Cultural Hegemony in a Scientific World: Gramscian Concepts for the History of Science 9789004443778, 2020037589, 2020037590, 9789004314603

Table of contents :
‎Contents
‎Notes on Contributors
‎For Gramsci: Hegemony in the History and Philosophy of Science (Badino and Omodeo)
‎Part 1. State of the Art
‎Chapter 1. Past and Present: Revisiting ‘Gramscianism’ (Nieto-Galan)
‎Part 2. Disciplinary Struggles
‎Chapter 2. The Concept of Hegemony in Discourse Analysis (Balsa)
‎Chapter 3. Hegemony and the Political Subject in Anthropology (Ciavolella)
‎Chapter 4. ‘The Common Cult of the Historical Truth’: The Formation of History of Religions in France and the Role of Socio-cultural Elites (Lannoy)
‎Part 3. Science and Religion
‎Chapter 5. ‘Jesuit Science’ and Cultural Hegemony: A Political-Historiographical Critique (Omodeo)
‎Chapter 6. ‘O pobre intelectual’: Manuel Lourosa, Astronomy, and the Political Restoration of Portugal in the Seventeenth Century (Carolino and Camenietzki)
‎Chapter 7. Cosmology, Religion, and Cultural Hegemony: The Scientific Apostolate of Antoni Romañá in Early Francoist Spain (Realdi)
‎Part 4. Organic Intellectuals
‎Chapter 8. Using Gramsci’s Dialogical Approach: The Struggle for Meaning in Q&A Sections of the Spanish Press in the First Third of the Twentieth Century (Jiménez-Lucena, Molero-Mesa and Tabernero-Holgado)
‎Chapter 9. The Scientific Intellectual, a Hostile Milieu, or a Cultural Dispositif? Revisiting the Historiography of Interwar German Physics and How It Explains Scientific Culture (Schirrmacher)
‎Chapter 10. Engineering as Cultural Hegemony: What a Gramscian Interpretation of Francoism Tells Us about Gramsci (Camprubí)
‎Chapter 11. Political Entanglements and Scientific Hegemony: Rector-Scientists at the University of Lisbon Under the First Republic and the Dictatorship (1911–74) (Simões, Diogo and Carneiro)
‎Part 5. Towards Cold War Science
‎Chapter 12. Philanthropy, Mass Media, and Cultural Hegemony: The Rockefeller Foundation and the Politics of Science Popularisation in the 1930s (Sastre-Juan)
‎Chapter 13. Why Hegemony Was Not Born in the Factory: Twentieth-Century Sciences of Labour from a Gramscian Angle (Cucu)
‎Part 6. Past and Future
‎Chapter 14. The Importance of Gramsci Today: The ‘New Lorians’ and the Biological Reduction of History (Cooter)
‎References
‎Index of Places
‎Index of Names

Citation preview

Cultural Hegemony in a Scientific World

- 978-90-04-44377-8

Historical Materialism Book Series Editorial Board Loren Balhorn (Berlin) David Broder (Rome) Sebastian Budgen (Paris) Steve Edwards (London) Juan Grigera (London) Marcel van der Linden (Amsterdam) Peter Thomas (London)

volume 221

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/hm

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Cultural Hegemony in a Scientific World Gramscian Concepts for the History of Science

Edited by

Massimiliano Badino Pietro Daniel Omodeo

LEIDEN | BOSTON

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Badino, Massimiliano, 1973- editor. | Omodeo, Pietro Daniel, editor. Title: Cultural hegemony in a scientific world : Gramscian concepts for the history of science / edited by Massimiliano Badino, Pietro Daniel Omodeo. Description: Leiden ; Boston : Brill, 2021. | Series: Historical materialism book series, 1570-1522 ; volume 221 | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2020037589 (print) | LCCN 2020037590 (ebook) | ISBN 9789004314603 (hardback) | ISBN 9789004443778 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Science–History. | Science–Political aspects. | Hegemony. Classification: LCC Q125 .C855 2021 (print) | LCC Q125 (ebook) | DDC 509–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020037589 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020037590

