16 - Chemistry

Summary

Writing in 1855, of the period now known as the Enlightenment, the Scottish Whig Henry Brougham commented that “the science of chemistry [was] almost entirely…the growth of this remarkable era.” One hundred years later, the British historian Herbert Butterfield, renowned for his critique of the Whig interpretation of history, issued a much more negative judgment of the chemistry of the Enlightenment. In his Origins of Modern Science (1949), Butterfield notoriously relegated eighteenth-century chemistry to a kind of limbo, where it was awaiting its “postponed scientific revolution,” which arrived only in the last two decades of the century with the work of Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier (1743–1794). Enlightenment chemistry had been “immature,” hindered by philosophical confusions and the absence of an adequate intellectual framework. The difference of opinion between Brougham and Butterfield has an intriguing connection with their divergent political outlooks. Whereas the Whig writer saw a lengthy period of gradual progress, culminating in Lavoisier’s individual accomplishments, the anti-Whig historian saw the French chemist as the first person with true insight into the fundamental ideas of the science, a beacon in an otherwise dark landscape of confusion and error.

The perspectives of Whiggism and anti-Whiggism have continued to dominate much of the historical writing on the sciences of the eighteenth century, not least chemistry. Whiggish historians have looked to catalog specific and permanent factual discoveries – steadily accumulating positive knowledge – such as findings of new gases, mineral species, and salts. Butterfield’s anti-Whiggism reflected the approach of Alexandre Koyré and, before him, the tradition of philosophical history derived from Immanuel Kant, which searched for organizing intellectual schemes, worldviews, Weltanschauungen, or paradigms.