from a comparative inquiry
that may stand on its own merits. One of Huff’s original contributions is to identify
the special character of law in European, Islamic, and Chinese civilization, and
to contend that only European legal tradition, both conceptual and institutional,
paved the way for the formulation of natural laws in modern science: “By the
end of the thirteenth century, along with the formal elements of the Aristotelian
corpus, a powerful, methodological sophisticated, intellectual framework for the
study of nature had been institutionalized” in European universities. For Huff,
universities, far from being bastions of ignorance and prejudice, were the engine
of the Scientific Revolution:
Sociological and historical accounts of the role of the university as an
institutional locus for science and as an incubator of scientific thought
and argument have been vastly understated.... The universities were highly
instrumental in disseminating many new intellectual currents in scientific
thought, and, most important of all, they were the primary locations of severe
criticism of both old and new ideas.
76
Edgar Zilsel’s fruitful emphasis on artisans and craftsmen as the non-academic
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COMPARATIVE HISTORY OF SCIENCE
· 13
builders and measurers of the world recedes in favour of a focus on the traditionally
maligned schoolmen as disseminators of the new knowledge.
77
Sophisticated comparison is now a structural feature of scholarship dealing
with East Asia. The Seventh International Conference on the History of Science
in East Asia, held in Kyoto in 1993, produced a number of sensitive studies in
this direction. There Nathan Sivin outlined a program to delve more deeply into
comparing ancient Greek and Chinese science. Comparisons have accumulated
“a certain number of facts and dates ... but the conclusions drawn in the many
published comparisons seldom affect our daily work or our understanding of the
world we study”, that is, the details of East Asian science. Sivin offered that many
comparisons were made “out of context one at a time, whether they are concepts,
values, machines, or groups of people”. He presented a project undertaken with
G. E. R. Lloyd to focus on the period 300
B
.
C
. to
A
.
D
. 200 in both the Greek
and Chinese ambit. Sivin’s preliminary conclusions identify a Greek culture of
disputation and a Chinese culture of consensus; the Chinese notion of ‘polis’
was unifying and centralized, while in Greek learning there was a multiplicity of
political concepts; Chinese rulers established a loyal civil service and they were
disposed to acknowledge political limitations offered by their clercs, while Greek
rulers and their successors ignored the advice of philosophers, a situation that
encouraged heterodoxy; Greek learning was a competitive affair, functioning by
oral disputation, while Chinese scholars offered their thoughts directly to rulers,
and in this way sought to avoid disagreement. In the same proceedings, Karine
Chemla compared algebraic equations in Babylonian, Greek, and Chinese traditions,
identifying two unique features of the Chinese literature: equations were imagined
as arithmetical operations, and equations were solved within a framework of root
extraction. By philological analysis involving a number of Arabic texts, Chemla
posited a debt by Arabic algebra to Chinese tradition. Jianjun Mei and Tsun Ko
compared copper, iron, and zinc technology in India and China. Hans Ulrich Vogel
compared Chinese and Western accounts of subterranean brine and gas wells. In
view of some confused postmodernist rhetoric that the conference sustained, Vogel’s
conclusion is strikingly reasonable: “Western explanations of the seventeenth
century were in no way superior to their Chinese counterparts. Only with the
development of modern chemistry and geology towards the end of the eighteenth
century were Western scholars in a better position to forward, in the long run, more
realistic explanations.” Vogel shares Needham’s emphasis on the unique importance
of the European Scientific Revolution.
78
* * *
Notwithstanding the sophisticated, sachlich comparisons of the Asianists, less
ambitious individual “comparisons” are a standard feature of scholarship now, and
the word has acquired a wide meaning. David B. Wilson has written a segmented
biography of two nineteenth-century British physicists who engaged related
scientific questions, notably the electromagnetic ether. R. D. Harvey has performed a
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LEWIS PYENSON
similar analysis for William Bateson and Erwin Baur, with regard to eugenics. Alan
J. Rocke has offered a “comparative perspective” on the early nineteenth-century
organic analysis of Liebig, Dumas, and Berzelius; the ‘comparison’ is summarized
weakly: “The battles over elemental organic analysis circa 1830 provide an
interesting window on wider aspects of chemistry, science, and European culture.
Liebig borrowed essential elements of French culture and French chemistry, some
of which remained with him for the rest of his life, but he added other elements as
well, including German and Berzelian.”
