Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-p2v8j Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-06-08T16:08:35.821Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

The history of measurement and the engineers of space

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 January 2009

Andrew Barry
Affiliation:
Department of Sociology, Goldsmiths' College, London SE14 6NW.

Extract

For the social theorists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, measurement, quantification and calculation were of particular social and political significance. Karl Marx, in Capital, based his critique of classical political economy on an analysis of the quantification of labour as a commodity. Max Weber, in Economy and Society, emphasized the importance of rational calculation in the conduct of modern bureaucratic organizations. And in his major work, The Philosophy of Money, Georg Simmel highlighted what he called ‘the calculating character of modern times'.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © British Society for the History of Science 1993

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

My thanks to an anonymous referee and to Georgina Born and Jim Secord for helpful comments made on an earlier version of this paper.

1 Simmel, G., The Philosophy of Money (tr. Bottomore, T. and Frisby, D.), London, 1990, 443.Google Scholar

2 Shapin, S.History of science and its sociological reconstructions’, History of Science (1982), 20, 157211.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 See Hessen, B. ‘The social and economic roots of Newton's Principia’ in Bukharin, N. et al. (eds.) Science at the Crossroads, London, 1931Google Scholar. On the reception of Hessen's work in the history of science see Schaffer, S., ‘Newton at the crossroads’, Radical Philosophy (1984), 37, 2342Google Scholar, and Graham, L.The socio-political roots of Boris Hessen: Soviet Marxism and the history of science’, Social Studies of Science (1985), 15, 705–22.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 Raymond Williams' work in the sociology of culture and Stuart Hall and David Morley's studies of non-fiction television highlight the relative sophistication of Marxist accounts of cultural production and consumption in comparison with contemporary Marxist accounts of science. See Williams, R., Culture, London, 1981Google ScholarPubMed, and Marxism and Literature, Oxford, 1977Google Scholar; Hall, S., Hobson, D., Lowe, A. and Willis, P. (eds.), Culture, Media, Language, London, 1980Google Scholar. For a general introduction to neo-Marxist and Weberian approaches to the study of cultural production see Wolff, J., The Social Production of Art, London, 1981.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5 For exceptions to this see Barnes, B., Scientific Knowledge and Sociological Theory, London, 1974Google Scholar, and Interests and the Growth of Knowledge, London, 1977Google Scholar; MacKenzie, D., ‘Statistical theory and social interests: a case study’, Social Studies of Science (1978), 8, 3583CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed, and Wynne, B., Rationality or Ritual: the Windscale Inquiry and Nuclear Decisions in Britain, British Society for the History of Science, 1982.Google Scholar

6 Knorr-Cetina, K. and Mulkay, M. (eds.), Science Observed: Perspectives in the Social Study of Science, London, 1983Google Scholar. Latour's article in this collection was an important exception.

7 See, in particular, the important work of Harry Collins (Collins, H., Changing Order: Replication and Induction in Scientific Practice, London, 1985Google Scholar). A good overview of the present state of the debate within the sociology of scientific knowledge is provided by Pickering, A. (ed.), Science as Practice and Culture, Chicago, 1992.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

8 For a rejection of the possibility of a macrosociology of scientific knowledge see Lynch, M., Art and Artifact in Laboratory Science: A Study of Shop Work and Shop Talk in a Research Laboratory, London, 1985Google Scholar. The suggestion that the macrosociology of science should be postponed to a later date is made in Collins, H., ‘Stages in the empirical programme of relativism’, Social Studies of Science (1981), 11, 310.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

9 See P. Bourdieu, The production of belief: contribution to an economy of symbolic goods', in Media, Culture and Society (ed. Collins, R. et al. ), London, 1986Google Scholar; Distinction: a Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (tr. Nice, R.), London, 1984Google Scholar; Homo Academicus (tr. Collier, P.), Oxford, 1988Google Scholar; Language and Symbolic Power (tr. Raymond, G. and Adamson, M., ed. Thompson, J. B.), Oxford, 1991Google Scholar. A useful introduction to Bourdieu's work is provided by Thompson, John B. in an introduction to Language and Symbolic PowerGoogle Scholar. See also Jenks, C. (ed.) Cultural Reproduction, London, 1993.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