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill‑typeface. ISSN 1570-1522 ISBN 978-90-04-31460-3 (hardback) ISBN 978-90-04-44377-8 (e-book) Copyright 2021 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi, Brill Sense, Hotei Publishing, mentis Verlag, Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh and Wilhelm Fink Verlag. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Requests for re-use and/or translations must be addressed to Koninklijke Brill NV via brill.com or copyright.com. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

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Contents Notes on Contributors

ix

For Gramsci: Hegemony in the History and Philosophy of Science Massimiliano Badino and Pietro Daniel Omodeo

1

Part 1 State of the Art 1

Past and Present: Revisiting ‘Gramscianism’ Agustí Nieto-Galan

19

Part 2 Disciplinary Struggles 2

The Concept of Hegemony in Discourse Analysis Javier Balsa

41

3

Hegemony and the Political Subject in Anthropology Riccardo Ciavolella

4

The Common Cult of the Historical Truth: The Formation of History of Religions in France and the Role of Socio-cultural Elites 80 Annelies Lannoy

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Part 3 Science and Religion 5

‘Jesuit Science’ and Cultural Hegemony: A Political-Historiographical Critique 115 Pietro Daniel Omodeo

6

‘O pobre intelectual’: Manuel Lourosa, Astronomy and the Political Restoration of Portugal in the Seventeenth Century 156 Luís Miguel Carolino and Carlos Ziller Camenietzki

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contents

Cosmology, Religion, and Cultural Hegemony: The Scientific Apostolate of Antoni Romañá in Early Francoist Spain 175 Matteo Realdi

Part 4 Organic Intellectuals 8

Using Gramsci’s Dialogical Approach: The Struggle for Meaning in Q&A Sections of the Spanish Press in the First Third of the Twentieth Century 203 Isabel Jiménez Lucena, Jorge Molero-Mesa and Carlos Tabernero Holgado

9

The Scientific Intellectual, a Hostile Milieu, or a Cultural Dispositif? Revisiting the Historiography of Interwar German Physics and How It Explains Scientific Culture 243 Arne Schirrmacher

10

Engineering as Cultural Hegemony: What a Gramscian Interpretation of Francoism Tells Us about Gramsci 258 Lino Camprubí

11

Political Entanglements and Scientific Hegemony: Rector-Scientists at the University of Lisbon Under the First Republic and the Dictatorship (1911–74) 274 Ana Simões, Ana Carneiro and Maria Paula Diogo

Part 5 Towards Cold War Science 12

Philanthropy, Mass Media, and Cultural Hegemony: The Rockefeller Foundation and the Politics of Science Popularisation in the 1930s 297 Jaume Sastre-Juan

13

Why Hegemony Was Not Born in the Factory: Twentieth-Century Sciences of Labour from a Gramscian Angle 319 Alina-Sandra Cucu

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Part 6 Past and Future 14

The Importance of Gramsci Today: The ‘New Lorians’ and the Biological Reduction of History 349 Roger Cooter References 373 Index of Places 420 Index of Names 422

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Notes on Contributors Massimiliano Badino is Associate Professor of Philosophy of Science at the University of Verona. He was recipient of a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Global Fellowship (FP7, 2014–2017). He wrote extensively on the early history of statistical mechanics and quantum physics. His research interests include history and philosophy of contemporary physics as well as the intersection between ethics, politics, and epistemology. Javier Balsa is professor in Political Sociology at the Universidad Nacional de Quilmes (UNQ), and Independent Researcher at the National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET), Argentina. He is currently the Chair of the IESAC (Instituto de Economía y Sociedad en la Argentina Contemporánea) at the UNQ. His research focuses in the theory of hegemony and the development of methodologies for it. Lino Camprubí (PhD UCLA, 2011) is a Ramón y Cajal Researcher at the Universidad de Sevilla and has worked at Cornell, the University of Chicago, and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG). He has authored Engineers and the Making of the Francoist Regime (MIT Press, 2014) and Los ingenieros de Franco (Crítica, 2017), recipient of the ICOHTEC 2018 Book Prize. He has also coedited Technology and Globalization (Palgrave Economic History Series, 2018), De la Guerra Fría al calentamiento global (Catarata, 2018) and the special issue “Experiencing the Global Environment” (SHPS, 2018). He has published in Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences, Technology and Culture, Energy Policy and Studies in History and Philosophy of Science. Ana Carneiro is associate professor of History of Science at NOVA School of Science and Technology, and researcher at the Interuniversity Centre for the History of Science and Technology (CIUHCT). Her research has focused mainly on the history of the nineteenth-century sciences, especially in Portugal, and is published in various specialised journals and books. She is former editor of HoST–Journal of History of Science and Technology (2012–2017) and president of HESS – History of the Earth Sciences Society (2015 and 2016).

