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Journal of Interdisciplinary of Ideas

16 | 2019 Varia

Electronic version URL: http://journals.openedition.org/jihi/276 ISSN: 2280-8574

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Electronic reference Journal of Interdisciplinary History of Ideas, 16 | 2019 [Online], Online since 31 December 2019, connection on 30 July 2020. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/jihi/276

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Éditorial Manuela Albertone and Enrico Pasini

Articles

Rendering . On the Utopian of and the ‘Mumbo Jumbo Club’ Matthew Wilson

Individualism and An Unexpected Theoretical Dilemma in Marxian Analysis Vitantonio Gioia

Notes

Introduction to the Open Peer-Reviewed Section on DR2 Methodology Examples Guido Bonino, Paolo Tripodi and Enrico Pasini

Exploring Dynamics in the Two Mapping Experiments Eugenio Petrovich and Emiliano Tolusso

Reading Wittgenstein Between the Texts Marco Santoro, Massimo Airoldi and Emanuela Riviera

Two Quantitative Researches in the History of Some Down-to-Earth and Haphazard Methodological Reflections Guido Bonino, Paolo Maffezioli and Paolo Tripodi

Book Reviews

Becoming a New Self: Practices of Belief in Early Modern Catholicism, Moshe Sluhovsky Lucia Delaini

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Éditorial

Manuela Albertone et Enrico Pasini

1 Le numéro qu’on va présenter à nos lecteurs donne deux expressions d’une histoire interdisciplinaire des idées, qui touche d’une façon différente à la dimension sociologique. Une nouvelle attention au jeune Marx est axée sur le rapport entre la formation de l’individualisme et le contexte historique, que l’orthodoxie marxiste a négligé, faute d’une connaissance directe des écrits de la période de la jeunesse du philosophe allemand. Elle est susceptible de modifier les interprétations strictement économique et sociologique de l’individualisme. Un autre article suit la dissémination du positivisme d’ par le biais d’une circulation des idées entre la et la Grande-Bretagne qui engendra la rencontre de la science de la société française avec les premiers sociologues britanniques de l’époque victorienne, Harriet Martineau et les membres du « Mumbo Jumbo Club », avoir et leurs originales contributions à la sociologie par le biais du féminismes, de la biologie et de l’étude du rapport entre villes et territoire.

2 Dans la section dédiée aux Notes méthodologiques, nous publions dans ce numéro les résultats d'une expérience de « open peer review ». Les contributions intéressées sont dédiées à l'application à l'histoire des idées des techniques de « distant reading » : un des approches auxquels nous prêtons présentement une attention particulière.

3 Les formes de collaboration du GISI aux initiatives interdisciplinaires se poursuivent. On présente ici le programme du Colloque internationale, La représentation politique et ses critiques. Approches historique, juridique, politique, qui aura lieu à Paris le 20 mars 2020 et à Turin le 16 avril 2020, dans le cadre d’un accord de collaboration scientifique entre le Département d’études historiques de l’Université de Turin et l’Institut de recherches juridiques de l’Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne.

4 Les éditeurs du JIHI – The JIHI Editors

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Articles

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Rendering Sociology. On the Utopian Positivism of Harriet Martineau and the ‘Mumbo Jumbo Club’

Matthew Wilson

1. Introduction

1 It was once wildly declared at the Sociological in that the single ‘meritorious gift’ the French Auguste Comte (1798–1857) offered to the world was his ‘intensely personal Utopia of a Western Republic’ (Wells 1907, 367–8).1 For over a century, countless scholars have entered into Comte’s utopian house of mirrors to sketch this white elephant. Most recently, it has been argued that the utopian system of modern life Comte envisioned — Positivism2 — served as a catalyst for various world-making activities during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.3 Comte’s systematic analyses, especially those appearing in the Cours de philosophie positive (1830–42), played a significant role in the advancement of the , political thought, and modern philosophy.4 Among other ostensible feats, this six-volume treatise introduced the modern discipline of sociology.

2 It was the English novelist H.G. Wells who championed Comte’s utopia at the meetings of the Sociological Society in London. In this 1907 narrative on the ‘so-called science’ of sociology, Wells was not referring to a ‘gift’ in the Cours but the one appearing in such works as Discours sur l’ensemble du positivisme (1848) and the four volume Système de politique positive (1851–4). In the Discours, Comte maintained that utopias were a subjunctive social necessity: ‘every great social change has been ushered in, one or two centuries beforehand, by a similar Utopia’. Whereas Comte denounced the ‘utopianism’ of communists and metaphysicians, the Positivist utopia would be ‘in constant subordination to [the] real laws’ of society (Comte 1848, 280). And in relation to such laws, Comte’s Cours had already outlined the Law of Three states, which holds that all

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social phenomenon evolves from a theological, to a metaphysical, and on to a ‘Positive’ of existence. Along these lines, the social structures underpinning ancient titles, privileges, and empires were thus destined to collapse. Comte considered the founding of the French and American republics, for instance, as an example of such social phenomenon. It was the work of Positivist sociologists to carefully guide the total reorganisation of society for the ‘Positive era’ by creating a ‘sociocracy’ or moral by sociology.

3 As such, Comte situated the Cours as the foundation for a modern Positive-era utopia, called the République Occidentale, which included: a new creed called the ; a new calendar and festivities honouring the ‘heroes’ of humanity and celebrating the ‘utopia of the Virgin Mother’;5 a new a flag and currency system; and, among other features, various types of Positivist architecture. The République Occidentale was to emerge over a century’s time as a global confederation of 500 - states or republics. Here sociologists would function as an independent, international, and scientific ‘spiritual power’. They thus would hold influence over workingmen and ‘moral capitalists’ functioning as a separate ‘temporal power’ operating at the local level within the fields of commerce, agriculture, and manufacturing (Wilson 2018b, 43– 51).

4 Effectively, Comte connected sociology to the creation of a utopia. And for such reasons, it seems, Wells argued that the creation and criticism of utopia was the ‘proper and distinctive method of sociology’. Utopias enabled one to ‘measure realities from the standpoint of the idealisation’ of society Wells (1907, 367–8). This begs the question: had Victorians witnessed forms of sociological practice during their own lifetime? And to whose efforts might we turn to test such a premise?

5 This essay will analyse the lifework of four of Comte’s British followers. They might best exhibit a link between the utopian sensibilities and sociological practice Wells suggested. Along these lines, this essay also builds on the work of intellectual historians, who have recently shown how various historical actors re-particularised philosophical ideas to suit locally-defined ‘world-making’ agendas during the nineteenth century (Bell 2009). In this regard, Positivism isn’t presented here by way of a ‘diffusionist model’ of ‘flows’, ‘influences’, and ‘transfers’.6 It is instead extended though highly personalised and contextualised archetypes (Feichtinger, Fillafer, and Surman 2018, 3; Wilson 2018a). By way of examining these four protagonists’ backgrounds and individual capacities, this essay thus seeks to reveal a deeper level of ‘world-making’, in which personal development interfaces with a common body of philosophical principles, to produce unique intellectual and creative tendencies. As first- sociologists, Harriet Martineau assumed an abolitionist-feminist perspective, John Henry Bridges a biologic-historical outlook, Edward Spencer Beesly a socio-political stance, and an urban-regional framework. Thus, in terms of using sociology as a critical lens for social change, their works aimed to reveal to the public different links between the inner troubles and the outer issues of the world; and this approach, as we will see, is compatible with how contemporary scholars view modern utopianism. The main rationale for choosing these specific individuals, however, is that they were among the chief contributors to the popularisation of Comtism in Britain, by way of publishing English editions of Comte’s oeuvre and acting on the philosopher’s ideas about the potentials of science to drive social change. Thus

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this essay employs intellectual history as the interdisciplinary crossroads of the history of philosophy, political thought, sociology and utopianism.

6 While Harrison, Beesly, Bridges, and George Earlam Thorley were students at Wadham College, Oxford, they read Martineau’s English ‘condensation’ of Comte’s Cours with ‘deepest enthusiasm’ (Harrison 1911, 96). This group of eccentrics, then linked by the moniker ‘the Mumbo Jumbo club’, 7left university life by the late 1850s. Barring Thorley, who became a Warden of Wadham, the remaining three-quarters of Mumbo Jumbo remained united by the intellectual and ethical spirit of Positivism. They were indeed among the founding members of the British Positivist Society created by their imperious Oxford tutor, .8

7 Congreve was the immediate inspiration for the Mumbo Jumbo club. He had been trained at Rugby School, where he was instilled with the religious latitudinarianism, political , and ethical imperatives of the Broadchurch headmaster, Thomas Arnold. He proceeded to Oxford for an MA in Literae humaniores during the Tractarian movement and earned a reputation for his tenacious and forthright at Oxford Union and Decade Society debates. Congreve was regarded by conservatives as a ‘very dangerous’ for his support of Irish emancipation, university reform, anti- , and Broadchurch thinking (OUBL-CP, MS.Eng.lett.c.185 f. 134; Hutton 1906, 18). On graduating first class and becoming an Anglican minister, he began his rise as an Oxford don. Lecturing broadly on various topics from a continental point of view, beyond those listed on the examination syllabus, Congreve was also popular among the students for engaging them at length on a personal level, and spending his summers with them touring Europe. He urged his pupils to critically assess current events, to question the veracity of historical and contemporary texts, and to make their own judgements. But behind his teachings were the ideas of Comte. By the time he left Oxford in 1854 for a new career as an independent scholar, the Mumbo Jumbo club were his ‘apostles’. Alongside the student body, they were well aware of his fixation with ‘French prophecies’ (OUBL-CP, MSS.Eng.lett.c.181, f. 59). Two years after he began issuing controversial polemical texts as a Positivist in 1857, he founded his church of ‘social action’, the Positivist Society or Church of Humanity (to separate these groups is a common misnomer). The first few decades of the society’s existence embodied the character of what, in the Victorian context, was a prototypal institute of applied sociology.

8 Notwithstanding, the history of the discipline of sociology in Britain centres around the founding activities of the Sociological Society in 1903. In terms of its intellectual forerunners, most historians overlook the contributions that the Positivist Society may have made to the discipline of sociology. Instead, they put emphasis on the numerical, analytical, and empirical methods developed by members of the Royal Statistical Society, the Association, and other groups.9 When the Sociological Society came to fruition — owing to proposals circulated by the Positivist sociologist Victor Branford (1903; 1904) — it hosted debates supported by the Positivist Society and other groups. And these debates, scholars have argued, shaped the academic discipline of sociology in Britain. According to most accounts, these battles were waged between three main factions: eugenicists associated with Francis Galton, town planners under , and ethical evolutionists linked to L.T. Hobhouse, with the last emerging victorious (Abrams 1968; Kent 1981; Bulmer 1985; Halsey 2004; Scott and Bromley 2013).10 The historiography of British sociology treats neither the protagonists

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under consideration here nor the subjects of Positivist sociology and utopianism with great interest.11

9 This neglect is likely rooted in the connotations of Comte’s ‘gift’ — utopia. Recently, however, the sociologist Ruth Levitas (2011, 1) has defined the word utopia as ‘how we would live and what kind of world we would live in if we could do just that’. It is in this light that this study applies the term to the protagonists of this study. One thus might think of utopia here as a mode of sociability seeking to negotiate improved relationships between the individual, society, and the environment. Along a similar vein, the esteemed scholar C. Wright Mills (1967, 4, 5–24) presented the ‘sociological imagination’ as a means to ‘understand the larger historical scene in terms of its meaning for the inner life [biography] and the external career of a variety of individuals []. From a compatible perspective, the philosopher Charles Taylor (2004, 17) described a ‘social imaginary’ as one who engages with ‘how things go on between’ individuals and their fellows, and how ‘expectations that are normally met, and the deeper notions and images that underlie expectations’ are carried out.12 Such commentaries suggest that utopians do not live in a literary ‘no place’, but instead that utopians are actors and that utopianism is performative.

10 Effectively, this essay seeks to show that the intellectual and creative lives of Martineau and Mumbo Jumbo were distinct but complementary. It argues that their didactic works were tethered at varied lengths to Comte’s sociological vision of an incipient modern utopia born of the coupling of enlightened science and moralised industry. Their efforts thus sought to stir a greater conscientiousness of social and environmental phenomena and to transform thoughts and feelings into positive interactions between space, earth, and humanity.

2. An abolitionist-feminist perspective

11 Throughout her life, Harriet Martineau (1802–76) challenged ideological assumptions that underpinned various forms of social oppression. Her works of fiction and nonfiction alike made Victorians knowledgeable of such pressing affairs as , industrial , and the condition of women. Although her recent biographer does not use the word ‘utopian’ to describe her activities, Martineau was a ‘daughter of the Enlightenment, committed to social and human perfectibility’. She was convinced of the transformative ‘power of education’ (Hoecker-Drysdale 1992, 21). Martineau’s life as a writer — spanning from the ages of nineteen to seventy-four — extended beyond the Victorian boundaries of the feminine domain. Her lifework has consistently been the of scholarly enterprise since the second wave of feminism of the 1960s (Mann and Béres Rogers 2012; Roberts 2002; Bohrer 2013; Hoecker- Drysdale 1992; Yates 1985; David 1987; Sanders 1986; Pichanick 1980). And although largely ignored by sociologists in her own lifetime, her literary works were well-known in Britain, the Americas, and in Europe.

12 Harriet Martineau was born in , England on 12 June 1802 into a large Unitarian family led by the cloth manufacturer Thomas Martineau and his wife Elizabeth. Her only source of primary education were her parents, who offered little emotional support for her inability to hear, taste, and smell. Her earliest public intellectual and moral connections, the Norwich Unitarians, also shaped her life trajectory. They championed and , and they were activists for moral education

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and social welfare. They opened up to her the idea of woman as public figure (Yates 1985, 53). Martineau’s first published piece, ‘Female Writers of Practical Divinity’, spoke admirably of as such (Discipulus 1822). Ultimately, she was among various Unitarians who expressed interest in Comte’s sociological thinking, which for many served as a stepping stone to agnosticism (Wright 1986, 156–6, 229, 243).

13 From the 1820s, Martineau issued the six-part ‘Essays on the Art of Thinking’ series in the Monthly Repository. Here, Martineau surveyed the toll of superstition on religious perils, warfare, and the unquiet obedience of social powers that hindered the progress of science and philosophy. She upheld the ‘right pursuit of ’ and the development of a ‘noble faculty of Reason’ towards an ‘enlightened intellect’ acting on its ‘moral obligation’ towards the gradual perfection of society (Martineau 1836, 62, 112–4). Such sentiments quietly resonated with Positivist ideas. As mentioned, Martineau helped to popularise Comte’s work during the 1850s. Knowledge of Positivism came to her two decades earlier, with an introduction to the ideas of Comte and his master, Henri de Saint-Simon (Hoecker-Drysdale 2017, 86). The date was 1830, and the messenger was the French collectivist Gustav D’Eichtal, who was staying at the home of their mutual friend, William Fox. D’Eichtal was in Comte’s ‘apostle’ and worked closely with him until the spring of 1828; he thereafter spent several months studying the ‘socialist’ experiment created by Robert Owen in New Lanark, Scotland (Pilbeam 2013, 33).

14 Of greatest interest for Martineau were Positivist ideas about the ‘progressive evolution of society, the goal of positivist systematic knowledge, and the proposal of a new discipline to study society’ (Hoecker-Drysdale 2001). Along these lines, Saint- Simon and Comte argued during the 1820s that a scientific could assume a role of the medieval in Western society in which an independent spiritual power would thus ‘discover and improve’ the industrial, social, and moral arrangements’ to improve the lives of the masses (Lengermann and Niebrugge 2007, 31). In such a scenario, science and industry could supplant ancient regimes and bequeath a peaceful, rational, and meritocratic system of life; some scholars have cast Saint-Simon as a proponent of ‘social ’ as such, but others think the philosopher’s suggestions amounted to creating an ‘industrial monarchy’ (Rykwert 2000, 62; Howe 2009).

15 From 1832 to 1834, Martineau synthesised intellectual curiosities and creative talents, producing more than 3,000 pages for her popular Illustrations of Political Economy series. These novelettes outlined the impacts of mammon worship, rampant speculation, the condition of women, and necessity of the cooperation of male workers in exchange for ‘domestic comforts’ (Martineau 1832, x, 82–3). The most contentious story, Demarara, focussed on life in the West Indies, and it cast slavery as incompatible with capitalism, , and . And as a result, Martineau was widely known as an ardent abolitionist. Above all, however, her series aimed to reveal to the common reader the rigid mechanics and so-called ‘immutable laws’ of capitalist or individualist system of ‘political economy’ laid out by Smith, Bentham, Mill, Ricardo, and Malthus, who she studied alongside such collectivist ‘social economists’ as Saint-Simon, Comte, and Owen (David 1987, 43–4; Harrison 1965, 41). Written during the era of the First Reform Bill, Martineau (2007, 691) relayed her altruistic intentions: ‘I thought of the multitudes who needed it, and especially of the poor, — to assist them in managing their own welfare’.

16 The only non-fiction volume of the series, The Moral of Many Fables, outlined the ostensibly iron-clad theories of political economy and declared that ‘we must mend our

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ways and be hopeful’. Echoing the utopian sentiments of Condorcet, Saint-Simon, and Comte, Martineau expressed hope for a state when ‘society shall be wisely arranged, so that all may become intellectual, virtuous, and happy’ (Martineau 1834, 141). Ethical social , she argued, could achieve happiness for all by first addressing the ‘long tragedy of pauperism’ in which nine million people received legal charity annually. While the poor were the ‘object of primary attention’ for various social leaders, the responsibility was left as ‘almost the sole employment of women’, complained Martineau (1834, 62). The development of women’s intellectual and practical capacities as public figures, she maintained, was central to ameliorating the lives of the operative classes (Martineau 1877b, 297–8). She expressed support for aspects of the radical reforming Chartists’ agenda of universal education, and perhaps would not have opposed their aim to establish an English republic by moral means (Holyoake 1848).

17 Martineau’s next significant piece How to Observe Morals and Manners (1838) took a similar didactic approach. Written during her journey across the Atlantic to America, scholars consider it the first work on sociological methods (Martineau and Lipset 1968, 7). Martineau described it as a study on the ‘science of morals’, and she wished to kindle readers’ awareness of how cooperation furnished moral progress (Martineau and Hill 1989, 15). With an interest in object-oriented ethics, similar to Bridges, Harrison, and Durkheim years later, Martineau delved into the ‘study of THINGS’ — ‘the eloquence of Institutions and Records, in which the action of the nation is embodied and perpetuated’. This ‘ OF PERSONS’ on ‘THINGS,’ not limited to ‘architectural remains, epitaphs, civic registers, [and] national music’, she claimed, afforded one more information on morals in a day than the testimony of individuals in a year (Martineau and Hill 1989, 73–4, 211–12; Madoo Lengermann and Niebrugge 2001). Such ‘social objects’ were positive of the ‘fraternal spirit’ of cooperation and a signal of the morals and manners of individuals, nations, and humanity generally (Martineau and Hill 1989, 221).

18 Martineau subsequently published Society in America (1837), which systematically and comprehensively examined: the morals of American governmental policies; the economy of disparate climactic regions, including their agriculture, manufacture, and commerce; and the concomitant conflicts arising between indigenous peoples and European invaders (Martineau 1837a, 244, 262).13 It explored the condition of children, the poor, and religion, and it provided ample commentary on the political non- existence of women. She professed not only that women had been written out of the Declaration of Independence but that they were excluded from full, true democratic representation. The government held the power to unjustly take women’s property and to enslave, imprison, punish, and execute them for offences. As such, Martineau (1837a, 152) proclaimed that women should not acquiesce to the . Along these lines, she criticised the insufficiencies of women’s education. To American men, the education of women, in terms of the development of their critical thinking skills and practical training, was too often considered a ‘dangerous’, frivolous, or fanciful pastime. Women were denied the of and were pressured into learning little more than how to be a wife and a male companion in the so-called ‘paradise’ of indulgent male chivalry (Martineau 1837b, 226–8).14

19 In the same study, Martineau also clearly articulated abolitionist views and exposed the more insidious forms of racism in American life. While blacks were protected

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legally, they were not acknowledged as such in daily life. Their schools and homes were being torn down, and some were locked out of their hired church pews. ‘They are thrust out of offices, and excluded from the most honourable employments, and stripped of all the best benefits of society by fellow-citizens’, wrote Martineau (1837a, 145). Ever the idealist, however, she expressed ultimate optimism for the fate of the oppressed. Pointing to the work of some 800 abolitionist institutions in the Northern states, she expressed a belief that soon few would regard America as the ‘country of the double-faced pretender to the name of ’ (Martineau 1837b, 368; 1837a, 148). Owing chiefly to the questions of slavery and women amidst the quiet assent of the clergy, Martineau (1837b, 369) concluded that the ‘civilisation and the morals of the Americans fall below their own principles’.

20 Martineau’s subsequent Letters on the Laws of Man’s and Development (1851), co- written with the geologist Atkinson, made her intellectual position even more explicit. Here, she controversially enticed Atkinson to explain his support for phrenology and his disbelief. Martineau enthusiastically claimed that his commentary had emancipated her ‘from the little enclosure of dogma’, and she championed making science the basis of all knowledge (Martineau and Atkinson 1889, 289).15 A self- confessed ‘atheist in the vulgar sense’, Martineau rejected ‘popular ’. Her faith resided in the ‘positive method, and its uniform and reliable conclusions’ (Martineau 1877a, 351; 1877b, 217). Unsurprisingly, her next turn was to delve into Comte’s Cours, which according to Martineau scholars was the ‘largest enterprise with which she was ever to be engaged’ (Wheatley 1957, 315).

21 Martineau became further acquainted with Comte’s ideas by way of Lewes’ A Biographical History of Philosophy (1845). Comte’s works became a ‘singular means of enjoyment’ thanks to an unnamed friend she visited in Yorkshire in 1850. By 24 April 1851, she was reading the Cours, and after two days of dreaming about translating it, she began planning out the project (Martineau 1877b, 366, 371–72). Comte’s six-volume set of scientific lectures, each averaging over 750 pages, was full of repetitions written in a woolly style. Over a period of sixteen months Martineau condensed them down to two volumes totalling 1,056 pages. She introduced to English readers the hierarchical classification of the positive , the Law of Three Stages, and static and dynamic sociology. Martineau relayed Comte’s desire to bring all speculations under the auspices of the and to establish a rational basis for education. It was not a translation but an ‘intellectual exercise’, which brought her to tears of joy (Martineau 1877b, 391).16

22 Martineau’s rationale for undertaking the project was that Comte’s work ‘ascertains with singular sagacity and soundness’ a ‘firm foundation of knowledge’, as the basis for ‘intellectual, moral, and social progress’. It was necessary reading, she thought, for the alienated and ethically adrift English working-classes (Martineau 1896a, xxiii–xxiv).17 One can imagine that as a feminist Martineau likely enjoyed recasting a work written by a misogynist who considered women less intelligent and more emotional than men (Pickering 2017, 175–204; 2009, 132–57; Webb 1960, 307; Hoecker-Drysdale 2001). Yet paradoxically, she did not omit Comte’s references to women as ‘the feebler sex’ who were ‘completely adapted’ to their ‘domestic destination’ (Martineau 1853, 376). She instead omitted ten pages of the conclusion, within which Comte made reference to his future ‘philosophical labours’ including the creation of a Positivist church (Martineau 1896a, 16).

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23 Some of Comte’s suggestions thus betrayed Martineau’s view of Positivism as a . It nevertheless seems that she considered her various studies of society as having been both independently validated by and reinforcing Comte’s work. The philosopher’s response to her condensation was to write a ‘glowing letter of gratitude, expressing amazement that a woman should have had the breadth of knowledge necessary for the task’, and although English reviews were ‘extremely hostile’, he had her study translated into French (Wright 1986, 66).

24 Martineau apparently rejected the Religion of Humanity, even though its affiliated utopia situated women alongside sociologists as the leaders of the incipient Positivist era. Instead she held faith in the broadest tenets of the positive philosophy set out in the Cours. She was thus a steadfast in defence of Comte and his contributions to Victorian life, which exacerbated conflicts between herself, her family, and her friends. Revealing that Comte’s Cours had reinforced her of morals and manners in society did her few favours. Indeed, she stepped forward courageously to become a leading figure on such topics while forging an abolitionist-feminist approach to a utopian sociology aspiring to realise social change. This approach resonated with Comte’s vision in the Système — to incorporate women and the proletariat into modern society. And after the Comte study appeared, Martineau continued to write on such controversial topics as colonial slavery and expansionist foreign policy for , among other publishers, but with less ease, perhaps owning to her public affiliation to Positivism (Logan 2009).

3. A biologic-historical outlook

25 The educator, physician, historian, social justice advocate, and philosopher J.H. Bridges (1832–1906) has almost entirely fallen out of contemporary scholarship. Notwithstanding such members of the Sociological Society as L.T. Hobhouse and Victor Branford described Bridges as one of the ‘Saints of Rationalism’ and the ‘cream of Comtism’ (Owen 1975, 12). Bridges, as we will see, was one of the first complete British adherents to Positivism, and a distinct biologic-historical outlook framed his utopian sociology.

26 He was born at Suffolk, England, to Harriet Torlesse and the evangelist minister Charles Bridges. After receiving a preparatory education from his mother, Bridges entered Rugby School in 1845. Its mission was to create upstanding, common-sense Christian citizens devoted to public life. Here, he proved himself as an independent thinker, and in 1851 he won a scholarship to Wadham College, Oxford, where he joined the Mumbo Jumbo club. As Congreve’s favourite student and closest follower, it is no surprise that he became the first of the club to detect Congreve’s Positivism. Whereas Martineau could not bring herself to become a ‘complete’ Positivist, her work contributed to Bridges’ adherence to Comte’s Religion of Humanity in 1854 (Dixon 2008, 60). A vociferous reader and independent thinker already too set in his heterodoxy, Bridges displeased his Literae humaniores examiners. Although known as the ‘ablest man’ around, he took a tragic third-class degree (Bridges 1908, 70). Despite this setback, by the late 1850s, he had begun his training as a physician at St George’s Hospital, London. After taking a BMed at Oxford in 1859, he became a member of the Royal College of Physicians the following year.18 Arguably, here Bridges was fulfilling Comte’s requirement to practice as a priest-sociologist of the Positivist utopia.19

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27 It should be added here that those who held the qualification of physician and fully accepted the Religion of Humanity stood as the highest-ranking male Positivists, as ‘sociologists’ proper, in Comte’s utopia (1875, 539–40). One justification for this decision, offered by the Positivist town planner Patrick Geddes, was that ‘explanations of divine will’ relating to epidemic disease, biological calamity, and other disasters dissolved proportionate to the physician’s study of the Positive environment (NLS, MS. 10616 f. 191). Sociologists held ‘moral and physical’ providence over civic hygiene; they must engage with the ‘Sociological Morality’ of the streets, claimed Comte (1875, 539– 40). Thus sociologists might be thought of as doctors of society.

28 Instead of making his motivations public, which would upset his family, Bridges emigrated to Australia with his cousin-bride Susan Torlesse in June 1861. After arriving at Melbourne, Susan fell ill and died of typhoid fever that December. During his three- month voyage back to England, Bridges locked himself up in his cabin and translated the 430 pages of Comte’s Discours sur l’ensemble du positivisme (1848).20 Published in 1865, the translation offered a complete view of Comte’s teaching in its totality and served as the ‘needed textbook for the young and growing Positivist school in England’ (Liveing 1926, 122).21 Here it was explained that sociology was compatible with ‘benevolent affections,’ as a result of it being founded on and history (Comte 1865, 98, 92). The former discipline emphasised the necessity of collective over individual life for survival in nature, and the latter held that the progress of civilisation was the result of the combined efforts of socially-minded peoples.22 For such reasons, Comte coined the word ‘’ as an antonym to .

29 In 1861, Bridges was appointed physician at Bradford infirmary, and he had now determined to indefatigably act on the Positivist maxim, ‘Live for others’. For the next seven years, he delved into the intellectual, cultural, and industrial problems of the region. Fortified with death-rate statistics, he had acquired from independent sanitary surveys, and knowledge from operatives visiting his medical practice, Bridges lectured on the impact of industrial life: the steam engine, alcohol, the printing press, the factory, the rickety house, and soiled street.23 Bradford ranked among the deadliest towns in England because of its poor-quality dwellings, workshops, sanitation, and its ‘inconceivable and intolerably monstrous’ canal system, he reported. Like Martineau, he suggested such objects indicated that Englanders ‘had not yet reconciled our higher civilisation to a higher form of life’ (Bridges 1862, 7–27; N.A. 1862). Bridges accordingly promoted Comte’s altruistic theories as the basis of moral and material improvements in England.

30 Out of all the Mumbo Jumbo club members, Bridges arose as both activist and intellectual champion of Positivism during the 1860s. In The Unity and Life of Comte’s Doctrine (1866), for instance, he issued an open rebuttal to J.S. Mill’s strictures on Positivism as an ethical creed. He revealed the great extent to which the recent works of Mill (1865) aligned with Comte’s system of ideas. Mill was indeed an inconsistent ally. Mill’s study On Liberty, for instance, castigated Comte’s turn to ‘intellectual degeneracy’ and his ‘hatred for scientific and all purely intellectual pursuits’ in the Système (Mill 1905, 30; 1865, 29). And he labelled despotic Comte’s calls for ‘unity’ via an organised spiritual power. Countering the efforts of Mill and Martineau, Bridges argued that Comte’s earliest works of the 1810s through to his death expressed an enduring ‘master-motive’ — to provide a rational, ‘renovated education’ for modern world- making, guided by sociology. Here unity was a central theme, and it represented the

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creative interplay of physical, intellectual, and moral energies converging to invigorate the collective organism of humanity (1866, 28–34). The notion of unity, claimed Bridges, meant crushing neither the ego or selfish instincts as Mill had claimed, but learning the altruistic principle of subordinating the self to the common good. Bridges (1882a, 47) offered a most charitable explanation of how Comte was no despot; he reminded Mill of the philosopher’s motto ‘Conciliant en fait, inflexible en principe’.

31 Despite his unsavoury Comtist affiliations, Bridges’ activities as a physician were well- received. Elected FRCP in 1867, he became factory inspector for north Yorkshire in 1869, and from 1870 to 1892 he served as a metropolitan medical inspector for the Local Government Board. Among his causes were nutrition, artisan housing conditions, child hygiene, and the prevention of small pox and contagious diseases.24 During this time Bridges issued what some people described as the ‘most philosophical essays ever written on public health’ (Wilson 1870, 42). In the ‘Influence of Civilisation on Health’ (1869), for instance, he confined himself to the ‘study of the laws […] the constant relations which exist in social phenomena’.25 Like Martineau, he situated political economy and its blind accumulation of wealth as the ideology of Victorian Britain, and thus the successor of military, civic, intellectual, and religious values. Owing to a lack of ‘sympathetic instincts’ in Britain, one could anticipate not a proper education but instead a morbidly dull, monotonous, and ultimately meaningless existence. This situation signalled a failure to harmonise individuality and community and to thus forge ‘true civilisation’, claimed Bridges (1869, 147–49). With historical statistics and diagrams, he showed how England’s deteriorating rural districts supplied its manufacturing centres with an abundance of workers. And, out of the blind chivalry Martineau despised, he desired to remove women from ostensibly too unsanitary, too unsafe, and too demanding manufacturing environments. He claimed that the ‘greatest problem’ of the nineteenth century was that religious and military communities had increasingly ignored the medieval notion of noblesse oblige.

32 Like Comte, Bridges called for a new ‘kind of discipline, some supreme controlling influence’ over the social environment: the recognition of new sensibilities in which industry and capital supplanted the military mentality, and the scientifically-trained intellect took the role once played by religion, acting on beneficent principles. He envisioned the ‘consolidation and revision of our whole sanitary legislation’ including the appointment of two hundred medical inspectors devoted to enforcing existing sanitary laws on housing, implementing a ‘simple catechism of health’ in primary education, creating new public parks, and drawing a tighter focus on the condition of the agricultural labourer. For Bridges (1869, 158–61) the scheme signalled the ‘conscious direction and modification’ of the social environment by the sociological ‘wisdom and the foresight of Humanity’.

33 Bridges thereafter issued ‘History an Instrument of Political Education’ (1882), which contended that the purpose of education was to ‘redeem modern industrial life from slavery by giving each worker a share in the inheritance of Humanity’ (Bridges 1882b, 8). Here, Bridges argued that one could not understand contemporary conflicts without being familiar with their deep-rooted origins. Like a physician examining a patient, he claimed that the student of the past had to investigate the comprehensive history of the patient’s life — their internal and external evolution, from their origins to the present. One must study their health as a long, dramatic sequence of religious, governmental, military, commercial, scientific, cultural, and industrial events. During

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this analysis, Bridges presented Eastern and Western cultures as unified by the shared etymology of various scientific words alongside common methods and ways of interpreting the physical world, the positive environment. Science was not conducive to shallow nationalism as such but was gradually producing a peaceful ‘global commonwealth of states’, as Comte forecast (Bridges 1882b, 30).

34 In 1878, Bridges became the first president of the English Positivist Committee organised by the Mumbo Jumbo triumvirate. It was a broader, less dogmatic offshoot of Congreve’s Church of Humanity and offered various social, intellectual, and cultural activities (as a political education) in affiliation with Positivist clubs across the world (Wilson 2015). As mentioned above, such affiliates to Positivism initiated and supported the founding of the Sociological Society in London.26 Here, Bridges spoke on ‘Some Guiding Principles of the ’ (1906). This continuation of his studies of in evolution was propelled by the work of Mill (1843, 606) and Comte (1876). In a utopian manner, Bridges referred to how the creative or ‘speculative faculties’ were the ‘most influential agent’ of modern society. These faculties are based on intellectual and religious developments and drove affections and practical activities towards social change (Bridges 1906, 200–1). Drawing on Comte’s Law of Three stages, Bridges traced the evolution of Western society in which fetishist-polytheistic and theocratic leaders relied on ‘unseen and arbitrary’ powers to advance ‘civilisation’ through warfare and slavery (Bridges 1906, 212). Examining Comte’s utopia as a scientific , he expressed his belief that the third ‘positive’ stage of historical existence would emerge from the ‘scientific examination of the laws of social concord and of social progress,’ to create a social superstructure premised on ‘justice, and mutual service’ (Bridges 1906, 220). When ‘rightly interpreted’ from a sociological perspective, historical study could disclose the ‘secrets of destiny’ for humanity, claimed Bridges (1903, 209).

