Mannered science and political identity

Abstract

Joe Bord presents this short, but important, book as a contribution to political history rather than to the history of science. In a technical sense he is right to do so since his explanandum is the identity and persona of the Whig Statesman, and his chief characters’ concern with, and occasional participation in, science is part of the explanans. Nevertheless Science and Whig Manners will interest and greatly profit any reader with an interest in the social and political history of science in Britain in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Margaret Jacob, Jim Jacob, Steven Shapin, Larry Stewart and others, have investigated heady brews of Whig politics and science in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in which natural philosophy and Whig political objectives and beliefs were directly connected. The characters from a later period with whom Bord deals (the likes of Shelburne, Althorp, the Bedfords, Fitzwilliam, Brougham) are known as supporters of science. They and lesser Whigs populated the presidencies and vice-presidencies of numerous scientific institutions in the early nineteenth century. London University, the Society for Diffusion of Useful Knowledge and the Mechanics’ Institute movement all drew on their energy and largesse. They were patrons of science. Though by no means rejecting these accounts, Bord distils a different, finer drop—the place of science in the cultivation of Whig identity. As he describes it, this scientific cultivation is, in a sense, quite remote. In Bord’s account a concern with natural science had a place in the spectrum of Whig manners (alongside racing, gambling, dining and literature). Manners, in their turn, are seen as one of the more tenuous, neglected, but important vehicles for the cultivation of political identity. The sceptic might expect to find science implicated in such cultivation only in homeopathic doses. But arguably they might find in Bord’s approach a valuable supplement to cruder historiographies in scientific as well as