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Riccardo Ciavolella (1979) is a Political Anthropologist. He is a researcher of the French CNRS and a member of the Institut interdisplinaire d’anthropologie du Contemporain at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. His ethnographic work explores politics in the margins of globalisation and the State in Europe and Africa. Form a theoretical point of view, his contributions to the history of anthropological ideas and critical social theory focus on the legacy of Gramscian theories and on the anthropological inspirations of radical imaginations. He currently coordinates an international partnership between Italian and French institutions about the ideas and legacies of Gramsci and Ernesto de Martino. He is the author of several ethnographic articles and monographs (Karthala 2010), manuals (De Boeck 2016) and theoretical essays (Mimesis 2013). He has recently published L’etnologo e il popolo di questo mondo, a historiographical essay (Meltemi 2018), together with a novel (Mimesis 2018), on the involvement of de Martino in Italian Resistance, now translated into French (Editions Mimesis 2020). Roger Cooter is a cultural historian of science and medicine. He has authored and edited over 20 books on subjects ranging from phrenology to orthopaedics, war, childhood, and historiography. Besides serving as the General Editor for Bloomsbury’s forthcoming 6 volumes on The Cultural History of Medicine he has just completed The Man Who Ate His Cats, a biography of the eccentric Pierre Henri Joseph Baume. Now retired from University College London, he lives in Berlin. Alina-Sandra Cucu is a historical anthropologist of labour. Her first book, Planning Labour: Time and the Foundations of Industrial Socialism in Romania was published in 2019 by Berghahn Books. At the moment, she is affiliated with the Anthropology Department at Goldsmiths, University of London, as the beneficiary of a Marie Skłodowska Curie postdoctoral grant, funded by the European Commission within the Horizon 2020 frame. The grant allows her to work on her second book, Entangled Worlds of Labour: The Advance of Flexible Capitalism in Romania. Maria Paula Diogo is full professor of History of Technology at NOVA School of Science and Technology and researcher at the Interuniversity Centre for the History of Science and Technology (CIUHCT). Her recent research interests intersect history of colonial technology and engineering, globalization and the Anthropocene. In this - 978-90-04-44377-8

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context, she co-authored the book Europeans Globalizing. Mapping, Exploiting, Exchanging (Palgrave, 2016) and co-edited Gardens and Human Agency in the Anthropocene (Routledge, 2019). She was awarded the 2020 Leonardo da Vinci Medal, the highest recognition from the Society for the History of Technology (SHOT). Isabel Jiménez-Lucena is a senior lecturer on History of Science at the University of Málaga (Spain). She researches in the fiel of social history of medicine in the 20th century, focusing on health, medicine, class and gender. She is currently working on biopolitics and technologies of gender in Spain. Annelies Lannoy (°1984) is invited lecturer in religious studies at Ghent University. Her research focuses on the history of the academic study of religion in 19th and 20th century Europe. Specializing in the study of scientific correspondence, she has been carrying out research on the making of history of religions as an academic discipline, and on scientific networks in knowledge production on ancient religions. She co-authored and co-edited “Mon cher Mithra.” La Correspondance entre Franz Cumont et Alfred Loisy, Mémoires de l’ Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres (Paris, 2019) with C. Bonnet & D. Praet, and authored Alfred Loisy and the Making of History of Religions (De Gruyter, 2020). Luís Miguel Carolino is a professor at the Lisbon University Institute (ISCTE-IUL), Portugal, where he teaches courses on the cultural and intellectual history of early modern Europe, with an emphasis on the history of science. Before joining the History Department at ISCTE-IUL, he held research positions at Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza, Florence, Italy, Museu de Astronomia e Ciências Afins, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and University of Lisbon, Portugal. He was also a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley, USA, and at the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. His research focuses on the social, institutional, and cultural relations of science, areas in which he has published extensively. Jorge Molero-Mesa is a senior lecturer on History of Science and researcher of the Centre for the History of Science (CEHIC) at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. He researches in the field of the social history of medicine in the contemporary period. He is the author of publications on the history of social diseases (tuberculosis, malaria), Spanish health policy and administration, Spanish colonial