79
A fine comparison of two contemporaries has been provided by Russell
McCormmach in his study of the response by Albert Einstein and writer Hermann
Broch to the horrors of the 1930s and 1940s: “Among the realistically hopeful and
humane critics of the actions of politicians and the publics who supported them
were a number of scientists and artists who included the physical scientist who was
perhaps the most gifted since Newton, and one of the century’s greatest writers of
fiction — Einstein and Broch.” Both men knew,
as we know, that the recent barbarism arose “from within, from the core of
European civilization” where great works of art were produced and where
the great scientific and technical institutes were. The extermination of tens of
millions of Europeans by Europeans, to say nothing of the related extermination
of and by non-Europeans, in a brief thirty years following 1914 makes the
normally reflective person question whether or not science and art have had any
significant influence for the better on the political life of the West.
Neither man questioned his own search for meaning and harmony in science and
in art, although Broch “did question ... the value of the pure quest for beauty,
and he made that question, paradoxically, the heart of his mature artistic work”.
McCormmach allows that if, today, we are inclined not to take their notions
seriously, it is an artifact of the timelessness of ethics: “If their admonitions sound
like moral platitudes — so they have been called — it is because the standard of
moral judgments is not originality.” McCormmach’s essay concludes:
Science and art, as Einstein and Broch knew, may not make our character
better, but they jointly shape many of our perceptions of reality. Ethical
judgements and actions take their starting point both in character and in
perceptions of reality. In this sense, both science and art serve as guides
through our ethical universe.
80
The assessment gives meaning to our own specialty, which frequently seeks to
evaluate the character of reality perceivers.
As part of her extensive work on the Nobel institutes and prizes, Elisabeth
Crawford has indicated three ways of undertaking comparison in history of science.
The first is to study disciplines, specialties, and schools; the second is to focus
on élite stratification of scientists; the third is to divide the world into centre
and periphery. Crawford undertakes a prosopography of the group consisting
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COMPARATIVE HISTORY OF SCIENCE
· 15
of nominators and nominees for Nobel prizes to explore these three senses of
comparison, and she applies her results to evaluate the notion of internationalism
in science. Her felicitous choice of data allows her to go beyond impressionistic
generalizing. It remains a rare, sophisticated comparative study dealing explicitly
with European science. A fourth form of comparison places comparable instances
alongside each other, notably in considering the reception of scientific innovations
in a national context.
81
Thomas Glick has used the national-reception comparison
effectively in a collective volume considering how people responded to Einstein’s
relativity. The chapters in the volume focus on particular national sectors, and it
is left for the reader to propose explanations for differences and similarities. One
of the chapters does explicitly engage comparison, considering how the structure
of the German response to relativity, called a scientific revolution, compares with
the structure of the French Revolution.
82
A related collection considers science
separately in the United States and in Australia, although the volume includes
a scintillating comparative chapter by Susan Sheets-Pyenson and a comparison
of science in Ireland and in Quebec during the nineteenth century by Richard A.
Jarrell; a companion volume comparing science in Canada and Australia features
only three explicitly comparative chapters in a total of nine, and of the three
only one focuses on science.
83
Historians with a theoretical bent have not hesitated to offer prescriptions to
their colleagues, but comparison in the history of science, undertaken by theorizing
authors, often remains indistinguishable from conflation. The result may be
persuasive and original, even if comparison is not a primary desideratum, as in
David S. Landes’s Unbound Prometheus, but the danger is superficial narrative, or
‘potted’ history.
84
Colin A. Russell’s survey of two centuries of European science
appears in a series devoted (according to the editor’s foreword) to themes “in a
comparative context, drawing on material from western societies as well as those
in the wider world”. Russell’s focus is heavily British, with comparisons most
effective between England and Scotland: “Scotland differed from England in its
dedication to cultural and economic improvements, in its Calvinist ethic and in
its University at Edinburgh uniquely tuned to the needs and aspirations of the
local and national community.”
85
In an examination of the introduction of Western
astronomy into China during the seventeenth century by the Jesuit Johann Adam
Schall von Bell, Zhu Weizheng analyses Schall’s confrontation with the courtier
Yang Guangxian; the only element of comparison concerns the two astronomical
systems — Western and Chinese. Zhu also writes about Han learning and Western
learning in the eighteenth century; where one might have expected a comparison
between the European Renaissance and the Han renascence, we see only European
writings in China placed alongside the Han classics.
86
The proceedings of the 13
th
International Symposium on the Comparative History of Medicine, East and West,
follows Zhu’s approach, restricting comparison entirely to the conflation of Western
and Japanese views of medicine and illness.
87
Seeking to reevaluate “the context of dependency”, Michel Paty has recently
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LEWIS PYENSON
called for careful comparison:
Only by ‘differential’studies, whose subject is restricted but which are accurate
and varied, concerning different but in some respect comparable situations
(this is indeed the original meaning of the term differential: different but
very close), can legitimate comparative statements be made. It is with these
differences and these similarities as starting point, situated exactly, that