The Social History of Skepticism: Experience and Doubt in Early Modern Culture.

The Social History of Skepticism: Experience and Doubt in Early Modern Culture. By Brendan Dooley (Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. viii plus 213 pp. $39.95).

Although its title rightly suggests a broad and vast inquiry across a wide sweep of social, cultural, and intellectual history, this book has a surprisingly tight focus. Dooley's central question is a very basic one: How and why did a widespread mentality of political skepticism emerge in the seventeenth century? How did "a culture of the illicit and a stance of defiance" produce what Dooley calls "a subversive undercurrent beneath the semiotics of absolutism (p. 44)"? He constructs the answers to these questions by combining in interesting ways the history of journalism, the history of publishing, and the history of history. The result is an absorbing analysis of texts and writers that many readers of this journal are likely to associate primarily with intellectual history or even philosophy. One of Dooley's principal achievements, in fact, is to make clear how artificial and unhelpful many of these boundaries really are, as this really is a social history of skepticism in the broadest possible terms.

Dooely focuses on two principal genres of information: (1) newsletters or broadsheets, circulating manuscripts that eventually were joined by newspapers in the seventeenth century, and (2) commissioned histories from both local and courtly patrons, who hired historical writers to construct narratives that generally put their patrons in the best possible light. Concerning the former, Dooley is less interested in whether the news contained in these broadsides was accurate or really how many people actually read them (though he argues convincingly that they were read by a large number of people). He is much more concerned with the impression these texts made on those in power, given that so many of these newsletters stood in open defiance of traditional political authority. Although subscription lists do not survive for most of these, Dooley makes clear that they reached a broad readership and that they were powerful influences on public opinion. When authorities began commissioning histories to combat this skep ticism, political news became a commodity. The result was a growing skepticism about traditional modes of power as well as means of communication. As political histories were used in such obviously partisan ways in this marketplace of ideas, a growing doubt also emerged over the possibility of ever gaining any historical knowledge at all. With writers as vendors of ideas and readers as critical consumers, a significant transformation occurred according to Dooley, that transformed the way people perceived and understood news of the world in which they lived. By the late seventeenth century and early eighteenth century critics such as Pierre Bayle and Giambattista Vico both argued against as well as attempted to remedy what they viewed as the politicization of truth.

All of this brings Dooley squarely into the debate over Habermas's idea of the public sphere (see Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. T. Burger and F. Lawrence. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT University Press, 1989). What he might have underscored more sharply than he does, however, is the fact that this public sphere emerged long before the mid-eighteenth century, and in fact, even predated the newspaper and printed broadsheet. One of the strengths of Dooley's book is its demonstration that the unpublished handwritten newsletters circulated to produce the same kind of public debate and political excoriation as the eighteenth-century British pamphlets that Habermas describes. He is also right to wonder, as did Vico, whether the public sphere was too important to be left to its own self-regulation. He notes that in seventeenth-century Italy the intellectual community occasionally felt the need to introduce a new discourse to help r egulate the public sphere in times of necessity. "We may well wonder," Dooley muses, "when scholarship becomes politicized and entrepreneurialism once again enters the public sphere disguised as activism for a cause, bringing in its wake a relativization of truth and a new skepticism, whether intellectuals in our own time will [be] up to the task (p. 154)." Indeed.

In summary, this is an intelligent and useful book. While its focus is squarely on early modem Italy and the author is clearly partial to the history of ideas, there are some very broad issues here that merit attention from social and cultural historians. That such a wider conversation can be fruitful is one of the strengths of this book.