35 Indeed, Comtean Positivism shaped Bridges’ life. After taking a disastrous third-class degree at Oxford, Positivism provided him with the basis for an active and meaningful career. He was among the first Britons to act on Comte’s suggestion that a true sociologist would believe in the Religion of Humanity, care for the city-space as a registered physician, and employ Positivist history to moralise society. Hence, he developed a biologic-historical strand of sociology. Bridges’ desire to remarry after his wife’s death, however, proved to be highly problematic to more devout Positivists such as Richard Congreve. This was one reason for the 1878 schism between the Mumbo Jumbo club members and Congreve, who was never fully convinced they truly adhered to or did enough for the Positivist cause.

4. A socio-political stance

36 Edward Spencer Beesly (1831–1915) was a controversial home rule advocate, Positivist sociologist, historian, and professor. His name sometimes appears within British political history and typically in good graces.27 His death caused an outpouring of remembrances from trade unionists, social democrats, members of parliament, and public figures including H.M. Hyndman (1915), Robert Applegarth and Herbert Burrows (1915).28 The Sociological Review recalled that Beesly’s ‘politics were derived from his sociology,’ which was based on the ‘premise of the historic evolution of humanity’ (Swinny 1915).

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37 Beesly was born 23 January 1831 at Feckenham, England, into the strict Anglican household of the evangelical clergymen James Beesly. Edward’s earliest domestic interactions instilled in him a forthright moral and intellectual earnestness that he is said to have rarely betrayed (Harrison 1915). His stringent father taught him and Greek and then sent him off in 1846 to live on the Isle of Man. Here he was under the unbending masters at King William’s College, the unruly environment of which was portrayed in Frederic Farrar’s Eric; or Little by Little (1858). Beesly gradually became a keen spectator of the political liberal advocacy of and , and he was captivated by the upheaval of social structures during the 1848 European (Harrison 1959b). The only book he knew well, however, was the Bible. And on this basis, the following year he entered the bastion of evangelicalism at Oxford University, Wadham College, with a Bible clerkship. His disciplined nature and ability to recall Christian verses with ease impressed the future leader of the British Positivist school, Richard Congreve.

38 Alongside his Mumbo Jumbo club affiliates, Beesly actively engaged in the Oxford Union, which was a debate club for training those interested in the public life of politics. Beesly served as the Union’s librarian the year before he took his BA in 1854. Congreve resigned from Oxford that year, and took on the role of private tutor in Wandsworth, London, while publishing political tracts on home rule for Gibraltar and India; they brought him instant notoriety and shocked his closest followers. Notwithstanding, by this time Mumbo Jumbo had a reputation for using Union debates to defend manufacturing strikes, to ‘attack the Tories’, to uphold the principles of , and to promote prophetic visions of , where workers ‘have a direct share in the profits and the master be overseer and clerk of the works’ (BLPES- HP 1/3, ff. 95–6).29 Beesly engaged in such activities as he proceeded to an MA, taking a second class in literae humaniores in 1857.30

39 Although appointed in 1860 as the chair of History at University College London and professor of Latin at Bedford College, Beesly prioritised Positivist activism over all other things.31 After the London masons went on strike in 1861, for instance, he signed an open letter in defence of trade unions that appeared in The Times, — the nationally syndicated newspaper he described as the ‘mouthpiece of the masters’ (Beesly 1861c, 275–6). Alongside such Christian socialists as , he helped to win a compromise between the striking masons and the master builders (Beesly et al. 1861).32 Meanwhile, Congreve (1892, 181–4) prompted international Positivist Society members in Paris to express support for the London Building Strike (Magnin 1861). And from this point onward French workers were in continual correspondence with George Odger and others on trade union activities (Kun and Magnin 1913).

40 Along these lines, Beesly’s 1861 essay ‘Trades Unionism’ for the Westminster Review aimed to align the ideas of New Model Unionism with Comte’s theory of social economy (Harrison 1965, 17). Here, he encouraged unionists to form an ‘industrial regime’, to shape public opinion, and to make the capitalist ‘doubt his morality’ (Beesly 1861c, 275– 6). Beesly claimed that workers felt that their trade union was ‘something dearer, something more significant, than the British Constitution or the Established Church, aye, or than country itself’. He rather romantically believed that unionists were so loyal to one another that they formed a near equivalent to a religious community of worshippers, ‘yearning for an ideal state of society’ (Beesly 1861c, 275–6). Notwithstanding his hazy economic theorisations and conspicuous Comtist utopianism,

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he emerged as a welcome spokesperson for London Trades Council and the labour movement generally by the mid 1860s (LMU-LTC 1/2, ff. 6).

41 One of Beesly’s main conduits of was the workingmen’s newspaper, The Bee-Hive. Here, he published polemics against various popular conservative newspapers broadcasting the ‘distortion of facts’ regarding trade unions and their activities (Beesly 1861b; Beesly 1861a; Beesly 1863e, d; 1863b). He also promoted the pro-federal activities of the American North, agitated about the treatment of operatives during the Lancashire ‘cotton famine,’ criticised the conscious consumption of the Royal Family, and argued that only a new religion could tame contemporary anarchy (1863d; Beesly 1863a, b; Harrison 1957). During this time Beesly was on close terms with such trade union leaders as George Odger and George Howell of the London Trades Council, as well as Robert Applegarth of the Amalgamated Society of Carpenters and Joiners, which elected Beesly as its first honorary member. Along these lines, Beesly has been credited with organising a ‘most significant and important [political] act’ for country and humanity — the Working Men’s Emancipation meeting on 23 March 1863 at St. James’ Hall. Mumbo Jumbo stood alongside the statesman John Bright and trade union leaders, and they together expressed their full support for Abraham Lincoln, the Northern states, and the emancipation of American slaves (Beesly 1863e; 1863a). Beesly denounced the theories of political economy as the root evil of the international working classes (1863c).33 French and British workers were also called on to extend support for Polish independence and Italian unification (Beesly 1864; Harrison 1864; Beesly 1863c). Beesly’s efforts in particular, it has been suggested by several historians, paved the way for the First International,34 which called for the economic ‘emancipation of the working classes’ in all ‘counties in which modern society exists’, in addition to the ‘abolition of class rule’, and the recognition of equal and duties (N.A. 1871, 3). But not all was lost to Marx. It seems Beesly was taking a wider outlook based on Comte’s anti-imperialist ideas in the Système, which inspired an array of British socialists (Claeys 2010; Porter 1968).

42 While his friend Marx took the leadership of the International, Beesly was developing a sociological study of British imperialism in the ‘uncivilised’ wastelands, beyond Europe, where ‘modern society’ did not exist. His essay appeared in the volume called International Policy (1866), which as a matter of debate is either nothing new or the magnum opus of Positivist diplomacy (Porter 1968; Claeys 2010). Herein Beesly asserted that Britain’s maritime supremacy was rooted in the immoral commercial activities of the Protestant middle class. With a policy based on a system of ‘violence and injustice’, British conduct abroad was incompatible with modern European society. Like the forecasts of Saint-Simon, Comte, and Congreve, Beesly claimed that without a true ‘Universal Church’ embracing all aspects of modern life, Western civilisation was destined to collapse (Beesly 1866, 158, 168, 220–1). Critics likened Beesly’s tone in International Policy to that of a moral martyr shouting platitudes about English hypocrisy. Some foreign journals called International Policy a ‘remarkable book, a sign of the times’, and they desired to see such a treatment for their own foreign policy. But the British press deemed its promotion of Comtist propaganda as both ridiculous and courageous owing to its highly ‘uncommon and unpopular’ nature (N.A. 1866b, a).

43 In 1867, Beesly stoked public indignation and gasps from the Commons for defending the Sheffield Outrages.35 Branded ‘DR. BEESTLY’ in the popular press, he nearly lost his post at University College London when he claimed that the Outrages were no less

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immoral than the Jamaican Mutinies perpetrated by Governor Eyre (Beesly 1867a, b; Congreve 1867; N.A. 1867a, b). Among other conflicts, the Outrages stirred the government to declare that trade unions held no legal protection. When a Royal Commission was called to address the matter, Beesly described it as a ‘symptom of the enormous social ’ of modern times (Beesly 1867b). Beesly and Harrison, among others, prepared the Royal Commission minority report, which served as the basis of a new trade union law. Active between 1868 and 1906, this law granted unions the same legal protection as friendly . As a measure of appreciation, the London Trades’ Council invited Beesly to deliver a lecture before their workers on 7 May 1868. Entitled the ‘Social Future of the Working Class’ Beesly argued that the year 1789 marked a purely political upheaval. The events of the year of 1848 spurred a social revolution, where such ‘real forces’ as the cooperative movement and especially its moral superior, trade unionism, could ameliorate the lives of the working class. Following Comtean thinking, Beesly held that unions could furnish posterity with happiness and comfort by teaching the ‘possessors of power’ how to use their influence for the ‘interests of society’. Unions could pressure the state to raise taxes on the wealthy to help the working class ‘arrive much nearer perfection, both moral and material’. And they could moralise capitalists to provide higher wages, facilitate working-class home ownership, and reduce working hours. They could enable the ‘workman […] to educate himself, to enjoy himself, and above all to see more of his family’ (Beesly 1869, 1, 5–6, 14–15). Along these lines, Beesly’s ‘Programme for Trade Unions’ during the general election of 1869 proposed to establish laws for the protection of union funds, to protect unionists from conspiracy charges, and to create public juries for trade offences. It also recommended an extension of the Acts preventing women and children from factory employment, a national system of compulsory secular education, and cuts in indirect taxes and military expenditure, alongside hikes in property taxes (Harrison 1967).36

44 In his subsequent writings Beesly suggested that applied sociology, when linked to the Religion of Humanity, could serve as the guide for implementing such initiatives for a broader social reorganisation (Beesly 1881, 18; Beesly 1870; Beesly 1886, 1887; N.A. 1915). Although he offered little detail here, he contributed to popularising Comte’s utopia by translating the third volume of the Système. He also served as the president of the London Positivist Committee, founded the Positivist Review, and contributed over seventy of 558 biographical entries to the book called New Calendar of Great Men (1892).

45 Scholars have remarked that as a doughty knight of the Positivist faith, Beesly’s efforts were rooted in disseminating Comte’s ‘conception of the nature of the proletariat and its “historical destiny”’ — realising Comte’s République Occidentale utopia (Harrison 1959b, 24; Thomas 1915). This vision called on Positivists to unite workers under the banner of trade unionism and to form, in the words of Comte (1901, 163), a ‘systematic connection with the socialist movement towards internal regeneration’. For Beesly, trade unions were thus an integral part of Comte’s sociological vision of , where science and industry would supplant the order of church and crown as the new ‘spiritual and temporal’ powers. Beesly’s utopian sociology was bottom-up and of a socio-political nature as such and it aided his personal struggle to help those less fortunate than himself. It was perhaps the most controversial when compared to that of his colleagues. His interventions into political affairs, fortified by his Positivist

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morality, drove him to not only forge important events in labour history but to also stoke the sentiments of revolt, which nearly cost him his academic career.

5. An urban-regional vision

46 An unsettling and polymathic figure, Frederic Harrison (1831–1923) was the most well- known Mumbo Jumbo member. He managed to present Positivism more diplomatically than his colleagues, as something palatable if not entirely unsavoury to the Victorian public. He managed to entice such eminent Victorians as Charles Booth, , Patrick Geddes, and to explore the world of Comtean thought. And as a sociologist and literary savant, he investigated the ethical nature, governance, and operations of past and present, especially the London region. As we will see, he imagined through an urban-regional framework how labour collectives could spur its transformation into an ideal Positivist republic or city-state.

47 Born on 18 October 1831 to a wealthy stockbroker and his wife Jane Brice, young Harrison’s first memories were of the rolling landscapes of suburban Muswell Hill, London. Julia provided him with regular lessons in geography, history, and Latin. But following the pedagogical philosophy of Isaac Taylor (1838, 52), Harrison’s first true ‘classroom’ was in the rural outdoors, which complemented his father’s interest in gardening, art, and architecture. The young Harrison was particularly fascinated by his father’s daily trips into London by stagecoach, from which one could witness broad panoramas of the city’s dramatic roofscape of steeples and smokestacks.

48 On moving to 22 Oxford Square, London, at the age of nine, Harrison recalled taking half-hour walks into the ‘quiet fields and pure air’ of the countryside. In the city, he quickly became aware of his social privileges. ‘I used to watch the climbing boys — “sweeps” — little children who were sent up chimneys to sweep them and rattle outside the pots,’ he wrote; ‘[…] we looked on them with a strange compound of wonder, pity, and horror’ (Harrison 1911, 19). He quickly developed a love for the classics and architecture as family holidays extended into the continent. He became captivated with French cities, gothic cathedrals, Romanesque churches. And he became fully aware of the marked contrast between the common people at home and abroad (Harrison 1911, 9, 29, 47).

49 In 1849 Harrison, then an eighteen-year-old Tory and devout Anglican who knew no other book better than the Bible, entered Wadham College, Oxford. Regarded as ‘eccentric’ if ‘mad’ for tastes and convictions uncommon to typical boys, the young scholar found solace in the teachings of the ‘famous tutor’, Congreve. As a Mumbo Jumbo club member, he encountered the new science of sociology and read the works of Martineau, J.S. Mill, G.H. Lewes, Émile Littré, and David Brewster. After taking a second class in moderations in 1852, he completed a literae humaniores the following year. Along these lines, the year of 1855 marked a certain turn in life for Harrison. The twenty-four-year-old graduate now considered himself a ‘Republican, a democrat, and a Free-thinker’ (Harrison 1911, 95). After becoming aware of Congreve’s Positivism, he visited Comte in Paris and returned to London thoroughly impressed with the philosopher’s latest ethical ideas.37 After assuming the position of tutor at Wadham College, he returned to London life, taught history and Latin at Working Men’s College, and he studied law until called to the bar in 1858.

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50 Similar to Beesly’s, Harrison’s various vocations were framed by Positivist thinking, and Bridges’ demands ‘social action’. While living in the Lancashire area during the 1860s, Bridges urged his colleagues Beesly and Harrison to investigate the ‘cotton famine’. After various interviews Harrison published accounts on the oppressive nature of poor relief administration, exposed instances of church corruption, and criticised the indifference of the manufacturing aristocracy towards the plight of their former operatives (Verity 1863; Harrison 1863; Vogeler 1984, 55). He proposed a series of landscape projects to enable the forlorn to recuperate their region with spaces of beauty and leisure (1863, 1865b, a; Vogeler 1984, 55; Wilson 2019). As a Positivist sociologist, Harrison documented the nature of life in regions across the nation. He collected information on the working conditions, hours, wages, education, pastimes, beliefs, and living conditions of trade unionists. He interviewed trade union leaders and documented the rules and procedures of their organisations. By publishing his various investigations on industry in scientific journals and parliamentary proceedings, Harrison aimed to legitimise, systematise, and strengthen the of trade unionism for some forty years. He plainly claimed in 1908 that such efforts were intended to help realise Comte’s utopia (Harrison 1908, 262). In this vision, trade unions were the modern equivalent of medieval guilds. In his lectures published as The Meaning of History (1862), for instance, he wrote that the medieval clergy provided guilds with the ‘constant sense of each citizen having a place in a complex whole’. He praised Comte’s aim to establish a similar Positivist sociability with city-spaces replete with ‘centres of moral and spiritual education’ (Comte 1875; Harrison 1894a, ii–iii, 54–8, 236). To imitate the relationship between the medieval clergy and guilds, the Positivist Society aimed to counsel trade union disputes with industrialists — to ‘moralise capital’ (Harrison 1884; Hyndman, Bradlaugh, and Beesly 1884; 1874a; 1874b).

51 Like Beesly and Congreve, Harrison not only lectured at the London Trades’ Council and other labour institutes, but also invited workers to the Positivist Society meetings. During the 1870s, he incrementally laid out how trade unions could play a central role to social reorganisation, by way of creating a network of industrial city-states or republics. Harrison stressed that the defining attribute of the ideal industrial city was civil activity ‘devoted to the welfare of the community itself’. Secular education was the ‘first element’ of ‘the very conditions of the life of the citizen’, and the Positivist Society ‘temple’ held education as one of its central imperatives (BLPES-HP 2/2, ff. 16–7; Harrison 1875, 236–7). A scientific and moral education, as provided by the Positivist Society, would engender a measure of ‘equality’ between citizens, giving them the ‘liberty’ to contribute to society. By merit alone could they gain full ‘entitlement’ to the ‘gratitude and honour of their fellows’, maintained Harrison (BLPES-HP 2/2, ff. 64–72).

52 More immediately, Harrison stated, ‘present life is undermining our health, our sanity, and our civilisation,’ which was a consequence of the haphazard and ‘incessant growth’ of ‘every city of the kingdom’ (Harrison 1911, 2–47). The ‘monstrous, oppressive, paralysing bulk of modern London is becoming one of the great diseases of English civilisation,’ he wrote (Harrison 1894a, 242). London, he declared, was becoming a ‘wilderness of houses’ with ‘huge areas of ugliness, and portentous piles of brick and iron which modern ideas of progress have given it’ (Harrison 1886, 233–56). Britons could no longer experience a leisurely half-hour stroll out to ‘open fields’ to ‘breathe the air of the country, or see its freshness’ (Harrison 1911, 2–47).

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53 Harrison believed that ethics and education should serve as the basis for restructuring of public service and industry. On the national level, he called for the municipalisation of the factory, post office and rail, road, harbour, pier, dock, bridge, and lighthouse. Extending the sanitary agenda outlined by Bridges, Harrison claimed the sovereign municipality should ‘provide for its citizens air, water, light absolutely pure, unlimited in quantity and gratuitous to all’ (Comte 1877, 267–8; Harrison 1898; 1894a, 244–51, 412–55). The community of trade unionism was important to protecting individual liberty because it could refuse to produce adulterated goods or poison the environment writ large (BLPES-HP 2/2, ff. 58–9). Like the Garden City inventor Ebenezer Howard, Harrison urged unions to use their strike fund to seek out and flatten the ‘blind accumulation’ of ‘old, poisonous, and crumbling’ suburban ghettos, thereby permitting the country to ‘invade’ the town, to create a civic province (Harrison 1894a, 244–51, 412–55; 1894b).

54 As an alternative to sub-urbanism, Harrison advocated urban surgery to ‘economise space by loftier buildings’. The home, he claimed, was the fundamental ‘spiritual’ building block of social reorganisation.38 Like Comte, who outlined a ‘collective system’ of mixed-use, multi-family housing blocks in the Système — as well as temples, schools, and salons — Harrison described ‘the future working homes of our great cities’ as ‘a scientific system of tenements’ (Comte 1877, 380; Harrison 1906, 284). Instead of ‘cheerless, huge, monotonous barracks’ Harrison proposed ‘detached blocks of not less than five or six stories, each housing not less than twenty or thirty families’ (Harrison 1894a, 414–31). These mid-rise buildings would also provide common spaces of education, medicine, and craft. Such semi-closed structures would plug into larger civic spaces, playgrounds, parks, and transport links. Harrison envisioned London becoming ‘an aggregate of cities […] real civic organisms of a manageable size’ (Harrison 1894a, 414–31). ‘Ideal London’, replete with intellectual and moral institutions, would gradually emerge (Comte 1877, 267–8; Harrison 1898; 1894a, 244–51, 412–55). Heeding Comte’s advice for creating Positivist republics in the Système, Harrison suggested that future London would be home to an average of two million people and have certain geographical limitations on its expansion (Comte 1877, 267–8; Harrison 1898; 1894a, 244–51, 412–55).

55 Along these lines, Harrison was a keen advocate of ‘Home Rule All Around’ following the Local Government Act of 1888. Over the next few years, the London County Council appointed him to lead the design of the Kingsway Boulevard, which permitted trade unionists to begin rebuilding the city. But he ultimately presented smaller Roman British towns, namely Bath, as both the original garden cities and a model for town planning and place-making, which indeed aligned with Comte’s vision about the city- states of the République Occidentale (Harrison 1914).

56 Harrison developed an urban-regional strand of sociology, which being from a family of architects and builders suited his background. From early on in life, he seemed aware of his social privileges and felt a responsibility to use them for the greater good. His training as a historian and barrister as well as his career as a figure of letters facilitated his broad presentation of Positivism as offering improved moral and material comforts for modern life, which made the system of ideas more accessible to the public. Of Mumbo Jumbo, he was the least conform or appease Congreve’s dogmatic views about the Religion of Humanity. For Congreve, the glum but unacceptable truth was that Harrison reigned in a large group of intellectual and literary sympathisers to

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the Positivist cause. But Congreve’s strident demanded was that Mumbo Jumbo and others adhere to the letter of the Religion of Humanity, hence rendering all other efforts futile.

6. Conclusion

57 Martineau and Mumbo Jumbo shared commonalities that were not mutually exclusive to all Victorian sociologists, but these likenesses nonetheless seemed integral to their Positivist outlooks. As utopians, they all believed social betterment was rooted in education and in the creation of an altruistic and rational society, where science formed the basis of all knowledge. Martineau aimed to liberate women from the oppressive spaces and servitude to patriarchal demands within the home and their near-singular public role as Poor Law guardians. But Mumbo Jumbo sought to keep the world of women and children apart from factory life and the suffrage. They considered women the objects of their Positivist worship, and at the same time, leaders of the Positivist era. While Martineau remained suspicious of trade unions, Mumbo Jumbo extended support for them on the premise that they could acquire various social benefits for the common good. Whereas they all took a critical stance on slavery, Mumbo Jumbo also maintained an explicitly anti-imperialist position. Positivist ideas of history and social unity framed their intellectual and creative work, and such convictions propelled their practical activism offering distinct but unified responses to the shifting currents of social and political events. Martineau, on the other hand, chiefly took the role of a detached observer, perhaps owing to her disabilities, turning from an intellectual to an all-encompassing social commentator aiming to influence institutions. Whereas Martineau chiefly operated alone Mumbo Jumbo united the voices of the British Positivist Society.

58 Apart from these differences, while Positivism informed their work, for Martineau it strictly remained a practice of a scientific method linked to hopefulness about rational social change. She did not attend Congreve’s Church of Humanity. On the other hand, Mumbo Jumbo were believers in the destiny of humanity, as laid out in Comte’s Système. They considered their lifework as a contribution towards realising the Positivist utopia. The translations of these four actors helped to advance Comte as the founder of modern sociology and aimed at resolving societal issues and personal troubles. Rooted in the sociological imagination, their works thus furthered the of the discipline in Britain. But in terms of their own lives, Positivism seemingly gave them a unique voice and emotional identity. It may have solved their personal problems but it seemingly amplified the fractures in their interpersonal relationships.

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Kristofher Muñoz, “Gender Abolition,” 2009

(https://www.flickr.com/photos/kristofher/4198179990/)

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NOTES

1. This paper draws on five archival sources. They are: British Library of Political and Economic Science, Harrison papers [BLPES-HP]; London Metropolitan University, London Trades’ Council papers [LMU-LTC]; National Library of Scotland, Patrick Geddes Papers [NLS]; Oxford University Bodleian Library, Richard Congreve Papers [OUBL-CP]; and Surrey Heritage Centre, Vernon Lushington Papers [SHC]. I would like to thank a number of groups for their kind and constructive feedback to the contents of this essay. They are: the editors and reviewers of the

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Journal of Interdisciplinary History of Ideas; David Labreure, Michel Bourdeau, and Dominique Iogna-Prat, for organizing a lecture series enabling me to present my research for those affiliated to École des hautes études en sciences sociales, Centre d’études en sciences sociales du religieux, and Musée d’Auguste Comte; the members of the Society for Utopian Studies and Society for Utopian Studies Europe; and, finally, the members of the Proportion, (dis)Harmony and Identity Multidisciplinary Congresses. 2. See: (Harrison 1908b, viii, ix). According to one of Comte’s ardent British followers ‘Positivism is not simply a system of Philosophy; nor is it simply a new form of Religion; nor is it simply a scheme of social regeneration. It partakes of all of these, and professes to harmonize them under one dominant conception that is equally philosophic and social’. Comte presented Positivism as a ‘moral socialism’ based on a ‘synthetic scheme of philosophy’ that attempted to mesh religion, politics, art, and industry via sociology. Also see (Bridges 1866, 19). 3. See for instance: (Feichtinger, Fillafer, and Surman 2018; Wils 2005; Bevir 2002; Soja 2000; Scharff 1995; Sutton 1982; Bryant 1985; Woll 1976; Zea 1974; Woodward 1971; Simon 1963; McGee 1931; Gallo 2013; Gilson and Levinson 2013; Mitsunaga 1992; Wilson 2018b; Larizza 1989; Alengry 1900; Mumford 2000; Galison 1990; Wright 1986). 4. See for instance: (Bourdeau, Pickering, and Schmaus 2018; Wernick 2001; Grange 2000; Bourdeau 2006; Petit 2003). 5. As with his previous works, Comte prefaced these books with a discussion of his private life. Comte’s pining away from unrequited lust for a young woman named shaped his ideas about a ‘utopia of the Virgin-Mother,’ which was linked to his conception of the Great Being (Macey 2011, 70). The Great Being was the foremost element of the Positivist Trinity. Then followed the Great Fetish (the earth) and the Great Milieu (space). Thus, the Religion of Humanity was concerned with the veneration of space, earth, and humanity. Clotilde was not in the least attracted to Comte’s egotistic philosophising-as-flirtation. And on her sudden illness and death, he reflected on the ‘brutish sexual impulses of men’ (Pickering 2009, 324). Seemingly inspired by Dante’s ‘Paradise’ and the ‘Festival of the Assumption’ of the medieval Catholic church, Comte concocted a ‘feminine utopia’ that would free women from ‘all coarse dependence’ on men; it promised to emancipate them from ‘servile reproduction’ and male sexual pleasure (Comte 1877, 266–7; Alighieri 1814). Whereas and his ‘modern imitators’ suggested ‘real progress’ was based on ‘collective property and promiscuous intercourse,’ Comte introduced the ‘abstract worship of women’ with a ‘public festival of the Virgin-Mother’. It intended to replace the ‘intellectual belief in the Sacrament of the Eucharist, the true embodiment of the religion of St. Paul’ (Comte 1877, 266–7, 357–8). The ostensible aim here was to enable women to fully ‘develop physically, morally and intellectually’ while realising the ‘Christian dream’ of ‘human perfection’. That intersection of ideas for Comte was the possibility of pregnancy without sexual intercourse by using ‘stimulants’ if and when women desired, thus rendering sexual relations with men redundant (Pickering 2009, 324). Comte soon thereafter claimed that only ‘truly virginal’ women were ‘fully worth worship’ and emblematic of the Great Being (Armenteros 2017). A ‘satisfactory institution of the worship of women’, and the ‘Utopia of the Middle Ages’ was ‘out of the question’ otherwise (Comte 1877, 357–8). 6. See for instance: (Simon 1963, 361; Harrison 1971; Rosenberg 1908; Soja 2000, xii–94; Mumford 1997, 351; Buder 1990, 34, 170; Weaver 1984, 31; Wilson 2018b, c, 2019). 7. At Wadham, Harrison, Beesly, Bridges, and Thorley enjoyed a Sunday breakfast of cold duck while discussing all things social, political, and religious, framed by the democratic and republican teachings of Congreve, Comte, and Martineau, among other thinkers. According to Harrison (1911, 101), the group ‘was in obvious antagonism to the more hilarious spirits who glorified the Boat, the Eleven, sports, and convivialities’. The leader of one such group called “The Hares” (i.e. Hayers = Raggers, or Hazers) nicknamed the quartet ‘Mumbo Jumbo’ after the idol he believed they worshipped. Harrison explained that the ‘cold duck was held to be the

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“fetish” in whose honour our pernicious rites were performed. […] So was started, about 1852, the Confederacy of the Scholars of Wadham, which worked on for quite half a century, with common ideals and close friendship’. 8. Congreve was responsible for translating the fourth volume of Comte’s Système on the ‘Theory of the Future of Man’, among other Comtist works. 9. Leading members of such institutes either expressed disdain for Positivist sociology and largely ignored the works of Martineau and Mumbo Jumbo. These earlier scientific groups considered their own efforts as something between desultory fact-collecting and substantiating the theories of political economy (Branford 1914; Abrams 1968, 8–12; Renwick 2012; Harrison 1866; Wilson 2018b, 15–7; Bridges 1903). Affiliates to the British Positivist Society contributed to sociology via historical and social analysis. See for instance (Harrison 1913; Congreve 1855a, b, 1860, 1866; Beesly 1878; Wilson 2018d). 10. Of these figureheads, Geddes was a member of the British Positivist Society. Hobhouse was also sympathetic to Comte’s complete works, but he was not elected a member. Positivists such as Harrison and F.S. Marvin claimed Hobhouse as one of their lot (Collini 1983, 152 n.16). Hobhouse did after all attend meetings convened by the Positivist Society. He and Bridges spoke together, for instance, on the issue of forced labour in South Africa in 1902 (Harrison 1902). 11. Abrams (1985, 191) observed that by engaging with Comte, Martineau ‘found comfort in a sociological utopia of authoritative knowledge’. Elsewhere, Abrams has shown how members of the Social Science Association used the word ‘utopia’ to deny sociology as a scientific discipline (Abrams 1968, 82, 271). Also see: (Annan 1959; Farmer 1967). 12. A compatible language on the social imagination appears in Comte’s Cours. Here, Comte described sociology as a ‘complementary part of natural philosophy which relates to the positive study of all fundamental laws of social phenomena’. Sociology aimed at ‘discovering or perfecting the exact coordination of all observed facts’. This process could open to the ‘human imagination the largest and most fertile field’ of existence, life on earth and its improvement (Comte 1839, 294). 13. She wrote ‘I should like to see every squatter frightened away from Indian lands, however advantageous their squatting may be upon lands which are unclaimed, or whose owners can defend their own property’. The natives were ‘were spoken of in a tone of dislike, as well as pity, by all’ (Martineau 1837a, 244, 262). 14. As a result of restrictions on education, ‘woman’s intellect is confined, her morals crushed, her health ruined, her weaknesses encouraged, and her strength punished’ (Martineau 1837b, 226–8). 15. ‘Knowledge gives us a more elevated poetry, gives us the chart and laws of mind to guide us, and will exhibit to us higher objects for reference’, wrote Martineau and Atkinson (1889, 237). 16. Her method was to glance ‘over a page or a paragraph, and set down its meaning in the briefest and simplest way’ (Martineau 1877b, 391). 17. Because of his practice of régime cérébral, Comte only read a small portion of Martineau’s ‘condensation’ of the Cours. He praised it, and described it as a ‘faithful but free translation’ (Comte 1903, 273). His eager approval of the entire study, it seems, was based largely on the ‘unanimous’ expression of satisfaction from his disciples in Ireland, Paris, and Holland. He thought the study might garner more followers, particularly women (Littré 1877, 637). Yet, later Comte claimed the Cours was really only intended for theorists. The people in France, and Western Catholics in particular, were more interested in witnessing the realisation of the social demands he laid out in the Système (Comte 1904, 143). Despite Comte’s boasts about the English- edition Cours, his other English followers, especially Harrison and Bridges, complained that his meanings and intentions had been lost in Martineau’s edition. Bridges (1905) lavished high praise on Paul Descours and H. Gordon Jones for their more literal translation of the first two chapters of Comte’s Cours, which appeared under the title The Fundamental Principles of the Positive

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Philosophy (1905). Bridges published a side-by-side comparison of the paragraphs of Martineau’s effort aside this new translation to exhibit how her work suffered from some ‘serious defects’ based on ‘erroneous conception’. Some significant paragraphs had been ‘omitted entirely’, he complained. Martineau’s work nevertheless remained on the list of Positivist publications printed on the end leaves of the Positivist Review. 18. During this time Bridges was living at Spring Gardens, a boarding house of John Chapman, the physician and editor of the Westminster Review, who hosted soirées with London’s literary giants. Here Bridges mingled with Martineau, J.S. Mill, and George Eliot, among others (Liveing 1926, 62). 19. Comte’s Système outlined the ideal spatial organisation of a Positivist hospital, among other types of buildings. See for instance (Comte 1877, 372–80). 20. Quoting Tennyson’s In Memoriam, Harrison described the process as ‘a sad exercise, like dull narcotics, numbing pain’ (Harrison 1908b, xii; Tennyson 1849, v). 21. According to his colleagues, Bridges rendered a ‘literal translation’ and ‘clear presentation’ of Comte’s cloudy ‘philosophical dogmatism’, which sold ‘thousands of copies’ in the first three editions (Harrison 1908b, viii, x–vi). 22. The Positivist Vernon Lushington wrote a lecture explaining this line of thinking, and like Comte’s British followers it was conspicuously mysogynist. See: (Wilson 2013). 23. He entered into radical literary circles of the Jewish women’s educational reformer Fanny Hertz, who described him as ‘intellectually the most important man’ she had known (Wills 1852, 81). He helped and encouraged Hertz to found the Mechanics Institute at Bradford. Inspired by the ‘beautiful’ theory and practice Martineau laid out in Household Education (1849) and Nightingale’s Notes on Nursing (1959), Bridges lectured ‘factory girls’ and ‘working men’ at the institute on Bradford life, health and, controversially, Comte’s atheistic philosophy (Liveing 1926, 91). 24. See for instance his Socratic pamphlet, A Catechism of Health: adapted for primary schools (Bridges 1868, 1870). 25. In contrast to the speculations on nature and society discussed by Rousseau, Boerhaave, and Fielding, he referred to using Comte’s ‘method of Historical filiation, or the study of the laws according to which the acts of each generation affect the acts of its successors’. He argued following Leibniz’s maxim ‘d’abord la vertu, est puis la santé’ that virtue and health were inseparable and constituted the ‘twofold object of human thought’ (Bridges 1869, 141–42). In biological and sociological terms, health pertained to the ‘harmonious action of each organ […] the combination of strong individuality with orderly co-operation’ in ‘continuous adjustment of an organism to its environment’ (Bridges 1869, 143). 26. The initial discussions about establishing a Sociological Society were held on 29 June 1903 in the rooms of the Statistical Society in London. In attendance were Bridges, Patrick Geddes, J.A. Hobson, L.T. Hobhouse, and Benjamin Kidd, among others. Bridges maintained that the aim of science ‘is to discover natural laws, and by means of such laws to predict phenomena before their occurrence or before opportunity for direct of them has been afforded. Prediction, as Auguste Comte long ago explained, is the test of science’ (Bridges 1903, 206). 27. See: (Cole 1970, 385; Bevir 2011, 47; Biagini 2007). 28. See: (Applegarth and Burrows 1915; Hyndman 1915). 29. Beesly served as the Union president in 1862. Airing Positivist perspectives on contemporary affairs he argued that Giuseppe Mazzini, the ardent supporter of Italian unification, deserved the sympathy and respect of Britain. Controversially, he proclaimed that the ‘Conservative Reaction’ in England was a ‘Conservative Delusion’ (N.A. 1865, 46), and that the much antagonised radical politician John Bright was an ‘enlightened and patriotic statesman’ for his denunciations of the Crimean War (Kent 1978, 27). He also argued at the Union that the unification of workers as trade unions was not only necessary but that their conduct was a wise and justified response to employers’ unions (N.A. 1865, 42).

