The centre from the periphery: appropriating scientific ideas during the eighteenth century Kostas Gavroglu To cite this version: Kostas Gavroglu. The centre from the periphery: appropriating scientific ideas during the eighteenth century. Revue de la Maison Française d’Oxford, Maison Française d’Oxford, 2003, Centre and pe- riphery revisited. The structures of European science, 1750-1914, 1 (2), pp.11-32. hal-01896022 HAL Id: hal-01896022 https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01896022 Submitted on 19 Oct 2018 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. THE CENTRE FROM THE PERIPHERY: APPROPRIATING SCIENTIFIC IDEAS DURING THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY Kostas Gavroglu eception or transmission studies are not something new. There have been studies discussing the diffusion of the R new ideas about nature in England, Scotland, France, the Low Countries and Germany during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Nevertheless, respective works in languages other than the local languages for the Balkans, the Ottoman Empire, the Central European countries, the Baltic countries, Portugal, but also Spain have been very few and written mostly from a philological point of view.1 The lack of studies of any subject does not, of course, constitute by itself a legitimate reason for starting to work on it. But discussing the issues related to the introduction of the new scientific ideas from the point of view of their appropriation rather than their transfer from what has been usually called the centre, makes it possible to raise many interesting historical questions that warrant an analytical discussion. Although a simple bipolar distinction between centre and periphery is useful for broadly delineating the situation, it is incapable of capturing many salient details. There are first of all many centres and many peripheries. Moreover, and depending on the subject one is discussing, a place may be both centre and periphery. A centre may, over time, change into a periphery, and vice-versa. And a single country may contain both centres and peripheries, thereby making purely national distinctions of dubious use. Nevertheless, in this article I shall use the term centre- periphery to denote the dynamics of the transmission and appropriation of new scientific ideas from the region broadly defined by the British Isles, France, Switzerland, Germany and the Low Countries to the rest of Europe during the eighteenth century. TRANSMISSION VERSUS APPROPRIATION The concept of the “transfer” of ideas, used extensively by those who have discussed these issues, is found to be ultimately inadequate in contextualizing the dissemination of the new sciences in the societies of the European periphery. I shall argue that “appropriation” can be a more 1 Kostas GAVROGLU (ed.), The Sciences in the European Periphery during the Enlightenment. Archimedes, vol. 2 [series editor Jed Buchwald], Dordrecht, Kluwer, 1999. 11 Revue de la Maison française d'Oxford, vol. I, n° 2, 2003 coherent and fruitful analytical instrument. Appropriation directs attention to the measures devised within the appropriating culture to shape the new ideas in the context of the local traditions that form the framework of local constraints – political and ideological as well as intellectual. To examine such issues requires discussing the ways in which ideas that originate in a specific cultural and historical setting are introduced into a different milieu with its own intellectual traditions and political and educational institutions. A historiography based on the concept of transfer can easily degenerate into an algorithm for keeping tabs on what is and what is not “successfully” transmitted. A historiography built around the concept of appropriation is more nearly comparable to the procedures of cultural history; acceptance or rejection, reception or opposition are intrinsically cultural processes. Such an approach also permits the newly introduced scientific ideas to be treated not as the sum total of discrete units of knowledge but as a network of interconnected concepts. The practical outcome of a historiography based on the notion of appropriation is that we can articulate the particularities of a discourse that is developed and eventually adopted within the appropriating culture. Undoubtedly the concept of the transmission of ideas is of some use to the historian. This, however, is apparent only when the transmission is used for certain specific cases within a wider context of the appropriation of multiple cultural traditions during a specified period of a society’s history. In these instances the intellectual and institutional framework for the reception of new ideas is, to a large extent, conditioned by the cultural and religious traditions of the specific society. But one must always recognize that ideas are not simply transferred as if they were material commodities. They are always transformed in unexpected and sometimes startling ways as they are appropriated within the multiple cultural traditions of a specific society during a particular period of its history. Indeed, a major challenge for historians of science who examine processes of appropriation across boundaries is precisely to transcend the merely geographical reference and to understand the character of what one might call the receiving culture. Adopting the notion of appropriation directs attention to the production of a distinctive scientific discourse through the reception of the new scientific ideas. This is a crucial point, and misconceptions abound. Many historians assume that the scholars of the periphery introduce new scientific ideas having already adopted the same constitutive characteristics of the new discourse as those adopted by the scholars at the centre. Alternatively, one has to take the view that the whole enterprise of appropriating new ideas during the eighteenth century could only be achieved through the formation of a new discourse as the optimum way of 12 The Centre from the Periphery overcoming the local constraints. There is, indeed, very little point in directing our attention to drawing up lists of what has been successfully transmitted. Instead, what should be systematically studied are the metamorphoses the new ideas go through the initial stages and the kinds of attempts by the “local” scholars to incorporate them within existing traditions. For it appears that at the initial stages of the attempts to introduce new ideas, the respective groups of scholars can choose among many alternatives for developing an appropriate discourse. One of the main tasks in such an approach is to understand the dynamics and the conditions under which the creation of legitimizing spaces for new ideas becomes possible. The problem is relatively simple in those cases where we are confronted with well discerned and clearly defined spaces such as universities and academies. But in many instances in the countries of the periphery it is impossible to find such spaces. So where are we to direct our attention to find these legitimizing spaces? How are we to understand the many cases of lay people who had written similar works and never had the opportunity of communicating them through the standard institutional settings? Although, for example, travel itineraries, the programmes of publishers, and lists of subscribers at the end of books, may provide some alternative indications, part of the task of understanding the creation of legitimizing spaces for the new ideas is to comprehend the nature and features of resistance to the new ideas. Therefore understanding the creation of legitimizing spaces for new ideas cannot be achieved independently of understanding the ways resistance is expressed against these new ideas. Disputes between scholars reflect some aspects of such resistance, and they have also been a particularly advantageous method for understanding the dynamics of legitimizing spaces. Yet somehow, in the more standard accounts, disputes presuppose an audience with an inclination, or at least a potential interest, to engage in the issues involved in the dispute. Audiences have always been a necessary dimension for a discussion of disputes, and it has quite often been the case that those who are directly involved in a dispute are preoccupied almost exclusively with the audience rather than with their adversaries. But what about when there are public disputes and an audience that is on the whole totally ignorant of the issues involved while being supportive of the overall agenda of particular scholars? Under such circumstances can our studies concentrate on understanding the cognitive content of disputes? My answer is yes. It is possible to deal with the cognitive content, but only if we stop looking at disputes as intricate rituals and analyse them instead as alternative educational processes. Personal agendas, professional strategies, institutional flexibilities and social 13 Revue de la Maison française d'Oxford, vol. I, n° 2, 2003 demands form different settings for the formation of the multifarious spaces of appropriation