Abstract
Francis Bacon (1561-1626) maintained a lifelong interest in the institutional implementation of experimental science. What changed over the years were the rhetorical strategies employed to give this project legitimacy. I systematize those changes by dividing Bacon's works into three groups according to three criteria: what rite of officialization is enacted in each text (e.g., conversion, fatherly generation, royal delegation); who the inscribed addressee is (e.g., an imagined audience of sympathetic disciples, the monarch, posterity); and what the status is of the invoked philosophical, religious, and political authorities. In this manner, I isolate three distinct versions of Bacon's rhetoric of legitimation.
Highlights
Francis Bacon (1561-1626) maintained a lifelong interest in the institutional implementation of experimental science
The one work in which Bacon outlines step by step the foundational moments that constitute a path is the New Atlantis (1623), an uncharacteristic Renaissance utopia precisely because an equal amount of attention is given to the articulation of those steps in a temporal sequence and to a description of the main features of the society in question
Pierre Bourdieu, whose insights into the process of symbolic production in rigidly hierarchized political systems have strongly influenced my thinking on institutions, acknowledges as much when he writes that "an act of institution ... represents a form of officialization and legitimation" (Language and Symbolic Power 173)
Summary
Before the practices that characterize anew society become institutionalized, they must acquire sufficient legitimacy by appealing to interest groups that articúlate such practices in their discourse as an aspiration of their own or as an accepted deviation. Bensalem provides an inverted reflection for the England Bacon aspired to reform: a nation where each Christian form of observance (Protestant, Catholic, and Puritan) still functioned in addition as a rite of varying social and political legitimation; where the fatherly first Stuart King dreamed of carrying out his own fantasy of a personal rule; where non-Aristotelian philosophy was rendered suspect due to its association with atomism, religious sorcery, and even low drudgery; and where types of experimentally based science were often not reconciled with the respective dogmas of "divines," "politiques," and "learned men themselves" (Ofthe Advancement [Works 6.91]).. It denotes the emancipation of human life from the tyranny of physical affliction. For Bacon, humankind has always enjoyed the "sovereignty of all inferior creatures," and so any kind of knowledge that contributes to increasing the human "power and dominión" over nature is legitímate so long as it is immediately "referred to use and action" rather than "contemplation" {Valerias Terminas [Works 6.28-29]). This dominión goes as far back as Moses and Solomon, the two Oíd Testament champions of material progress, both of whom play a crucial part in the New Atlantis. As Blumenberg writes, in Bacon "a concept of human happiness appeared that separated theory from existential fulfillment by reducing the necessary knowledge to the amount fixed by the requirements of domination over natural reality" (239).
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