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30. Despite this setback, he was appointed assistant master at Marlborough College under George Cotton, the headmaster and friend of Congreve. Beesly thereafter left for London in 1959, where he served as a principal for a University College London student residence hall. 31. During this time Mumbo Jumbo was reunited in London. In 1859 Congreve established the first Church of Humanity in Britain at his Southfields, Wandsworth, London home. His first intention, it seems, was for the ‘Church’ to address the ‘social war’ between capital and labour, specifically the construction trades striking for the nine hours movement. Congreve presented the Religion of Humanity as differing from Christianity because it dealt ‘directly with social questions’. The ‘most urgent of all’ that required ‘social action’ was: ‘How are the working classes to be made, in the fullest sense of the term, citizens; how are they to be incorporated into the existing social order, so as to have their due share of its benefits?’ (Congreve 1874, 110). 32. They amplified the sole, unheeded voice of striking masons who favoured neither the nine hours movement nor the hourly system in which masters hired labourers committed to ‘systematically working 12 hours, and even more, per diem’. The strike committee demanded a standard five days of ten hours work with five and a half hours of work on Saturdays (Beesly et al. 1861). 33. ‘Political economists tell us that labour is a commodity, and that like other commodities, if it is very cheap in one place it will have a tendency in the long run to sink in in other places also. It is not our interest that labour should be here or anywhere else, much less that it should be absolutely unpaid,’ wrote Beesly (1863c). 34. See, for instance: (Bagenal 1883, 425; Gryzanovski 1872, 330; Harrison 1959a). 35. The Sheffield Outrages were a string of violent or intimidating acts committed by trade unionists on low-paying employers and non-union workers. The Royal Commission found that the trade union leader William Broadhead coordinated and funded the attacks. 36. Along a similar vein, Beesly and his Positivist colleagues were keen champions of the Paris commune, and though severely criticised they considered it a working model for the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ Comte imagined decades earlier in the Système (Beesly 1871a, b). Scholars of Positivism have cast the commune as a case of ‘the rule of the Democracy; of the exploited rather than the exploiter; of the workman than the employer; of the tenant rather than the landlord; of the hard-pressed debtor rather than the well-heeled creditor’ (Harrison 1971, 8). 37. The philosopher had recently finished outlining his utopian vision in the Système. 38. A common positivist trope was that the home was ‘the natural school of the social virtues’ (Swinny 1908; Wilson 2013).

ABSTRACTS

Among the Victorians who contributed to British sociology were the social theorist Harriet Martineau and a peculiar trio of Oxford students called the ‘Mumbo Jumbo club’. Martineau published an English ‘condensation’ of Auguste Comte’s Cours de philosophie positive (1830–42), which introduced sociology to English readers. While under the watchful eye of the Oxford don Richard Congreve, Mumbo Jumbo read Martineau’s study with great enthusiasm, and it shaped their course as first-generation sociologists. Using an intellectual history method, this essay argues that as the first female British sociologist, Martineau pioneered an abolitionist-feminist approach to the discipline in such works as Society in America (1837). Meanwhile, on leaving Oxford, Mumbo Jumbo became the first British Positivist Society members. They not only

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translated but acted on the ideas in Comte’s Système de politique positive (1851–4), which their leader, Congreve, described as the ‘definitive construction’ of sociology. Whereas Martineau’s work offered an abolitionist-feminist framework for sociology, the Mumbo Jumbo trio — J.H. Bridges, E.S. Beesly, and Frederic Harrison — developed biologic-historical, socio-political, and urban-regional strands of sociological thinking respectively. While examining these sociologists’ lives and complementary methods, this essay argues that theirs was a distinctly utopian if critical, imaginative, and optimistic sociology, just as some people suggested was the discipline at the founding meetings of the British Sociological Society. Thus, the works of Martineau and Mumbo Jumbo, from compatible Comtean perspectives, aimed to transform thoughts and feelings into social actions for resolving societal issues and personal troubles.

INDEX

Keywords: History of science, History of philosophy, History of utopianism

AUTHOR

MATTHEW WILSON Ball State University ([email protected]).

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Individualism and Social Change An Unexpected Theoretical Dilemma in Marxian Analysis

Vitantonio Gioia

I am grateful to the anonymous referees for their valuable comments and suggestions.

1. Introduction

1 It may seem paradoxical to focus on a ‘theoretical dilemma’ in Marxian analysis with reference to the birth and the role of modern individualism in capitalist society. In fact, Marx (especially in his youth) developed an original analysis of individualism, rooted in the structure of modern society. He set himself in continuity with the reflections of the great thinkers of the Enlightenment (Rousseau, Condorcet, Kant, etc.), while criticizing Hegel and many representatives of the ‘Hegelian left’. Nevertheless, it remains true that in the Marxist view the role of the individual has always been pushed towards the background, in order to emphasize the relevance of economic and collective factors (classes, state, political parties, etc.) for explaining social change. The question is whether this theoretical outcome has its roots in Marxian analysis or whether it has been the result of a theoretical distortion of Marxist orthodoxy.

2 The latter view seems partially confirmed by the fact that Marxist orthodoxy was built on the basis of only part of Marx’s works: the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right was published in 1927, the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and were published in their full version in 1932 and the Grundrisse was published by the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute of in 1939-41. So Marxist orthodoxy was built without the knowledge of the texts in which Marx largely developed his reflection on modern individualism and its role in capitalist society. But this approach raises two questions: • if orthodox Marxists did not perceive the relevance of modern individualism, it is likely because the Marxian works that they considered did not place the same emphasis on this topic as the young Marx’s reflections; • if this is the case, we have to explain these differences in Marx’s view, with reference to individualism and its role in modern society.

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3 As we will see, the new model of individualism was a decisive factor in the building of . On August 11, 1844, Marx wrote to Feuerbach, pointing out that his writings concerning human nature and men’s interactions were “certainly of greater weight than the whole of contemporary German literature put together” (CW 3, p. 354)1. According to Marx, Feuerbach had overcome the metaphysical individualism of Max Stirner and Bruno Bauer: “The unity of man with man, which is based on the real differences between men, the concept of the human species brought down from the heaven of abstraction to the real earth, what is this but the concept of society!” (CW 3, p. 354). And yet, because of his naturalistic vision, he had also produced an inadequate model of individualism: “the relation of man to nature is excluded from history” (CW, 5, p. 55). Once again, the category of ‘man’, defined only with reference to man’s natural endowments, replaces the category of “real individual”, concealing man’s social and historical roots. If “the real production of life appears as non-historical, […] the historical appears as something separated from ordinary life, something extra- superterrestrial” (CW 5, p. 55). The fact is that: “As far as Feuerbach is a materialist he does not deal with history, and as far as he considers history he is not a materialist” (CW 5, p. 41).

4 According to Marx, the individual dimension can assume a paramount importance, only under the conditions that the whole of individuals’ endowments is conceived— beyond the common traits of human nature—within the interaction between individuals and their historical environment. On this basis, we can understand the relationships between individuals and productive forces (in the context of a specific social organization), as something that strengthens human faculties: The appropriation of these forces is itself nothing more than the development of the individual capacities corresponding to the material instruments of production. The appropriation of a totality of instruments of production is, for this very reason, the development of a totality of capacities in the individuals themselves. (CW 5, p. 87)

5 The characteristics of modern individualism depend on its social embedding, for the simple reason that the mental and moral structures of individuals, the changing features of their needs, the patterns of their desires, the whole of their activities are socially and historically determined (Dewey 1999, p. 40).

6 In this perspective, a mechanistic vision of the relationship between the productive system and individual behavior is distant from Marx’s conception. Individuals’ choices and activities are determined by the awareness about their social conditions, giving rise to collective orientations capable to induce social changes. The social transformations retroact on the individuals, modifying their perception, culture and needs, giving rise to new problems and asking for new solutions. As a consequence, in the young Marx’s view automatisms—determined by the social position of the individual (according to the approach of vulgar materialism)—are not contemplated, nor is the efficacy of individual activity considered (as in the idealistic view) as separated from the conscious perception of its material condition of existence. Social changes are the result of collective activities, but collective activities cannot be adequately explained without reference to individual behavior: individuals with their motives, their awareness, their capability to solve problems in innovative ways (individuals as “agencies of deviation”, according to Dewey’s definition of impulse; Dewey 2008, p. 67), overcoming the routine and the passive attitude, suggested by the

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dominant ideology: “Individuals have always proceeded from themselves, but of course from themselves within their given historical conditions and relations, not from the ‘pure’ individual in the sense of the ideologists” (CW 5, p. 78).

7 As we will see, the rich analytical perspectives linked to this original model of individualism of the young Marx shift into the background when Marx reflects about the economy as “anatomy” of capitalist society, disappearing almost completely into the Marxist tradition, exclusively interested in the focusing on the economic conditions making possible the transition from capitalism to socialism. In other words, the theoretical pathway toward the construction of an individualism characterized by a social dimension, because of the propensity of the individual for social change, has been neglected. As a consequence, the theoretical (and practical) horizon has been completely filled by the liberal (and neo-liberal) model of individualism, which emphasizes the features of a rapacious and a-social individual, determined solely by the pursuit of personal advantages within a context of unbridled .

8 This paper will focus on the following aspects: • the originality of the category of individualism of the young Marx andits role in the making of historical materialism; • the gradual loss of importance of this category in the work of the mature Marx, because of his growing emphasis on the theoretical centrality of ‘economic mechanism’, in order to forecast the ‘necessary’ evolution of the capitalistic economy; • the consolidation of this view in of the Second International, with reference to the issue of the transition from capitalism to socialism; • the recovery of the young Marx’s approach in ’ analysis; • finally, we will hint at the current relevance of Marxian reflections and this model of individualism for contemporary social sciences.

2. Human nature, individualism and history in the young Marx

9 Of course, I do not want to reconstruct Marx’s ample and rich reflection on human nature. The purpose of this paper is much more limited: to emphasize those aspects of Marx’s analysis of human nature which stress the individual’s capacity for social change. At the same time, I will inquire into the reasons leading Marx to push towards the background the reflections that were central to his youthful work. Schaff was right when he wrote that the young Marx’s anthropological analysis was a genetic element essential to the definition of historical materialism: “it is historically true that in Marxism the category of the human person was not deduced by the presuppositions of historical materialism, but, on the contrary, that the starting point of Marx’s sociology was the problem of the individual” (Schaff 1966, p. 73, see also p. 79; my transl.). Of course, it is quite ingenuous to believe—as Schaff does—that historical materialism can keep its genetic footprint apart from every analytical development or every scientific purpose pursued (Schaff 1966, p. 39).

10 Marx, in his analysis of modern individualism, reflects at the same time on its contradictory features and on the different interpretations of it present in the contemporary literature. In fact, the explanations proposed on the one hand seemed contradictory, on the other they were characterized by a common epistemological approach: they isolated one motive of individual behavior, trying to interpret it as a

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universal and unchangeable feature of modern individualism. On the one hand, Hegel had emphasized the individual as “consciousness”, becoming “self-consciousness” through history (CW 3, p. 331 ff.), Max Stirner theorized the individual as ‘Unique’, radically irreducible to the social order, and the “hegemony of the spirit in history” (CW 5, p. 62, p. 144 ff.), Bruno Bauer saw the individual as ‘consciousness’ on the basis of their religiousness (CW 5, p. 97 ff.; CW 3, p. 157 ff.), and Feuerbach, abstracting from historical processes, in order to explain “the religious sentiment by itself”, presupposed “an abstract—isolated—human individual” who is naturalistically determined (CW 5, Th. 6, p. 4; p. 37, p. 41). On the other hand, Enlightenment materialism (above all in the French version) isolated the material character of man, emphasizing man’s univocal dependence on the natural environment (CW 5, p. 409 ff.; see: Badaloni 1976, esp. p. 62 ff.) and political economy, indicating egoism as a prevalent aspect of the individual, tried to link the dynamics of their needs with a peculiar social type (capitalism): individual and society were seen as a result of a ‘natural evolution’ (CW 3, p. 217-21, see also CW 3, p. 164-67). Of course, the question was neither the search for a common trait characterizing the category of individualism, or the existence of those features inquired into. According to Marx, focusing on a minimum common denominator was to be considered a legitimate scientific operation, the question was: how this common trait of the nature of individual was acquired and whether it allowed a sound analysis of individual behavior and its changing aspects in history.

11 From this vantage point, we see in Marx’s view a significant epistemological passage, which we find already, within the Scottish Enlightenment, in Hume and Smith. According to Hume, in order to overcome the metaphysical foundation of the reflection about ourselves, we have to leave that “tedious lingering method” that traditional philosophy had hitherto followed, aimed at the development of particular about individuals and their relationship with the world. In fact, such inquiries were developed on the basis of an unquestioned view of the world and they were directed more towards the confirmation of that general (and a priori) view, than to the discovery of the features of the individual. But Hume added, if we really want to analyze individuals and their behavior, we have to start directly from “human nature itself” (Hume 2007 [1739], p. 4). This would also contribute to overcome the old metaphysical view of the world.

12 For Marx also, the analysis of the individual, through their common traits and changing characteristics, is a key for focusing on the social structures and their historical evolution. So, Marx’s preliminary reflections about the natural dimension of individuals does not represent a residue of an old philosophical tradition, but an original approach to the reading of economic and social transformations. The inquiry into the Gattungswesen (the essence according to the genus) is the way to focus on the natural endowments that make history and historical change possible, by means of human propensity to act (praxis), modifying the natural environment in order to satisfy their needs (CW 3, p. 276-77, 333; on this, see: Dumont 1977, p. 139-40; Pezzano 2012, p. 9 ff.; Basso 2008, p. 38 ff.). These endowments belong specifically to the human species, differentiating it from other animal species, characterized by a passive and adaptive behavior with respect to the natural environment:

13 The animal is immediately one with its life activity. It does not distinguish itself from it. It is its life activity. Man […] has conscious life activity. It is not a determination with

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which he directly merges. Conscious life activity distinguishes man immediately from animal life activity. (CW3, p. 276; see also: Cw 5, p. 31).

14 According to Marx, we cannot avoid considering ‘man’ as a natural being, as a starting point for every inquiry about man and society: Man is directly a natural being. As a natural being and as a living natural being he is on the one hand endowed with natural powers, vital powers—he is an active natural being. These forces exist in him as tendencies and abilities—as instincts. On the other hand, as a natural, corporeal, sensuous, objective being he is a suffering, conditioned and limited creature, like animals and plants. That is to say, the objects of his instincts exist outside him, as objects independent of him; yet these objects are objects that he needs—essential objects, indispensable to the manifestation and confirmation of his essential powers. (CW 3, p. 336)

15 Given these natural propensities, the life of the individual implies immediately a lot of practical activities and complex relationships with the environment. Cooperation and development of communitarian links are strategic in order to satisfy present and future needs, following human projects and conscious activities: “man’s consciousness of the necessity of associating with the individuals around him [is] the beginning of the consciousness that he is living in society at all” (CW 5, p. 44). It is then not contradictory to say that “history is the true natural history of man” (CW 3, p. 337), since man, exploiting the features of his “nature”, transcends his “animal dimension”, characterizing himself as an eminently historic being, who builds his own personality by acting in historically determined environments. Individual personality and its evolution are, then, linked to the consciousness of “real, active men”: “Consciousness can never be anything else than conscious being, and the being of men is their actual life-process” (CW 5, p. 36). This consciousness implies, at the same time, the building of views about the world, determined by every particular stage of social development. The personality has not only a ‘social character’, but also the changing character of a process; it is not the product of supra-human forces, but that of a social man, a ‘self- creation’: The conditions under which individuals have intercourse with each other […] are conditions appertaining to their individuality, in no way external to them; conditions under which alone these definite individuals, living under definite relations, can produce their material life and what is connected with it, are thus the conditions of their self-activity and are produced by this self-activity. (CW 5, p. 82; on this, see: Cimatti 2011b, p. 101; Pezzano 2012, p. 9 ff.)

16 The critique of essentialism addressed to Marx with reference to this issue is quite surprising. In fact, whether by essentialism we mean that the ordinary world is a sort of appearance or manifestation of something intrinsic to it, conceived as a hidden cause, it is clear that Marx’s Gattungswesen (or, in general, his view on “human nature”) does not have these characteristics. The general proposition that man (as natural being) is part of a natural environment, which he can modify, because of his propensity to act in a creative way (praxis), is not an explanation. It is, if anything, a propaedeutic pathway to the building of scientific explanations. The fact is that essentialism is often used in a general and uncritical way with reference to every attitude aiming at the inquiry into aspects or issues that are outside the formal contexts of ordinary scientific representations. Nevertheless, scientific systems are not the world, but mental structures built ( would say: by our ‘imaginary machine’, see further) for its explanation. There will always be an external reality to know and, on the other hand, there is no phenomenon or relationship between phenomena, even the simplest one,

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that expresses a theory by itself. Theories always imply human activities and ingenious capabilities able to insert the empirical phenomena in our scientific systems in a correct procedural way. Frankly speaking, I find amazing the attempt to consider this reference to human nature as a form of essentialism. If it were so, as Popper himself pointed out, it would be an acceptable form of essentialism, since science has to be “capable of real discoveries”, overcoming the empirical aspects of the observed phenomena: in “discovering new worlds our intellect triumphs over our sense experience” (Popper 1962, p. 117). From this point of view, the convergent preoccupation between moral and social scientists with reference to the human nature category is significant. Moral philosophers aim generally at controlling and bending the impulses and instincts linked to the category of human nature in order to conform individual behavior to the prevalent rules of the processes of civilization; social analysts tend to consider the concept of human nature as irreconcilable and, even, dangerous for the formal structures of our scientific reasoning and for the principle of rationality at the basis of the human behavior which they adopt. Anyway, moral philosophers and social analysts do not consider the possibility that in those inner forces of man and in his “natural and vital powers”, developing in historical environments, it would be possible to find a leverage for social change.

17 Besides, the charge of ‘essentialism’ addressed to Marx neglects that his epistemological view was explicitly critical of those who considered, through unfounded abstraction, the human being as an ‘essential reality’ (as a spiritual being) capable of creating history while preserving invariant features. The personality of individuals, materialistically determined, has a historical character which depends on the social contexts within which they live. Culture and ideas about the world are built in the interaction between individuals and between individuals and nature. Of course, according to Marx, society is not uniform in its morphological traits: social organizations change and in the course of history become different historical types, endowed with original distinctive characteristics. The explanation of individual personality has to be, therefore, sought with reference to these different historical contexts. Consciousness is nothing else than awareness about the “existence of men” about “their actual life-process”. History cannot be reduced into “self-consciousness as spirit of the spirit”, because it is at each stage a material result, a sum of productive forces, a historically created relation to nature and of individuals to one another, which is handed down to each generation from its predecessor; a mass of productive forces, capital funds and circumstances, which on the one hand is indeed modified by the new generation, but on the other also prescribes for it its conditions of life and gives it a definite development, a special character. It shows that circumstances make men just as much as men make circumstances. (CW 5, p. 54)

18 This reference to the natural propensities of man (Gattungswesen), however, has a decisive importance in Marx’s analysis. From a certain point of view, it can be said that Marx applied to social analysis and to the individual-society relationship that sense of the ‘limit’ that Kant used in his theory of knowledge. As Kant tried to avoid the propensity of reason “to overstep the limits of [possible] experience” (Kant 1900, p. 74; 143-146), so Marx, with reference to the natural propensity of man, defines a possible process of social change depending on the relationships between two polarities: human awareness (and activities) and the material conditions of existence, rooted in fundamental biological aptitudes appertaining to the human species. Of course, if the

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distinctive characteristics of the historical processes and their scientific explanations have to be searched for in the circular interaction of these two polarities, this does not imply the complete annihilation of the ‘natural propensities’ of individuals. The Gattungswesen forms a sort of genetic basis for the ‘necessary social relationships’, but it is not reducible to them. Natural endowments (vital and natural forces, human creativity, etc.) can be reinforced or hindered by ‘social relationships’, but they are not created by them. It is the reason justifying the irreducibility of individuals to society, even though individual development is the result of the historical determinations of the social organization.

19 The inversion of individual and society (interpreting individual as a univocal and total product of society), is—if anything—a result of those ideological views, in which the material conditions and historical circumstances “appear upside-down as in a camera obscura”; this phenomenon “arises just as much from their historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life-process” (CW 5, p. 36). As a consequence, if the idea of ‘human nature’ that goes unchanged through history, even determining it, is not conceivable; the idea that a human being can be mechanically and totally determined by the social environment is equally inconceivable. It is a view that Marx continues to emphasize, recalling it in the Capital: we “have to deal with human nature in general, and then with human nature as historically modified in each epoch” (Marx 1976, p. 759 fn.).

20 In this sense, we can also refute the “obstinate old legend” about the anti-individualism and about the organicist view of Marx (Geras 2016, p. 11; Basso 2008, p. 9 ff.). Such interpretations are derived, inter alia, by a superficial reading of the 6 Thesis on Feuerbach: “human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations”. Now, if we isolate this sentence from the wide reflection about the human nature and the Gattungswesen, we would reach paradoxical conclusions radically incompatible with the thought of Marx. If we assume the idea of a complete derivation of individual features from the social environment, the category of human praxis becomes inconsistent with the work of the young-Marx. It would also be difficult to understand the critiques that Marx addressed against the univocal environment-individuals relationships of vulgar materialism or to explain the whole of Marxian analysis about the role of ideologies: if the motives of human action were completely attributable to the characteristics of the social system, all of human activities would be immediately clear and transparent, because men could not escape behavioral canons which are merely adaptive in nature (it is the way adopted by economics). Furthermore, the inquiry into “human nature” would simply be pleonastic. It would have been sufficient to start from the features of social systems, given the coincidence between the characteristics of the society and the constitutive traits of the individuals. The contradiction would be even more relevant if we consider Marx’s intention to represent human activity as an activity aimed at changing social relationships, when they were perceived as a limit for further human development. The hypothesis of the dominion of society over individuals would eliminate any possibility of social change. In fact, given the tendency of social systems (and of the many sub- systems that characterize them) to preserve themselves, and given the power over individuals of the economic and social mechanisms, the coincidence between individual motives and the reproductive exigencies of the social system excludes a priori social change. The sole possibility of change would seem to be related to the Hegelian “law of

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the transformation of quantity into quality and vice versa”, which Engels in the of Nature (CW 25, p. 357 ff.) considered central in scientific materialism. It seems rather difficult however to attribute such a vision to Marx.

3. Marx and classical economics: from human nature to the “anatomy” of modern society

21 Given this rich reflection on human nature and individuality, we have to ask whether the subsequent marginalization of the issue of the individual and its development as a condition of social change in Marxism has to be attributed to the analytic distortions of orthodox thought or whether its basis can be found in the reflections of K. Marx after 1845-46. In fact, while it is true that the youthful work of Marx was not known at the time of the spread of Marxism and Socialism, it is also true that if such an issue had had the same relevance in the work of his maturity, this would not have escaped his interpreters. In my opinion, the large and engaging confrontation with classical economics has had a decisive effect on this specific aspect, determining a sort of epistemological shift that partially changed the Marxian object of research. Of course, this did not modify the anthropological orientation of Marx’s approach and his interest in human emancipation, but the economic factors and their internal relationships assumed the role before played by individual and human nature from the epistemological point of view. The sign of these different theoretical perspectives can be found in Marx’s judgments on the analyses of Adam Smith and . As is well known, Smith and Ricardo defined the object of research (modern capitalism), isolating the distinctive features of the new economic system and its original working mechanisms. Obviously, on this basis their analyses can be critically compared (Dobb 1975, p. 324-335), focusing on the logical contradictions of their scientific systems. Of course, this is only one side of a possible comparison, the other being the basis of the different epistemological perspectives they adopted, which we want to emphasize for the purposes of this paper.

22 As is well known, Marx often manifests surprise (and, sometimes, a certain impatience) with reference to the fact that Smith seemed to move “with great naïveté in a perpetual contradic- tion” (CW 31, p. 390), emphasizing the difference between an esoteric vision and a exoteric one, between his capability to focus on “the intrinsic connection existing between economic categories or the obscure structure of the bourgeois economic system” and his loitering on the representation of the apparent and deceptive dynamics of economic phenomena (CW 31, p. 390). Finally, Marx points out, Ricardo “steps in and calls to science: Halt!”, isolating the “the starting-point for the physiology of the bourgeois system”. He, focusing on the “determination of value by labour time”, grasps the “contradiction between the apparent and the actual movement of the system” and he builds (or tries to) a consistent scientific system (CW 31, 2, p. 390-91). Ricardo, the “scientific deficiencies of his procedure” (CW 31, p. 392) notwithstanding, represents for Marx the most advanced analysis of modern capitalism, imposing his system as a general point of reference. Marx does not find relevant that the object of research, ‘the capitalist economy’, is built on the basis of a different epistemological approach compared to Smith and that this could imply—at least partially—different analytical purposes. In particular, the ‘economic order’ of Adam Smith was far away from that of Ricardo concerning a specific aspect: the relationship between the

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mechanism of the economic order, according to its distinctive features, and the effects on it of individual behaviors. In Smith’s opinion, the representation of a ‘whole’, through a scientific system based on the use of inductive-deductive procedures (Gioia 2019), did not imply that it actually function as predicted by the theory or that the behavior of the agents were necessarily those envisaged by the (assumed) mechanisms of the economic system. This depends on two aspects: the way in which Smith saw the relationships between his scientific system and the investigated reality, and his belief that the autonomy of individuals and their free choices could produce unforeseen effects on the economy and society. As is well known, Smith assigned a central role to scientific representation, because without it the explanation of the facts and their causal connections would have been impossible. Nevertheless, according to Smith, we have to be aware that: 0) we cannot derive the scientific explanations from the simple collection of facts, but, at the same time, our theoretical representations cannot exhibit the structure of the world (Smith 1980 [1795], p. 45 ff.; Berlanda 1984, p. 20 ff.); 1) our scientific imagination (the “imaginary machine”) allows representations of the world viable for adequate explanations of the “real chains” we observe, through appropriate analytical and procedural devices (Smith 1980 [1795], 66-67, 105); 2) these explanations represent our knowledge of the relations between facts,on the basis of a unified image of the whole, built by the social analyst with reference to the distinctive features of the investigated world; such knowledge can change if new facts and new causal relationships show its inadequacy (Raphael-Skinner 1980, p. 20-21, Whightman 1975, esp. p. 50-52).

23 Of course, as for economy and society, the facts to explain are the behaviors of individuals and the results of their activities within the context of a system endowed with original features. Such a system supposes the prevalence of some categories of behaviors and its ability to orient (by means of endogenous mechanisms, institutional arrangements, cultural traditions, etc.) individual behaviors in accordance with its exigencies of preservation and development. The fact remains, the dynamics of the system depends not only on the automatisms of its internal mechanism, but also on the behaviors of individuals. Ex ante we cannot decide which will be the real dynamics of the system, for the simple reason that individual behaviors are determined by a larger variety of motives than those supposed by social analysts, and some of them might not be completely compatible with the logic of the system.

24 Philosophers use to think that individuals behave in the way envisaged by the logic of their theoretical system, but this belief is unrealistic and based on erroneous analyses about the motives of individuals. In fact, Smith points out, “traditional philosophy” can insist on the necessary convergence between individual behaviors and exigencies of the economic (and social) system, because of the procedure adopted for establishing the motives of individuals. They normally start by aprioristic and “abstract” views of society, isolating its predominant features and attributing them to individuals as their real motives. But if we derive individual motives (for instance: selfish sentiments) from the features of the system, without a preliminary study of human nature, the convergence between individual activities and the dynamics of the system is only an a priori hypothesis (see: his critique to Hobbes and Mandeville). Of course, Smith maintains, we cannot underestimate the role of some motives (selfish sentiments) of human behavior, which are surely grounded on the «natural effort which every man is

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continually making to better his own condition» (Smith 1976 [1776], 2, IV.9.28, p. 674), but we cannot foresee the way in which they are really performed, in order to attain in every specific situation the purpose of bettering “his own condition”. In particular, the certainty that it necessarily occurs in the envisaged forms (because it is desirable or “rational”, according to the perspective of the social analyst) is unrealistic and erroneous from the analytical point of view.

25 Anomalous behaviors normally occur in society and the economy. They arise from individual activities and are rooted in social and economic attitudes, determined by endogenous changes of the environment. So, if in society inappropriate behaviors can be caused by the “corruption of moral sentiments”, the same occurs in the economy, where inappropriate behaviors can be caused not by the impact of external factors on the market (State, social rules, ethics, etc.), but just by its ordinary working: “not only the prejudices of the public, but, what is much more unconquerable, the private interests of many individuals, irresistibly oppose it” (Smith 1976 [1776], 1, IV.2.43, p. 471). As a consequence distances can arise between the scientific representation of the world and its historical evolution and this represents a permanent challenge for the social sciences (Heilbroner 1982, p. 434ff; Winch 1978, p. 167 ff.; Pesciarelli 1988, p. XL ff.). Of course, Smith admitted, the pride and presumption of the philosopher lead him to consider his scientific representation of the world as the only possible: even we, while we have been endeavoring to represent all philosophical systems as mere inventions of the imagination, to connect together the otherwise disjointed and discordant phænomena of nature, have insensibly been drawn in, to make use of language expressing the connecting principles of this one, as if they were the real chains which Nature makes use of to bind together her several operations. (Smith 1980 [1795], p. 105)

26 A relativistic attitude, grounded on his peculiar inductive-deductive approach, pervades the entire work of Adam Smith. Ricardo’s theoretical universe, deductively built, is different. Ricardo is convinced of the priority of the stability of his scientific system, in the belief that it perfectly reflects the real world—what T. Hutchison has defined as “the enormous simplification of the full knowledge postulate” (Hutchison 1994, p. 196). The concept of “natural order” of his system is closer to that of Quesnay and French rationalism rather than to that of Adam Smith and the empirical rationalism represented along the axis Locke-Hume-Smith (Jonas 1964, p. 53-80). Besides, the explanatory efficacy of his scientific representation is guaranteed by the postulate of the structural stability of the economic system. Individual behaviors, in the case of activities not convergent with the structural rules (‘natural laws’), cannot affect the long-term dynamics of the system and its rational order. They—like those historical events not foreseen by the evolutionary logic of the system—represent a kind of ‘accidental’ or inessential “in the sea of singular empirical data” (Hegel 1991, p. 31). They are simply irrelevant for the understanding of social order and its endogenous necessities.

27 Economists are exclusively called on to represent the essential structure of the world. For this reason, Ricardo considers unacceptable taking into account those “accidental” historical changes that seem to introduce doubts regarding the scientific representation of the world (De Vecchi 1993, p. 21-24). Think, for instance, of the Ricardian reflection on economic imbalances or the anomalous aspects of international trade. In the case of economic crises, he criticized Malthus for focusing on “temporary effects” (Ricardo 1973, 6, p. 133), sacrificing the relationships between the structural

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variables that emerge in the long run. In the case of the effects of the international commerce on the dynamics of economic systems, he again accused Malthus of letting himself be fooled by superficial and contradictory events, which are more practical in nature than scientific ones. One must not forget, he stresses, that “that is a question of fact and not of science.” If we were to give relevance to these facts, we would risk compromising the structure of our scientific representation. On the other hand, he adds, the recourse to the facts might always be used against theories: “might be urged against almost every proposition in Political Economy” (Ricardo 1973, 6, p. 64).

28 As is well known, Marx criticized Ricardo on economic crises, on money, on international trade, on the effects of competition on the economic structure, for his incapability to consider the role of the middle classes in the distribution of surplus, etc., denouncing the distance between his scientificrepresentation and historical reality. Nevertheless, the fascination of Ricardo prevailed in his judgment, beyond the internal inconsistencies of his analysis, with reference to two aspects: the supposed certainty about the correspondence between scientific system and reality, and, above all, because of his belief in the necessary evolution of the economic system, according to its ‘natural laws’. So, the Ricardian analysis of the ‘anatomy’ of modern social formation pushed Marx toward a reflection on the economic field as the essential one for the inquiry into modern society. But as pointed out, to have a historically determined system, viable for “constructing relationships winch our imagination accepts as plausibly motivated”, and, hence, “objectively possible“, according to our “nomological standpoint” (Weber 1949, p. 92), does not authorize unequivocal and mechanical correspondences between theories and reality, In fact, such a hypothesis would introduce in the social sciences those “naturalistic prejudices”, which on the one hand, would make scientific explanations difficult, and on the other hand, would give to scientific theories a normative structure (Weber 1949, p. 94). Probably, through Ricardo, Marx re-opens the path towards the recovery of that “powerful tradition of philosophical jusnaturalist teleology”, which profoundly characterized the vision of “liberal economists of the time” (Myrdal 1975, p. 251). So, Marx seems to accept, in some way, that inversion between individual and society, which he had harshly criticized in his youthful work. This passage will be decisive for the subsequent evolution of Marxist thinking, even though Lenin, as a strict reader of Das Kapital, warned about the risk of this reductionist approach: the analysis of the anatomy of society cannot be sufficient for the social analyst, just like the study of human anatomy cannot exhaust the study of man (cf. Lenin 1977, p. 57-58).