10 Bourdieu, P.The specificity of the scientific field and the social conditions of the production of reason’, Social Science Information (1975), 14 (6), 21CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a critique of Bourdieu's analysis of natural science see Knorr-Cetina, K., ‘Scientific communities or transepistemic arenas of research: a critique of quasi-economic models of science’, Social Studies of Science (1982), 12, 101–30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11 See, for example, Barrett, M., The Politics of Truth: From Marx to Foucault, Oxford, 1992Google Scholar; Laclau, E. and Mouffe, C., Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, London, 1985Google Scholar; Eagleton, T., Against the Grain, London, 1986, 8998Google Scholar; Foucault, M., Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–77 (ed. Gordon, C.), Brighton, 1980Google Scholar; Hindess, B., ‘Power, interests and the outcome of struggles’, Sociology (1982), 16, 498511CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wolff, J., ‘The global and the specific: reconciling conflicting theories of culture’, in King, A. (ed.), Culture, Globalization and the World-System, London, 1991Google Scholar. Within the sociology of science the influence of such arguments is most evident in the work of Michel Callon, Bruno Latour and John Law, see Law, J. (ed.), Power, Action and Belief, London, 1986.Google Scholar

12 This is not the place to review the increasingly rich connections between the history of science and other fields of cultural history. One example of an issue where there has been a broader dialogue between the history of science and related areas of social and cultural theory has been in the study of gender. See, for example, Haraway, D., Simians, Cyborgs and Women, London, 1991Google Scholar; Jordanova, L., Sexual Visions: Images of Gender in Science and Medicine Between the Eighteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Hemel Hempstead, 1991Google Scholar; Taylor, J., ‘Dreams of a common language: science, gender, culture’, New Formations (1991), 13, 103–11.Google Scholar

13 Mann, M., The Sources of Social Power, vol. 1, Cambridge, 1986, 31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

14 Giddens, A., A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism, London, 1981CrossRefGoogle Scholar; The Constitution of Society, Cambridge, 1984Google Scholar; The Nation-State and Violence, Oxford, 1985.Google Scholar

15 The problem of the relation between the situated character of laboratory work and the formation of social and scientific networks was raised by Collins (see Collins, , op. cit. (7), 2978Google Scholar). For Latour's approach to this problem see Callon, M. and Latour, B., ‘Unscrewing the Big Leviathan: how actors macrostructure reality and sociologists help them do so’, in Advances in Social Theory and Methodology (ed. Knorr-Cetina, K. and Cicourel, A.), London, 1981Google Scholar; Latour, B., ‘Visualisation and cognition: thinking with hands and eyes’, Knowledge and Society (1986), 6, 140Google Scholar; Science in Action, Milton Keynes, 1987Google Scholar. For a cogent discussion of some of the limitations of Latour's reliance on a semiotic analysis of scientific discourse see Schaffer, S., ‘The eighteenth Brumaire of Bruno Latour’, Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. (1991), 22, 174–92.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

16 Virilio, P., Speed and Politics (tr. Polizotti, M.), New York, 1977.Google Scholar

17 Within the sociology of scientific knowledge the debate about postmodernism turned on the question of ‘reflexivity’. For examples of ‘postmodern’ approaches to the sociology of scientific knowledge see Woolgar, S. (ed.), Knowledge and Reflexivity, London, 1988Google Scholar, and Ashmore, M., Mulkay, M. and Pinch, T., Health and Efficiency: A Sociology of Health Economics, Milton Keynes, 1989Google Scholar. For Latour's arguments against postmodernism in the sociology of science see, for example, Latour, B., ‘The politics of explanation: an alternative’Google Scholar, in Woolgar, (ed.), op. cit. (this note)Google Scholar. For more general discussions of postmodernism in sociology and anthropology see Rabinow, P., ‘Representations are social facts: modernity and post-modernity in anthropology’, in Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (ed. Clifford, J. and Marcus, G.), Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1986Google Scholar; Hall, S., ‘On postmodernism and articulation’, Journal of Communication Inquiry (1986), 10 (2), 125–9Google Scholar; Harvey, D., The Condition of Postmodemity, Oxford, 1989Google Scholar; Hirst, P., ‘An answer to relativism?’, New Formations (1990), 10, 1324Google Scholar; Boyne, R. and Rattansi, A. (eds.), Postmodernism and Society, London, 1990.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

