The self-fashioning of French Newtonianism

Abstract

J. B. Shank has written a major cultural history of Newtonianism in the French Enlightenment—or rather a study of how Newtonianism was constructed to serve the purposes of the ‘‘self-fashioning’’ of various key figures in the French Enlightenment. As straight history of ideas, it can be read as providing a French counterpart to works such as John Gascoigne’s masterful (1989) study of science and religion at Cambridge, or as a more detailed, more culturally and rhetorically sophisticated book-length extension of analyses such as Robert Schofield’s ‘‘taxonomy of eighteenth-century Newtonianisms’’ (Schofield 1978). But Shank is also interested in a different approach, a different form of analysis, which in fact challenges ‘‘the classic narrative produced by the Enlightenment philosophes’’ (21). He uses lots of language that harks back to the heyday of theory in the humanities— the book is ‘‘a critical genealogy of beginnings,’’ a ‘‘postmodern,’’ ‘‘postEnlightenment’’ history of an event—but in fact very little of this really has an impact on the detailed analyses produced over the next four hundred and fifty pages. Brunet’s (1931) book on the introduction of Newton’s theories into France in the early eighteenth century, and Koyre who refers to it approvingly, are targeted by Shank for their uncritical acceptance and reproduction of the philosophes’ narrative of the heroic Newton—a reproduction of ‘‘Enlightenment modernity itself,’’ as well as of the canonical narrative of the Scientific Revolution, which rests on the figure of Newton as its ‘‘climatic, synthetic hero.’’ Indeed, Shank calls his book a ‘‘postmodern and post-Enlightenment history of a crucial moment in the beginning of Enlightenment modernity,’’ which is precisely ‘‘the moment when Newtonian science became linked to it as its genetic code and avatar’’ (15). Shank wants to