4. Some developments of Marxist views after Marx: from the “final economic crisis” to socialism

29 As is well known, the extraordinary diffusion of socialism in the last quarter of the 19 century was not the effect of direct reading of Das Kapital. But apart from this, we have to acknowledge—as pointed out—that its importance was remarkable in the popular imagination not only because it seemed to respond to the thirst for social justice, but also because it did that in a “scientific way”, according with the expectations of the time (Pareto 1987, p. 334 ff.; Pareto 1961, § 1009, p. 401). Not by chance did Marxist scholars emphasize in Das Kapital this character of a neutral scientific analysis, deriving the necessity of socialism from it. Within such a discourse,

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historical materialism was seen as a general interpretative canon, in many respects comparable with the positivistic theory of evolution. The recurring focus on the Marxian reflection about the contradictions between the capitalist mode of production and the development of the productive forces as a neuralgic and inevitable mechanism able to assure social change, facilitated the inattention on the complexity of the historical determinations of capitalist society. As a consequence, the reference to the centrality of economic factors was conceived as a sort of unquestionable general explanans of social dynamics, reserving to political strategy an ancillary role. It is amazing that since the 1880s (Marx died in 1883), “the concept of revolution was simply equated with the collapse of capitalist society” (Steinberg 1979, p. 79). Such an approach was favored by the fact that in the work of Marx there did not exist for political theory “an analogous corpus” comparable with that devoted to economic theory (Hobsbawm 1978, p. 247). Marx and Engels had generally considered the issues related to the political and institutional evolution of society as “secondary problems” (Hobsbawm 1978, p. 247). The low importance attributed to political theory inevitably translated into a substantial eclipse of a thorough reflection about the role of subjective factors in the analysis of capitalism (Bobbio 1976, esp. p. 21-41; Cerroni 1973, esp. p. 84-97; Cerroni 1982, p. 103 ff.).

30 This theoretical approach, primarily concerned with the analysis of the “anatomy” of society, was further amplified by Engels, whose Anti-Dühring played an essential role in the international diffusion of Marxism (Stedman Jones 1978, p. 320). The most authoritative members of the Second International (Bebel, Bernstein, Kautsky, Plechanov, Aksel’rod, Labriola, etc.) were so influenced by this book that Kautsky confessed that Anti-Dühring had helped him “to understand Das Kapital and to read it in a correct way” (Stedman Jones 1978, p. 320, see also Steinberg 1981, p. 159-174). It is not surprising, then, that they spread the idea of the “final crisis” of capitalism as an economic event and Kautsky (1881) wrote: “Our task is not to organize the revolution but to organize ourselves for the revolution; our task is not to make the revolution, but use it” (Steinberg 1979, p. 79). A view he will confirm ten years later (1891), in his commentary about the Erfurt Program: We consider the breakdown of the present social system to be unavoidable, because we know that economic evolution inevitably brings on the conditions that will compel the exploited classes to rise against this system of private ownership. (Kautsky 1971, p. 90)

31 The “final crisis of the capitalist economy” was “justified” with arguments deriving predominantly from the theory of the lack of proportion (between the productive sectors), or, to a lesser extent, from the under-consumption theory. Nevertheless, the theorists of the Second International did not use a pure theory of the lack of proportions (remembering the outcomes it had given in Tugan-Baranowsky) and, with the exception of Rosa Luxemburg, they did not even adopt a pure theory of under- consumption. The Marxian critique of Malthus, Sismondi and Rodbertus were continuously recalled: under-consumption does not explain the genesis of economic crises, Engels wrote, even if it is a recurring phenomenon within them: The under-consumption of the masses is a necessary condition of all forms of society based on exploitation, consequently also of the capitalist form; but it is the capitalist form of production which first gives rise to crises. The under- consumption of the masses is therefore also a prerequisite condition of crises, and plays in them a role which has long been recognised. But it tells us just as little why crises exist today as why they did not exist before. (CW 25, p. 272)

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32 Within this mechanistic vision of economic (and social) dynamics, the theory of the anarchy of production seemed to assume a catalytic role, as it could encompass a theory of the lack of proportions in which under-consumption was conceived as a kind of inevitable major disproportion. On the other hand, this reference to under- consumption and to the lack of effective demand seemed functional to the explanation of imperialism. Rosa Luxemburg expressed this connection between under- consumption and imperialism in extreme form in her The Accumulation of Capital (1913) (which, not by chance, is subtitled: A contribution to the economic explanation of Imperialism). This approach was largely shared: think of Kautsky, Bebel and even Lenin (Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, 1917), who in his youthful writings had severely criticized the analytical relevance of the under-consumption theories (vs Sismondi and his Russian followers).

33 The successes of the trade unions (especially in England), the positive electoral results of the Social Democratic Party and the “Bernstein-Debatte”2 accentuated the reflection on the political strategy of the working class, but in the circles of Marxist orthodoxy the general approach, centered on the theory of the economic collapse, was largely confirmed. The relevance of the theory of the “final crisis of capitalism” continued to be unquestioned but, with reference to the issue of the transition to socialism, reflections arose whether it should be the result of a “violent political revolution” or the consequence of reformist policies. The view of a possible peaceful transition to socialism (Cunow 1970, p. 424-30) gained a growing weight in the internal debates, both because—as Conrad Schmidt noted—it would be difficult to realize the radical “socialist reforms” on the ruins of the old social order (Schmidt 1970, p. 266), and because the conviction that a ‘political rupture’ would have preceded the economic collapse of capitalism also gained ground (Engels in CW 25, p. 254 ff.; Hilferding 1910, esp. chap 25; on this, see: Napoleoni 1970, esp. p. XLIV-LXX).

34 Rosa Luxemburg severely criticized this view. In her opinion, the recurring crises of the capitalist economy constituted only a prerequisite for political revolution: there is undoubtedly a continuous mutual influence between the political and economic aspects of social becoming, but the determining and decisive factor remains, in the ultimate analysis, the economic one. According to Luxemburg, while the organization of the economy and its productive systems “approach more and more the production relations of socialist society”, “its political and juridical relations established between capital ist society and socialist society a steadily rising wall”. In this situation, only “the hammer blow of revolution, that is to say, the conquest of political power by the proletariat, can break down this wall” (Luxemburg 2008, p. 65-66; on this: Cerroni 1973, p. 70-75). The fact remains, that these discussions were rigidly confined within the space of economic reflections and the idea of the economic collapse of capitalism (Cerroni 1971, p. 17; Perrotta 2018, p. 137-151).

35 An interested observer, in his Sozialismus und Soziale Bewegung im 19. Jahrhundert3, summarizing the essential aspects of those debates, indicated two main limits: on the one hand, their economicist torsion, on the other, the lack of rigorous investigations about the role of subjective factors in social change (Gioia 2015). Sombart did not question the “necessity of socialism”, emphasizing the crucial role played by Marxian analysis about the relationship between material conditions of existence and social change, but he considered unacceptable the Zusammenbruchstheorie (‘theory of self-destruction’) and the idea that it could have a central role for the transition to

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socialism (Sombart 1909, p. 86-87). If anything, he continued, contemporary capitalism would be characterized by recurring “periods of chronic depression” and stagnation. For this reason, Sombart proposed to correct the famous Marxian expression that capitalism will dig its tomb in the course of its development. In his opinion, “it would be more correct to say that it was preparing its bed of sickness” (Sombart 1909, p. 87; on this, see: Priddat 1996, 1, p. 291; Chaloupek 1996, 2, p. 172).

36 According to him, the main problem of those debates derived from the fact that they completely neglected the ideal component, which is predominant in the construction of a new social system. Social evolution is caused by changes in historically determined “relationships of powers”. They do not change mechanically, on the basis of the dynamics of economic factors, but only if an ideal propensity towards the change produces an adequate capacity of political control and a transformation of the political systems addressed to the development of more democratic institutions, able to modify the cultural contexts and the motives of human activity (Sombart 1908, p. 60 ff.; 1909, p. 53 ff.; on this see: Lenger 1996, 2, p. 257-8, Lenger 1997, p. 148 ff.). If we only use leverage on the economic factors, the reference to the role of the subjective factors (through “class consciousness”) will only represent an ineffective and ideological surrogate. Lukács himself would later admit that the exclusive reference to economic factors in the view of the transition to socialism had facilitated the adoption of an idealistic approach with reference to the category of the “class consciousness”: “As to the way in which the problem was actually dealt with, it is not hard to see today that it was treated in purely Hegelian terms” (Lukács 1972, p. xxii, see also p. xxvii ff.).

5. A revolution against “Das Kapital”. Antonio Labriola and Antonio Gramsci: the Italian way toward the rediscovery of the role of political subjectivity

37 Gramsci largely developed this issue in his Prison Notebooks, where we find the attempt to propose a new vision of Marxism, which could overcome the theoretical limits which had distorted its evolution. Such limits were also traced back to those naturalistic and positivistic attitudes which had characterized the thought of K. Marx. Along this pathway Gramsci recovered the scientific contribution of Antonio Labriola (Gramsci 1975, 1, p. 309; 2, 1241ff., 1507 ff.), who had emphasized the following aspects: 1. the originality of historical materialism and its scientific autonomy with respect to other philosophical views (idealism, positivism, neo-Kantianism, old materialism) (Labriola 1968b, p. 18-19, p. 86 ff., Labriola 1968c, p. 188 ff.; Labriola 1968d, p. 320-340). 2. the need to free Marxism from economism, which had transformed historical materialism into a general interpretative canon, mechanically applicable to every social situation in order to foresee its evolution, apart from detailed historical analyses (Labriola 1968a, p. 59-60; Labriola 1968b, p. 76 ff., p. 98 ff.). 3. finally, the emphasis on the role of human subjectivity in social change (Labriola 1968a, p. 54-56¸Labriola 1968b, p. 83, p. 105-107; Labriola 1968d, p.336).

38 Of course, we cannot reconstruct the entire reflection of Gramsci (and Labriola) on this issue, but we can probably give the sense of Gramsci’s approach, with reference to two articles—The Revolution against Capital and Utopia—which he published in 1917.

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39 In the previous section, we recalled in synthesis what is considered as a common starting point of Marxist inquiries into contemporary capitalism and the prevalent view about the transition to socialism. With reference to Marx, Marxist scholars tried to demonstrate that the socialism should have been the result of the most advanced capitalistic organization of the economy and society. As is well known, history so far has led to the realization of socialism in countries which were not capitalistically advanced and which were even difficult to define as capitalist societies, in a proper sense (young Lenin’s analysis of the capitalistic nature of Russian society was a successful invention). Anyway, this view was grounded on a mechanical application of the historical materialist approach, linking social changes to the evolution of the economic system. Within it, the role of subjective factors was irrelevant and, in every case, exclusively determined by economic dynamics (development of productive forces). According to Gramsci, a theoretical revision of the view of historical materialism was needed and the seemed to represent an ideal event to begin with: 1. “The Bolshevik Revolution consists more of ideologies than of events. […] This is the revolution against Karl Marx’s Capital”. Now, the new events have overcome the old ideologies: “Events have exploded the critical schemas determining how the history of Russia would unfold according to the canons of historical materialism. The Bolsheviks reject Karl Marx, and their explicit actions and conquests bear witness that the canons of historical materialism are not so rigid as one might have thought and has been believed”(Gramsci 2000, p. 33). 2. “if the Bolsheviks reject some of the statements in Capital, they do not reject its invigorating, immanent thought. These people are not ‘Marxists’, that is all; they have not used the works of the Master to compile a rigid doctrine of dogmatic utterances never to be questioned” (Gramsci 2000, p. 33). 3. “They live Marxist thought […] which represents the continuation of German and Italian idealism, and which in the case of Marx was contaminated by positivist and naturalist incrustations. This thought sees as the dominant factor in history, not raw economic facts, but man, men in societies, men in relation to one another, reaching agreements with one another, developing through these contacts (civilization) a collective, social will; men coming to understand economic facts, judging them and adapting them to their will until this becomes the driving force of the economy and moulds objective reality, which lives and moves and comes to resemble a current of volcanic lava that can be channelled wherever and in whatever way the will determines” (Gramsci 2000, p. 33, my italics). 4. During the social changes of a country devastated by unspeakable suffering and miseries, the ideal and voluntaristic component became prevalent: “Mechanically at first, then actively and consciously after the first revolution [february revolution], the people’s will become as one”. (Gramsci 2000, p. 34, my italics).

40 Antonio Gramsci did not hide the difficulty of a challenge such as that of realizing a socialist society in a country which did not have the necessary level of economic maturity, but he was convinced that “the revolutionaries themselves will create the conditions needed for the complete and full achievement of their goal. And they will create them faster than capitalism could have done” (Gramsci 2000, p. 35). Gramsci insists on a issue which will be central in his Prison Notebooks: as the increase of material wealth depends less on the time of labor and on the quantity of labor, but more and more on the powerful capability of men educated in the use of science and technologies, so the development of a social system depends on the cultural richness of individuals rooted in always more complex social contexts, oriented by advanced

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political-institutional networks. On this basis, it is possible to conceive and plan original processes aiming for the development of the whole of mankind. Besides, we should know that such projects of human development need not only the analysis of “raw economic facts” (the “anatomy” of the society), but especially the inquiry into the distinctive features of the social systems, their cultural attitudes and their institutional arrangements: The truth is that no two political constitutions are the same, just as no two economic structures are the same. The truth is that the formula is anything but the arid expression of a glaringly obvious . Between the premises (economic structure) and the consequence (political constitution) the relations are anything but simple and direct; and the history of a people is not documented by economic facts alone. The unraveling of the causation is a complex and involved process. To disentangle it requires nothing short of a profound and wide-ranging study of every intellectual and practical activity. (Gramsci 2000, p. 45, on this, see also: Gramsci 1970, I, p. 462-465)

41 The emphasis on that “profound and wide-ranging study of every intellectual and practical activity” is important in order to highlight the link between the development of subjectivity and the political-institutional context, avoiding those unacceptable simplifications which had exclusively insisted on the economic aspects of social dynamics, neglecting the relevance of the modern state and the cultural phenomena of a civilized country. On this aspect, as Umberto Cerroni pointed out, if Lenin was the heretic Marxist who realized the revolution against Marx’s Capital, Gramsci can be considered the Leninist heretic, who, through such an approach, imagined the social transformation against Lenin, who—as the author of State and Revolution—pictured a simplified and unacceptable representation of the modern state, with reference to the way in which the institutional arrangements can hinder or promote the development of the individuals (Cerroni 1978, p. 49).

42 Nevertheless, it is useful to remember that Lenin himself reflecting later on this issue reached the same conclusions and criticized the serious limits of his analysis in State and Revolution. In fact, in 1923 (a few months before his death) he proposed (Better Fewer, but Better) a double self-critical judgment about his previous analyses: he criticized again the economistic interpretation of social changes and, at the same time, acknowledged that his view about the role of the modern state was inadequate. As far as the first aspect is concerned, he writes: we started not from where we had to start according to the theory (of all kinds of pedants) and in our country the political and social revolutions preceded the cultural revolution […] Now, we have to do this cultural revolution in order to become a completely socialist country; But for us this cultural revolution implies incredible difficulties, both of a purely cultural nature (since we are illiterate), and of a material nature (since, in order to become educated men, a certain development of the material means of production is necessary). (Lenin 1977, p. 839-840)

43 As for the second aspect, he emphasized the need to inquire in a more profound way into the role of the modern institutional systems within a Marxist perspective, because the “proletarian state” is in a “deplorable” situation, and the task of improving the “state apparatus” “is very difficult and it is far from being solved, and is an extremely urgent one”: Either we prove now that we have really learned something about state organization (we ought to have learned something in five years), or we prove that

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we are not sufficiently mature for it. If the latter is the case, we had better not tackle the task. (Lenin 1977, p. 847 ff.)

44 On this aspect, Lenin wrote, that the Russians had to learn from the more advanced capitalist countries. Such as Germany and England: “in order to renovate our state apparatus” and as the representatives of proletarian culture “we must at all costs set out, first, to learn, secondly, to learn, and thirdly, to learn…” (Lenin 1977, p. 848, see also p. 852).

45 As we can see, this view represented the distinctive aspects of the Gramscian research project of 1917: the development of human subjectivity depends not only on economic growth and the scientific development it promotes, but also on the institutional arrangements and the symbolic forms guaranteeing processes of . The features of the individuals, determined by continuous interactions with social environment, are central to promoting social change. In fact, their motives are intertwined with the more complex structure of needs (starting from the exigency of social justice and human equality), which invert individual behavior from a merely adaptive attitude to a creative one. Only on this basis, do we have the possibility of overcoming the ideological bonds of capitalist society, which consider the “economic structure and its exigencies” in a theological way, as supra-human forces driving men’s lives. Men can, then, re-appropriate their destiny: “man can dominate his own destiny, he can do it himself, creating his life (on this: Labriola 1968b, p. 142).

6. Conclusions

46 Some years ago, Norman Geras in his Marx and Human Nature: Refutation of a Legend gave us a synthetic view of scholars (as , Tom Bottomore, Robert D. Cumming, Eugene Kamenka, Vernon Venable, Robert Tucker, Kate Soper, Colin Summer, Sidney Hook, etc.), who refuted Marx’s analysis on human nature, trying to build, as Althusser pointed out, a “theoretical anti-” (Althusser 1969, p. 219 ff.; on this, see Geras 1983, p. 49-50; Goldmann 1969, p. 166 ff.). The young Marx’s analysis on individuals and human nature was considered a sort of residue of a philosophical tradition which was inappropriate for social analysis. In this short conclusion, I will try to show that the recovery of Marx’s reflection has neither an archeological purpose nor that of solving some interpretative aspects within the limited field of Marxist scholars. In my opinion, the recovery of this Marxian issue can have significant effects for contemporary social sciences, opening analytical perspectives devoted to a better integration between the historical characteristics of social systems and the features of individuals. From this point of view, I find difficult to understand the reasons for the anti-humanistic attitude which has characterized some interpretations of Marx’s thought: I cannot see the advantages it should offer for the analysis of the economy and society. A humanistic viewpoint does not bring to diminish the relevant Marxian contribution to the analysis of the capitalistic economy or to underrate the role of the economy in modern society. On the contrary, it lays at the core of Marxian analyses aimed at discovering the human roots of every , escaping the theological trap which sees facts or things as dominating human life (e.g. the ‘fetishism of commodities’).

47 Without this humanistic attitude, Marxian analyses would be close to those of liberal and neo-liberal economics, which inverts the relation between the purposes of the

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economy and the purposes of men, in the conviction that, in the long run, they can coincide (on this, see Heilbroner 1986, p. 163, 170). Besides, this cannot but create a de- historicized view of individualism and a distorted idea about the relationships between individual and society. The former and the latter become the terms of an unresolvable antinomy: on one side, we find an isolated and impotent Self (with a given structure of needs and a tightly limited range of possible choices within the ‘capitalist rules of action’); on the other side, we find the omnipotent society, determined by the fatalistic character of its natural laws (Plekhanov 1960, p. 56).

48 Now, if we take a rapid glance at many contemporary analyses of individualism or to the reflections on the relationships between individuals and society, we find an impressive and recurring dissatisfaction among social analysts. As far as the first aspect is concerned, Weber emphasized the difficulty of a univocal definition of “the term ‘individualism’”, which “embraces the utmost heterogeneity of meanings” (Weber 1988, p. 208). Dewey harshly criticized the “perversion of the whole ideal of individualism” (Dewey 1999, p. 9, see also p. 51 ff.), pushing for a new model of individualism. Hayek was profoundly disappointed by the reflections concerning individualism, especially considering its centrality for social sciences: it has been “abused and […] misunderstood” in its meaning and “distorted […] into an unrecognizable caricature” by its critics and its followers (Hayek 1958, p. 2). More recently, Charles Taylor has observed “how shallow and partial are the one-sided judgments” we use with reference to the features of “modern individualism” (Taylor 1989, p. X) and Lukes has emphasized the difficulty of disentangling the “rich semantic history” of individualism (Lukes 1971, p. 45). The idea that the “individual person may be seen as—or actually is—a set of sub- individuals, relatively autonomous ‘selves’” does not seem a practicable solution (Elster 1985, p. 1), because it determines an increase of the problems to face. So—as Elliot and Lemert pointed out—the inquiry of the complexity of the “many selves”, risks rendering more problematic the possibility of a univocal meaning of the modern individual and his relationship with society (Elliot and Lemert 2009, esp. p. xi-xxvii).

49 Besides, and here we get at the second aspect, beyond the repetitive insistence of economists on the homo œconomicus approach (Hutchison 1994, p. 189-90; McCloskey 1991, p. 6-16; Davis 2003, esp. 81 ff.), many sociologists also adopt a similar view, starting from an atomistic vision of social life, centered on rational agents that move in contexts without institutions and historically relevant variables (Hodgson 2001, p. 14 ff.). The starting point is normally characterized by a definition of the individual obtained by isolating a supposed prevalent motive in his behavior, aiming to transform it into a universal feature of modern individualism. It is an old approach that Adam Smith had already criticized with reference to those ”splenetic philosophers”, like Mandeville or Hobbes, who—“in judging of human nature” (Smith 2004 [1790], 3.ii.27, p. 148)—would isolate individuals, considering exclusively their natural endowments and the desire to pursue only their own private good. This approach, on the one hand, does not explain sociability, because it cannot reconstruct the meaning of human interactions and lacks the understanding of the complex array of human passions at the base of human behavior; on the other hand, it presupposes—as given and unchangeable—the social organization that it claims to explain (Smith 2004 [1790], 7.ii. 6-14, p. 363-370; on this, see Hodgson 2001, p. 14 ff. and p. 273 ff.; Raffaeli 1996, p. 5-34; Gioia 2019).

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50 In the same way, some analysts of modern individualism consider the individual as a hedonist, narcissist, consumerist, a man without quality, by isolating features that appear on the surface of the individuals behavior in this historical phase. Once again, as the young Marx would have said, social analysts revert the relationships between society and individuals, univocally and uncritically attributing to the individual in general the features prevalent in contemporary society. On the other hand, the inquiry into the features of contemporary society, in order to focus on the historical determinants of individualism, is considered too problematic because of its exposure to the adoption of ad hoc assumptions that move away social science from that model of “parsimonious explanations” that social scientists prefer, following the explicative models typical of . However, Jon Elster has to admit (reluctantly), social science is more close to a “social ” than to a : “the time for social physics is not yet here, and may never come” (Elster 1995, p. 1, see also p. 248 ff.; on this, see: Giddens 1982, p. 527-539).

51 What is interesting is the fact that this approach was anticipated by the analyses of two scholars, Weber and Werner Sombart, who, through a rich and engaging confrontation with Marx, tried to build a theoretical alternative to him, emphasizing the role of the subjective factors in economy and society. As is well known Weber and Sombart appreciated Marxian historical materialism, emphasizing its originality and its usefulness for economic and social analysis. Nevertheless, they criticized the uncritical attitude of Marxist scholars, who transformed it into “a universal canon” with a ‘naturalistic’ basis, hypothesizing a necessary evolution of society (Weber 1949, p. 69-70, Weber 1992 [1904-05], p. 21 ff.). But “absolute necessities” do not exist in history, because economic and social phenomena are determined “in the ultimate analysis, by the psyche of the individuals” (Sombart 1894, p. 592; Sombart 1908, p. 11 ff.; on this: Pearsons 2002, p. 35; Lenger 1997, p. 151-3). The category of the “spirit of capitalism” was intended as a way of recovering the role of subjective factors (cultural, ethic, political, religious in nature) in order to understand the changes in the economy and society, As is well known, they used this category for explaining the genesis and development of “modern capitalism” (Gioia 2013, 2015).

52 Nevertheless, when they analyzed the individual-economy relationship with reference to advanced capitalism their views radically changed. In their opinion, the bureaucratic and technological dimension of contemporary society and its internal and inescapable rationality have destroyed the distinctive features of the social systems (capitalism and socialism are the same): individuals discover themselves as passive elements in an enormous mechanism. They are considered as “fragments” of an “unalterable order of things”, without any real autonomy. Weber’s “iron cage” and Sombart’s “economic machine” represent an unchangeable world. Individual and rational behavior, have to move within the “capitalistic rules of action”. Adaptive behavior is the only way in which individuals can survive. The creative and innovative human who built ‘modern capitalism’ is considered a fact of the past: The capitalistic economy of the present day is an immense cosmos into which the individual is born, and which presents itself to him, at least as an individual, as an unalterable order of things in which he must live. It forces the individual, in so far as he is involved in the system of market relationships, to conform to capitalistic rules of action […]. (Weber 1992 [1904-05], p. 20)

53 The same conclusions we find in Sombart: capitalism, radically changing the ‘natural orientation’ of the old economic organizations, has destroyed every communitarian

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value, modifying even human nature. A ‘new mankind’ arose, the features of the individuals (entrepreneurs and workers) being strictly determined by the logic of the system: Capitalism needed a new race of men in order to reach its ends. Men able to insert themselves in a big system, a capitalist firm […] those marvelous feats of relations of superiority, subordination, and coordination, those skilful pictures composed of partial men (Teilmenschen). The new economic structure required these human segments: beings without soul, depersonalized, dispirited beings, capable to be components, or better: little cogwheels in an intricate mechanism. (Sombart 1927, 1, p. 424; my transl. from German)

54 And, as he wrote in his Der Bourgeois, this is an inescapable : Some people indeed expected to overcome [the giant Capitalism] by appealing to ethical principles; I, for my part, can see that such attempts are doomed to utter failure. When we remember that capitalism has snapped the iron chains of the oldest religions, it seems to me hardly likely that it will allow itself to be bound by the silken threads of the wisdom that hails from Weimar and Kőnisgsberg. (Sombart 1967 [1913], p. 357-58)

55 It is really amazing that strict interpreters of Marx’s thought, as Max Weber and Sombart were, have reproduced in their analyses those epistemological distortions that Marx had radically criticized with reference to Hegel, Stirner, Feuerbach, and others. Of course, they ignored the work of the young Marx, but the fact remains: if their critiques of Marxist seemed to recover the scientific perspectives of the young Marx, their analyses of late capitalism re-proposed that naturalistic determinism which they had denounced with reference to Marxism. Probably, their analyses would have had a different outcome if the structure of human needs was not only defined within the circular relationships between historical characteristics of society and motives of the individuals, building an unchangeable identity between human needs and exigencies of the economic system. The reference to that propensities of the nature of man that Marx inquired (“natural forces, vital forces” “as dispositions and faculties”, as “natural impulses”) would have allowed a better understanding of the present in a historical perspective. Not by chance, as Wallerstein pointed out, “the prevalent opinion in politics and mainstream social sciences has been that no major structural change is even worth thinking about”, following in such a conviction the approach of neoclassical economics, which “bases its model on the assumption of a fundamentally unchanging social universe” (Wallerstein 2013, p. 5).

56 In my opinion, it is still a rich field of enquiry within which the approach of the young Marx and his radical humanism (“To be radical is to grasp the root of the matter. But for man the root is man himself”, CW 3, p. 182) will have great relevance. Thus, whether Max Weber is right calling for ‘historically-oriented analyses’ concerning the features of modern individualism and the scientific explanations of individual behaviors, it is useful to not neglect the relationships between habits, culture, social rules and human nature: Impulses are the pivots upon which the re-organization of activities turns, they are agencies of deviation, for giving new directions to old habits and changing their quality. Consequently, whenever we are concerned with understanding social transition and flux or with projects for reform, personal and collective, our study must go to the analysis of native tendencies. (Dewey 1922, p. 93)

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Newell Convers Wyeth, Endpaper for a 1920 edition of Robinson Crusoe

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Smith, Adam, 1976 [1776], An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Clarendon Press, Oxford.

Smith, Adam, 1980 [1795], “The Principles which Lead and Direct Philosophical Inquiries; Illustrated by the History of ”, in Id., Essays on Philosophical Subjects (W.P.D. Wighman, J.C. Bryce, I.S. Ross eds.), Oxford University Press, Oxford.

Smith, Adam, 2004 [1790], Theory of Moral Sentiments (K. Haakonssen, Knud ed.), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Sombart, Werner, 1894, “Zur Kritik des ökonomischen System von Karl Marx”, in Archiv für Soziale Gesetzgebung und Statistik, vol. 7, p. 555-594.

Sombart, Werner, 1927, Der moderne Kapitalismus. Historisch-systematische Darstellung des gesamteuropäischen Wirthschaftsleben von seinen Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart, 3, Das Wirtschaftsleben im Zeitalter des Hochkapitalismus, 2 tomes, Duncker und Humblot, Leipzig-München.

Sombart, Werner, 1908, Sozialismus und soziale Bewegung im 19. Jahrhundert, Gustav Fischer, Jena.

Sombart, Werner, 1909, Socialism and the Social Movement (M. Epstein ed.), J.M. Dent, London.

Sombart, Werner, 1967 [1913], The Quintessence of Capitalism: a Study of the History and Psychology of the Modern Business Man (M. Epstein ed., orig.: Der Bourgeois: zur Geistesgeschichte des modernen Wirtschaftsmenschen), Howard Fertig, New York.

Stedman Jones, Gareth, 1978, “Ritratto di Engels”, in Storia del Marxismo, I, Einaudi Editore, Torino, p. 318-345.

Steger, Manfred B., 1997, The Quest for Evolutionary Socialism. and Social Democracy, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Steinberg, Hans-Josef, 1979, Il socialismo tedesco da Bebel a Kautsky, Editori Riuniti, Roma.

Steinberg, Hans-Josef, 1981, “La formazione dell’ortodossia marxista in Germania e il problema della recezione del marxismo nelle masse”, in F. Zannino (ed.), L’Anti-Dühring affermazione o deformazione del marxismo, Franco Angeli, Milano, p. 159-17.

Taylor, Charles, 1989, Sources of the Self. The Making of Modern Identity, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Wallerstein, Immanuel et al., 2013, Does Capitalism Have a Future?, Oxford University Press, Oxford.

Weber, Max, 1949, “‘Objectivity’ in Social Science and Social Policy”, in Id., The Methodology of the Social Sciences, The Free Press, Glencoe IL, p. 50-112.

Weber, Max, 1988 [1904-05], The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Routledge, London and New York.

Whightman, W. P. D., 1975, “Adam Smith and the History of Ideas”, in A.S. Skinner , T. Wilson (eds.), Adam Smith, Clarendon Press, Oxford, p. 44-67.

Winch, Donald, 1978, Smith’s Politics. An Essay in Historiographic Revision, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

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NOTES

1. In the following, Marx & Engels 1975-2005 will be abbreviated as CW followed by volume number, page(s). 2. The “Bernstein-Debatte” was originated by a series of articles published with great furor between 1896-8 in the socialist journals Neue Zeit and Vorwärts. They constituted the basis for the publication of Bernstein’s Die Voraussetzungen des Sozialismus und die Aufgaben der Sozialdemokratie, 1899. 3. As is well known, this work was the result of a series of eight lectures on socialism held in 1896 by W. Sombart in Switzerland (invited by the Swiss Society for Ethical Culture). They were soon published in several editions and translated into many languages (Epstein 1909, p. v-vi).

ABSTRACTS

Marx (especially in his youth) develops an original analysis of individualism, rooted in the structure of modern society. He criticizes on the one hand Hegel and many representatives of the ‘Hegelian left’, on the other hand ‘vulgar materialism’ and Feuerbach. Nevertheless, it remains true that in Marxism (especially in Second-International Marxism) ‘individualism’ was seen negatively and, consequently, the individual and their activities were always pushed towards the background, in order to emphasize the relevance of collective factors (classes, state, political parties, etc) for explaining social change. The question is whether this outcome has its roots in Marxian analyses or it is the result of a theoretical distortion by early Marxist orthodoxy, due to the lack of knowledge of young Marx’s significant works: the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right was published in 1927, the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and the German Ideology were published in full version in 1932 and the Grundrisse were published in 1939-41. However, to reclaim young Marx’s rich analysis of modern individualism seems important in order to build a historically oriented analysis of individuals and of their relations to society. This approach would let us move away from the prevailing axiomatic approach of both mainstream economics— centered on homo oeconomicus and their selfish motives—and many representatives of contemporary sociology, who aim at building universal explanations based on the hypothesis of rational agents acting in a social environment inhabited by ‘isolated individuals’, at the expense of the historical features of individual activities.

INDEX

Keywords: Marx (Karl), Marxism, Individualism, Historical Materialism, Weber (Max), Sombart (Werner), Gramsci (Antonio)

AUTHOR

VITANTONIO GIOIA University of Salento, [email protected]

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Notes

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Introduction to the Open Peer- Reviewed Section on DR2 Methodology Examples

Guido Bonino, Paolo Tripodi and Enrico Pasini

1 In the last twenty years Franco Moretti’s ‘distant reading’ approach has provided a fresh understanding of literature and its historical development not by studying in detail a few particular texts (as in the so-called ‘close reading’), but rather by aggregating and analyzing large amounts of information (Moretti 2013). The central role of data in this approach is not determined only by their quantity. It is also important to look for different kinds of data, not investigated before, drawn from a variety of sources. In this sense this approach may be regarded as a form of data-driven research in the humanities. As members of the DR2 research group at the University of Turin—DR2: Distant Reading and Data-Driven Research in the History of Philosophy— we share the conviction that it is time to apply quantitative methods to the history of thought, and in particular to the history of philosophy, very broadly conceived. It seems to us that this kind of methodological innovation can be of interest for scholars working on different historical periods (ancient, medieval, modern, contemporary) and from the perspective of different fields (history of philosophy, history of science, history of ideas and intellectual history, , and so forth).

2 A founding moment for this approach was the first DR2 Conference, held at the University of Turin on January 16-18 2017. At the conference, after Moretti’s opening talk on “Pattern and interpretation” (later published as Moretti 2017), several scholars from different countries met together for the first time to discuss a variety of topics and methods: from Justin Smith (Paris Diderot) to Gino Roncaglia (Viterbo), from Arianna Betti (Amsterdam) to Peter de Bolla (Cambridge), to mention but a few of them.

3 Since then the DR2 research programme has developed in several directions. First of all, the research group has been enlarged by new members and collaborators. A series of DR2 Colloquia was inaugurated, and a second DR2 Conference was held in Turin on February 12-13 2019. Among the invited speakers were Franco Moretti (Stanford and Berlin), Arianna Betti and Pauline van Wierst (Amsterdam), Glenn Roe (Paris Sorbonne),

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Nakul Krishna (Cambridge), Paolo D’Angelo (Roma Tre), Giulia Venturi (CNR Pisa), and Nicola Guarino (CNR Trento). The conference focused on two main issues: style in philosophy and corpora building. Furthermore, some courses on quantitative methods in the history of philosophy have been scheduled at the University of Turin—such as a course held by visiting professor Arianna Betti on the computational history of ideas and a special course at the Scuola di Studi Superiori “Ferdinando Rossi” (both in the academic year 2019-2020)—and the first M.A. dissertations based on these methods were defended. Bonino, Pulizzotto & Tripodi 2018, Buonomo & Petrovich 2018, Petrovich 2018a and 2018b, Bonino & Tripodi 2019, and Carducci et al. 2019 are some examples of the group’s results; moreover, the first issue of the series “DR2 Working Papers” is going to be published. Last, but not least, a web page and a blog were opened, with the aim of raising attention on this approach, of communicating results and reflecting on tools and techniques, and of providing a space for discussion of our research work (https://dr2blog.hcommons.org).