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medicine in Morocco and the relationships between medicine and society from a class and gender perspective. Agustí Nieto-Galan is full professor of History of Science at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB), ICREA Acadèmia Fellow (2009 & 2018), and former Director of the Centre d’Història de la Ciència (CEHIC) at the UAB. Following degrees in both chemistry and history, he took his PhD in the History of Science at the Universitat de Barcelona (UB), and held postdoctoral positions in the Modern History Faculty, University of Oxford, and the CNRS, in Paris. He has written widely on topics such as history of chemistry, history of science popularization, urban history of science, and science and power (18th–20th centuries). His last book is The Politics of Chemistry (Cambridge, 2019). Pietro Daniel Omodeo is Professor of Historical Epistemology at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Italy; Principal Investigator of the ERC project EarlyModernCosmology (Horizon 2020, GA 725883) and the FARE project EarlyGeoPraxis (grant of the Italian Ministry of University and Research). He is the author of Political Epistemology: The Problem of Ideology in Science Studies (Springer, 2019). Matteo Realdi is a historian of astronomy. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Physics and Astronomy of the University of Padova (Italy), the Center for the History of Science of the Autonomous University of Barcelona (Spain), and the Institute for History and Social Aspects of Science of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (the Netherlands). His research focuses on the history of relativistic cosmology and the history of astronomical observatories in the twentieth century. Jaume Sastre-Juan is Serra Húnter Fellow at the Center for the History of Science (CEHIC) and the Department of Philosophy of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. His main overarching research interest is the intersection between politics and the popularization of science and technology. In particular, he has published on the politics of display in museums of science and technology, and on technological fun in amusement parks and ‘interactive’ museums. He is currently working on the history of international science popularization policies. He has also taught at the Universitat de Barcelona, the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya and the Universidade de Lisboa, where he was postdoc researcher at the Interuniversity Center for the History of Science and Technology (CIUHCT). - 978-90-04-44377-8

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Arne Schirrmacher is a historian of science at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin where his research focuses on European cultures of knowledge and science since the 19th century. In addition he teaches in the program of Theory and History of Science and Technology at the Technical University of Berlin. As a Heisenberg Fellow, he is currently involved both in projects on the history of modern quantum physics and the political, material and media history of the science museum in the 20th century. Recent publication include ‘Establishing Quantum Physics in Göttingen: David Hilbert, Peter Debye and Max Born in Context, 1900–1926’ (2019) and ‘Architectures of Science: Berlin Universities and their Development in Urban Space’ (ed. with M. Wienigk, 2019). Ana Simões is full professor of History of Science at the Faculty of Sciences, University of Lisbon, Portugal, and researcher at the Interuniversity Centre for the History of Science and Technology (CIUHCT). She was President of the European Society for the History of Science (ESHS) (2018–2020). Her research interests include history of the physical sciences (18th–20th centuries), mostly in Portugal in its multiple European and global entanglements, with recent incursions on urban history of science and the Anthropocene. Latest book publications include as co-editor Gardens and Human Agency in the Anthropocene (Routledge, 2019), and as co-author the essay/graphic novel Einstein, Eddington and the Eclipse. Travel Impressions (Chili com Carne, 2019). Carlos Tabernero is an associate professor of History of Science at the Institute of History of Science (formerly Centre for the History of Science – CEHIC) of the Autonomous University of Barcelona (Spain). His research and teaching focus on the media and the production, communication and management of scientific knowledge. He is currently working on processes of construction and circulation of natural history knowledge, specifically concerning urban narratives about nature in relation to cinema, television and literature in the 20th century. Carlos Ziller Camenietzki is professor in Modern History at the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. His research focuses on Iberian intellectual history and the Jesuits Astronomers in the seventeenth century. His most recent book deals with the debate on terrestrial paradise of the Jesuits and the political confrontation about the Portuguese independence war of the years 1640–1668. His current research encompass the development of tidal theories in the 16th and 17th centuries.

