Shapin, The Scientific Revolution

Shapin, Steven. The Scientific Revolution

Steven Shapin’s short survey of the period of European history known as the Scientific Revolution is a book clearly not intended for serious scholars of the period. Indeed, Shapin says so himself in the introduction. Despite this, it is a valuable and clearly-written resource for those trying to make sense of an important but incredibly complicated period of discovery, writing, and thought. Shapin begins by explaining that the term “Scientific Revolution” was in fact coined in the 1930s to describe the flurry of scientific discovery that took place during the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries in Europe. From the start, Shapin clearly takes the position that the Scientific Revolution as the one cohesive narrative implied by the term never existed. As one reviewer writes, “The most important idea that one takes away from the book is that one monolithic narrative about the ‘Scientific Revolution’ does not do justice to the complexity of scientific activity during the early modern period, necessitating the production of detailed microhistories.” Instead, Shapin argues, the period we call the Scientific Revolution, though filled with innovation and discovery, was in fact a “conceptual revolution, a fundamental reordering of our ways of thinking about the natural. In this respect, a story about the Scientific Revolution might be adequately told through an account of radical changes in the fundamental categories of thought” (2).

The book itself is clearly organized to reflect this idea of a conceptual revolution rather than a scientific one. Shapin divides the text into three chapters: “What Was Known,” “How Was It Known,” and “What Was the Knowledge For.” In the first chapter, Shapin explains some of the common ideas of the age, such as corpuscular theory, while in the second chapter he goes into methodology and experimentation. The third chapter, the longest, fills out the picture by explaining political and social context, and especially puts the new scientific knowledge and approaches into the context of supporting religion. This organization makes it particularly interesting that one reviewer of the book was a professor at UC Berkeley’s School of Information Systems and Management. The Scientific Revolution is in many respects a survey of a period during which the methods for information collection, application, and general management changed drastically.

Reviewers seem to be critical of the shortness of the book. One remarked on the fact that the thirty-four page bibliography at the end is a list of books which it would take a lifetime to read, while Shapin’s book itself is closer to one hundred twenty-five pages if one takes the illustrations into consideration. The reviewer in question continues by stating that the third chapter, the one in which the author discusses the context and the relation of science to religion during these centuries, is unnecessarily confusing, since he tries to explain why the changes in scientific outlook changed in the seventeenth century. The point is well taken, though it might be pointed out that the section in the review on this subject is equally confusing as the chapter in the book to which the reviewer objects. Overall, though The Scientific Revolution by Steven Shapin is a short, over-arching survey of a period of astonishing scientific discovery, innovation, and thought, not to mention its lack of scholarly footnotes, it is useful. The book provides a clear introduction to a complicated period in European intellectual history, and though scholars of the subject might object to its general audience appeal, it serves well for those of us whose areas of study only overlap the Scientific Revolution on the edges. Like any book, it has its flaws. On the whole, however, it is a well-written, interesting book.