4 Some of the participants to the first DR2 Conference agreed to publish edited versions of the conference talks in the form of working papers, that would be subjected to an open peer review process. The trial—as the editors of Nature said about their own run at open peer review: “We use the word ‘trial’ rather than ‘experiment’ advisedly” (‘Peer review on trial’ 2006)—has been an interesting chance to stretch the limits of peer review. Nature’s trial quite failed and the practice has been abandoned by them, but it has been taken up by others, and sometimes with perceived success: “What failed for Nature in 2006, has been very succesful for JMIR since 2009: inviting the broader scientific community to comment on current submissions before they are formally published” (Eysenbach 2015). This seems very inviting indeed: nonetheless, we must admit that we were not completely pleased with the outcome of our effort.

5 There is a lot of alternative interpretations of ‘open peer review’ or ‘open review’: a systematic review of the available definitions (more than one hundred) has been provided two years ago by Tony Ross-Hellauer (2017). For our trial, we went for collaborative, community-driven open peer review. Thus we opened a second DR2 blog for the review process (https://dr2openpeerreview.hcommons.org), where anyone could comment the papers by the paragraph (thanks to the excellent CommentPress plugin, http://futureofthebook.org/commentpress/) and we put to work the DR2 community that had gathered around the various activities of the research group. The submitted texts and the comments can still be scrutinized by interested readers.

6 On the one hand, the quality of the reviewing was quite satisfying, and we consider the result of the reviewing process utterly adequate for validating the final publications. On the other hand, we found ourselves—at times—in a situation not dissimilar from that of illustrious predecessors: “The trial was well-publicized ahead of time by Nature, but comments were rather scarce” (Shema 2014). One member of the DR2 group spent part of his scholarship gathering and galvanizing reviewers, with fairly good results: yet, in our experience, this aspect—participation—was, is, and is likely to remain the crucial shortcoming of this kind of open peer review process.

7 We’d like to warmly thank the Journal of Interdisciplinary History of Ideas for accepting to include the open peer-reviewed papers in the section devoted to methodological Notes: we are grateful for the attention that the Journal has been recently paying to distant-reading, quantitative, data-based methodologies in the

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history of ideas. We also heartily thank the authors and the reviewers who participated in the ‘trial’, and hope that the readers will enjoy the result.

Logo of the DR2 Research Group

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bonino, G., Pulizzotto, D. and Tripodi, P. (2018). Exploring the history of American philosophy in a computer-assisted framework. In Iezzi D. F., Celardo L., & Misuraca M. (eds.), JADT ’18. Proceedings of the 14 International Conference on Statistical Analysis of Textual Data (1, pp. 134-141). Roma: UniversItalia.

Bonino, G. and Tripodi, P. (2019). Academic success in America. Wittgenstein and . British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 359-392. http://doi.org/ 10.1080/09608788.2019.1618789

Buonomo, V. & Petrovich, E. (2018). Reconstructing late analytic philosophy. A quantitative approach. Philosophical Inquiries, 6(1), 149-180.

Carducci, G., Leontino, M., Radicioni, D., Bonino, G., Pasini, E. & Tripodi, P. (2019). Semantically aware text categorisation for metadata annotation, in in Computer and Information Science, Springer Verlag, pp. 315-330.

Eysenbach, G. (2015). Peer-Review 2.0: Welcome to JMIR Preprints, an open peer-review marketplace for scholarly manuscripts. JMIR Prepr, 1(1):e1. http://doi.org/10.2196/preprints.5337

Moretti, F. (2013). Distant Reading, London & New York: Verso.

Moretti, F. (2017). Patterns and interpretation. Pamphlets of the Stanford Literary Lab, 15, https:// litlab.stanford.edu/LiteraryLabPamphlet15.pdf.

Peer review on trial. (2006). Nature, 441(7094), 668-668. http://doi.org/10.1038/441668a

Petrovich, E. (2018a). Forms, patterns, structures: Citation analysis and the history of analytic philosophy. Journal of Interdisciplinary History of Ideas, 7(13), 1-21. http://doi.org/ 10.13135/2280-8574/2843

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Petrovich, E. (2018b). Accumulation of knowledge in para-scientific areas. The case of analytic philosophy. Scientometrics, 116(2), 1123-1151.

Ross-Hellauer, T. (2017). What is open peer review? A systematic review. F1000Research, 6, 588. http://doi.org/10.12688/f1000research.11369.2

Shema, H. (2014). An Introduction to open peer review. In Information Culture, Scientific American (June 28). https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/information-culture/an-introduction-to-open- peer-review/

ABSTRACTS

In the last twenty years Franco Moretti’s ‘distant reading’ approach has provided a fresh under standing of literature and its historical development not by studying in detail a few particular texts (as in the so-called ‘close reading’), but rather by aggregating and analyzing large amounts of information. As members of the DR2 research group at the University of Turin—DR2: Distant Reading and Data-Driven Research in the History of Philosophy—we share the conviction that it is time to apply such methods to the history of thought. This kind of methodological innovation can be of interest for scholars working on different historical periods (ancient, medieval, modern, contem porary) and from the perspective of different fields (history of philosophy, history of science, hist ory of ideas and intellectual history, sociology of knowledge, and so forth). A founding moment for this approach was the first DR2 Conference, held in Turin in 2017. Some of the participants to the Conference agreed to publish edited versions of the conference talks in the form of working papers, that would be subjected to an open peer review process. We present here the results.

INDEX

Keywords: Distant Reading, Open Peer Review, History of philosophy, History of science

AUTHORS

GUIDO BONINO University of Turin, [email protected]

PAOLO TRIPODI University of Turin, [email protected]

ENRICO PASINI University of Turin, [email protected]

Journal of Interdisciplinary History of Ideas, 16 | 2019 67

Exploring Knowledge Dynamics in the Humanities Two Science Mapping Experiments

Eugenio Petrovich and Emiliano Tolusso

1 Science mapping is a flourishing research topic at the crossroad of scientometrics, information visualization, network analysis, and sociology of science (Börner, Chen, & Boyack, 2005; Börner, Theriault, & Boyack, 2015; Chen, 2013). It aims to display the structure and dynamics of scientific knowledge by using 2- or 3-d visualizations, known as “science maps” (Chen, 2017). Among the different kinds of science maps that can be found1, bibliometric maps are the most developed. Bibliometric maps are based on the idea that scientific knowledge can be represented by a network, in which scientific publications (e.g., articles published in academic journals) are represented by the nodes or vertices of the network and the citations between them by the links or edges (Waltman & van Eck, 2014).

2 Until recently, science mapping has been mainly used to investigate the structure of the sciences, with little interest in the humanities. However, in the last years, scientometricians and digital humanists have started to map humanistic fields too (see for instance (Colavizza, 2018; Kreuzman, 2001)). In this working paper, we aim to contribute to this strand of research, by displaying and shortly discussing the results of two mapping experiments that we originally presented at the first DR2 conference, held in Turin in January 2017.2 Our experiments targeted analytic philosophy and human geography, respectively.

3 The rest of the paper is organized as follows. First, we provide a short introduction to bibliometric science maps to better understand the methodology and the tool we used to produce the maps (a software called VOSviewer). In the second section, we present and comment on our maps. Lastly, we discuss some limitations of bibliometric mapping applied to the humanities.

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1. A short introduction to bibliometric mapping

4 As we said above, the bibliometric approach to science mapping is based on the analysis of the links between scientific publications, i.e., on the analysis of citation networks. The classic workflow to produce a bibliometric map includes the following steps: data selection and retrieval, data cleaning, network extraction, normalization of the co- occurrence matrix, mapping and visualization, and, lastly, interpretation (Chen, 2017; Cobo, López-Herrera, Herrera-Viedma, & Herrera, 2011).

5 The first step consists of selecting a set of scientific publications that reasonably represents the research area we want to map, a process known as field delineation (Laurens, Zitt, & Bassecoulard, 2010; Zitt & Bassecoulard, 2006). Second, the data for the mapping is retrieved from a citation database, i.e., a database that collects the meta- data of scientific publications (authors, title, publication year, etc.) along with their citation links with other publications. Clarivate’s Web of Science (WoS) and Elsevier’s Scopus are the main resources for this kind of data.3 After the pre-processing phase in which the downloaded records are cleaned and standardized (e.g., by correcting the misspelling of author names or disambiguating homonyms), the citation network is extracted from publications and the relative occurrence matrix is thus obtained. An example of such a matrix is displayed in Table 1. Each row of the matrix represents a citing publication, whereas each column represents a reference, i.e., a cited publication. If the citing paper cites one of the references, the corresponding cell is marked with 1, 0 otherwise. In the example below, paper A cites the references (a, b, c), whereas paper B cites (b, d), and so on. Thus, each row-vector associated with a capital letter represents the bibliography of that publication, whether each column-vector relative to a lowercase letter represents the citations obtained by that publication (publication a is cited by A and B, publication b by A and B, and so on). The sum of the values on the row-vectors is equal to the length of the bibliography of the citing publication (for publication A, it amounts to 3), whereas the sum of the values on the column-vector is equal to the total number of citations gathered by the cited publication (for publication a, it amounts to 2).

Table 1: Example of occurrence matrix.

a b c d e

A 1 1 1 0 0

B 0 1 0 1 0

C 0 0 1 1 0

D 1 0 0 0 1

E 0 0 1 1 1

F 0 0 0 0 1

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6 The same information contained in the occurrence matrix can be represented by a directed graph in which the nodes represent the publications and the arrows the citation ties (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1: Example of a citation network.4

7 The citation network represented in the occurrence matrix can be used to produce a direct-linkage bibliometric map, such as the one shown in Fig. 1. However, since the citation occurrence matrix is usually very sparse (i.e., most of its cells contain zeros), this technique is little used in science mapping (see however (Waltman & van Eck, 2012)).

8 In fact, the two most common techniques of bibliometric mapping, namely bibliographic coupling (Kessler, 1963) and co-citation analysis (Small, 1973), do not work directly on the occurrence matrix itself but on a matrix derived from it, containing co-occurrence data (van Eck & Waltman, 2009).

1.1. Bibliographic coupling and co-citation analysis

9 Both bibliographic coupling and co-citation analysis use citations to calculate the similarity between publications. In bibliographic coupling, publications sharing many references, i.e., publications the bibliographies of which largely overlap, are considered as more similar than publications sharing few or no references at all. In co-citation analysis, on the other hand, the similarity of publications is measured based on the number of times they are cited together in the bibliographies of a set of other publications. Once again, the idea is that, if publications are frequently cited together, they are likely to be more similar than if they are seldom or never cited together.

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10 Now, both the strength of the bibliographic coupling and the strength of the co-citation link between two publications can be calculated by multiplying the original occurrence matrix with its transposed. In network analysis, this operation amounts to project a bi- modal network on one of its two one-mode networks. In the case of the example in Fig. 1, the resulting matrices are shown in Table 2 and Table 3.

Table 2: Bibliographic coupling matrix derived by the occurrence matrix in Fig. 1.

ABCDEF

A - 1 1 1 1 0

B - 1 0 1 0

C 1 1 - 0 2 0

D 1 0 0 - 1 1

E 1 1 2 1 - 1

F 0 0 0 1 1 -

Table 3: Co-citation matrix derived by the occurrence matrix in Fig. 1.

a b c d e

a - 1 1 0 1

b 1 - 1 1 0

c 1 1 - 2 1

d 0 1 2 - 1

e 1 0 1 1 -

11 Note that both the co-occurrence matrices are squared and symmetrical, whether the original occurrence matrix is rectangular and asymmetrical.5 In the bibliographic coupling matrix in Table 2, the citing publications C and E have the highest bibliographic coupling, whereas in the co-citation matrix in Table 3, the cited publications e and d have the highest co-citation strength.

1.2. Normalization

12 Once all the co-occurrence values have been computed, the next step in the production of the science map is to normalize the raw values, i.e., to replace the raw co-occurrences with statistical processing. As we saw above, the bibliographic coupling and the co- occurrence strengths are used as proxies of the similarity between publications. What

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we want from them, thus, is to represent similarity accurately. The problem with raw co-occurrences is that they are not very good at doing that, since they are affected by a “size effect”, which produces a distorted picture of the real similarities (van Eck & Waltman, 2009).

13 To see this, suppose that article A and article B are very similar in content. Suppose also that article A contains ten times as many references as article B. Other things being equal, one would expect article A to share more references with other articles in the same research field as article B. Article A, thus, would have more raw co- occurrences with other research articles than B. However, this does not indicate that article A is more similar to other articles than article B. It only indicates that article A has more references than B. Therefore, the raw co-occurrences are not a good indicator of similarity, since they reflect not only the similarity, but the size of the items as well.

14 There exist different options to avoid such distortion by normalizing the raw values. In science mapping, the most frequently used include the cosine (the most popular one), the association strength (used in the VOSviewer tool, see below), the inclusion index, and the Jaccard index (van Eck & Waltman, 2009).6 Clearly, depending on the chosen normalization, the final maps will be different.

15 Once the normalized version of the co-occurrence matrix is obtained, the next, crucial step is to visualize the information contained in it, using a representation that is more intelligible by humans than matrices of numbers, i.e., the science map.

1.3. Mapping and visualization

16 The easiest way to do so is to produce the network version of the matrix, using some graphical strategy to represent the strength of the links. A classic solution is to set the width of the link proportional to the strength (see Fig. 2 and Fig. 3) or to report the values as an index close to the link. This resulting visualization is known as a graph- based science map (Waltman & van Eck, 2014).

17 When interpreting this type of map, the most important thing to keep in mind is that the distance between the nodes is, in general, not significant. The similarity between the nodes is expressed by the width of the link, not by their distance on the plane. In software for network analysis and visualization, such as Pajek,7 which produce graph- based visualizations, the distance between the nodes on the map does not reflect similarities. Rather, the nodes are placed in order to enhance the readability of the network (for instance, by avoiding the overlap between the nodes’ labels).8

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Fig. 2: Graph-based visualization of the bibliographic coupling matrix. Nodes are citing publications.

Fig. 3: Graph-based visualization of the co-citation matrix. Nodes are cited publications.

18 A more interesting kind of science map, however, attempts to follow more closely the metaphor of the geographical map, by placing the nodes on the plane according to

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their similarity. This kind of map is called distance-based (Waltman & van Eck, 2014). Ideally, the distance of the nodes on the map (i.e., their Euclidean distance) should be inversely proportional to their similarity, so that similar nodes are placed close in the space and dissimilar nodes distant from each other.

19 However, as cartographers know well, it is impossible to fulfill this task when the object we want to represent has a higher number of dimensions than our representation. Think of the Earth and a geographical map: since the Earth is a 3-dimensional object while the map is in two dimensions only, it is impossible to represent our planet on a map without introducing some degree of distortion (e.g., the exaggerated size of Greenland in maps based on Mercator projection).

20 The same, but even worse, happens for science maps. In the case of the Earth, which is a 3-dimensional object, any point on its surface can be fully described by a vector of three coordinates. However, in the case of our matrices, any publication is described by a vector of coordinates, the length of which is equal to the number of other publications in our set. For instance, to fully individuate the “position” of the publication A of our example in relation to the others, we needed 5 coordinates! This means that each publication can be conceived as a point in a multi-dimensional structure, which is strictly impossible to represent perfectly on a 2-d map. A certain degree of distortion will always be present.

21 Fortunately, statisticians have elaborated several techniques to address this problem, technically known as ‘dimensionality reduction’. The main ones are a family of techniques called MDS, which stands for Multi-Dimensional Scaling (Borg & Groenen, 2010).9 Such techniques allow to find the 2-d representation of an n-dimensional space which minimizes the degree of distortion between the real n-dimensional object and its 2-d representation:

22 The goal is to find a new representation for the N objects as k-dimensional vectors, where k

23 It is important to note that, depending on the MDS technique chose, the resulting 2-d visualization will be different, since the distances will be calculated in different ways. Moreover, certain techniques tend to produce “artifacts”, such as quasi-circular layout, or to place the most important items in the center of the map (van Eck, Waltman, Dekker, & van den Berg, 2010).

1.4. Clustering

24 After the 2-d visualization of the similarity matrix is obtained, a common step in science mapping is to detect the presence of communities in the network, i.e., groups of similar nodes. This is done by using statistical techniques of clustering, a family of various techniques that are able to sort objects (i.e., data-points) into disjoint groups, called clusters. In network science, the most popular technique for clustering is based on the modularity function, but there exist several other clustering methods, such as hierarchical clustering (Hennig, Meilă, Murtagh, & Rocci, 2016). In science maps, clusters are usually represented by colors, so that the information about clusters can be superimposed on the network layout, enhancing the readability and interpretation of the map.

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25 Once again, different clustering methods or variations in the parameters of the clustering functions (e.g., resolution) will result in different clusters and, thus, different science maps. In fact, the main goal of this relatively technical excursus on science mapping was to show that science maps are not a simple “photograph” of the “real structure” of a citation network. Like any other map, they are the result of two elements: the features of the mapped object on the one hand, and the methodological choices of the mapper, on the other.

26 When we proceed to the final step of science mapping, namely the interpretation of the map based on our expert knowledge of the field, we should always remember these caveats and clarify our methodological choices to the readers.

1.5. Higher-level maps

27 The same methodology we described above can be extended to other bibliometric units. For instance, co-citations can be calculated between authors (author co-citation analysis (White & Griffith, 1981)) or between journals (journal co-citation analysis, (McCain, 1991)). The corresponding maps will display authors and journals, respectively, as nodes of the network. The higher-level maps based on relationships between journals are used to investigate science at the level of fields, which contain millions of publications and thousands of journals, or even to map the entire scientific literature (Boyack, Klavans, & Börner, 2005; Leydesdorff & Rafols, 2009).

1.6. Term maps

28 As we saw above, bibliometric maps use the citations between publications as input. Another common type of science map uses instead the textual meta-data of scientific publications, namely their titles, abstracts, and keywords. Clearly, these textual properties of scientific publications are a very rich source of information about their content. Thus, they can be used to obtain fine-grained pictures of the structure and dynamics of scientific knowledge (Callon, Courtial, Turner, & Baui, 1983).

29 The workflow for producing a term map is not very different from what we saw for bibliometric mapping. Citation indexes store also the textual meta-data of publications. Once the target publications are singled out, the titles, abstracts, and keywords can be easily retrieved. Their processing then follows the standard steps of NLP (Natural Language Processing).10 Irrelevant words (called ‘stop words’) such as ‘and’, ‘or’, and so on, are removed, and noun-phrases (i.e., sequences of nouns plus adjectives) are extracted.

30 Usually, not all the extracted noun-phrases are equally relevant. Compare, in the scientific literature, the different relevance of a specific term like ‘cardiovascular’ with that of a generic term like ‘paper’. Even if the former is likely to occur fewer times than the latter, it carries more information about the topic of a research field than the other. To retain only the ‘specific’ terms and remove the ‘generic’ ones, different statistical techniques are available. The most popular is to calculate the tf-idf (which stands for ‘term frequency—inverse document frequency’) of each term, but other approaches are possible.11

31 Once the relevant noun-phrases are selected, the occurrence matrix (publications terms) is constructed (see Table 4) and transposed to the co-occurrence matrix of terms

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(Table 5). Each cell of the matrix tells in how many publications the two noun-phrases occur together.

Table 4: Example of term occurrence matrix. Rows are publications, columns are relevant noun-phrases.

“abcd” “efgh” “ilmn”

A 0 0 1

B 1 0 1

C 1 0 0

D 0 1 0

Table 5: Example of term co-occurrence matrix derived from Table 4.

“abcd” “efgh” “ilmn”

“abcd” - 0 1

“efgh” 0 - 0

“ilmn” 1 0 -

32 Once again, the raw values are statistically processed to correct for differences in sizes between the items, to avoid that publications with longer abstracts or titles distort the similarity measures.

33 From the normalized co-occurrence matrix onward, the processing pipeline is basically the same as in bibliometric mapping: the n-dimensional information contained in the similarity matrix is turned to a 2-dimensional representation by dimensionality reduction techniques and clustering is applied to detect groups of similar terms. Lastly, the interpretation of the maps is developed based on the expert knowledge of the field under study.

34 After this relatively technical excursus, we hope that the results of our two mapping experiments, that we present in the following sections, will be easier to assess.

2. First mapping experiment: Late Analytic Philosophy

35 Even if there are good historiographical arguments to refuse the label “analytic philosophy” and to contest any definition of analytic philosophy that has been provided in the literature (see, for instance, (Beaney, 2013; Glock, 2008)), the existence of a of contemporary philosophers sharing a common “analytic” tradition can be hardly denied. Social practices such as job offers, journal choices, editorial policies, and publication styles attest to the presence of such a group (Preston, 2010).

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Therefore, trying to map analytic philosophy starting from its main “social traces”, namely the publications in analytic journals, seems to be a reasonable endeavor.12

36 In this first mapping experiment, our goal is to map the structure and evolution of recent analytic philosophy by mapping the research articles published in five journals, that are deemed by analytic philosophers themselves as the “best” generalist journals in their field:13 • Philosophical Review (PhR) • Journal of Philosophy (JPh) • Mind • Noûs • Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (PPR)

37 The time span chosen for the analysis is 1985-2015, which falls within what Tripodi and Bonino call “late analytic philosophy”, that is the most recent phase of analytic philosophy (Bonino & Tripodi, 2018; Tripodi, 2015). We retrieved on Web of Science Core Collection all the publications published by these journals in that period, obtaining a corpus of 11167 records. Table 1 reports some descriptive statistics of the dataset.

Table 6. Analytic Philosophy dataset. In brackets percentage values.

Rank Journal Publications Publications Publications Tot Avg pubs

(1985-1994) (1995-2004) (2005-2015) per year

1 PhR 821 [7.4%] 722 [6.5%] 440 [3.9%] 1983 [17.8%] 66,1

2 Noûs 755 [6.8%] 606 [5.4%] 554 [5.0%] 1915 [17.1%] 63,8

3 JPh 593 [5.3%] 416 [3.7%] 387 [3.5%] 1396 [12.5%] 46,5

4 Mind 750 [6.7%] 1064 [9.5%] 1268 [11.4%] 3082 [27.6%] 102,7

5 PPR 752 [6.7%] 1062 [6.7%] 977 [8.7%] 2791 [25.0%] 93,0

Total 3671 [32.9%] 3870 [34.7%] 3626 [32.5%] 11167 [100%] 372,2

38 The data were divided into three timespans for the historical analysis (see below). Each of the three sub-timespan accounts for around one-third of the publications. The journals, however, are not equally represented, due to differences in publication frequencies (the number of issues per year, the average number of articles per issue, etc.). In particular, the most prolific journals Mind and Philosophy and Phenomenological Research account alone for more than half of the total publications.

39 Note that in the follow-up study by Buonomo and Petrovich, we restricted the publication type to research articles, excluding book reviews, editorials, etc., that are instead included in this dataset. The choice of focusing or not on research articles only produces significant differences in the dimension of the datasets, especially in the case of , which publishes mainly book reviews. It is very interesting to compare the different maps of analytic philosophy which result from different choices in the dataset. In particular, in the inclusive dataset we examine here, the

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cluster of philosophy of language is placed at the center of the map, at the crossroads of the other philosophical sub-disciplines. In the restricted map, it is in between the and clusters (Petrovich & Buonomo, 2018, fig. 1).

2.1. Results

40 The publications retrieved were mapped with the technique of co-citation analysis using the software VOSviewer, a freely available science mapping tool developed by Ludo Waltman and Nees Jan van Eck at the Center for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS) in Leiden (van Eck & Waltman, 2010). VOSviewer extracts the citation network from the Web of Science records, calculates the co-occurrence matrix and then normalizes raw co-occurrences data using the association strength measure (see above).14 It produces distance-based visualizations, in which the relative distance between the nodes on the 2-d map reflects the similarity of the publications (with the lowest stress possible), using a special technique (the VOS technique) which does not produce the visual artifacts that are sometimes introduced by standard MDS methods (van Eck et al., 2010). VOSviewer also groups publications with a clustering technique based on a modified version of the modularity function (Waltman, van Eck, & Noyons, 2010).

41 Remember that in co-citation analysis, the items on the map are the cited items, i.e., the cited references of our target publications. The map thus represents the structure of the literature cited in our corpus, not the structure of the corpus itself. To investigate the latter, i.e., the citing publications, bibliographic coupling would be the right technique.

42 In the map in Fig. 4, the size of the nodes is proportional to the number of citations they receive in the corpus, i.e., the number of times they appear in the bibliographies of the corpus publications. Note that only the top-100 most cited references are shown on the map.15 The width of the link between two nodes is proportional to the number of co-citations of the publications connected by the link. Only links with 10 co-citations or more are shown on the map. Lastly, the color of the nodes corresponds to the cluster.16

43 The map shows some interesting features of the dataset. First, some clear clusters can be recognized, showing that late analytic philosophy literature is grouped into different areas. Indeed, each cluster can be easily mapped to a sub-specialty of analytic philosophy. The red cluster in the northern part of the map relates to the philosophy of mind, the yellow eastern cluster to moral and political philosophy, the southern green cluster to metaphysics, and the western light blue to epistemology. Interestingly, at the center of the map, lies a violet cluster containing several works in the field to which analytic philosophy was originally closely associated, namely the philosophy of language.

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Fig. 4: Overall map of analytic philosophy dataset (timespan: 1985-2015).

44 It seems, therefore, that the organizing principle of the late analytic literature lies in sub- disciplinary differences, rather than, say, major authors, philosophical theories or meta- philosophical principles.

45 A further interesting feature of the map is its center-periphery structure. Remember that in distance-based visualizations, relative distances are meaningful, therefore they can be interpreted. In our case, it seems that the center of the map hosts the ‘’ of the analytic tradition, such as Quine’s Word and Object and Kripke’s Name and Necessity (Levy, 2003). The periphery, on the other hand, is populated by specialized sub-disciplines. Apparently, the farther a document appears on the map, the more specialized its content is.

46 Considering the top-100 documents represented by the nodes of the map, we note that no ‘Continental’ author or publication is present (Table 2). The isolation between the two ‘camps’ of contemporary philosophy seems therefore still alive, notwithstanding the efforts, from both sides of the divide, to overcome the gap (Biletzki, 2001).

47 David Lewis has the highest citation score and is the author of two out of ten publications in the top-10, On the Plurality of Worlds and Counterfactuals. By knowing the reaction of the analytic community to the former, it is easy to understand why high citation counts should not easily be interpreted as a sign of agreement or success of a philosophical theory. In fact, the main philosophic thesis advanced in On the Plurality of Worlds (modal realism) has been criticized by most analytic philosophers, not accepted as an uncontested philosophical “achievement”. From this point of view, citation scores in philosophy should be interpreted very differently than in the sciences, when they are frequently equated with scientific quality or scientific consensus on a certain claim. 17

Table 7. Top ten most cited publications (timespan: 1985-2015).

Rank Author Title Year Links Co-cits Cits

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1 Lewis, David On the Plurality of Worlds 1986 80 595 260

2 Kripke, Saul Naming and Necessity 1980 89 552 223

3 Evans, Gareth Varieties of Reference 1982 82 558 176

4 Quine, W.V.O. Word and Object 1960 84 472 172

5 Williamson, Timothy Knowledge and Its Limits 2000 82 467 163

6 Lewis, David Counterfactuals 1973 78 327 156

7 Parfit, Derek Reasons and Persons 1984 64 293 151

8 Nozick, Robert Philosophical Explanations 1981 86 463 150

9 Rawls, John Theory of Justice 1971 61 179 128

10 Davidson, Donald Essays on Actions and Events 1980 82 308 110

48 Interestingly, no journal article appears in the top-10 of the most cited publications. Indeed, of the 100 most cited documents, only 18 (less than one on five) are journal articles. Thus, although analytic philosophers usually present the journal as their favorite publication outlet—sometimes highlighting this publication choice as a sign of the fact that analytic philosophy is more ‘scientific’ than other philosophical traditions —in their cited references they are quite loyal to the standard humanities practices. Consider, however, that some of the most-cited documents are collections of articles previously published as journal articles (e.g., the Essays on Actions and Events by Donald Davidson), so that the underrepresentation of articles could be overstated.

49 Until now, we investigated the structure of the entire dataset, producing a map of analytic philosophy, which aggregates all the corpus publications. In the next three maps, we divided the corpus into three sub-periods: 1985-1994, 1995-2004, 2005-2015. This allows us to carry out a longitudinal mapping exercise, which uncovers the temporal evolution of the field. The maps are shown in Fig. 5 (a, b, c). They are all co-citation networks, with a citation threshold of 20 citations, a link strength threshold of 4 co- citations, and the clustering resolution parameter set to 1.0.

50 The three maps present a clear pattern: the quite sparse and unstructured network of the first decade becomes, in the last decade, an organized network with three definite sub-areas. The clusters become more and more compact, highlighting that the sub- disciplinary literatures become more and more delineated.18

51 We interpret this pattern as the of a process of specialization that occurred within analytic philosophy during the last thirty years, confirming the qualitative perception of analytic philosophers and historians of analytic philosophy (Marconi, 2014; Soames, 2005; Tripodi, 2015). The maps show also the birth of the new sub-specialty of analytic epistemology in 1994-2004, and its consolidation in the next decade.

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Fig. 5 (a, b, c). Longitudinal mapping of analytic philosophy in three timespans. A: 1985-1994

B: 1995-2004

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C: 2005-2015.

3. Second mapping experiment: Human Geography

52 For our second experiment, we focused on a different task. Our main interest was to explore how science mapping can be actively used to make sense of the complex cognitive content of a broad research field. Thus, we turned to term-based science maps.

53 The case of human geography constitutes in our eyes a very fitting example. Human geography is a complex and heterogeneous field of research, usually dealings with different research topics, employing a vast array of research methodologies and a varied lexicon. Given these specific conditions, an analysis of the textual meta-data seems very promising in terms of experimenting the power of term-mapping.

54 Once again, we based our analysis on Web of Science Core Collection. We used the Scimago Journal Ranking19 to individuate the top journals in the field, selecting the five journals in the category “Social Science—Geography” with the highest h-index in the year 2015: • Progress in Human Geography (PHG) • Global Environmental Change: Human and Policy Dimensions (GEC) • Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers (TIBG) • Journal of Economic Geography (JEC) • Economic Geography (EG)

55 Documents were divided into three different ten-year timespans to capture the development of the field over time. Descriptive statistics of the dataset are displayed in Table 7.

Table 7: Human geography dataset. In brackets percentage values.

Rank Journal Publications Publications Publications Tot Avg pubs

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(1985-1994) (1995-2004) (2005-2015) per year

1 PHG 1136 [13.2%] 1132 [13.2%] 1080 [12.6%] 3348 [39%] 108

2 GEC 154 [1.8%] 361 [4.2%] 1028 [12%] 1543 [17.9%] 49.8

3 TIBG 667 [7.8%] 538 [6.2%] 480 [5.6%] 1685 [19.6%] 54.3

4 JEG 0 [0%] 99 [1.1%] 523 [6.1%] 622 [7.3%] 20.1

5 EG 518 [6%] 443 [5.1%] 428 [5%] 1389 [16.2%] 44.8

Total 2475 [28.8%] 2573 [30%] 3539 [41.2%] 8587 [100%] 286.2

3.1. Results

56 The whole dataset (1985-2015) was converted into the first map (Fig. 5) . Terms (noun- phrases) serve as the node of the network, while the link width between terms represents the number of their co-occurrences. Terms appearing closer in the map have high co-occurrence values, meaning that they are frequently coupled in titles and abstracts of our corpus.

Fig. 5: Overall map of human geography dataset (timespan: 1985-2015).

57 The thematic structure of contemporary research in human geography is easily readable in the map. Specifically, four main clusters are recognizable. The yellow cluster in the northern part of the map represents the sub-discipline of economic geography, the red cluster in the western part stands out as a compendium for social geography, while the eastern cluster colored in green is representative of the environmental geography field. The last one, colored in blue, represents a specific subfield dealing with climate change, a topic faced so often in our sample to be recognizable as a cluster on its own, telling explicitly of the emerging structures and patterns in the literature.

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58 A compelling feature of the map is the absence of a real center. The four clusters gravitate around autonomous centroids, with different levels of integration with each other. The resulting structure is donut-shaped, showing the lack of a real thematic focal point in the broad discipline and its very distinctive specializations. However, the widespread presence of inter-cluster connections highlights, to a certain extent, the presence of a coherent lexicon shared by the different branches of human geography. Table 8 shows the 10 most common terms in the corpus.

Table 8. Top ten most recurring terms (timespan: 1985-2015).

Rank Term Cluster Links Occurrences Avg. Pub. Year

1 change 2 145 1591 2005

2 climate change 3 143 1307 2008

3 space 1 143 1063 2005

4 impact 2 145 1032 2007

5 city 1 143 1009 2004

6 practice 1 145 975 2007

7 region 4 145 954 2006

8 economy 4 145 926 2004

9 model 2 145 922 2005

10 country 2 145 902 2006

59 As for the historical reconstruction, three maps were constructed based on three subperiods (Fig. 6, a, b, c). The main aim of these maps is to show the morphological evolution of the term network overtime.

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Fig. 6: (a, b, c). Longitudinal mapping of human geography in three timespans. A: 1985-1994

B: 1995-2004

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C: 2005-2015.

60 The longitudinal mapping highlights the unfolding of the specialization process: the maps display a clear pattern of clusterization, with the gradual definition of subclusters and specialized terms increasingly occurring.

61 Particularly notable is the gradual establishment of the cluster of climate change, emerging clearly in the last time span as a strong branch of environmental geography. The two subfields are still highly interconnected, as the latter deals with the everyday conundrums of global environmental change, but the salience of climate change as a topic proves to be extraordinarily relevant for human geography, detaching from the fold.

62 Specialization, however, might be matched also by the opposite process of unification: the cluster of social geography, for instance, seemingly coalesces with the cluster of economic geography, which stands as an independent family of terms only in the first map (Fig. 6 a).

63 Besides the dynamics of specialization and unification, the maps show also examples of clusters perduring overtime. The main terms representing social and environmental geography are stable through the different reconstructions, suggesting the existence of two affirmed strains of research that are hardly affected by the passing of three decades.

64 Clusters, therefore, are to be intended as very dynamic entities, the presence and detectability of which is not necessarily constant, as they evolve in different directions before our eyes. In general, we believe that such trends are coherent with the recent dendrogram of geography’s subfields, but a more in-depth, qualitative evaluation is needed, and still to be performed.

4. Main limits of science mapping as applied to the humanities

65 Science mapping allows us to visualize the structure and dynamics of knowledge produced in the humanities from a new and different perspective, but it is subject to

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some limitations that must be considered (Nederhof, 2006). At least four of them deserve attention.

