Leviathan and the Air-Pump examines the conflicts over the value and
propriety of experimental methods between two major seventeenth-century
thinkers: Thomas Hobbes, author of the political treatise Leviathan and
vehement critic of systematic experimentation in natural philosophy, and
Robert Boyle, mechanical philosopher and owner of the newly invented
air-pump. The issues at stake in their disputes ranged from the physical
integrity of the air-pump to the intellectual integrity of the knowledge
it might yield. Both Boyle and Hobbes were looking for ways of
establishing knowledge that did not decay into ad hominem attacks and
political division. Boyle proposed the experiment as cure. He argued
that facts should be manufactured by machines like the air-pump so that
gentlemen could witness the experiments and produce knowledge that
everyone agreed on. Hobbes, by contrast, looked for natural law and
viewed experiments as the artificial, unreliable products of an
exclusive guild.
The new approaches taken in Leviathan and the Air-Pump have been
enormously influential on historical studies of science. Shapin and
Schaffer found a moment of scientific revolution and showed how key
scientific givens--facts, interpretations, experiment, truth--were
fundamental to a new political order. Shapin and Schaffer were also
innovative in their ethnographic approach. Attempting to understand the
work habits, rituals, and social structures of a remote, unfamiliar
group, they argued that politics were tied up in what scientists did,
rather than what they said. Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer use the
confrontation between Hobbes and Boyle as a way of understanding what
was at stake in the early history of scientific experimentation. They
describe the protagonists' divergent views of natural knowledge, and
situate the Hobbes-Boyle disputes within contemporary debates over the
role of intellectuals in public life and the problems of social order
and assent in Restoration England. In a new introduction, the authors
describe how science and its social context were understood when this
book was first published, and how the study of the history of science
has changed since then.
