Abstract
The institutionalization of natural knowledge in the form of a scientific society may be interpreted in several ways. If we wish to view science as something apart, unchanging in its intellectual nature, we may regard the scientific enterprise as presenting to the sustaining social system a number of absolute and necessary organizational demands: for example, scientific activity requires acceptance as an important social activity valued for its own sake, that is, it requires autonomy; it is separate from other forms of enquiry and requires distinct institutional modes; it is public knowledge and requires a public, universalistic forum; it is productive of constant change and requires of the sustaining social system a flexibility in adapting to change. Support for such an interpretation may be found in the rise of modern science in seventeenth-century England, France, and Italy and in the accompanying rise of specifically scientific societies. Thus, the founding of the Royal Society of London may be interpreted as the organizational embodiment of immanent demands arising from scientific activity—the cashing of a blank cheque payable to science written on society's current account.
Highlights
STEVEN SHAPIN political, and cultural forces as the institutions that sustained the practitioners of belles-lettres, medicine, antiquarian studies, or law
The fact of autonomy, the desire for autonomy, and, especially, the immanent necessity of separateness is extremely difficult to document in the history of a number of British scientific societies
The founding of the Royal Society of Edinburgh was the result, not of necessary organizational demands of science, but of the particular position that scientific culture came to occupy in the local context
Summary
THE institutionalization of natural knowledge in the form of a scientific society may be interpreted in several ways. I shall be examining the origins of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in the context of eighteenth-century Edinburgh society and culture and giving particular attention to the role of proprietary concerns, patronage, and local politics in shaping the institutional patterns of natural knowledge. As the winter capital of the Scottish landed classes, the national powerwielding elite flocked to Edinburgh, attracted for a variety of reasons—to supervise the education of their sons at the non-residential University, to attend to legal business at the Court of Session, to participate in the annual sittings of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, and, by the middle of the eighteenth century, to associate themselves with the sparkling Enlightenment society of David Hume, Adam Smith, Lord Kames, Joseph Black, James Hutton, and others in the myriad literary and social clubs of the metropolis.. The consequences of such a social reference for Edinburgh science were far-reaching
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