66 First, the Web of Science database (like Scopus) does not include monographs, which are still one of the most important publication outlets in the humanities. However, it is crucial not to misunderstand this point. The lack of monographs in WoS means that references cited in monographs are not indexed, not that monographs do not appear at all. Indeed, monographs do appear in so far as the citing articles contain citations pointing to them. Therefore, monographs are part of the set of cited items but are not part of the set of citing items of WoS.

67 Secondly, the scope of the data that can be accessed from Web of Science (and Scopus) depends on the terms of the agreement of the subscription. In our case, for instance, we could not access Web of Science before 1980 due to the conditions of the University of Milan’s agreement. The fact that bibliographic and bibliometric data lie behind a paywall poses strong limitations to the reproducibility of citation analyses. Hopefully, the launch of the free citation database Dimensions will change the situation for the better.

68 Thirdly, Web of Science’s subject categories are often inaccurate for the humanities. Sometimes, journals are misplaced in the wrong category. Hence, they should be used with great care when data are selected during the field delineation step.

69 Lastly, Web of Science indexes mainly journals in English. Non-English journals are under-represented. Scopus’ linguistic coverage is larger, but still, for the humanities, it is far for being complete. These limitations significantly reduce the possibility of studying national scholarly traditions in the humanities.20

70 Despite these limitations, however, we think that science mapping is a valuable tool for exploring knowledge dynamics in the humanities, especially for recent periods, characterized by a massive production of scholarly literature that would be hard to investigate by traditional close reading methods. Therefore, we would recommend historians of ideas to include it in their methodological toolbox.

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Bearded young man consulting a map in a Belfast café.

Photo by Toa Heftiba on Unsplash (https://unsplash.com/photos/HGhIH73WTSE).

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NOTES

1. See (Börner, 2010) for an excellent and aesthetically stunning overview. 2. This paper is a revised version of the post we published on the DR2 open peer review blog on February 2018. In particular, we tried to integrate the several and very useful comments we got during the process of open peer review happened on the blog (https://tinyurl.com/dr2oprblog- exploring). We thank anyone who contributed to it by sharing with us helpful suggestions. Note that improved versions of the mapping experiments can be found in (Petrovich & Buonomo, 2018), (Petrovich, 2019), and (Tolusso, 2019). 3. WoS and Scopus require subscriptions that are usually provided by the universities and thus are not free. Recently, a new, open access citation database, Dimensions, has been launched by Digital Science (Holtzbrinck Publishing Group) (https://www.dimensions.ai/) 4. Citing publications (capital letters) are in pink, cited publications (lowercase letters) in light green. Citations are represented by directed arrows. 5. Note also that, in both cases, it is difficult to interpret the meaning of the values lying on the diagonal (Ahlgren, Jarneving, & Rousseau, 2003). 6. Cosine similarity: cos=cijsisj. Association strength: as=cijsisj. Inclusion index: inc=cijmin(si,sj). Jaccard index: J=cijsi+sj-cij. Where cij is the number of co-occurrences of the publications i and j, si is the total number of co-occurrences of publication i, and sj is the total number of co- occurrences of publication j. In the past, also the Pearson’s r, a common statistical measure of correlation, was frequently used, but it was demonstrated that, as a similarity measure, it is flawed (Ahlgren et al., 2003). 7. http://mrvar.fdv.uni-lj.si/pajek/. 8. The most common algorithms for doing so are known as Kamada-Kawai and Fruchterman- Reingold. 9. Factor analysis and Principal Component Analysis (PCA) are sometimes used for the same aim of MDS. 10. An introduction to text mining techniques can be found in (Taheo, 2018). 11. VOSviewer, the tool we used to produce the term maps of human geography, employs a different technique for selecting the most relevant noun-phrases, based on the comparison of co- occurrence distributions (van Eck & Waltman, 2011). 12. For a science mapping experiment investigating a field the existence of which is frequently contested, i.e., Integrated History and Philosophy of Science, see (Weingart, 2015): “The best we can do to empirically show that a certain exists is to study their institutional traces. In the case of academia, that means looking at publications, citations, institutional affiliations, mentorship relationships, conference attendance, and so on” (Weingart, 2015, p. 203). 13. See (Petrovich & Buonomo, 2018) for a discussion of the reasons behind the choice of these journals.

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14. Association strength is the default option for normalization, but other are possible. We tested other methods and the overall structure of the maps remained almost the same, providing a certain degree of robustness to our analyses. 15. Therefore, the citation threshold for being included on the map was 44 citations. 16. The resolution clustering parameter was set to 1.00. 17. To be sure, this is a naïve interpretation of citation scores also in the sciences. See (Aksnes, Langfeldt, & Wouters, 2019) for an introduction to the debate on the limits of evaluative bibliometrics. 18. Maximilian Noichl provided a very nice quantitative follow-up of this qualitative assessment of specialization in a post published on the DR2 blog (https://dr2blog.hcommons.org/ 2019/11/04/a-short-and-informal-replication-of-petrovich-and-buonomo-2018/). Noichl is also the author of a detailed map of philosophy made with bibliographic coupling (the pre-print is available at http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/16470/1/modeling_recent_philosophy2.pdf). 19. https://www.scimagojr.com/ 20. For instance, the Rivista di storia della filosofia, an Italian journal publishing high-quality studies in the history of philosophy, is not covered by Web of Science Core Collection.

ABSTRACTS

This paper reports and briefly discusses the results of two science mapping experiments we conducted in two humanities fields: analytic philosophy and human geography. In the first section, we provide a non-technical introduction to science mapping techniques, presenting the steps required to produce distance-based science maps. The two following sections present the datasets of our experiments and the maps we produced. Lastly, we discuss the main limitations of science mapping when it is applied to areas in the humanities.

INDEX

Keywords: Science Mapping, Scientometrics, Late Analytic Philosophy, Human Geography

AUTHORS

EUGENIO PETROVICH University of Siena, [email protected]

EMILIANO TOLUSSO University of Milan and PoliS-Lombardia, [email protected]

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Reading Wittgenstein Between the Texts

Marco Santoro, Massimo Airoldi and Emanuela Riviera

My work consists of two parts: the one presented here plus all that I have not written (L. Wittgenstein)

1 In this paper we will investigate the philosophical production (and, to a lesser extent, some non-philosophical works as well) on —henceforth LW—from a distant reading perspective (Moretti 2000, 2004 and 2013; but see also the more sociologically oriented Bennett 2009). Our aim is that of focusing on works about Wittgenstein, rather than on Wittgenstein’s own philosophical work. There are two reasons why our work can be considered a case of distant reading. First, we take a certain ‘distance’ from Wittgenstein, our object of investigation. Second, we do not closely read the texts we investigate, but rather we attempt to reconstruct some of their aggregate properties. Methodologically, this article lies within the sociology of philosophy, based on the analysis of bibliographical data (McKenzie 1986, Santoro and Gallelli 2016, Gerli and Santoro 2018).

2 There’s no doubt that Wittgenstein is a central figure in 20th-century philosophy, even though his place and role in contemporary analytic philosophy has considerably declined in the last decades (Hacker 1996; Tripodi 2009). Moreover, qua social scientists, we are interested in Wittgenstein’s work because we consider it to be relevant for the social sciences (think for example of the cases of sociology and ) (Winch 1959; Saran 1965; Giddens 1976; Porpora 1983; Bloor 1997; Das 1998; Pleasants 2002; Rawls 2008). Currently, the influence of LW is also visible in social theory and, in particular, in the sociology of scientific knowledge, , and practice theory (Bloor 1973, 1983; Phillips 1977; Coulter 1979; Lynch 1992, 1993; Schusterman 1998; Schatzki et al. 2001; Stern 2002; Kusch 2004; Bernasconi-Kohn 2007; Sharrock, Hughes, and Anderson 2013). Arguably, something similar can be said for other fields outside philosophy: in fact, the empirical assessment of this conjecture is one of the aims of the present article. Finally, it is also worth noticing that the richness and complexity of LW’s publishing and editing history (Kenny 2005; Erbacher 2015) make Wittgenstein a

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strategic case study for research on cultural production and postmortem consecration, two major topics in contemporary sociology of cultural life (Heinich 1990; Santoro 2010; Fine 2012).

3 The paper is divided into three main sections. First, we briefly deal with some preliminary issues concerning LW as an author and the availability of his philosophical works during time. Second, we present our data: bibliographic data drawn from the Philosopher’s Index, an electronic bibliographic database entirely devoted to philosophy. This is the main section of the paper, and the longest one, in which we attempt to describe the data with the aid of some statistical tools. Third, we provide some provisional explanations and interpretations of the results: in particular, we will focus on the issue of the international circulation of LW’s ideas (Bourdieu 2002).

1. The structure of LW’s philosophical work and the philosophical field

4 The question “What is a work by Wittgenstein?” (Schulte 2006) is not only appropriate; it is almost inevitable, and this is especially true for the kind of analysis put forth in this article. Works on LW are chronologically intermingled with Wittgenstein’s own philosophical work, most of which was made available posthumously: during his life Wittgenstein published 25,000 words of philosophical writing, including a book (the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus), a caustic book review, and a very short conference paper he never delivered; however, the writings that he left unpublished played a major role in the reception of his work, similarly to other 20th-century cases as Husserl and Gramsci.

5 Approximately, LW’s Nachlass contains three million words (i.e., more than 20,000 pages), and only one third of it has been printed and published as a separate work. However, since a large part of this material consists of early versions and rearrangements, it seems reasonable to argue that considerably less than 75% of the Nachlass has still to be made available.

6 The history of the publication of LW’s work is less linear than it may appear from the figures above. Consider, first of all, that the publication of the posthumous works required substantial editorial decisions, which were the results of the negotiation between several actors: the literary executors (G.E.M. Ascombe, R. Rhees, and G.H. von Wright), publishers, collaborators, and so forth; moreover, new materials—such as manuscripts, letters, lectures—entered the scene; they were translated from German, and this operation required a preliminary interpretation and ‘manipulation’; new collective actors were also involved, such as departments (e.g., the Cornell Department of Philosophy, which owned a copy of all materials, and the University of Bergen, which bought and digitized them, and so on); in the meantime, editing conventions and publishing technologies also changed, asking for new solutions.

7 Most part of the Nachlass was extensively edited, often with little or no indication of the relationship between the source texts and the published material (at least till what Erbacher calls the “later rounds of editing Wittgenstein’s Nachlass”), opening the door to debate about the real content, form, composition and structure of LW’s philosophical writings. Therefore LW’s work is not something fixed, established, and crystallized, and its edition and publication is part of a political and intellectual game, in which LW qua

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author and qua person was introduced (i.e., read, commented, criticized, contradicted, supported, refined, developed, interpreted, canonized). This operation lasted almost seven decades after his death, and distortions and misunderstandings played a central role in it. As once remarked: “His [LW’s] ideas may be influential through distortion; those who see themselves as his successors and disciples may propound ideas which they wrongly attribute to him, but the impact and fruitfulness of these distorted ideas may be of the first importance, and may well owe their emergence to the writings whose distortions they are” (Hacker 1996, 2). Of course, this mechanism is not peculiar to the reception of LW (see, for example, Bourdieu 2002). In a sense, LW’s work—once published—has fostered (or perhaps even generated) philosophical problems, the kind of problems he himself tried to solve (or dissolve) during his life.

Fig. 1. LW’s Nachlass.

Legenda: new edition/translation only in English.

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Fig. 2. A cumulative work, in published books (1922-2015).

8 As we will show in the next section, LW’s work prompted a whole ‘industry’ within philosophy, an industry made of people, articles, books, journals, conferences, associations, academic positions, fellowships, and so on. Our research focuses on this industry, which we conceptualize in ’s terms as a field of cultural production (or better: as a subfield located at the intersection of other fields, including philosophy as an academic discipline). Let us quote Bourdieu at length: The space of literary or artistic position-takings, i.e. the structured set of the manifestations of the social agents involved in the field—literary or artistic works, of course, but also political acts or pronouncements, manifestos or polemics, etc.— is inseparable from the space of literary or artistic positions defined by possession of a determinate quantity of specific capital (recognition) and, at the same time, by occupation of a determinate position in the structure of the distribution of this specific capital. The literary or artistic field is a field of forces, but it is also a field of struggles tending to transform or conserve this field of forces. It follows from this, for example, that a position-taking changes, even when the position remains identical, whenever there is change in the universe of options that are simultaneously offered for producers and consumers to choose from. The meaning of a work (artistic, literary, philosophical, etc.) changes automatically with each change in the field within which it is situated for the spectator or reader. (Bourdieu 1993, 30)

9 In Bourdieu’s view, we cannot understand any work of philosophy (but also of art, literature or science) unless we situate it in its multifaceted intellectual and practical context. History of philosophy is not a grand summit conference among great philosophers. Our understanding of Descartes, Leibniz, and the great philosophers depends on our understanding of such contexts, and the meaning of philosophical works changes as the contextual “points of reference” move. Such “relationality” and “embeddedness” raise important interpretive questions. As Bourdieu remarked: One of the major difficulties of the social history of philosophy, art or literature is that it has to reconstruct these spaces of original possibles which, because they were part of the self-evident givens of the situation, remained unremarked and are therefore unlikely to be mentioned in contemporary accounts, chronicles or memoirs… In fact, what circulates between contemporary philosophers, or those of

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different epochs, are not only canonical texts, but a whole philosophical doxa carried along by intellectual rumour—labels of schools, truncated quotations, functioning as slogans in celebration or polemics—by academic routine and perhaps above all by school manuals (an unmentionable reference), which perhaps do more than anything else to constitute the ‘common sense’ of an intellectual generation. (Bourdieu 1993, 31-2)

10 This background information has not merely a semiotic import; it is institutional and material as well. It includes “information about institutions—e.g. academies, journals, magazines, galleries, publishers, etc.—and about persons, their relationships, liaisons and quarrels, information about the ideas and problems which are ‘in the air’ and circulate orally in gossip and rumour” (Bourdieu 1993, 32). So that the intellectual product is created not only by the author, but also by the field of knowledge and institutions.

11 In what follows we will describe the ‘Wittgensteinian field’. This is just a first assessment of a more complex social and intellectual world (an ‘intellectual microcosm’, as Bourdieu would put it), whose boundaries, dimensions, and structure would require further analysis and data.

2. Sources and data

12 Our dataset has been selected from the Philosopher’s Index, a specialized archive that is possibly the best available source to focus o, in order to analyze the international philosophical production (which is the result of several philosophical subdisciplines, rather than of a single discipline). On the Philosopher’s Index webpage, you can read as follows: “This premier bibliographic database is designed to help researchers easily find publications of interest in the field of philosophy. Serving philosophers worldwide, it contains over 650,000 records from publications that date back to 1902 and originate from 139 countries in 37 languages. This ready source of information covers all subject areas of philosophy and related disciplines” (https://philindex.org/).

13 From this archive we selected all the records containing the tag ‘Wittgenstein’ in the field TITLE, within a time span from 1951 to 2015. The selected dataset includes 4,209 records, which are our units of analysis. The Philosopher’s Index claims to provide a “comprehensive coverage”, including “articles from over 1,750 Journals and e-Journals, Books, e-Books, Dictionaries and Encyclopedias, Anthologies, Contributions to Anthologies, Book Reviews”. Nonetheless, the dataset is inevitably biased, for the more peripheral publications (such as for example the Italian ones) are less represented. More in general, as is obvious, not every philosophical journal published in the world is indexed. This means that our dataset can be seen at best as a non-random sample of documents related to LW and the few other philosophers that we take into account for the sake of a compariso. It is a sample because of the inevitably incomplete nature of the original archive we are working with, but also because of the highly restrictive criteria we have used in selecting our units of analysis. It is apparent that an article or a book can deal with Foucault or Wittgenstein without mentioning them in the title. So, our dataset is far from approaching the universe—what Franco Moretti aimed to do when he studied, for example, the Victorian novel (Moretti 2013). At the same time, we would argue that our criteria, exactly because they are so restrictive, may capture better than others what we are looking for, i.e., a sample of documents representing the public

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impact LW and other authors had and still have on the cultural production of professional scholars who write on academic journals and established book series.

14 Our sample, however, is also—let us stress this point too—not random, because there are some biases concerning the selection of journals, languages, and countries.

3. The ‘Wittgensteinian field’: a first assessment

15 Of course, the contents of a work (as an opus operatum) are inside the work itself, and they wait for being discovered. This is common wisdom in the humanities, deeply embedded in education and research practices, as well as in a wide array of institutions. But is it the only way to address philosophy as both a form of knowledge and a tradition of texts and ideas? In a sense, philosophy as a disciplinary practice can be interpreted as a struggle to determine the meaning of philosophical works, or works with philosophical potentialities (such as for example films). Books like The Conflict of Interpretations (Ricoeur 1967) or still earlier The Contest of Faculties (Kant 1798) make this view explicit even in their titles (see also Read and Lavery 2011). Randall Collins developed a whole “sociology of ” moving from the simple idea that Intellectual life is first of all conflict and disagreement […] the forefront where ideas are created has always been a discussion among oppositions […] Not warring individuals but a small number of warring camps is the pattern of intellectual history. Conflict is the energy source of intellectual life, and conflict is limited by itself. (Collins 1999, 1)

16 Wittgenstein himself moved in his early work from a critical engagement with two of his contemporaries, Frege and Russell, and all his philosophical work has been said to consist of critical “remarks” on other thinkers—from Augustine to Frazer—in order to avoid dogmatism (Anscombe 1969, 373; Rothhaupt 2010, 51; Kuusela 2008). In LW’s own words: “Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language” (Wittgenstein 1953, 109). Indeed, LW was one of those scholars who rarely refer directly to other authors—but this doesn’t mean that such authors are not present between the lines of his writings. Moreover, other scholars were present—even physically—in LW’s life, when he was developing his ideas.

17 As is well know, LW himself was not entirely satisfied of the effects of his work, and he had ambivalent feelings about the opportunity to establish something like a “school” (Wittgenstein 1998). However, it seems apparent that he had a deep and wide philosophical impact not only as a teacher in Cambridge but also as a writer.

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Fig. 2a. Publications on LW by year according to the PI, 1951-2015. Total frequencies.

18 The first figure shows a rising trend till 2008 (note the outburst in 1981), followed by an apparent fall in 2009, and a peak in 2010 and since then a continuous decline. But if we check data against the total of indexed publications (Fig. 2b), the picture changes, taking the form of a parabola: an apparent growing trend till 1981, then a decline, interrupted only in 1991 (the climax of the whole series). However, these data have to be read in a comparative way, taking into account other influential authors. Figures 3 and 4 provide a comparison with Husserl, Heidegger, Foucault (chosen as representatives of the so-called Continental tradition), on the one hand, and Russell and Frege (selected as representatives of the so-called Analytic tradition), on the other hand. Among contemporary (or 20 th-century) philosophers only Heidegger has fostered more discussion and intellectual production than LW since the end of WWII. The intellectual productivity of LW’s ideas is dramatically apparent if compared to two of his main sources/influences, Russell and Frege (Figure 3).1

Fig. 2b. The same of 2a but ‘weighed’ on total publications indexed in PI.

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Fig. 3. Literature on Wittgenstein, Foucault, Husserl and Heidegger compared, 1951-2015

(our elaboration from Philosopher’s Index).

Fig. 4. Literature on Wittgenstein, Russell, Frege compared, 1951-2015

(our elaboration from Philosopher’s Index).

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3.1. Some general properties of the Wittgensteinian field

19 Some descriptive statistics will help us to set the scene for the more sophisticated analysis we have conducted using bibliometric tools and topic modeling (Mohr and Bogdanov 2013).

20 Table 1 offers a first description of the Wittgensteinian dataset according to different publication categories. Book reviews have been excluded: first, PI uses different forms for book reviews; moreover, they might be redundant or a source of potential biases.

21 The selected dataset includes 3,374 records (77% of it consists of journal articles, 14% of book chapters and 9% of books). The following tables and figures offer some useful information to characterize the philosophical production on LW, according to some relevant variables such as language, publication venue, publisher, author, topic. LW’s results are compared with those of different authors.

Table 1. Records by publication type.2 Source: Philosopher’s index, 1951-2015 (Tag ‘Wittgenstein’ in TITLE).

Publication type N

Journal Article 2579

Book Review 835

Contribution in book 474

Monograph 317

Dissertation 4

Total 4209

22 English is clearly and foreseeably the most used language in the works on LW. This reflects both the dominance of this language in academic and scientific communication and the Anglophone scenario in which LW mainly worked during his life. It is worth noticing that German is the third in this language ranking—much below English and even below Spanish.3 Considering that LW was Austrian, that German was his mother tongue, and that almost everything written by LW available in English is also available in German, this gap is quite impressive. Of course, we are dealing with intellectual communities with different demographic sizes. But at the same time the data mirrors the trajectory LW has followed after his death, and indeed even before it (recall he spent a few weeks in his last living years at Ithaca, the small town where Cornell University is located, hosted by his former student and friend, ). It was through his American reception—mediated by Carnap and later by Malcolm (Tripodi 2009)—that LW moved from the highly prestigious but relatively limited British (or better: Oxbridge) environment to the global scenario, in the same period in which American philosophy was becoming more and more central and predominant (Kuklick 2001).

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Fig. 5. Percentage distribution of records by publication type.

Fig. 6. Distribution of records by language (percentage).

3.2. Publishers

23 As emphasized by the sociology of science and knowledge, journals and publishers play a central role in the reception processes and the circulation of ideas. Not only are they responsible for the material venues (the book as a vehicle of texts and ideas) but also

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for visibility and retrievability (Boschetti 1985; Clemens et al. 1995; Fleck et al. 2018; Sapiro, Santoro and Beart 2019). In the case of LW’s writings there exists a long lasting pattern—Basil Blackwell as the main publisher for the English editions, and Suhrkamp for the German ones (with the main exception of the Tractatus, originally published by Routledge).

24 What about texts not by LW but on him? Tables 2 and 3, which respectively refer to journals and publishers, provide a rough description concerning the structure, the institutional character and the geography of the publications. Let us single out some features of this description: 1. As shown in Table 2, there is a great dispersion among many different journal sources (the total amounts to 616) with a limited number of records each (more than 250 have just one publication on LW; average number of publications for each source is 3.5). 2. There is a high concentration of records in just one source, i.e., Philosophical Investigations, a quarterly peer reviewed journal established in 1978 with the aim of publishing work on LW. Philosophical Investigations seems to work like a ‘school journal’: nowadays it is indeed the official journal of the British Wittgenstein Society, a scholarly association founded in 2008 which is currently hosted by the University of (UK). 3. There are other, more specialized ‘sources’ devoted to LW (e.g., the Nordic Wittgenstein Review (NWR), the official journal of the Nordic Wittgenstein Society (NWS); or Wittgenstein Studies (WS), a journal founded in 2010 by the International Ludwig Wittgenstein Society and “designed as an annual forum for Wittgenstein research”). 4. Mind, the flag journal of Oxford-Cambridge philosophy (i.e. the philosophical tradition on which LW had the stronger impact in the fifties) occupies “only” the 12th position. 5. Notice that a German-speaking journal occupies the fifth position in the ranking: this seems to indicate the persistence of a specifically Austrian tradition of philosophy with its special identity. 6. Among the sources with at least 20 publications we find two Indian journals, two journals from Israel, one from Portugal, and one from Canada. Seventh, in the list we find a journal not specifically devoted to philosophy, namely, Religious Studies.

25 Table 3 shows the distribution of publications on LW according to their publishers (data are referred to books and book chapters). Clearly, there is no strict correspondence between the structure of LW’s published work (mainly based on two publishers, Blackwell and Suhrkamp, as said above) and the works on him. Blackwell (6% in both the UK and US) is the fifth in the ranking, after Routledge (an international group based in London), Cambridge UP and above all Rodopi (whose NL/USA branches account for 7,5% of the total). LW’s German publisher, Suhrkamp, is not a benchmark for scholars working on LW. Oxford University Press comes after Cambridge University Press (5,1%, including Clarendon). As Table 3 shows, the most frequent publisher is the young German publishing house Ontos Verlag, accounting for 13,6% of the entire dataset. Small, specialized publishers such as Open Court, Thoemmes and Humanities Press are comparatively important venues. Stricto sensu, University Presses are a minority in the list—a datum which is, however, difficult to interpret as such (rather than in a comparative way). As to national distribution: beyond Anglo-American publishers, German language is well represented; small countries such as Norway and the Netherlands, but even larger countries that are less central in the international philosophical establishment such as Spain, figure in the top list.

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Table 2. Distribution of records by source.4

Source N %

Philosophical Investigations 164 5.5

Synthese. An International Journal for Epistemology, Methodology and Philosophy of 53 1.8 Science

Philosophy. The Journal of the Royal Institute of Philosophy 49 1.6

Inquiry. An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 40 1.3

Grazer Philosophische Studien. Internationale Zeitschrift für Analytische Philosophie 38 1.3

Southern Journal of Philosophy 33 1.1

Philosophical Quarterly 32 1.1

Indian Philosophical Quarterly 31 1

Dialogue. Canadian Philosophical Review 31 1

International Philosophical Quarterly 29 1

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 28 0.9

Mind 28 0.9

Analysis and Metaphysics 27 0.9

Philosophy and Literature 25 0.8

Philosophical Review 25 0.8

Revue Internationale de Philosophie 25 0.8

Journal of Indian Council Of Philosophical Research 23 0.8

Revista Portuguesa de Filosofia 22 0.7

Metaphilosophy 22 0.7

Deutsche Zeitschrift Für Philosophie 21 0.7

Philosophia. Philosophical Quarterly of Israel 21 0.7

Religious Studies 20 0.7

Iyyu. The Jerusalem Philosophical Quarterly 20 0.7

Philosophy Today 20 0.7

American Philosophical Quarterly 20 0.7

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Total Sources (N = 616) 2290

Table 3. Publications by publishers (at least 10+).

Publisher N %

Ontos Verlag (Germany)5 108 13.6%

Rodopi (NL)6 60 7.5%

Routledge (UK/International) 59 7.4%

Cambridge Univ Press (UK) 53 6.7%

Blackwell Publishing* (UK) 48 6.0%

Hölder-Pichler-Tempsky ()7 22 2.8%

Clarendon Press (Oxford, UK) 21 2.6%

Oxford Univ Press (UK/International) 20 2.5%

Continuum International Publishing Group (USA)8 18 2.3%

University of Chicago Press (USA) 17 2.1%

De Gruyter (Germany) 15 1.9%

Springer (Germany) 15 1.9%

Garland (NY, USA)9 14 1.8%

Ed Univ Castilla-La Mancha (Spain) 14 1.8%

MIT Press (USA) 13 1.6%

Rowman & Littlefield 13 1.6%

Humanities Press (USA)10 12 1.5%

Suny Press (USA) 12 1.5%

Open Court (USA)11 11 1.4%

Wittgenstein Archives (Berge, Norway) 11 1.4%

University Press of America (USA) 10 1.3%

Thoemmes (UK)12 10 1.3%

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Total 795 100.0

3.3. Who are the Wittgensteinians?

26 First of all, how many are they? Our dataset shows 1,863 names, 1,255 of which are authors of just one publication (this means that only the 33% of the authors have written more than occasionally on LW). Only thirty authors (1.6%) have ten or more than ten publications, accounting for 11.7% of the total number of publications (415 out of 3547). Their names (see Fig. 8) are familiar ones to those who study Wittgenstein and, more in general, analytic philosophy and its subareas: epistemology, logic, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, ethics, aesthetics and even cognitive sciences. A few social properties of this more restricted population are apparent at first sight: they are predominantly male (there are just four women), white (no black, no colored people), mainly located in the UK (at least eight of them) and the US (at least 11), but there are also one Canadia, a few Continental Europeans (from Germany, Austria, France, Hungary) and two Finnish authors.

Fig. 7. Authors of publications on LW (at least 10).13

27 Names in Fig. 7 are representative of the scholarship on LW since the 1950s. There are authors born in the 1910s as well as authors born in the 1960s, authors dead some years ago as well as living authors, students or pupils of LW (such as Malcolm and Rhees) and students of his students or pupils (such as Phillips or Hintikka). A temporal division of the same dataset is presented in Fig. 8. Looking at these data longitudinally you can have a sense of the growth of an industry: the growth occurred is impressive, as the histograms show.

28 Dividing the author’s population into decades, some patterns emerge. In the first period (two decades, 1951-70, N = 162) the more productive author has just 4

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publications (Engel), followed by 7 authors with 3 publications (among them von Wright, Moore, Rhees and Malcolm), 31 with 2 publications (including Hintikka and Winch) and 123 with just one publication. In the decade 1971-1979 it is apparent a trend of increasing concentration and hyper-productivity among a few authors (the highest point is in the 1990-99 decade when a single author is responsible for 12 publications, i.e., Pears). A further pattern is the following: the percentage of people publishing just one text remains constant (around 15%) for the entire period.

Fig. 8. Number of authors publishing on LW, by period.

29 Some further information on the social structure of this intellectual microcosm is available in Fig. 9, where we diagrammatically represent the networks of co-authorship linking selected subsets of our population of Wittgensteinians. This is just an essay of a research line we are not pursuing in this paper but for which we would make a plea, i.e., the analysis of intellectual communities. The figure includes only systems of at least three linked authors (in other words, couples are not included in the figure). As the figure shows, the more common structure is the complete triad (three authors publishing together, or three couples). There are instances however of the so- called ‘impossible triad’ (two couple of authors with one of them acting as a ‘broker’). The largest network comprises seven nodes, including reference authors in this microcosm, such as Malcolm, Moore, Rhees, Winch, and Phillips.14

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Fig. 9. Networks of co-authorship among authors publishing on LW. The size of the nodes is proportional to the number of publication ties.

4. Mapping topics and modelling topics: the symbolic space of Wittgensteinianism

4.1. A data-driven exploration

30 In the previous section we attempted a sociological reconstruction of the Wittgensteinian research field from 1951 to 2015. We identified a few social properties and some structural features, as well as some patterns of change and continuity. However, we said nothing about the symbolic dimension of this field, i.e., about the identity and structure of the ideas circulating across it. This is the main aim of the present section, where we show the main results of two distinct research paths.

31 The first aim is that of identifying the conceptual map of the intellectual production on LW: which themes, concerns, and topics do scholars working on LW consider worth

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investigating? How did these topics change during time? First, we focus on the occurrence of ‘subjects’ (as reported in the PI), identifying their ranking and temporal trends—at least for the most frequent ones. Second, we search for relationships and patterns. Methodologically, we have been looking for patterns of co-occurrence among (a) subjects and (b) words featuring in titles and abstracts (on the methodology of scientometrics see Callo, et al. 1983; Callo, Law, Rip 1986; Whittaker, J. 1989; Leydesdorff 1991; Kreuzma, H. 2001; Gerli and Santoro 2018).

32 The second research line is the application of so-called ‘topic modeling’ (TM) to this set of abstracts, in order to identify textual patterns. TM is an increasingly popular statistical technique which allows the fast exploration of large amounts of text data (see Mohr and Bogdanov, 2013; see also Airoldi 2016 for an application to social media). In our study, we apply Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA)—that is, the most common and simple topic modeling algorithm (DiMaggio et al., 2013)—to the abstracts in English that are present in our dataset (N = 1650). This technique has already been used for this purpose (McFarland et al., 2013; Jiang et al., 2016). In plain words, LDA discerns the semantic structure of a corpus of documents on the basis of patterns of word co- occurrences (DiMaggio et al., 2013). Its key assumption is that the analyzed corpus of documents features a number k of distinct topics. In practice, the algorithm automatically identifies sets of words statistically associated to the k topics (each word can appear in more than one topic). The, these coherent lists of words can be inspected and interpreted ex post. After qualitatively inferring the logic or the meaning underlying each topic, it is possible to analyze the topics’ distribution in the corpus and relate it to external variables. This has been done by considering the year of publication, as well as a field-level variable, that is, the number of different journals publishing about Wittgenstein each year.15

Fig. 10. Subjects’ occurrences (% on the total records; min. 3%).

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33 A methodological remark is in order here. To explore the semantic structure of a research field devoted to LW, some knowledge is required about the recurring topics in LW’s work. As is well know, there is not just one ‘Wittgenstein’ but (at least) two: the Tractatus and the Philosophical Investigations imply two different philosophical approaches and, so to say, belong to two different philosophers. This simple bipartition can be criticized, for example by introducing a middle period, preparatory of the latter (Thompson 2008). We could certainly move from this picture (even the most sophisticated one) searching for its ‘reflection’ in the literature on LW. But this would entail a drastic reduction of the value and potentialities of our research methodology. Adopting a distant reading approach means, in our view, to sidestep the results of previous (close) readings and to look for fresh information collected (but not immediately visible) in aggregate data. In other words, instead of searching in our data a confirmation of what we already know, we should consider the data an original source of new knowledge (this is what we mean by ‘data-driven research’).

4.2. Mapping topics

34 The number of recorded subjects included in our dataset is impressive:16: we have collected 1,496 items for a total of 13,965 occurrences. As Fig. 10 shows, dispersion is only relatively high, as the most frequent subject accounts for 40% of the total of the publications in our dataset, which seems a relatively high ratio.

35 It is not surprising that this subject is LANGUAGE. Maybe more surprisingly, the second more frequent subject is METAPHYSICS (15,6%)—the kind of intellectual endeavor against which Wittgenstein was fighting. EPISTEMOLOGY, LOGIC, MEANING are the topics everyone would expect to find. Less foreseeable are perhaps RELIGION and ETHICS—subjects about which there has been much attention in most recent years. Relatively low in the ranking are topics strongly associated with Wittgenstein and his thought—and even to his iconic image17—such as RULE, LANGUAGE GAME, PRIVATE LANGUAGE and even PROPOSITION.

36 Fig. 12 maps the topics according to the strength of their co-occurrence. The more two topics are associated with one another, the greater the link on the map (the map measures the ‘Total link strength’). Frequently associated topics form colored clusters. Distance is relative to the strength of association (closer items co-occur more frequently).

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Fig. 11. A conceptual map of subjects in the literature on LW, 1951-2015.

Legenda: 11 clusters (colours) for 207 subject items. Size of nodes is contingent upon weight of links (visualized only the strongest 200 links). Minimum total link strength of any item = 1.

37 As suggested, Fig. 11 is a map representing the conceptual structure of Wittgenstein scholarship, the network of concepts and themes he has addressed in his work as it is made available to his readers and scholars. Some clusters are easily identifiable (Language, Religion, Logic, Psychology, Aesthetics, etc.). The most interesting thing is indeed the network of concepts that create clusters. So we can see that culture and even anthropology are strongly associated with religion and other “theological” topics, rule and rule following are linked with logico-mathematical topics (the blue cluster), and so on. To make things more readable, we present the data disaggregated by three periods, an early one (1951-1970), a middle one (1971-1990) and a more recent one (1991 to 2015). The results are presented in the three following maps.

