Volume 46, Number 17 · November 4, 1999
The Advancement of Francis Bacon
By Quentin Skinner
Philosophical Studies c.1611-c.1619
by Francis Bacon, edited by Graham Rees
Clarendon Press/Oxford University Press, 503 pp., $140.00
Hostage to Fortune: The Troubled Life of Francis Bacon
by Lisa Jardine, by Alan Stewart
Hill and Wang, 637 pp., $35.00
Francis Bacon: The History of a Character Assassination
by Nieves Mathews
Yale University Press, 592 pp., $52.00
Francis Bacon: History, Politics and Science, 1561-1626
by B.H.G. Wormald
Cambridge University Press, 421 pp., $74.95
Francis Bacon
by Perez Zagorin
Princeton University Press, 286 pp., $35.00
Francis Bacon has always been given a leading part to play in the grand narratives about the origins of modern thought. The philosophers of the Enlightenment made him a hero of their story about the triumph of reason over superstition and ignorance. Immanuel Kant, for example, hails him in the preface to The Critique of Pure Reason as one of the revolutionary thinkers who first enabled the study of nature 'to enter upon the highway of science.' More recently, however, Bacon has been recast in the role of arch villain. Both Heidegger and the critical theorists of the Frankfurt School have held him responsible more than anyone for the catastrophic error of identifying science with technology. As Horkheimer and Adorno put it in their Dialectic of Enlightenment, Bacon's confusion has condemned us to living in a mechanized world in which nature has been made an object of domination and 'no obstacles' have been left to 'compliance with the world's rulers' and 'the enslavement of men.'
Review, 4061 words
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