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For Gramsci: Hegemony in the History and Philosophy of Science Massimiliano Badino and Pietro Daniel Omodeo

At the present juncture, politics has become the most pressing concern in debates on science and epistemology. This is partly due to the fact that, in the context of renewed mass media indoctrination and populism, the ties linking science to ideology, narrativity and radical relativism have emerged as a political and societal problematic that cannot be ignored. Today we are witness to cynical abuses of public discourse and attacks against scientists’ consensus on problems that require both scientific analysis and solutions based on economic regulation, for instance problems related to climate change. These attacks on the scientific consensus of truth, which are often summarised under the label of ‘post-truth’, reveal their political dimension by appearing alongside and being empowered by forms of demagogy which they reinforce in their turn. When faced with the misrepresentations of post-truth politics, the intellectual arsenal of postmodernity proves incapable of any resistance or counteraction. In many ways, postmodernity paved the way for the present predicament. Science itself, today’s hegemonic institution of truth, is under attack and often discredited. Its connections to economic interests and religious concerns are just two of its most evident political entanglements. They require mature critique, not the cynicism that turns social constructivism into a socialDarwinian conception of knowledge as a relation of forces, in which the views of the stronger prevail. A renewed reflection on knowledge, its genesis and goals is necessary in order to escape the dangerous logic of radical scepticism and relativism. However, just as we cannot continue to follow the blind alley of radicalised constructivism, so we must also not naively claim a privileged epistemological position for ourselves. We have no immediate access to absolute posita, ‘hard’ facts on which we can construct our certainties as if they were an immutable landscape at which we can look independently of our historical lenses. The awareness of the political importance of rethinking science together with its material and intellectual ‘conditions of possibility’ encourages an understanding of science that connects its past and future. The investigation of the ‘historical a priori’ of knowledge implies a future-oriented epistemological commitment on our part.1 1 The calls for intellectual responsibility and political engagement on the part of historians,

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004443778_002

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The aim of this volume is to show that an in-depth engagement with the political dimension of the genesis, trajectory, and import of scientific categories would greatly benefit from a reassessment of Gramsci’s legacy. His theory of hegemony as well as his many insights into culture and knowledge, which he understood as contested fields of the struggle for meaning, invites a political inquiry into the scientific past and present that takes into account many interconnected levels: scientific policies, the agendas underlying the philosophy of science and historiography, the interrelations of scientific thought with common sense, shared beliefs, and academic culture. Gramsci outlined three main fields of philosophical relevance which, in his perspective, coincided with ideology and cultural politics: ‘[philosophy, or cultural politics] cannot but begin with “common sense” and, secondly, with religion. Only in the third place, [it tackles] the philosophical systems elaborated by […] intellectual groups’.2 A conference held in Barcelona, ‘Science as Cultural Hegemony: Gramscian Concepts for the History of Science’,3 proved to be a memorable starting point for a Gramscian reconsideration of the role of science in our world. It especially addressed science as hegemony, which is to say, science as a politically articulated cultural phenomenon that is socially and historically grounded in struggles for meaning. The speakers at the conference looked at the cognitive-political dimensions of science by making use of Gramscian categories. Three areas of inquiry proved to be of particular interest: 1. the social dissemination and popularisation of science as an ideological project that involves the construction and deconstruction of common sense; 2. the historical-historiographical connection between science and religious agendas and identities; and 3. the political construction of scientific categories and the uses of science (and techno-science) as a means of legitimation for various forms of political regime ranging from the technocratic modernisation of liberal democracies, the rhetoric of productivity in the countries

