Volume 52, Number 9 · May 26, 2005
The Scientific Takeover
By P.N. Furbank
Science and Polity in France: The Revolutionary and Napoleonic Years
by Charles Coulston Gillispie
Princeton University Press, 751 pp., $80.00
A question is bound to arise how a scientifically ignorant person, like the present writer, can presume to review Charles Gillispie's remarkable book (itself the continuation and completion of his earlier Science and Polity in France at the End of the Old Regime, published back in 1980). Of course, Gillispie's is a work not of science but of history, the history of science, and to some extent of political history. It is concerned with the changing shape of what the state seeks from scientists and gives them in return, and the way in which, in response to this, science organizes itself, both as a profession and as a discipline. Gillispie's example is France just before and after the French Revolution—and for a good reason, for during this period (which spans two generations) French scientists were well ahead of all their rivals.
Review, 3171 words
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