Review: [untitled]

Author(s): Mordechai Feingold

Source: The English Historical Review, Vol. 106, No. 418 (Jan., 1991), pp. 187-188
Published by: Oxford University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/575429 .
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I99I SHORTER NOTICES I87

period. In particular, he has circumvented what has become the greatestobstacle

to its proper study: the indignant conviction that because bribery was used
to influence the Scottish parliament to accept the incorporating Union of I707,
the issues must have been irrelevant. What Levack's book quite clearly shows
is that the form the Union of I707 took can only be understood in the light
of a century of debate, negotiation and occasionally conflict over the range
of issues at stake.

St Hugh's College, Oxford JOHN ROBERTSON

During the I920S, a major debate over the issue of quantum jumps divided
the community of physicists. The two most prominent protagonists in the
dispute were Max Born and Erwin Schr6dinger, the latter of whom became
particularly indignant when his ideas - which were quickly designated as the
'minority opinion' - were 'refuted' by a consensus of opponents. At one point
he even sniped: 'Since when are scientific questions decided by majority?'
Born, for his part, reserved his response to this question to his obituary of
Schr6dinger - 'at least since the time of Newton'. He might well have replied
'ever since Boyle', for as Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer's important book,
Leviathan and the Air-Pump. Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Prin-
ceton: U.P., i985; pp. 440. ?43), clearly demonstrates, the seventeenth-century
debate between Robert Boyle and Thomas Hobbes resulted in the creation
of a most powerful image of what constitutes consensus within a scientific
community. Ostensibly, the debate revolved around whether Boyle had indeed
been able to create a vacuum in the expensive air-pump he had invented, and
whether the ensuing experimental results were authentic. However, much more
fundamental issues were at stake. In the realm of philosophy and science,
the debate involved conflicting opinions of what were 'matters of fact'. How
public was Boyle's laboratory? What constituted evidence? Who was a credible
witness, and how reliable were experiments in natural philosophy to warrant
inference concerning the attainment of 'true' and scientific knowledge? In con-
trast to many other commentators, Shapin and Schaffertake Hobbes's criticism
seriously. Appropriately, they also recognize that the debate transcended the
merely scientific domain. After all, by the early i66os Hobbes's political philo-
sophy - which was explicitly cast upon his natural philosophy - represented
the embodiment of materialism and atheism. And Boyle's critique was, in
some respects, an extension of the previous debate between Hobbes on the
one hand and John Wallis and Seth Ward on the other. Boyle, like his two
Royal Society colleagues, recognized the significance Hobbes attached to his
mechanicalphilosophy, and concluded that the undermining of Hobbes's scien-
tific pretensions was prerequisite for discrediting his moral and political philo-
sophy. From our present perspective, it seems as if Wallis and Ward had little
difficulty in refuting Hobbes's 'groundless' claims that he was able to square
the circle; however, no one has yet taken the trouble to analyse that debate
carefully. I suspect that the result of such an investigation would lend further
credence to Shapin's and Schaffer's insistence on taking Hobbes seriously.
Hobbes denied the validity of Boyle's claim concerning the public nature of
'laboratory life'. His own exclusion from membership in the Royal Society
served to reinforce his accusation about the private and restrictive nature

EHR Jan. 91
i88 SHORTER NOTICES January
of the new scientific community, which not only created new canons of ineligi-
bility and authority, but employed such canons for the purpose of ostracizing
dissenters. Thus, Hobbes's ability to point out some 'mistakes' in the reported
results - as well as his skill in marshalling valid philosophical (and 'believable'!)
objections - made him all the more dangerous to the Royal Society, which
was already facing fierce opposition from various quarters. This is why it was
so important for Boyle and his colleagues at the Society to display a unified
and solid scientific front, to agree about what comprised a scientific 'fact',
and how the aggregate of such facts constituted true natural philosophy.
Hobbes, therefore, was portrayed as a subversive element in the scientific
sphere, as he was in the political and religious spheres. He erred not only
in his philosophy and unwillingness to desist from controversies, but also
in his refusal to admit to the weight of consensus. Community consent was
therefore an exercise in a powerful form of authority, as Hobbes - and two-and-
a-half centuries later Schrodinger- found to their chagrin. I missed a discussion
of the other dimension of the debate between Hobbes and the Royal Society,
the one over mathematics. Moreover, the authors' predilection for hammering
their sundry arguments at regular intervals becomes tedious at times. Still,
such cavils in no way lessen my respect for the major contribution this book
makes to our understanding of the genesis of the 'new science' of the seventeenth
century.

VirginiaPolytechnic Institute MORDECHAI FEINGOLD

In the last twenty years local studies have greatly enriched our understanding
of seventeenth-century England. By showing how few were the activists on
either side, they have changed our perspective of the Civil Wars. By stressing
the conservatism, political and religious, of provincial England they have
encouraged historians to see the Restoration not as an aberration, but as a
return to normal. This view receives powerful support from Andrew M.
Coleby's Central Government and the Localities: Hampshire, I649-I689
(Cambridge:U.P., I987; pp. xiii + 266. ?27.50). His mainthesisis thatlocal
government worked best when the central government was sensitive to the
wishes of the localities and framed its policies accordingly. Communication,
whether through Parliament or personal contacts, and responsiveness were
vital to effective government. Dr Coleby sees these conditions being met mainly
in the i66os and early i68os. By contrast, in the i65os and under James II
the centre was out of step with the provinces: controlled by men with extreme
and unpopular views, it had to rely on authority and the military to get its
way. That was not, he argues, very effective: even the New Model Army
was too small to police and defend the whole country without civilian co-
operation. This is an interesting thesis, which stands on its head the conven-
tional view of a rigorously effective centralist regime in the i650s giving way
to inefficiency and decentralization under Charles II. At times, however, the
author seems to strain his evidence. He claims that revenue collection in the
i65os was inefficient on the grounds that there were substantial arrears;yet
compared with the period before I640, what is surely striking is that so much
was being collected so quickly. Moreover, his claim that tax collection improved
after I66o is vitiated by a lack of comparative figures for either government

EHRJan. 91