McEvoy J.G. The Historiography Of The Chemical Revolution: Patterns Of Interpretation In The History Of Science

London: Routledge, 2010. — 352 p. — ISBN10: 1848930305; ISBN13: 978-1848930308The chapters alternate (roughly) between quite general treatments of the development of the historiography of science over the last fifty to sixty years and examination of what that development has meant for writing about the much contested ‘Chemical Revolution’. In a final chapter McEvoy develops the outlines of his own historiographical approach, which tries to avoid what he sees as the weaknesses of prior traditions and to incorporate their strengths. Given this structure, readers less expert in eighteenth-century chemical history and historiography could, in my view, profitably read alternate chapters and gain many sophisticated insights into the changes and continuities involved in the three main phases of historiography that McEvoy identifies in post-war history of science.When it comes to McEvoy’s own historiography of the Chemical Revolution his basic strategy is to fold into the one complex, multi-level model many of the approaches and tendencies now often seen as mutually exclusive. Crucially, though, he seeks to do this in a way that incorporates a new grand narrative of the historical materialist type, which he labels ‘robust contextualism’. Economic transformation generating civil society produces the dominant philosophical structure of the Enlightenment, a movement ‘with a complex identity that shaped, but did not determine, the conjunctural unity of ontological, epistemological, linguistic, methodological, empirical, theoretical, instrumental and institutional factors or levels that constituted the Chemical Revolution’. McEvoy’s exemplification of this approach deals with the figures of Priestley and Lavoisier at all these levels, showing how their differences represented ‘divergent articulations of their shared Enlightenment heritage’ . He acknowledges that this is an inadequate and incomplete demonstration of the approach that he advocates. Its full realisation lies in the future and will have to be the work of many hands. Whether one identifies or not with McEvoy’s elevation of history (as distinct from philosophy or sociology) as the basis for a new grand narrative, he is to be loudly applauded for insisting that the many scattered gems concerning the development of chemistry-as-practice, fashioned by the labours of the current generation of historians of eighteenth-century chemistry, can be brought together into a narrative that reconnects with the history of Enlightenment and of Capitalism. He encourages us to trust that we can think big but at the same time be assured that this need not be reductively or at the expense of sophisticated and nuanced interpretation.Introduction: The Philosophical and Historiographical TerrainPositivism, Whiggism and the Chemical Revolution
Postpositivism and the History of Science
Postpositivist Interpretations of the Chemical Revolution
From Modernism to Postmodernism: Changing Philosophical Images of Science
The Sociology of Scientifi c Knowledge and the History of Science
Postmodernist and Sociological Interpretations of the Chemical Revolution
The Chemical Revolution as History