38 Comparing the three figures a few elements emerge: (a) the persisting centrality of ‘language’ as a subject; (b) a pattern of increasing connectivity among the subjects (i.e. a reduction of the subjects’ dispersion, which is still visible in Fig. 12); (c) the rise of ‘metaphysics’ and ‘mathematics’ as central subjects in the period 1971-1990 and their relative decline in the following period; (d) a focus shift toward subjects such as ‘ethics’, ‘aesthetics’, ‘religion’ and ‘knowledge’18 in the last period (1991-2015). These are just very preliminary and still impressionistic results we can infer from an inspection of the three maps.

39 A way to read these maps is to compare their structural or formal features, e.g., to compare the total number of nodes (subjects) and the total number of clusters.19 In the period 1951-70, these numbers were respectively 149 and 10. In the period 1971-90 they were 292 and 18. In the last period, 1991-2015, they were 466 and 20. This suggests that the general trend was a growth in both subject number and subject clusters, but also a reduction of the dispersion of subjects across clusters (that is, clusters have become more internally articulated and therefore more complex).

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Fig. 12. A conceptual map of subjects in the literature on LW, 1951-1970

(threshold co-occurrences: 10; minimum cluster size: 5).

Fig. 13. A conceptual map of subjects in the literature on LW, 1971-1990

(threshold co-occurrences: 10; minimum cluster size: 5. Links in the map are the strongest 400).

4.3. Modelling topics

40 In this section we apply topic modeling, a statistical technique that allows the fast exploration of large amounts of text data (Mohr and Bogdanov 2013). First, we pre- processed our corpus of 1,650 abstracts following standard text analysis procedures (Krippendorff 2013)—e.g. stop-words removal and content lemmatization using R

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library tm. Second, we removed generic academic terms frequently occurring regardless of the discipline (e.g. ‘essay’, ‘book’, ‘analysis’), aiming to reduce the ‘noise’ and better highlight the discursive facets of Wittgensteinian scholarship. For this purpose, we employed a customized version of the Academic Word List (Coxhead 2000), obtaining 2,940 terms, and filtered them out together with other frequently occurring and scarcely informative terms in our corpus (e.g., ‘Wittgenstein’). Third, we selected a 16-topics LDA solution after different attempts (e.g., k = 15; 20; 10). By selecting k = 16, we have maximized at the same time the ex-post, qualitative interpretability of the resulting topics (DiMaggio et al., 2013) and the statistical accuracy of the model— verified using the R package ldatuning (Nikita 2014). The 16-topic solution has been obtained using the R package topicmodels, which enabled also the detection of each abstract’s ‘prevalent’ topic. This information has been then used to analyze the distribution of topics over time (see Fig. 15, 16). The authors have jointly labelled and interpreted the 16 topics, based on the lists of the most associated 300 terms.

Fig. 14. A conceptual map of subjects in the literature on LW, 1991-2015

(threshold co-occurrences: 10; minimum cluster size: 5. Links in the map are the strongest 500).

41 This analysis reveals (a) the fragmentation and dispersion of topics and (b) their weights changing in time. From the inspection of the data (see the Appendix for subtler information and evidence) we suggest this list of topic labels (question marks mean that we had doubts, so that we asked historians of philosophy and Wittgenstein scholars to help us): • Topic 1 (rules/action) • Topic 2 (philosophy of mind/psychology) • Topic 3 (truth or normativity?) • Topic 4 (metaphysics) • Topic 5 (mathematics) • Topic 6 (aesthetics) • Topic 7 (epistemology?) • Topic 8 (music?)

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• Topic 9 (critical publishing history and metaphilosophy) • Topic 10 (ethics) • Topic 11 (religion) • Topic 12 (practice) • Topic 13 (Tractatus) • Topic 14 (phenomenology?) • Topic 15 (language) • Topic 16 (LW in the history of ideas)

42 The three following figures give an idea of these topics’ relative weight and their change over time. First, you can notice that at the end of the 1960s both the overall number of publications on Wittgenstein and the heterogeneity of topics sharply increase. There seems to be evidence of a relative decline of topics that used to characterize the very first publications on Wittgenstein (e.g. topic 2, , topic 14, phenomenology), while other topics seems constant (e.g. 13 on the Tractatus), and new topics are emerging and gaining relative importance: for example, we notice an increasing relevance of rule/action theory (topic 1) and metaphilosophical topics and topics that concern publishing history (topic 9) and historical influence of Wittgensteinian thought (topic 16) (see Fig. 17).

Fig. 15. Topics, 1951-2015, absolute figures.

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Fig. 16. Topics, 1951-2015, percentages.

Fig. 17. A zoom on some specific topics of theoretical relevance.

43 With the aim of understanding better how the structure of the Wittgensteinian field affects the contents of the publications, we have correlated the number of topics per year and the number of publishing journals per year. For this purpose, we have focused on a subset of 1,281 journal articles written in English, published in 274 different venues (we didn’t analyze monographs, Ph.D. dissertations and other kinds of contributions). The correlation between number of journals per year and number of topics per year is, predictably, very high (0.92). Interestingly, it is even higher than the obvious correlation between number of publications per year and number of topics per year (0.90)—which is partly due to the way in which topic models are calculated. The longitudinal distribution of these three variables is presented in Fig. A4 in the Appendix. The strong correlation between number of publishing journals and number

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of topics appearing in articles about Wittgenstein clearly suggests that the structure of the Wittgensteinian field has an impact on its symbolic space.

5. By way of conclusion: Wittgenstein beyond philosophy

44 How can the structural changes in content that we have detected be explained from a sociological perspective? Clearly, to understand how the changes in the social structure of the philosophical field and the Wittgensteinian microcosm can account for such variations is the central problem for a sociological reading of the legacy of Wittgenstein. This is indeed the final question of our research, even if for the moment we have to limit ourselves to just a few conjectures.20

45 Let us distinguish between exogenous and endogenous (hypothetical) explanations. The first class comprises the sociological approaches that try to make sense of variations in cultural systems by focusing on elements which do not belong, at least prima facie, to the market, institutions, and socio-structural boundaries. Variations in cultural and symbolic systems are conceived as contingent and independent from variations in institutional systems. This first group of approaches, long dominant in the (see Crane 1992, Griswold 1995, Santoro 2008, Santoro and Solaroli 2016), has been more recently supplemented by a series of approaches based on the endogenous explanation of cultural life. This means that the sociological approach to culture has abandoned the purpose of explaining culture by referring to extra-cultural factors such as the social structure (DiMaggio 1982), the economics of artistic production (Peterson 1976), the institutional makeup of criticism and dissemination of the arts (Griswold 1987), and so forth. On the other hand, endogenous explanations focus on causal processes that occur within the cultural stream: mechanisms such as iteration, modulation, and differentiation, as well as processes such as meaning making, network building, and semiotic manipulation. This new approach has the merit of making culture something more than a merely dependent variable (Kaufman 2004, 336).

46 Having clarified this distinction (but see infra for a further discussion on this point), we can now speculate about at least four tentative ways of accounting for the structure and transformation of LW’s scholarship. The following should be regarded as thought experiments, or better, speculations for future work.

5.1. Exogenous explanations

47 H1: The changing topical structure, i.e., the volume and relative weight of topics, is homological (that is, corresponds) to a changing social structure in the Wittgensteinian microcosm.

48 To elaborate further on this hypothesis more data is required on the social properties of the Wittgensteinians, i.e., the authors writing on LW (as operatively defined in our study), including the social arrangements of their collaborations, the modes of recruitment, the modes of recognition, the international circulation of texts (papers, articles, books, including translations) and so on. This would also require an investigation of the changing institutional environments in which these scholars have been working: the creation of specialized journals, the launch of book series, the founding of societies and associations such as the Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein Society

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(ALWS), active since 1974, the North American Wittgenstein Society (founded in 2000), the British Wittgenstein Society (BWS, 2008) and the Nordic Wittgenstein Society (2008), periodic conferences, and the establishment of scholarly institutions such as the Wittgenstein Archives at the Universities of Cambridge and of Bergen (WAB):21 these are just the most visible and active institutions or organizations in the Wittgensteinian field.

49 This first research line would be firmly grounded in the traditions of the sociology of knowledge and the sociology of science (including their more recent development as “the new sociology of ideas”, see Camic and Gross 2001), and would ultimately amount to the formation and increasing institutionalization of a specialized research field, with all its social consequences for intellectual and academic life, such as competition, conflict, patterns of alliance, spatial concentration of creativity, and so on (see e.g. Mullins 1972).

50 H2: The changing topical structure is a consequence of wider changes in intellectual fields, which go beyond the philosophical field and the more specialized microcosm of the Wittgensteinian scholarship.

51 This second hypothesis requires a wider research frame, capable to capture structure and transformations in circles and microcosms, i.e., fields which are larger than that of philosophy as a discipline (or as a set of research groups). Recall what we said at the very beginning of this paper: qua sociologists we have been interested in studying LW also because of his influence on our discipline. But sociology is just one of the disciplines influenced by LW’s ideas in the last fifty years (see e.g. Kerr 2005 on theology; Das 1998 on anthropology; Baquero& Moya 2012 on biology; see Hughes 1977 on the social sciences more in general). In order to assess the spread and development of LW’s ideas and writings, it is apparent that we cannot limit ourselves to the field of philosophy. This would misrepresent the picture and role of Wittgenstein today. After all, when discussing LW an important question is: Is he only a philosopher? Or maybe, better: Is philosophy nowadays something different from what it used to be at the time of Wittgenstein? For example: Is the decline of LW in contemporary analytic philosophy the effect of a transformation of philosophy in a direction that LW not only preconized but also fought, i.e. its professionalization?22

52 As we can read in a popular web source on philosophy (representative, we would suggest, of the common wisdom in the discipline): “[his] style of doing philosophy has fallen somewhat out of favor, but Wittgenstein’s work on rule-following and private language is still considered important, and his later philosophy is influential in a growing number of fields outside philosophy” (from The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (IEP). In other words, “forgetting Wittgenstein” (Tripodi 2009) may not be the right slogan in order to capture what is occurring in scholarship and more in general in the intellectual debate when you look at what happens in other fields than philosophy.

53 Unfortunately, our main archive (PI) is specialized exactly in this field, philosophy, so it cannot be very useful for us. An alternative source of data—one we are also working upon—is the Web of Science (WoS), founded in the fifties by Eugene Garfield (one of the pioneers in bibliometric studies) and nowadays managed by Clarivate Analytics.23

54 We therefore did with WoS the same we did with PI, i.e., selected records ( = publications indexed in one of the various databases) containing the tag “Wittgenstein” in the title. The total dataset comprises 3,136 records, which we analyzed in 2017 with

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the standard tools WoS made available to its users. In particular, we explored the distribution of these records by Research Area (an information the indexing service of WoS provides). The results of our exploration confirm that LW has a place also out of the borders of philosophy as a disciplinary endeavor, but also that philosophy (accounting for 67% of the occurrences)24 is possibly still the most important place where LW’s ideas are debated—which is not the same as saying that it is the most important place where they circulate (see Fig. 18 for a comparison with other 20 th - century philosophers). We have indeed to acknowledge that Wittgenstein is still a central figure in the philosophical field more than in other fields—his presence in research areas different from philosophy is smaller than that of Rawls and Foucault, even if larger than that of Husserl. There doesn’t seem to be a great difference among LW, Quine or even Heidegger. However, it can still be the case that LW’s ideas have a different impact on intellectual debates which are not strictly philosophical, even though these ideas are not directly discussed and do not constitute the main topic of such publications: in other terms, they are more resources than objects of discussion.25

5.2. Endogenous explanations

55 H3. Variations in time and space in LW’s scholarship, including variations in topics and their relative weight, contingently depend on processes of symbolic production of value, especially in terms of reputation-building and consecration.

Fig. 18. Publications on selected XX century philosophers with “Philosophy” as Research Area (% on total publications for each philosopher), 1985-2015.

Source: WoS.

56 LW is possibly one of the most celebrated authors of our times. His reputation goes well beyond the kind of recognition philosophers usually gain. In the following excerpts the reader can find a few exemplary statements about the curious and ambivalent place LW occupies in philosophy.

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Ludwig Wittgenstein occupies a unique place in 20 th-century philosophy and he is for that reason difficult to subsume under the usual philosophical categories. What makes it difficult is first of all the unconventional cast of his mind, the radical nature of his philosophical proposals, and the experimental form he gave to their expression. The difficulty is magnified because he came to philosophy under complex conditions which make it plausible for some interpreters to connect him with Frege, Russell, and Moore, with the Circle, Oxford Language Philosophy, and the analytic tradition in philosophy as a whole, while others bring him together with Schopenhauer or Kierkegaard, with Derrida, Zen Buddhism, or avant-garde art. Add to this a culturally resonant background, an atypical life (at least for a modern philosopher), and a forceful yet troubled personality and the difficulty is complete. To some he may appear primarily as a technical philosopher, but to others he will be first and foremost an intriguing biographical subject, a cultural ico, or an exemplary figure in the intellectual life of the century. Our fascination with Wittgenstein is, so it seems, a function of our bewilderment over who he really is and what his work stands for (Sluga 1996, 1). Although Wittgenstein is widely regarded as one of the most important and influential philosophers of this century, there is very little agreement about the nature of his contribution. In fact, one of the most striking characteristics of the secondary literature on Wittgenstein is the overwhelming lack of agreement about what he believed and why. (Stern 1996, 442). Wittgenstein is a contested figure on the philosophical scene. Having played an important role in the rise and development of not just one but two schools of analytic philosophy […] he is for good reasons associated with the analytic tradition. Nevertheless, Wittgenstein’s relation to (what we now call) analytic philosophy tended to be somewhat uneasy. […] In contemporary analytic philosophy, by contrast to its earlier phases, Wittgenstein tends to play a less central role. […] the philosophical climate has clearly changed since the heyday of Wittgenstein’s influence. (Kuusela and McGinn 2011, 4) Considered by some to be the greatest philosopher of the 20 th -century, Ludwig Wittgenstein played a central, if controversial, role in 20 th -century analytic philosophy. He continues to influence current philosophical thought in topics as diverse as logic and language, perception and intention, ethics and religion, aesthetics and culture. (SEP 2014). Ludwig Wittgenstein is one of the most influential philosophers of the 20 th century, and regarded by some as the most important since . […] Wittgenstein’s work on rule-following and private language is still considered important, and his later philosophy is influential in a growing number of fields outside philosophy. (Richter n.d.)

57 LW has also been voted as the most important philosopher of the past 200 years in the widely read blog, Leiter Reports: a Philosophy Blog (the description of which reads: “News and views about philosophy, the academic profession, academic freedom, intellectual culture, and other topics. The world’s most popular philosophy blog for more than a dozen years”). LW got 600 votes, followed by Gottlob Frege, , , W.V.O. Quine, G.W.F. Hegel, , , Karl Marx, Søren Kierkegaard and so on (for our sociologist fellows: a major reference for human and social scientists, , is ranked only at the 32nd place). As Brian Leiter commented: “I do hope some sociologist is prescient enough to hold on to these results; I imagine they will look both startling and revealing to the philosophers of 2059— though I’d expect some of ‘the top ten’ to be the same (e.g., I’d imagine that Wittgenstein, Nietzsche, Mill, and Marx will be there–perhaps even Hegel, Frege and Russell […]”.26

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58 Yes, qua sociologists we hold these results and set forth an explanatory hypothesis for this ranking and more in general for the ambivalent status of LW among philosophers— high and contested at the same time: we may consider it as a consequence of the difficult reputation LW has enjoyed since his early years as a would be author (of the curious, atypical work later published as the Tractatus) and after a few years as a Ph.D. student and professor at Cambridge, a process starting with Bertrand Russell’s intellectual infatuation for his supposed, presumed exceptional talent, and continued in the following decades through the intensive symbolic work done around LW’s persona by a few influential colleagues, a group of his early students, some students of his students (Gellner 1998a, 1998b), and a growing body of scholars who have been writing about him, including of course his biographers (from Norman Malcolm to Ray Monk, whose 1990 book on LW “as a genius” has played an influential role in rising LW’s status among younger of philosophers).

59 This is a simple case of what sociologists define as a ‘process of reputation-building’ or even—when especially successful in establishing a name and her value—of ‘consecration’ (e.g. Heinich 1997; DeNora 1995; Bourdieu 1992; Fine 2000; Kapsis 1992; Santoro 2010; Bartmanski 2012), a process which is at the same time social and cultural: it is social because social agents and social institutions are required to consecrate—i.e., to build the recognition of an exceptional status of—someone; it is also cultural because the success of this operation can only be achieved by means of a symbolic work made of critical reviews, biographical texts, discussions of ideas, and so on.

60 This brings us to our fourth and last hypothetical explanation, perhaps the most basic one, though not perhaps the best from a sociological perspective (because of its apparent distance from the social structure).

61 H4. To make sense of the form and variation of a cultural structure as the scholarship on LW, we have to go back into the Wittgensteinian texts, to investigate the nature of the ideas expressed in them.

62 This is clearly the more endogenous explanation we are proposing, and we should make it clearer. We are not making a plea for a turning back to traditional humanistic work conceived of in terms of ‘close reading’, philology, style analysis or even strictly hermeneutical studies (e.g., Anscombe 1969; Perloff 2011; Ware 2011; Berry 2013). We are suggesting to consider texts and ideas as immanently social products which follow conventions and ask for interpretative work. Every act of intellectual or artistic creation is social, i.e., relational (Becker 1974). Wittgenstein’s biography fostered a romantic interpretation of the solitary genius creating his work).27 However, even this life choice has to be read in terms of some social aspects (Becker 1982; Farrell 2001). We cannot forget that LW was born and was educated (i.e., socialized) in a given family (Waugh 2009), in a given place (Vienna) with its own social structure and cultural life (Janik and Toulmin 1996), during a given historical period (marked by two world wars, the collapse of an empire and so on), and he worked mainly in British prestigious universities (which were themselves part of a structured academic field), thus being in close relation with other people such as colleagues and students. Yet, his legacy is mainly made of unfinished and unpublished texts, made available thanks to the collaborative work of different people (with different dispositions, tastes, background, objectives, attachments, strategies, and so on). A collective work, one could say.

63 Of course, acknowledging the collective nature of a cultural work is not ipso facto claiming for an endogenous approach to cultural analysis. You can always limit your

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research to patterns of human cooperation without entering into the ideas and texts (which can be viewed as black boxes). Following an endogenous explanatory approach means on the contrary that one opens the black box in order to apply a sociological interpretation to the same texts and patterns of ideas. Tools borrowed from (e.g. Latour 1986; Cerulo 1995, 2000; Alexander 2003) and ecological studies (e.g. Abbott 2001; Lieberson 2000) may help in identifying the mechanisms of cultural change. An endogenous explanation has the advantage—as stressed by Kaufman (2004)—that it makes culture more than just a dependent variable. Language, thought, writing style “not only shape the meaning we attribute to material things and human relationships […] but also influence one another in ways worth understanding. Cultural change can occur independently of social structural, technological, or material change. The transformation of Calvinist theology into the ‘spirit of capitalism’ […] is only one such example of the power of endogenous cultural change. An abiding strength of the new focus on endogenous explanation in the sociology of culture is its ability to unveil the internal workings of such processes in detail” (Kaufman 2004, 336).

64 Topic modeling goes in the same direction, providing a valuable method to identify the linguistic contexts surrounding social institutions and policy domains (DiMaggio et al. 2013) but also, we would add, cultural fields as disciplines and research areas. It is possible to conjecture, here, that variations in the scholarship on LW (including variations in topics and semantic associations) may depend on both LW’s texts and the way in which such texts have been arranged and edited for publication after LW’s death. As Fig. 1 and 3 show, the temporal structure of LW work is far from a common one. In a way similar to that of Antonio Gramsci, LW’s published work has been for its most part a post-mortem business (on Gramsci, see e.g., Santoro and Gallelli 2016). The publication of new, previously unpublished, texts “authored” by LW has been continuous since his death, and the amount of words and sentences to be edited, discussed, interpreted, commented, written about, translated and even re-translated, has been increasing decade after decade. Moreover, as is obvious, the scholarship has its own effects on the rate of publication, re-edition and re-translation of LW’s texts, in a mutually reinforcing circle.

65 In this situation of textual hyperproduction, distant-reading techniques such as topic modelling may work very well, especially thanks to recent technological facilities, such as for example the electronic edition of the Nachlass (Pichler 2002; see also Pichler and Hrachovec 2013). The affinities of topic-modelling methods with a sociological approach to the study of culture depend on devices and concepts that nowadays are well established in cultural sociology: for example, framing, polysemy, heteroglossia, and the relationality of meaning (Mohr 1998). Texts and ideas have the power to affect human and institutions and we should be careful not to reduce them sociologically. At the same time, we should be aware that texts as well as ideas depend in several ways on the social arrangements in which they are embedded—after all, we wouldn’t have an electronic edition of the Nachlass if there were no department in some rich country that was ready to invest human and financial resources on that project.

66 On the whole, the distinction between exogenous and endogenous explanations we have posited at the beginning of this section is just a heuristic device, though it shouldn’t be taken too seriously: culture and social structure, i.e., ideas/texts and social arrangements (such as institutions and social structures) are intertwined, mutually constitutive, and always working together in real life. Research on intellectual life from

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this perspective is just beginning. It is worth emphasizing that in this research activity philosophers and historians of ideas should be aware that ideas, even the philosophical ones, neither exist nor live in a social vacuum and that tools and techniques to capture and detect their social life do exist and are easily available.

Wittgenstein-monument near the philosopher’s hut in Luster, Sogn og Fjordane, Norway

(Bair175, https://commons.wikimedia.org).

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APPENDIXES

6. Appendix

Table A1. Top ten publication sources (including book reviews).

Sources N

Philosophical Investigations 236

Mind: A Quarterly Review of Philosophy 70

Philosophy: The Journal of the Royal Institute of Philosophy 68

Philosophical Quarterly 55

Synthese: An International Journal for Epistemology, Methodology and Philosophy of Science 53

International Philosophical Quarterly 52

Grazer Philosophische Studie: Internationale Zeitschrift für Analytische Philosophie 44

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Philosophy in Review (Comptes rendus philosophiques) 43

Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 40

Review of Metaphysics 38

Table A2. Topic model analysis: 15 topics, first 30 words for each topic.

Fig. A3. Where do the Wittgensteinians come from? Source: WoS. Years covered: 1985-2015.

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Figure A4. Distribution of number of journals, publications and topics per year.

NOTES

1. For the comparison in figure 3 and 4 we have repeated the same operation with the respective noun-tags in the camp TITLE. (For the sake of precision, we would say at this point these names have been selected after an exploratory analysis of the whole archive, whose results have generally confirmed what professional philosophers already may suspect in terms of distribution of attention and rankings of presence in current debates). 2. Of course, in the world there are many more Dissertations on LW (also having W. in their title) than four. This is a clear indicator of the quantitative limits of our source (a standard source for professional philosophers, anyway). Also Monographs on LW are more than those indexed in the PI—a comparison between the latter and a local (i.e. Italian) bibliographical commercial database as Ibs would suffice to prove this. At the same time, it is arguable along these same lines that nothing minimally relevant published not only in English but in any language or in recognized international journals can miss being indexed in this archive. This is our working assumption, anyway, at least at this stage of analysis. 3. The Spanish philosophical production on LW, accounting for the 7,3% of the total—247 titles— is something to be explored carefully, we would like to suggest, much more than we are able to do here. 4. Sources may be academic journals (above all), book series, or multi-authored books (such as handbooks, companions, and so on). The total amounts to 616 different sources (N = 2990; reported only sources for 20+ occurrences). 5. Founded in 2003, Ontos has been publishing some 50 titles and three journals of international repute each year in the fields of philosophy and mathematical logic. The publishing house’s backlist comprises more than 300 publications (in 23 book series), 90% of which contain English content. It has been acquired by De Gruyter in 2013, even if its founder Rafael Hüntelmann continues to manage its portfolio. 6. Rodopi was founded in 1966 in Amsterdam; it is an academic publishing company specialised in humanities and social sciences with offices in the Netherlands and the United States. Rodopi publishes over 150 titles per year in around 70 peer-reviewed book series and journals. Although the main language of publication is English, the multilingual list includes Germa, French, and

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Spanish. The backlist contains around 4,000 titles. In 2014 Rodopi was taken over by the international academic publisher Brill. 7. The same publisher of LW’s children dictionary of 1926. 8. Continuum International Publishing Group was an academic publisher of books with editorial offices in London and New York City. Continuum International was originally created in 1999 with the merger of the Cassell academic and religious lists and the Continuum Publishing Company, founded in New York in 1980. The academic publishing programme was focused on the humanities, especially the fields of philosophy, film and music, literature, education, linguistics, theology, and biblical studies. Continuum published Paulo Freire’s seminal Pedagogy of the Oppressed. In July 2011 it was taken over by Bloomsbury Publishing. As of September 2012, all new Continuum titles are published under the Bloomsbury name (under the imprint Bloomsbury Academic). 9. Founded in 1969 by Gavin Borde, the New York firm initially reprinted 18ᵗʰ-century literary criticism; by the late 1970s, its chief business was academic reference books, although its facsimile and reprint editions were also popular with niche markets. The firm began publishing scientific textbooks in 1983. Among textual critics, Garland is best known as the publisher of Gabler’s genetic edition of Joyce’s Ulysses (1984). In 1997 Garland was acquired by Taylor & Francis, and is now known as Garland Science Publishing. 10. No information on the web, but it seems it published in 1980 an edition of LW’s Tractatus. 11. The publisher of the Collected Works of Carnap and of various books on scientific and analytic philosophy (e.g. Tait 1997), it is also known for a successful series in Philosophy & Popular Culture. More important, it is the publisher of The Library of Living Philosophers (LLP), which commenced in 1939 with a volume on , and is “an unparalleled series that has made an advancement to the understanding of philosophy through rational debate.” (from the official website). Among the authors G.E. Moore and Russell, but not Wittgenstein (and never will be, as the series is on living philosophers). 12. Established in Bristol, it became an imprint of Continuum, and currently is part of Bloomsbury). It had a series on “Wittgenstein Studies”, where also Rhees published among others. 13. (Wittgenstein is misleadingly part of the list just because there are works in which Wittgenstein is the author and “Wittgenstein” occurs in the title). 14. The rationale behind this kind of social analysis is that different network configurations account for different intellectual outcomes (Collins 1999; de Vaan et al. 2015). We don’t pursue this line of investigation in this paper however, and we are just happy to suggest this research opportunity. 15. The same procedure could be implemented with other external variables as well, e.g. number of authors by period, distribution of languages of publication, etc. For now we just present some preliminary and general results of our analysis. 16. After excluding book reviews, only four records lack subjects. 17. On the notion of an “iconic intellectual” see Bartmansky (2012). There is no doubt LW has become such an icon—a process started already in his life. See for an early instance of public “iconization” Malcolm (1958) and for a recent exemplary demonstration Nedo (2013), whose subtitle reads as “a biography through images”. 18. Possibly due also to the growing centrality of Wittgenstein in the “sociology of knowledge” after Bloor (1973, 1983). 19. The data concerning the number of clusters should be taken with some caution because it might depend on several factors, which do not necessarily reflect the ‘objective’ structure of the field. 20. What follows may be read as a research program for a (historical) sociology of analytic philosophy. For a famed (and in someone’s view infamous) predecessor see Gellner (1958), whose

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analytical strength is compromised by his negative normative judgment of what was at the time a recent and fashionable trend in British academic circles, which he read as a form of elitist idealism: “[A]t that time the orthodoxy best described as linguistic philosophy, inspired by Wittgenstein, was crystallizing and seemed to me totally and utterly misguided. Wittgenstein’s basic idea was that there is no general solution to issues other than the custom of the community. Communities are ultimate. He didn’t put it this way, but that was what it amounted to. And this doesn’t make sense in a world in which communities are not stable and are not clearly isolated from each other. Nevertheless, Wittgenstein managed to sell this idea, and it was enthusiastically adopted as an unquestionable revelation. It is very hard nowadays for people to understand what the atmosphere was like the. This was the Revelation. It wasn’t doubted. But it was quite obvious to me it was wrong. It was obvious to me the moment I came across it, although initially, if your entire environment, and all the bright people in it, hold something to be true, you assume you must be wrong, not understanding it properly, and they must be right. And so I explored it further and finally came to the conclusion that I did understand it right, and it was rubbish, which indeed it is.” We cite from an published in the Ernest Gellner Resource Site at LSE: http://www.lse.ac.uk/researchAndExpertise/units/gellner/Section2.html. A philosopher converted to anthropology and sociology, Gellner had enough philosophical credentials to have his 1959 book Words and Things (the first he published, as a young assistant professor of the Department of Sociology at LSE) prefaced by Bertrand Russell. The book was at the time a critical success also because of the harsh debate it raised. Ryle refused to have the book reviewed in his edited journal Mind, which prompted Russell to start a protest on the pages of The Times. 21. We can get an idea of the institutional relevance of these scholarly enterprises considering the following description about The Wittgenstein Archives at the University of Bergen: “[it] is a research infrastructure and project platform bringing together philosophy, editorial philology and text technology. It is a meeting place for intellectuals, technicians, scholars and students from many different research fields and geographical areas around the world. WAB has been central in the establishing of the new international Wittgenstein journal Nordic Wittgenstein Review (NWR) and runs its technical platform, as well as participates in the editing. WAB has also been central in the establishing of the new international Wittgenstein book series Nordic Wittgenstein Studies that continues WAB’s earlier series Publications from the Wittgenstein Archives at the University of Berge.” See http://wab.uib.no/ 22. On this see also Santoro (1999) and Marconi (2014). 23. Web of Science (previously known as ISI-Web of Science, later operated by Thomson-Reuters, and now part of Clarivate’s Web of Knowledge) is an online subscription-based scientific citation indexing service that gives access to several multi-discipline citation databases. 24. The ranking of RA is the following (data referred to December 2016): Philosophy 67%, Literature 11%, Other arts and humanities 7%, Religion 5%, Social science (general) 5%, Linguistics 5%, History and philosophy of science 3%, Psychology 2,5%. Others follow with percentages below this figure. Recall WoS attributes research areas (RA) references in a not exclusive way, i.e. the same record may have more than one RA. 25. A further interesting information we get from WoS is the geographical dispersion of the population of scholars writing on LW. Their distribution according to country (academic location) is shown in figure A3, in the Appendix. The geographical dispersion of the field is worth of being noticed: the expected majority of Anglo-American scholars is confirmed (they account for almost the 40% of the population, see also Garver 1987 and Glock 2008) but this is accompanied by a plurality of geographical standings, ranging from France to Finland, from Spain to China, from Romania to South Korea till Zimbabwe (see for LW’s reception in various countries Helgeson 2011; Zhang 2014; Schulte 2003; on the Japanese case see Botz-Bornstein 2003).

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26. Posted by Brian Leiter on March 11, 2009. See http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/ 2009/03/so-who-is-the-most-important-philosopher-of-the-past-200-years.html (retrieved on 29-12-2016). 27. On LW’s way of working see Rothhaupt (2010). See also Pichler (1992), who emphasizing Wittgenstein’s “solitary writing” (p. 220) says: “Wittgenstein’s writing can be seen as the particular medium, the motor, the carrier of his philosophizing and of his philosophical development. We should regard the various aspects of his writing process such as deleting, overwriting, crossing out, slips of the pen, underlining, marking, inserting, varying etc., and his tendency to revise and rewrite as the tools of his work. As such they deserve our careful consideration. Significantly, writing meant for Wittgenstein—and surely not only for him—not just the pinning down of a philosophical thought but rather the causing, carrying and structuring of it, letter by letter, word by word, sentence by sentence; and it meant, contesting words with words and looking for a possible dialogue” (p. 221). However, the same Pichler acknowledge in these same pages the crucial role played by oral communication in LW’s thinking, and this reminds us of the necessary social mediation also of his writing—which asks on its turn some social mediation to be made publicly available.

ABSTRACTS

Sharing the “historicist challenge to analytic philosophy” (Glock 2006) we investigate the philosophical production (and, to a lesser extent, some non-philosophical works as well) on Ludwig Wittgenstein from a distant reading perspective. First, we provide a description of the “Wittgensteinian field” by analyzing several data provided by the Philosopher’s Index, an electronic bibliographic database especially devoted to philosophy. Then we analyze these data by using statistical tools (such as for example topic modeling) and we interpret the results historically and sociologically, along the lines of Bourdieu (1988) on Heidegger, Lamont (1992) on Derrida, Gross (2006) on Rorty, and Collins (1999) on the whole philosophical tradition.

INDEX

Keywords: Distant Reading, Scientometrics, Analytic Philosophy, Wittgenstein, Wittgensteinian Field

AUTHORS

MARCO SANTORO University of Bologna, [email protected]

MASSIMO AIROLDI EMLyon Business School, [email protected]

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EMANUELA RIVIERA Independent Researcher

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Two Quantitative Researches in the History of Philosophy Some Down-to-Earth and Haphazard Methodological Reflections

Guido Bonino, Paolo Maffezioli and Paolo Tripodi

1. Wittgenstein and Academic Success

1 The first investigation concerns the place of Wittgenstein in contemporary analytic philosophy (Bonino and Tripodi 2019). Of course, this topic has already been widely investigated by means of the traditional methods of the history of philosophy. A rather convincing historical reconstruction is shared by most scholars. In the 1950s and ’60s, Wittgenstein—the later Wittgenstein—was considered the leading figure of the two main centers of analytic philosophy, namely Oxford and Cambridge (though the latter to a lesser extent). The success of the Wittgensteinian during those years led many people to suppose that such a paradigm would have a similar impact on the U.S. as well. For various reasons (philosophical, cultural and even geopolitical), the philosophy of Wittgenstein did not quite live up to those expectations. Let us just say that the Wittgensteinian tradition lost its centrality in Britain and never reached a corresponding reputation in the U.S.

2 That is roughly the story that many philosophers accept and that is told by historians of philosophy. The aim of our work was to check whether a quantitative approach to the history of philosophy can add some interesting details and new insights to the historical-philosophical understanding of the decline of the Wittgensteinian tradition in contemporary analytic philosophy.

3 It is important to realize that, notwithstanding the supposed decline, Wittgenstein has always remained a very important philosopher throughout the whole period under consideration, and that he has always been a very popular subject matter of Ph.D. philosophy dissertations in the U.S.

