Francis Bacon: History, Politics and Science, 1561-1626.

B.H.G. Wormald's new study completes a project the author implied in the 1976 preface to his much respected study of Clarendon. There he suggested that two figures of the seventeenth century were especially important for the constitutional attitudes within England. The revolution of the seventeenth century was, he asserted, "the transition from a Baconian to a Clarendonian constitution - Bacon and Clarendon, both men of the law and of letters, readers and writers of histories for instruction, parliament-men and counsellors of Kings." With this new publication, Wormald presents the fruit of his long consideration of the intertwined roles and significance of history, politics, and epistemology in seventeenth-century England.

Wormald argues at the outset that concentration on Bacon's contributions to scientific methodology, though without a doubt important on their own, often ignore a wider Baconian project. This project the author calls Bacon's "grand strategy" and compares it with the Great Instauration. This study does not, however, downgrade the importance of Baconian science. Rather, it argues that Bacon had two crucial programs, "Know Thyself and know the universe of nature" (both of which have remarkably similar epistemological methodologies), were active means of achieving improvement in the social, political, and natural realms, and must be taken together to gain a fuller understanding of Francis Bacon.

The key to these Baconian programs was history. Bacon announced that "knowledges are as pyramides whereof history is the basis." Wormald makes much of this claim. The problem for scholars, however, has not only been the explication of Bacon's ideas of knowledge, regarding which there has of course been much success, but also in explicating Bacon's ideas of history. The author makes significant contributions to this difficult problem, as he presents a persuasive explanation of the complex Baconian notion of "Civil History." Moreover, Wormald argues that Bacon's goal for this civil history was ultimately to produce not only a large body of experiential knowledge, much like the basis for his natural history, but also to produce "middle axioms," or maxims, by which men might better their lot in life. In one chapter, Wormald focuses on Bacon's The History of the Reign of King Henry the Seventh as Bacon's contribution to this civil history project.

Bacon's insistence on behavior, whether that of humanity or of the natural world, is also a major consideration of this study. Throughout the work, but especially in a series of chapters entitled "Morality and Policy," the author argues that Bacon emancipated policy, which for him was itself a science, from conventional considerations of morality. The power and greatness that Bacon sought to achieve through his civil program of "Know Thyself" was to be linked with moral conduct, and this in turn was linked to divinity. "Cultivation of knowledge, religious, moral, civil, natural," was for Bacon, "a religious and moral exercise" (262).

Wormald is conscious to present the major influences on Bacon, or "markers," throughout this work, but he also considers these specifically in the last two chapters. These markers include Aristotle, Pyrrhonian skeptics, and the Scriptures, none of which would be at all surprising to the reader. But they also include a canon of secular civil histories, Machiavelli's Discorsi, and the English Common Law. These last, though certainly well known as important to Bacon's thought, take on a new importance in the light of Wormald's analysis.

The reader must beware of several weaknesses regarding this otherwise thought-provoking work. Its complex subject is accompanied by a somewhat laborious prose style that often makes the direction of argument rather hard to follow. Moreover, it is occasionally repetitive to little effect. Furthermore, the author makes no explicit attempt to integrate his work into recent historiographical trends, though connections can often be made by the perceptive reader. This lack is further exacerbated by the absence of even a general bibliography. Nevertheless, this study represents a fresh look at Francis Bacon. Its argument possesses strength and persuasiveness based on a close examination of primary sources. It is a significant contribution.

GEORGE OUWENDIJK Graduate Center, the City University of New York