philosophers, and sociologists of science have multiplied in recent years. Among other events, the 7th conference of the European Society for the History of Science (Prague, 22–24 September 2016) was dedicated to ‘Science and Power, Science as Power’ and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science organised a series of meetings in order to discuss the new frontier of ‘Political Epistemology: New Approaches, Methods and Topics in the History of Science’ (Berlin, 2017). 2 Gramsci 1975, Notebook XI, p. 1401: ‘non si può non prendere le mosse dal “senso comune”, in primo luogo, secondariamente dalla religione, e solo in un terzo tempo dai sistemi filosofici elaborati dai gruppi intellettuali tradizionali’. 3 Centre for the History of Science at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, 22–24 January 2014.

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of real socialism, and fascist engineering as a consensus-generating asset for right-wing dictatorships. Our reassessment of the benefit of Gramsci’s thought for the history and philosophy of science comes at an opportune moment. The pace of new publications on Gramsci or Gramsci-inspired studies is remarkable. As a matter of fact, those who claim to be his heirs are too numerous to be listed in such a short overview.4 For our present purpose, it is important to stress that the ongoing reappraisal of Gramsci transcends disciplinary boundaries and the confines of academic circles. Eric Hobsbawm argued that the increasing international attention given to Gramsci since the 1970s is symptomatic of a phase of global retreat on the left, one connected with a need for political-cultural renewal. Gramsci offers key instruments for those who want to embark on such renewal. Did he not reflect on culture and hegemony in prison, linking his thoughts to the momentary defeat of Italian communism and liberalism by the fascist regime?5 The task that Gramsci ascribed to culture and politics in those tragic years of world history was to engage in the long-lasting trench warfare of ideas. The circumstances that led to the ideological divisions of the 1920s and 1930s bear striking resemblances to the present. Karl Polanyi interpreted the politics of that time as a direct consequence of the laissez-faire ideology which disrupted society and culminated in the economic breakdown of 1929. The consequences and political worldviews that have emerged from the ongoing crisis of global neoliberalism, which started in the 1990s, similarly arise out of the previous decades of free market imperialism. While the financial crisis of 2008 has laid bare the need to reconstitute societal unities against further fragmentation and postmodern fluidity, global responses have regrettably often taken the form of a neo-nationalist nostalgia for the fatherland, race and religion, old identities which are contrary to emancipation and communitarianism.6 Back in the 1980s, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe anticipated this turn towards societal fluidity and co-opted the Gramscian concept of hegemony into their project of ‘radical democracy’ which articulates identity politics.7 The success as well as the limitations of their proposal can be measured through the impact of their theories on political movements, first of all on the (short-lived?)

4 Anderson 2016. For the history of science, see Nieto-Galan 2011a. See also Omodeo 2016b, pp. 57–8. 5 Eric Hobsbawm wrote persuasive pages on Gramsci’s political heritage. See especially Hobsbawm 2011, pp. 334–43. 6 Stiglitz 2011, pp. vii–xvii. 7 The neo-Gramscian work of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe has become a new classic of political theory: see Laclau and Mouffe 2014.