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Table 1. 20th-century philosophers in dissertation titles (1901-2015).

Philosopher Occurrences

Heidegger 499

Wittgenstein 321

Dewey 302

Whitehead 247

Husserl 227

Peirce 184

Sartre 167

James 157

Table 2. 20th-century philosophers in the abstracts (1981-2010).

Philosopher Occurrences

Heidegger 2779

Wittgenstein 1376

Dewey 1241

Husserl 1059

Derrida 846

Foucault 842

Sartre 726

Peirce 718

4 We thought that one aspect of the supposed decline of Wittgenstein in the history of analytic philosophy could be investigated by analyzing the academic careers (if any) of those who wrote their dissertation on Wittgenstein, and by comparing them with the careers of those who wrote their dissertation on a ‘typical’ analytic philosopher. We chose four analytic philosophers, who hold very different views on virtually every subject, but who are almost unanimously regarded as important figures within the analytic community. They are David Lewis, Saul Kripke, Michael Dummett and Jerry Fodor.

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Fig. 1. Analytic philosophers: +35%

5 The first step was that of selecting the philosophy dissertations defended from 1981 to 2010. Then we selected those dissertations in which the name ‘Wittgenstein’ occurs in the abstract. We got 329 dissertations. The same was done with the ‘analytic’ dissertations (we got 404 of them). Then we traced the academic careers (if any) of all the authors of dissertations that had been selected. We attributed a numerical value (which we call the ‘Academic Success Index’) to the highest position each of them held (if any). We considered both the academic rank (adjunct, assistant, associate, full professor) and the ranking of the philosophy department (such rough three-levels ranking is drawn from existing rankings).

6 Figure 1 shows the comparison between the average academic success index of the authors of Wittgensteinian and analytic dissertations respectively. As one can see, there is a significant difference between the two groups. The Wittgensteinian ‘decline’ seems to be in some way confirmed. The relatively low Academic Success Index is a manifestation of such a decline.

7 The Academic Success Index should not be taken as an absolute value, if only for the fact it is calculated by weighing different factors in a rather arbitrary way. It is, however, a significant indicator of the relative success of an author vis-à-vis another. Moreover, a further indication of its reliability is provided by comparative evaluations of other groups of dissertations. More or less the same results can be obtained whether you consider the whole period 1981-2010 or the disaggregated data for five-year periods, whether you focus on strictly Wittgensteinian theses or you take into account also those in which Wittgenstein is a minor topic, whether you normalize the Academic Success Index for academic age or not, etc.; moreover the Academic Success Index of Wittgenstein is low not only with respect to typical analytic philosophers, but also with

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respect to some other groups of dissertations we chose as control groups: Gadamer, Spinoza and a random sample of the dissertations.

Fig. 2. Academic Success Index of Wittgenstein compared with other groups.

8 Of course, correlation does not entail causation and we cannot conclude that the relatively unsuccessful careers of those who wrote their dissertations on Wittgenstein causally depends on the choice of the topic. We tried in our work to show, by means of different comparisons of data, that the choice of the subject matter is at least a genuine cause, among others, of the difference in academic success.

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Fig. 3. Wittgenstein.

9 But why, and how, does a philosophical topic make a difference for academic success? Using a visualization software, we found this.

10 These maps have been obtained by retrieving and counting the occurrences of terms in the abstracts of the theses. The size of an item’s label and circle depend on the number of occurrences of the term.

11 Looking at the analytic map, we found a pattern that we did not recognize in the Wittgensteinian one. The keywords on the map suggest the idea that philosophy is a kind of theory—THEORY is the biggest circle—which defends arguments, provides accounts and put forth claims, in order to solve problems. This pattern on the analytic map—in which theory, argument, problem, account, claim are all important keywords—hints at a science-oriented style and metaphilosophical view.

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Fig. 4. Analytic philosophy.

12 To sum up the present results: it seemed to us that the difference of academic success may be (partly) explained by the presence (and the absence) of certain semantic patterns; such patterns, in turn, point to the presence (and the absence) of a science- oriented philosophical style and metaphilosophy. Therefore, this is perhaps our main thesis: the index of academic success for Ph.D. candidates in U.S. philosophy departments in the last forty years is quite strictly connected to the choice of a more or less science-oriented philosophical style and metaphilosophy.

13 Did our add anything original to the picture of the decline of Wittgenstein provided by historians of philosophy by means of traditional methods? We think so. We have retrieved, measured, read and interpreted a relatively large amount of data, and by examining the data we have pointed out the metaphoric place where the decline of Wittgenstein began.

14 In particular, we have discovered that the decline of Wittgenstein took place at the level of academic recruitment. Our results suggest that such a decline did not depend, so to speak, on a shift in the Zeitgeist. It was not due to a bottom-up dismissal of the interest in Wittgenstein’s philosophy because Wittgenstein was a philosopher swimming against the tide of history. On the contrary, it seems to be the result of a top- down process guided by a relatively small number of people, i.e. those academics who held the power of influencing the recruitment policies in the philosophy departments.

2. Logic in analytic philosophy

15 The aim of our second work was that of substantiating with data the widely shared view according to which logic is central in analytic philosophy. The corpus taken into consideration comprises all the articles published in five important philosophical

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journals (The Journal of Philosophy, Mind, The Philosophical Review, The Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society and Philosophy and Phenomenological Research) in the time span 1941-2010.

16 To give a concise anticipatory overview, we provided some results concerning the overall presence of logic in these articles, the relative technical sophistication of the logic used for philosophical purposes, the kind of use that is made of logic (i.e., subject matter vs. instrumental). Our guiding questions were: What are the relations between analytic philosophy and logic? What is the role of logic in analytic philosophy? Would one need logic to do analytic philosophy? Distant reading and, more generally, quantitative methods allowed us to find more interesting and reliable answers to these questions.

17 By distantly or—as Moretti once said (2013, 44)—serially reading all the articles in which logic is in some way present, for each paper we raised the following two questions. Q1: What does this paper use logic for? Q2: What level of logical competence does this paper require? In answering Q1, we distinguished an instrumental and a non- instrumental role of logic in philosophy. By non-instrumental uses we mean either doing logic properly understood (= giving proofs, demonstrating theorems, and so forth) or dealing with logic as a subject matter of philosophy (= investigating the philosophy of logic). Instrumental uses are those that can be found in articles in which the role of logic is that of providing an instrument for philosophy: logic as an instrument for doing moral philosophy, metaphysics, epistemology, and so forth. A third category (‘Other’) includes and inductive logic.

18 Logic as an instrument increases over time, logic as a discipline does not: philosophy of logic decreases and logic proper remains more or less constant (with negligible numbers). The common opinion seems to be confirmed by data, but it does not tell the whole story.

19 Even with respect to Q2, we wanted to find an answer as precise and complete as possible. In order to get to such an answer, we proposed a method to measure the level of ‘logical sophistication’, from logical preliminaries to Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, so to speak. Very succinctly, we identified eleven topics and we have assigned a level of sophistication from 1 to 4 to each of them. • Preliminaries: 1 • Propositional logic: 2 • Propositional modal logic: 3 • Non-classical propositional : 3 • First-order logic: 3 • Peano arithmetic: 4 • Proof theory: 4 • Second-order logic: 4 • Model theory: 4 • Set theory: 4 • First-order modal logic: 4

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Fig. 5. How much logic? Percentage of analytic philosophy articles in which logic is present in some way.

20 Notice there is also a level 0: no competence of logic at all. Then for each article we wondered: How much logic would you need to have a fair grasp of the article itself? Figure 7 is a summary of the results.

21 Level 0 (no logical competence at all) disappears in the 60s. Level 1 is largely the most significant (55.77%). Level 2 and 3 increase until the 70s and then decrease moderately. Level 4 also increases, but only in the last decade.

22 Thus, how much logic is present in analytic philosophy? Approximately 25% of all the articles in the corpus. What use of logic is made in analytic philosophy? Logic is mainly instrumental. What is the level of logical sophistication in analytic philosophy? The average level of difficulty does not go beyond preliminaries. How should these results be interpreted? Do they confirm the centrality of logic in analytic philosophy? Are they in some way unexpected? These are difficult questions, and they certainly require serious reflection. Yet it seems to us that also in this case distant reading has provided at least the raw material for such reflections.

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Fig. 6. What does this paper use logic for?

Fig. 7. Levels of logical sophistication.

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3. Some considerations

23 Some methodological considerations can be put forth concerning the two studies described above. They concern three main issues: the motivation for quantitative analysis (question-driven vs. method-driven investigations); the kinds of data and corpora; human distant reading as opposed to computer-assisted distant reading.

3.1. Question-driven investigations

24 The origin of both studies lies in specific research questions, which are raised in the context of traditional history of (analytic) philosophy, and by the conviction that it would be difficult to answer such questions by applying non-quantitative methods.

25 The first set of questions concerns the place of Wittgenstein in contemporary analytic philosophy or, perhaps more precisely, the relationship between two philosophical traditions, the analytic and the Wittgensteinia. Part of this story—the story of the decline of the Wittgensteinian tradition in analytic philosophy from the 1960s to the 1980s—has already been written (Hacker 1996; Tripodi 2009). According to such “received view” influence of Wittgenstein’s philosophy has been declining in the last decades for many different reasons: the predominance of American analytic philosophy over British analytic philosophy; the scientific, rather than humanistic, self- understanding of analytic philosophy in the United States; the misleading association of Wittgenstein to (the declining tradition of) logical positivism; the success of Quine’s anti-Wittgensteinian argument for the continuity between philosophy and the natural sciences; the widespread view, among analytic philosophers, according to which Wittgenstein’s a-theoretic metaphilosophy is untenable; several anti-Wittgensteinian arguments about language and mind put forth by analytic philosophers such as Hilary Putnam, Donald Davidson, J.J.C. Smart, Jerry Fodor and some others; the rise of cognitive sciences; the revival of metaphysics fostered by Saul Kripke and David Lewis, and so forth (Quine 1951; Putnam 1962; Davidson 1963; Smart 1959; Fodor 1975; Kripke 1972/1980; Lewis 1973 and 1986).

26 Given this multifaceted explanation, however, many questions are still open and wait for an answer. At what pace did Wittgenstein’s philosophy declined? Can we understand the relative weight of its different causes? What areas of philosophical production were more involved in the decline? In general, is it possible to measure the decline in any significant way?

27 It was quite natural, for us, to think of the application of quantitative methods, in order to tackle such questions, as we assumed that analytic philosophy is a paradigm case of academic philosophy and that, consequently, part of the answers could be found in the sociology of academia. Luckily Proquest provides the metadata of 30,000 U.S. Ph.D. dissertations in philosophy (1899-2015). As the choice for a subject matter of a dissertation is usually sensitive to fashions and trends, we thought that this corpus was not only interesting and worth exploring in itself, but it could be the right place to look at, in order to answer our remaining questions. Preliminarily, however, we had to enrich the corpus with newly acquired data: in particular, the data concerning academic careers. Then we analyzed the data in the way described above.

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28 The second group of questions was addressed because of the need to clarify and test a widespread but vague view about the presence and role of logic in analytic philosophy. Many people seem to take it for granted that there is a very large amount of logic in analytic philosophy, that the role of logic in analytic philosophy is crucial, perhaps even constitutive, and that many or perhaps most analytic philosophers are logically sophisticated thinkers. However, this view is based on impressions rather than on the analysis of a large amount of data. Hence, like in the previous case, it was natural to rely upon quantitative methods, with a twofold aim: (i) to explicate the vague, impressionistic view about logic in analytic philosophy; (ii) to test the explicated view, thus providing a well-grounded confirmation or disconfirmation of it.

29 It seems to us that historians of philosophy and historians of ideas should be aware that generalizations in their disciplines (and, more in general, in the humanities) are methodologically awkward and take too often the form of unjustified statements. Working as a traditional historian of philosophy, what are the you can rely on to support the story about the decline of Wittgenstein in the history of analytic philosophy, or the idea that logic plays a crucial role in analytic philosophy? You may certainly rely on a fair number of influential articles and books. Still, you will only be able to read a small part of the relevant philosophical production. And things are even worse if you are interested in recent philosophical works, since the academic philosophical production has grown considerably during the last decades. Alternatively, you can trust your more or less well-established personal impressions, which ultimately derive from your acquaintance with the subject matter or the relevant philosophical milieu. Finally, you can also rely on semi-autobiographical accounts of what happened provided by people who played some role in the events. Although these evidences may be reliable enough to write a more or less adequate history, many details will inevitably elude the historical reconstruction.

30 In both cases our research was guided by problems and questions that emerged in our own previous work. It has to be emphasized that such a question-driven approach can be very burdensome and, in a sense, uneconomical. If for example your starting point is, as in our case, a specific question concerning the relation between philosophic academia and in particular the recruitment policies, on the one hand, and the developments in analytic philosophy in America, on the other hand, it is likely that you cannot find an easy and more or less ready answer in some preconstituted dataset that is already available. Thus, for example, as we will tell below more extensively, you have to build your corpus from scratch, starting with raw materials and enriching them; specific data can perhaps answer your question, but you have to work hard to obtain those very data, and this can cost you a lot of time and work. This has been our experience in the study on Wittgenstein and analytic philosophy: more than two years of preliminary work before we could start with our analysis and interpretation.

31 On the other hand, however, such a question-driven approach has also many merits, and it seems to us that it can be advantageous even from the point of view of the digital humanities, for three main reasons.

32 First, without a solid theoretical apparatus, strictly data-driven investigations are blind, and run the risk of being nothing but the curiosity-driven exploration of an available corpus (this, of course, can be an interesting and even pleasant task, but it is less likely to provide interesting results in the humanities than the question-driven approach): it seems to us that Moretti’s own work is an excellent example of an

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extremely ambitious question-driven approach (see many essays in Moretti 2013; yet, in a recent conference held in Turin—La strada per Roma. La letteratura tra ermeneutica e quantificazione, 20th November 2019—Moretti seemed to pay credit to the fruitfulness of curiosity-driven explorations as well).

33 Second, analyzing data with quantitative methods is a risky task in itself, because the chance of finding random or illusionary correlations is quite high: a possible antidote is to work within domains which we are already well-acquainted with; this would make the interpretation of data easier and more solid, and this is still a fundamental task, even in so-called data-driven research.

34 Third, a question-driven approach can help us avoid a possible shortcoming, which is not unusual in the recent history of the digital humanities: the impressio, from the disciplinary point of view (that is, from the point of view of the history of philosophy, the history of ideas, but also, say, of literary criticism) of beating around the bush methodologically, so to speak. In other words, it seems to us that in recent years the method-driven approach in the digital humanities has shown its shortcomings, in particular its poor results from the point of view of the humanities themselves: if your main aim is to develop methods, it is not surprising that you pay little attention to having solid results concerning the contents.

35 Our suggestion is that if distant reading and data-driven research are first of all motivated by the wish to answer substantial questions, it becomes easier to avoid such possible limitations. Obtaining results that are interesting from the point of view of the traditional humanities is, at least in some cases, the deserved reward for an extremely long and costly research work.

36 It is worth noticing that a question-driven approach leaves open the possibility of bringing to the fore aspects of the investigated issue that were not necessarily under the investigator’s attention since the beginning: for example, in the work on logic in analytic philosophy we realized that the articles requiring no logical knowledge at all in order to be understood (level 0) almost always belong to past traditions of logic, alternative to the mathematically oriented one that came to prevail in the 20th century; at first, we were not looking for this kind of logic, but we found out that this datum— notably, the disappearance of articles belonging to level 0—could be interpreted as one of the most clear markers of the acquired hegemony of analytic philosophy in the U.S.

3.2. Varieties of data and corpora

37 The kinds of data we analyzed in the two studies are very different from one another. Those which are taken into account in the work on logic in analytic philosophy are more traditional: they are just texts. As everybody knows, the relevant texts are to be found in philosophic journals, since analytic philosophy tends to mimic the natural (especially the biomedical) sciences in regarding articles rather than books as the standard scientific format. However, which journals should we include in our corpus? There are, of course, many possible criteria for the selection: citations, rankings, etc. However, in this case we felt confident enough, as domain experts, to select the five journals on the basis of our specific competence in this area; it seems to us that the selected journals are unanimously considered representative of analytic philosophy, and we also find it irrelevant whether all of them have always or in the considered time span being regarded as the most important ones.

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38 The texts are made available by J-Stor, but they were too many (over ten thousand articles) to be read, even in a serial way and from a distant perspective. Therefore, we decided to focus on two sub-corpora. The first dataset is a heterogeneous purposive sample, which includes 20% of the entire corpus (approximately, 2,500 articles): for each year we selected and read one journal, rather than five, with a random rotation. This sample allowed us to investigate the corpus in each decade from the 1940s to the 2000s. It seems to us that there is no ground to suppose that the sample is biased. The second sub-corpus includes all the 1731 articles which have the value ‘Logic’ in the subject field provided by the Philosopher’s Index (https://philindex.org). After manually eliminating the false positives, there were 1,622 articles left. Why did we combine the two different sub-corpora? Basically, because each of them provides a different kind of information. The former allows a coarse-grained level of analysis (which is more reliable), the latter a finer-grained investigation (which warrants an analysis of relevant sub-corpora concerning different philosophical sub-disciplines). Thus, they integrate well with one another.

39 The research on the decline of Wittgenstein is mainly based on metadata, rather than on texts: the metadata of the Ph.D. dissertations in philosophy defended in the United States from 1899 to 2015. The metadata includes the author of the dissertation, the title, the year of publication, the name of the supervisor, the university, the department, the abstract, some keywords, and some further information. These are very different kinds of data from texts, though both of them are, so to speak, “readable” entities: however, we didn’t read the dissertations themselves, rather we read their titles and abstracts. And the, of course, we also had to enrich the corpus by adding a crucial information that was missing, i.e., the subsequent career of the Ph.D. candidates, thus integrating our dataset with what could be regarded as sociological data.

40 Moreover, since Britain used to be the main center of analytic philosophy, but then became more peripheral with respects to the United States, it would have been extremely interesting for us to make a comparison between U.S. and U.K. dissertations. This purpose required some additional work as well. The set of U.K. doctoral theses are collected by the Electronic Theses Online Service (EThOS). When searching for philosophical theses in the EThOS dataset (i.e., those theses with ‘Philosophy’ in the dc:subject field) we discovered that not all the retrieved records are actually related to philosophy, but sometimes to kindred disciplines such as sociology, religio, psychology, etc. Moreover, in some cases the subject field is empty, or it contains numbers or ‘noise’. The thesis subject may be of little relevance in this setting because in the U.K. there is no clear and univocal administrative classification of Ph.D. titles according to disciplines.

41 Happily enough, a team of computer scientists created for our purposes a system aimed at solving the problem of discriminating philosophical documents from documents of other disciplines. The attempt is based on the combination of a standard learning approach with a semantic one, as illustrated in Carducci et al. 2019 (this part of the research is not included in Bonino and Tripodi 2019, but we intend to present it in a future work).

42 The work on logic is a typical or even literal case of distant reading, in the original sense suggested by Moretti: indeed, we serially read the journals; actually, we didn’t properly speaking read them, but we rapidly browse them. The work on Wittgenstein

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and analytic philosophy, on the contrary, is different in kind: the nature of the data— bibliographic metadata and sociological data—requires a different kind of quantitative analysis, rather than the application of distant reading as originally understood. It seems to us that this latter work, however, shows something that is true of quantitative methods in general, namely, that taking a distant perspective invites (though by no means forces) one to take an external approach to the history of philosophy. This is one further reason why we appreciate a distant reading perspective very much, but that may be a matter of personal inclinations. If one had to draw a provisional moral here, one could suggest that, generally speaking, the frequent need to tackle such diverse and heterogeneous data and corpora should make us aware that obtaining interesting results by using distant reading methods may be a slow and meandering process.

3.3. Manual distant reading

43 In both studies, computer-assisted techniques would not have been suitable for the required tasks. Therefore, in both cases we have deliberately decided to stick to Moretti’s original method, which might be called ‘human’ or ‘manual’ distant reading. In the study on the decline of Wittgenstein, we reconstructed the academic careers of each Ph.D. student in our corpora by using ‘manually’ search engine. As far as we know, there is no computational tool available to fulfil this task yet, though it is not unthinkable to build one in the next future (incidentally, reposum, one of the projects in which our group is involved, has taken some preliminary steps in this very direction).

44 Nor are there computational tools that are able to check whether there is logic in a given philosophic text, let alone whether the role of logic is instrumental or non- instrumental, or what the level of logical sophistication is. Of course, some argument mining projects are growing up, yet they do not seem reliable enough for our purposes.

45 Take, for example, the task of classifying instrumental and non-instrumental articles. The category of ‘instrumental’ is very important for our analysis, since it is a fundamental component of our explication of the prevailing view, i.e. the widespread but vague picture concerning the presence and role of logic in analytic philosophy. Qua instrument, logic spreads throughout the entire body of philosophy, and this seems to make sense and explicate the prevailing view. We provided some criteria for instrumentality: an article is instrumental if (i) logic is present in it, and (ii) it is not pursued for its own sake, but to tackle a specific philosophical problem; moreover, (iii) such a philosophical problem is not a problem directly and exclusively triggered by a philosophical reflection on logic. At the same time, however, we left some room for intuition.

46 To put it easily (perhaps too easily, but we are not in the context of cognitive science): we human beings are not just machines, so that distant reading is not for us just a question of applying algorithms. Two different issues are involved here: 1) intuition is not always reliable; 2) intuition often depends on one’s expertise and previous knowledge. To make the first problem (reliability) less serious, we simply assessed the articles by a two out of three majority when only binary choices were involved and discussed together the relatively few disagreements among the three authors in other cases.

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47 As to the latter problem (the interference of different pieces of previous knowledge), we solved the problem by practicing a sort of epoché. Consider for example ’s famous article “Deontic Logic”, published in Mind in 1951. This is one of the articles that we had to classify: is it a ‘logic proper’ article, a ‘philosophy of logic’ article or an instrumental one? Based on one’s expertise and, in particular, on one’s peculiar metaphilosophical interpretation of von Wright’s philosophical logic, one could argue that von Wright conceived of deontic logic and, more in general, philosophical logic as an instrument of philosophy, since his (explicitly declared) aim was that of providing an explication in Carnap’s sense of philosophical (deontic) concepts. This claim is based on the following remark: although von Wright later became a pupil of Wittgenstein in Cambridge, he grew up as a Carnapian, when he was a young man, in Finland, under the supervision of his former teacher, Eino Kaila, and he never ceased to be this kind of philosopher.

48 Perhaps this interpretation is correct, but that is not the point here. Rather, we would like to raise some methodological questions. Is the above mentioned historical- philosophical interpretation relevant, and should it be regarded as relevant, from the point of view of distant reading? Should distant readers focus mainly on the paper under consideration, without taking into account any further, external information, however interesting and correct it may be? Is, for example, “Deontic Logic” to be assigned to the logic proper category, rather than to the instrumental category, regardless of how one interprets von Wright’s intellectual biography and meta- philosophical preferences, simply because at the beginning of the article von Wright states explicitly that his aim is that of introducing a new logical formalism, deontic logic, for reasoning about ‘modes of obligations’?

49 In our study, we decided to answer this last question affirmatively, as we thought that von Wright’s statement at the beginning of the paper (“in the present paper an elementary formal logic of the deontic modalities will be outlined”) made it a paradigmatic case of a logic proper article. Moreover, if we didn’t apply to “Deontic Logic” the label ‘logic proper article’, then it would have been extremely difficult (and arbitrary) to apply that label to any further article.

50 Generally speaking, however, we find controversial whether the distant reader should modify his or her evaluation on the basis of his or her sophisticated and cultivated expertise. In other words, it is not obvious for us whether the distant reader should practice this sort of epoché. One might think that, to a certain extent, the distant reader should be an expert: after all, in the case under consideration (our work on logic in analytic philosophy), it would have been reasonable to select distant readers only in a relatively small group of people acquainted with logic and analytic philosophy. However, it seemed to us that the distant reader should at the same time be balanced enough, interpreting his/her task in a way that limits the weight of subjective interpretation. In our work we acted this way, putting our own exegetical and hermeneutic views in brackets and thus making ourselves more naïve readers than we actually were and are, but we are not confident enough to conclude that this attitude should be regarded as a general norm for a good practice of distant reading.

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Academic hat lamps.

Photo by Suad Kamardeen on Unsplash (https://unsplash.com/photos/ItFTJoh1A8c).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bonino, Guido, and Paolo Tripodi. 2019. “Academic Success in America. Wittgenstein and Analytic Philosophy”. British Journal for the History of Philosophy. https://doi.org/ 10.1080/09608788.2019.1618789

Carducci, Giulio, Marco Leontino, Daniele Radicioni, Guido Bonino, Enrico Pasini, and Paolo Tripodi. 2019. “Semantically Aware Text Categorisation for Metadata”. In Digital Libraries. Supporting Open Science, ed. Paolo Manghi, Leonardo Candela, and Gianmaria Silvello, 315-30. Berlin: Springer.

Davidson, Donald. 1963. “Actions, Reasons and Causes”. Journal of Philosophy 60(23): 685-700.

Fodor, Jerry. 1975. The Language of Thought. Hassocks: Harvester Press.

Hacker, P.M.S. 1996. Wittgenstein’s Place in Twentieth-Century Analytic Philosophy. Oxford: Blackwell.

Kripke, Saul. 1980. Naming and Necessity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard U.P.

Lewis, David. 1986. On the Plurality of Worlds. Oxford: Blackwell.

Moretti, Franco. 2013. Distant Reading. London: Verso.

Putnam, Hilary. 1962. “Dreaming and ‘Depth Grammar’”. In Analytical Philosophy: First Series, ed. Ronald Joseph Butler, 211-35. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Quine, W.V.O. 1951. “”. The Philosophical Review 60(1): 20-43.

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Smart, J.J.C. 1959. “Sensations and Brain Processes”. The Philosophical Review 68(2): 141-56.

Tripodi, Paolo. 2009. Dimenticare Wittgenstein. Una vicenda della filosofia analitica. Bologna: Il Mulino. von Wright, Georg Henrik. 1951. “Deontic Logic”. Mind 60(237): 1-15.

ABSTRACTS

In this paper we are going to put forth some methodological reflections on two different investigations we conducted in the context of the DR2 research group. Such investigations were our first serious attempts at applying distant reading techniques and more in general quantitative methods to the history of philosophy. Our reflections are rather down-to-earth, and they have their roots in the context of the actual research activity, with its practical difficulties, stratagems and questions left unanswered. In this sense they do not concern lofty questions of principle, to be established a priori and with a normative attitude. A sketchy preliminary presentation of the two researches is in order as a basis for the methodological remarks.

INDEX

Keywords: Distant Reading, History of philosophy, Wittgenstein, Academic Success, Ph.D. Dissertations, Logic

AUTHORS

GUIDO BONINO University of Turin ([email protected])

PAOLO MAFFEZIOLI Universitat de Barcelon ([email protected])

PAOLO TRIPODI University of Turin ([email protected])

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Book Reviews

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Becoming a New Self: Practices of Belief in Early Modern Catholicism, Moshe Sluhovsky

Lucia Delaini

REFERENCES

Moshe Sluhovsky, Becoming a New Self: Practices of Belief in Early Modern Catholicism, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017, xi+ 215 pp. ISBN: 9780226472850, $ 45.00.

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1 Moshe Sluhovsky’s work is a direct response to Michel Foucault’s seminal studies on confession and “technologies of the self”, tracking the emergence of modern subjectivity. The book aims to reclaim a role for Catholic tradition in the formation of Modernity, thus countering the myth of a Protestant origin, which is extremely common in the literature on this topic. Moreover, this book also counters the view of Catholic contributions as solely oppressive, exemplified by Foucault’s reductio ad confessionem. Foucault, in fact, stated that confession in particular developed to tie the construction of subjects to a dialogic and hierarchical device of self-narration. The confessional exchange thus became constant, and ultimately internalized. This way, the interaction with another person led to the gradual renunciation to one’s autonomy, rather than to the unveiling and discovery of one’s truth. In this way, the confessional device constitutes a subject structured as dependent and self- surveilling, which for Foucault is the essence of modern subjectivity. Sluhovsky’s book analyzes early modern practices of self-formation deriving from the religious realm, expanding beyond confession, and adding nuance and depth to Foucault’s reconstructions.

2 Sluhovsky highlights the diversification of practices similar and complimentary to confession that emerged or were re-elaborated in the 16th and 17th centuries, especially as a derivation of Ignatius of Loyola’s instructions. Sluhovsky’s analysis and historical reconstruction, which is drawn from substantive archival research, points to various aspects that contradict or correct Foucault’s condemning judgment. In particular, the author highlights, first, how the practices completing and surrounding oral confession (examination of consciousness, spiritual exercises, general written confession) required an active participation of the practitioner. Participation in turn demanded a degree of control and assertiveness denied by Foucault’s rendition of Early Modern subjectivity. Second, these practices were, in Sluhovsky’s rendition, highly democratizing, expanding beyond the clergy to include the laity; as such, they were often opposed by pre- and post-Trent institutions. Third, the element of contemplation and the relationship between the individual and the divine was just as important as that between the devout and the confessor or spiritual guide.

3 These fundamental aspects of early modern devotional practices emerge from the analysis of a vast and varied body of work, which spans from late Medieval to 17th century documents, and several genres (books of hours, manuals for confessors, chronicles of saints…). Sluhovsky thus connects Foucault’s writing on medieval monastic experiences to his reflections on early modern discontinuities, which has been, until now, a missing link in the literature. Moreover, the author shows how,

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rather than resulting solely in the internalization of typical of post-age classique power structures, these techniques are also part of the genealogy of the responsible individual representative of the Enlightenment.

4 This reconstruction shifts Foucault’s reading by tracing the changes to medieval practices in early modernity, and by interpreting their importance. Sluhovsky does this by adding elements to the story. Sometimes these are deeply significant details, for example the insistence on the devout’s development of a relationship with God through emotional and physical labor; or the difficulties, emerging from the subtexts of devotional manuals, in conveying methods for worship through printed sources, while refraining from making the laity too autonomous. At other times, Sluhovsky urges our attention towards historical factors that have been entirely overlooked, like the importance of non-clergy and often non-male spiritual guides, or the practice of general confession. The author analyzes this technique, described and prescribed by Loyola in his Spiritual Exercises, which was hugely popular (not to mention hotly debated) between 1500 and 1600. General confession is distinguished, and relevantly so, from the oral confession studied by Foucault, in that it was written, explicitly narrative, and highly dependent on the individual’s initiative over more marginal (yet still necessary) guidance.

5 However, while fascinating and well written, this work leaves points not entirely clear to the reader. For example, the difference between the active self-subjugation at the core of these subjects’ formation, and, on the other hand, the “joint agency” one gains through the spiritual exercises remains murky. In fact, the discovery of a God “already present and active within the self” requires a kind of self-mastery. This masterful devotion could constitute a mediation between the two poles described by Foucault: Hellenistic practices of self-care, vis-a-vis the formation of religiously subjugated individuals. What separates this self-mastery from mere obedience is the oscillation, shown by Sluhovsky in his corpus, between supervised and autonomous work of narration, construction, and maintenance of the self. The author’s care for historical accuracy fruitfully blurs and adds depth to the picture drawn by Foucault’s sharp lines. This study thus adds nuance; however, the oscillation it registers is not part of an individuated procedure: it is highlighted, but not fully explained. This prevents Sluhovsky’s contribution from reclaiming a more systematic revision not only of the role of Catholicism in the path towards modernity, but also of the concept of modernity itself, in light of its Catholic origins.

6 While this hesitation is dictated by prudent and meticulous close reading, with careful accounting for historical context, it is also a consequence of JM’s methodology. The choice of corpus is rich and significant, but it focuses on manuals for spiritual direction and practices. If extended to other texts documenting devotional practices of the time and before, like for example confraternal statutes and chronicles, this analysis would reveal the deep roots of Loyola’s initiatives. The many references to Savonarola present in the book are apt: however, charismatic Dominicans were not the only ones who understood, spread and coordinated the laity along devotional paths in urban contexts. Friars all over Italy and Europe were animating confraternities working across gender, class and even nationality, with very different scopes ranging from civic to spiritual ones, often intertwining them. Sluhovsky recognizes the existence of confraternities in their discoursive constructions, but does not delve into them in any detail. This is understandable for many reasons –from the scarcity of literature on these institutions,

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to the difficulty in recuperating relevant material. Nonetheless, it would be important to establish Loyola’s mostly individual-oriented effort as preceded by these more communal ones, because many of the activities suggested, along with the people practicing them, would pertain to both experiences.

7 Moreover, in his studies of Hellenistic practices, Foucault describes multiple techniques of self-shaping that are similar to those proposed by Sluhovsky’s analysis. While the comparison with Foucault’s reading of confession is sharp and attentive, these other techniques (journaling, examination of consciousness, etc) fall away. If they had been more systematically outlined, the relationship between Hellenistic and Catholic practices would offer poignant interpretative solutions to the reader and a fitting completion to the confessional enterprise. Hellenistic journaling and general confession, for instance, present important common traits (the individual and self- narrative character), but they also differ in key aspects (the breadth and frequency of the practice; the ultimate scope). By continuing his work with a more complete analysis of Early Modern self-shaping devices, Sluhovsky would facilitate greatly the conversation with and about Foucauldian theories on this topic. The publication, in 2018, of Les Aveux de la Chair, the posthumous 4th volume of , clarified Foucault’s interest in, and verdict on, Catholic practices. While his works from the ‘80s seem to reject these last ones and turn to , and especially Rome, as virtuous examples, Les Aveux de la Chair requires that this impression be re-evaluated. Early Christian practices are here treated in detail and often shown in their liberating, sometimes subversive value. Monasticism then, rather than Christianism itself, is individuated as generative of disciplinary societies, invalidating previous techniques of “care”, and shaping, of the self. However, the monastic experience is deeply transformed in the centuries leading to the Age Classique: Sluhovsky’s book shows a central way in which monastic techniques and practices were recuperated and modified. By connecting them with their early Christian and Hellenistic predecessors, the scholarly community could start mapping the evolution of Western techniques of self-shaping with more precision than Foucault’s illuminating, but necessarily limited, outlines. In doing so, as Sluhovsky’s book already shows, it would be possible to understand the hidden dynamics and potentials of apparently oppressive systemic devices. But it would also be possible to recognize how the necessities of distinct religious communities translated into differentiated evolutions of Western thought, power production, and subjectivities.

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Journal of Interdisciplinary History of Ideas, 16 | 2019