Objectivity in the Making: Francis Bacon and the Politics of Inquiry.

Julie Robin Solomon. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998. 321 pp. $49.95. ISBN: 0-8018-5675-2.

Perez Zagorin has written a sympathetic, reliable, and highly readable introduction to Bacon's thought and intellectual achievements, entitled simply Francis Bacon. It covers the whole range of Bacon's versatile thinking. The main body of the book consists of four chapters, which are evenly divided between Bacon's natural philosophy and civil philosophy. In the former, Zagorin treats Bacon's criticism of the earlier philosophical tradition, his partial debt to and partial repudiation of the occult sciences, his search for a new inductive method, his classification of knowledge and the relationship between science and religion. In the two later chapters, Zagorin offers his accounts of Bacon's moral and political philosophy as well as of rhetoric, law, and history.

Above all, Zagorin rightly emphasizes Bacon's pivotal role in the birth of modern science: "Pervading The Great Instauration and The New Organon is a very marked consciousness of innovation and modernity" (76). Bacon made a heroic attempt to reconstruct natural philosophy in such a way that new knowledge could be found and natural philosophy could be transformed into an operative science, whose ultimate aim was the improvements and benefits in the conditions of human life. Although Bacon fully understood that a new science could have momentous consequences for society, it did not occur to him, as Zagorin points out towards the end of his book, that a dynamic science might disrupt the traditional society and polity. But it would be highly anachronistic, as Zagorin also notes, to indict Bacon for all the problems of modernity.

In addition to this overall picture, the book is full of smaller fine points. For instance, Zagorin argues that far from seeing the ancient myths carrying a secret message, Bacon used the ancient fables in De sapientia veterum (The Wisdom of the Ancients) "as an ingenious literary exercise in which, by adopting the view that the ancient myths were profound allegories, he sought to expound and recommend his own philosophy" (70). Zagorin does not, however, note that in this Bacon was merely following the rules of classical rhetoric. In his Rhetorics, for instance, Aristotle recommends the use of fables precisely in this way.

The usefulness of the book as an introduction to Bacon's philosophy is enhanced by Zagorin's extensive commentary on earlier Bacon scholarship, although a separate bibliography would have made the reader's task slightly easier. The organisation of the volume, however, is not entirely successful. First, the introduction is a short, conventional biography. But it concentrates almost exclusively on Bacons search for advancement, which is thus cut off from the wider context of Bacon's political and philosophical career, giving an overtly cynical view of Bacon's life.

Second, Zagorin has organised the book almost completely on a writing-by-writing basis. As a consequence, the book sometimes gives not much more than summaries of Bacon's particular writings, with little commentaries attached to them. In other words, the contextualization of Bacons writings is sometimes unfortunately thin. This is most obvious in the case of Bacon's political philosophy, where almost no attempt is made to relate Bacon's writings and arguments to their meaningful intellectual and political context. We are merely offered short synopses of Bacon's political writings.

All in all, however, Zagorin's book is amongst the best introductions to Bacon's philosophy, making it plain why Bacons writings belong to the key works of the modern western philosophical tradition.

In his balanced account of Bacons natural philosophy, Zagorin gives short shrift to two particular claims: that Bacons philosophy was indebted to Giordano Bruno's influence and that it was by and large based on a political ideology. Both these claims, however, underlay Julie Robin Solomon's Objective in the Making: Francis Bacon and the Politics of Inquiry. Solomon points out at the outset that her book does not belong to the ordinary class of Bacon scholarship. Rather, her aim is a grander one - to contribute to "the process of resurrecting the history or histories of the idea(s) of objectivity," and "to consider why, given the apparently successful undermining of objectivity as a norm of scientific knowledge, any person, institution, or culture would have constructed the idea of scientific objectivity in the first place" (xi). The basic premise is that "the human capacity to engage in self-distancing is only realized through interpersonal intercourse within a particular sociohistorical context" (xi). That is to say, the advocacy of objectivity is caused and shaped by a particular intellectual and social context. Bacon has been chosen as a case study because "his discourse of objectivity" reveals these contexts so well.

The book is based on a wide range of early modern and modern (both historical and theoretical) material. It contains many interesting discussions and pertinent observations. The first chapter discusses the various histories of objectivity and emphasis, albeit too briefly, Bacon's seminal position in any serious attempt to write one. Having done this, Solomon moves to her main theme, to chart the intellectual and social background of Bacon's notion of objectivity, and most of the book is concerned with this charting.

The central contention of the book is that in order to understand Bacon's idea of objectivity, and thus histories of the ideas of objectivity, one has to realize that Baconian science was constructed for royalist purposes and that it shares this aim with commerce. Bacon is said to have "modeled his natural philosophy upon, commercial and technological practices, norms, and behaviors" (10-11). This claim is repeated several times and its exposition takes up most of the book. Yet, it is not entirely clear what form of connection Solomon claims there was between science, royalism and commerce. Sometimes the link is said to be metaphorical or rhetorical (58, 60, 62, 72, 105), sometimes ideological (24-25, 60), and sometimes social (10-11, 31). Bacon's personal links to the world of commerce are several times emphasized. Mercantilist policies were governmental strategies of control, so was, according to Solomon, Baconian science; hence, mercantilism lies behind Baconian science in general and behind its notion of objectivity in particular.

In whatever form it is presented, there are several problems with this interpretation. There is strikingly little evidence in Bacon's writings to suggest that Baconian science was constructed to serve royalist purposes, let alone that it was a mercantilist enterprise. Of course, Bacon emphasised the political support for the advancement of learning and was seeking for patronage, and in Jacobean England this could only come from the king or the court. Yet, Bacon never linked his reform of knowledge with any particular political system or with the interests of the state. To connect science with a particular state is in fact directly against what Bacon said throughout his life. The benefits of science were always said to be shared by the whole humankind. Whereas mercantilism was a strictly national enterprise, Baconian science discarded all political boundaries. Bacon hoped for closer cooperation between European universities.

Solomon's notion of disinterestedness is also problematic. When a seventeenth-century author declared that "every private man is a servant to the Common Wealth" (82), rather than stating a novel principle of disinterestedness, he was merely subscribing to a time-honoured political notion. Equally problematic is her discussion of the words real and royal. She proclaims that Roger Maynwaring's - a royal chaplain - correlation of merchandise with land implied expanding royal prerogative. Perhaps. But there was nothing necessarily royalist in the correlation. Thomas Hedley made exactly the same point in 1610 in order to argue against the king's policies.

There are several smaller inaccuracies. Solomon relies on Spedding's misleading translation of the aphorism 124 of the first book of the Novurn organurn, which Paolo Rossi corrected for the first time more than thirty years ago. Stefano Guazzo has become variously Stephen or Steven Guazzo, Bacon's "Of the True Greatness of the Kingdom of Britain," has become "Of the Kingdom of Britain," and Roger Ascham has been renamed as John Ascham.

University of Helsinki