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Latin-American response to unchecked neoliberalism and, secondly, with the rise of new-left movements in Greece and Spain resisting the violence of the European free market after the financial crisis of 2008. The ideals of socialist democracy have been less visible in Eastern Europe, silenced by the barbarity of present-day appeals to sovereignty and popular economy, above all in Orbán’s Hungary and Kaczyński’s Poland, and the establishment of a theo-nationalist leadership in Turkey. In the hegemonic West, the post-truth electoral campaign that opened the doors of the White House to Donald Trump calls for a new analysis of the ‘role’ of discursive practices, rhetoric, and ideology in the constitution of old-new militant identities. In this time in which emancipatory movements seem to be overwhelmed by visions of the nation, race, ethnos, religion, masculinity, and similar reactionary ideologies, the profound ambiguity of the Laclausian postmodern reading of hegemony as a bottomless discursive construction becomes evident. Back in the 1980s, the linguistic turn appeared to be a useful instrument for the left, one which was capable of discarding forms of economic reductionism alongside alienating narratives of progress without agency. ‘Society’ and ‘class’ were dismissed as mythological and purely discursive constructions. However, in light of the present developments, one can see how the separation of culture from content and politics from structures is unfolding in an unintended direction which, retroactively, raises doubts about the hasty dismissal of the material roots of history and society. As Laclau observed in his overly sympathetic considerations On Populist Reason, […] if through rhetorical operations they [the populists] managed to constitute broad popular identities which cut across many sectors of the population, they actually constituted populist subjects, and there is no point in dismissing this as mere rhetoric. Far from being a parasite of ideology, rhetoric would actually be the anatomy of the ideological world.8 The distance of such assertions from Karl Marx’s considerations about the ‘economic anatomy’ of society in the classical preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859) should be apparent. Gramsci gave a very different interpretation of Marx’s metaphor in his notebooks. He linked the anatomy metaphor to the organic interconnection of structures and praxis, in accordance with a philosophy of action which is far removed from both economic reductionism and discursive idealism:

8 Laclau 2018, pp. 12–13.

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Structure and superstructure have a necessary and vital connection. […] One cannot say that, in the human body, the skin and the type of physical beauty that prevails historically are mere illusions and that the skeleton and anatomy are the only reality, although something similar has been said for a long time. By enhancing the value of anatomy and the function of the skeleton nobody intended to assert that man […] can live without the latter.9 Here and elsewhere in his writings Gramsci pointed to the link, or ‘vital connection’, between ideology and society, culture and economy. He emphasised how materiality and objectivity cannot be reduced to discourse. This element has sometimes escaped Gramsci’s readers, who have selectively embraced his arguments about the transformative power of ideas and forgotten that they are related to a ‘reality’ to be transformed, which is marked by its resistance to change, its constraints or, in a word, its ‘objectivity’. As has been pointed out, ideology theory cannot establish simple relations of equivalence between social settings and subjectivity. Rather, it is ‘confronted with the discrepancy, or refraction, between what Marxism traditionally described as “objective” interests and the way they are interpreted by the subjects’.10 A reappraisal of the relation between identities and positions, subjective intentions and structures, is a pressing need today if we intend to deconstruct ‘discourses’ that misleadingly connect phenomena as different as the clash between Catalan independentists and the Spanish government, the xenophobic agendas of the Italian Lega (ex-Lega ‘nord’) and the silent civil war in Ukraine – to mention only a few European cases within a global scenario of mounting insecurity. Religious and ethnic conflicts inflame large areas of the globe and theo-conservative revivals resort to traditional forms of piety to justify caste hierarchies or caste-like regimes of identity and exclusion. The crisis of hegemony under neoliberalism can be evinced by the drawbacks of free market agendas such as those forcefully defended in Europe by the Troika of the International Monetary Fund, the European Commission, and the European

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Gramsci 1975, X 41, p. 1321: ‘Tra struttura e superstruttura esiste un nesso necessario e vitale. […] Nel corpo umano non si può certo dire che la pelle (e anche il tipo di bellezza fisica storicamente prevalente) siano mere illusioni e che lo scheletro e l’anatomia siano la sola realtà, tuttavia per molto tempo si è detto qualcosa di simile. Mettendo in valore l’anatomia e la funzione dello scheletro nessuno ha voluto affermare che l’uomo (e tanto meno la donna) possano vivere senza di essa’. Also, see Notebook X, pt. 1, 12, note 5: vol. 2, pp. 1237– 8. Rehmann 2013, p. 5.