18 On the importance of knowledge to the practice of modern forms of government see Weber, M., Economy and Society (ed. Roth, G. and Wittich, C.), part II, New York, 1968, 9561005Google Scholar. For a recent development of Weber's arguments see Dandeker, C., Surveillance, Power and Modernity, Oxford, 1990.Google Scholar

19 Habermas, J., ‘Theory and practice in a scientific civilization’, in Theory and Practice, Beacon Press, 1973Google Scholar. On the relation between politics and the history of quantification see Porter, T., The Rise of Statistical Thinking 1820–1900, Princeton, NJ, 1986Google Scholar; Hacking, I., The Taming of Chance, Cambridge, 1990CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Rose, N., ‘Governing by numbers: figuring out democracy’, Accounting, Organizations and Society (1991), 16 (7), 673–92.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

20 Wise, M. N. and Smith, C., ‘Measurement, work and industry in Lord Kelvin's Britain’, Hist. Stud. Phys. Sci. (1986), 17, 147–73CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Schaffer, S., ‘Victorian metrology and its instrumentation: a manufactory of ohms’, in Invisible Connections (ed. Bud, R. and Cozzens, S.), Bellingham, Washington State, 1992.Google Scholar

21 See Miller, P. and Rose, N., ‘Governing economic life’, Economy and Society (1990), 19 (1), 130.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

22 See, for example, Beniger, R., The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society, Cambridge, Mass., 1986Google Scholar; Mulgan, G., Communication and Control, Cambridge, 1990.Google Scholar

23 On the relation between the popularization of science and the development of liberal ideas of public education see, for example, Bennett, T., ‘The exhibitionary complex’, New Formations (1988), 4, 73102Google Scholar. For a more general discussion of the politics of public education which develops this point see Hunter, I., Culture and Government, London, 1988.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

24 Foucault, M., ‘Knowledge, space, power’, The Foucault Reader (ed. Rabinow, P.), Harmondsworth, 1986.Google Scholar

25 Quoted in Briggs, A., Victorian Things, Harmondsworth, 1988, 374.Google Scholar

26 Schaffer, , op. cit. (20)Google Scholar. Other useful discussions of the early history of electrical communications include Aitken, H., Syntony and Spark: The Origins of Radio, Princeton, NJ, 1985CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Marvin, C., When Old Technologies were New: Thinking about Communications in the Late Nineteenth Century, New York, 1988Google Scholar; and Headrick, D., The Invisible Weapon: Telecommunications and International Politics, New York, 1991Google Scholar. On the significance of the development of rapid communication systems for the understanding and analysis of war in the late nineteenth century see Pick, D., War Machine: the Rationalisation of Slaughter in the Modern Age, Chicago, 1993, 165–75.Google Scholar

27 Weber, M., ‘The development of bureaucracy and its relation to law’, in Selections in Translation (ed. Runcimann, W.), Cambridge, 1978CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Chandler, A., The Visible Hand: the Managerial Revolution in American Business, Cambridge, Mass., 1977.Google Scholar

28 Virilio, P., War and Cinema (tr. Camiller, P.), London, 1989.Google Scholar

29 Barry, A.The European Community and European Government: harmonisation, mobility and space’, Economy and Society (1993), 22, 3, 314–26.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

30 Foucault, M., ‘The question of power’, in Foucault Live (tr. Johnston, J.), New York, 1986.Google Scholar

31 On this point see, for example, de Certeau, M., The Practice of Everyday Life (tr. Rendall, S.), Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1984.Google Scholar

32 Ibid., p. xv.