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Central Bank and stubbornly imposed by the Franco-German axis MerkelHollande to Greece in recent years. Indeed, the threat of Grexit and the threatened expulsion of Tsipras’s Greece from the European Union fuelled centrifugal tendencies of which the Brexit referendum stands as a direct and most shocking consequence.11 This ‘Gramscian moment’ offers us conceptual tools to comprehend not only the political but also the cultural challenges that have emerged under post-liberal forms of capitalism. Within this metamorphosis of capitalism, which leaves behind past forms of ‘dominance without hegemony’, no socialist alternative has yet to unfurl its critical and transformative potential against the populist ‘third way’.12 In the midst of present conflicts and tensions, Gramsci himself has become a contested site of interpretation. The divergences in the intellectual appropriation of his work do not apply solely to leftist perspectives and revitalisations, since even right-wing identity movements have called for a theory of cultural hegemony. This fact should make us aware that such appropriation is only possible in the wake of a disembodied postmodern understanding of the Gramscian legacy which equates all forms of discursive construction. It is by pointing to the connection between the political and cultural and the structural and economic that we can dispel such an abstract analysis. Localism ideologically masks the real lines of fracture within the larger society, in particular potential conflicts that connect rather than divide the periphery and the core, and the local and the global. Gramsci, a former Sardinian independentist, criticised local identities in the years of his political maturity. In his time, a hegemonic discourse that construed an opposition between the rural South of Italy and the industrial North proved in the end beneficial to Fascism, because it obliterated the hidden connection between landowners, who benefited from the exploitation of the Southern peasants, and Northern magnates, who benefited from the exploitation of factory workers. North-South rhetoric has been revived in recent years at a European level when German media accused the Greeks of southern laziness and corruption while the latter denounced German imperialism. In this climate of division, which echoes that of the 1920s, hegemony and subalternity become disconnected from socio-economic analysis and are reorganised along ethnic and national lines. ‘America first’ is the motto of the American version of the North-South divisions, which play out at a global level. It is an apt slogan for an ideology of wall building. At a more provincial level, the xenophobic rhetoric of border 11 12

Cf. Gürcan and Bakner 2015. The expression ‘dominance without hegemony’ is taken from Guha 1997. On the Gramscian moment, see Thomas 2009.

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defence from a recent Italian right-wing populist government criminalised migrants while never mentioning the economic and social benefits of cheap and radically precarious labour. Further, the construction of pallid nationalist identities mystifies the social reality of a multi-ethnic working class that is excluded from the political right of representation. This regression away from democratic representativity has become more evident through the incapacity of the European Union to overcome the national logic of its political systems. At the peak of the recent financial crisis, more than a million Greeks, Italians, and Spaniards migrated from the South to Germany, thus constituting more than one percent of that society. In spite of their right to move throughout the borders of the EU as European citizens, they were excluded from the German vote at a time when Merkel’s crude attitude towards their countries of origin was electorally expedient for her. Western democracies are full of half-citizens and workers excluded from the practices of representative politics. Identity seems to constitute the indisputable criterion of political legitimacy. Science is never far away from such ideological-material constructions. We can learn much from Gramsci’s denunciation of the uses and abuses of scientifically-grounded, biologist discourses in the North-South political contrasts of his day. As he remarked, post-Lombrosian ideas about the inferiority of Southerners were useful for a politics of division and domination. But his criticism of scientism went much further. The Soviet experience made him aware that science could be misleadingly enrolled in the cultural battles of the left as well. Gramsci directly addressed and criticised the Soviet intellectual and philosopher of science, Nikolai Bukharin, whose scientistic (deterministic) treatment of history and human agency Gramsci rejected as fostering passivity in the masses instead of enhancing the subjective construction of their future. For Gramsci, dealing with the life of a society cannot be reduced to engineering, that is, to its administration and reproduction; it also involves cultural dimensions – symbolic, ethical, and political. Intellectual activity is particularly relevant in the battles of ideas which are part of larger socio-political dynamics. This is why Gramsci emphasised the collective responsibility of the intellectuals. He did not regard them as mere functionaries but as engaged partisans in collective struggles. From a methodological viewpoint, this outlook encourages investigation into the thinkers of the past – including technicians, engineers, and scientists – who should be seen as ‘intellectuals’ who endorsed cultural-political agendas, not just bureaucrats with specific tasks.13 From a

13

Cf. Omodeo 2018.

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cultural-political perspective, Gramsci pointed out that historical consciousness and self-reflection are necessary components of intellectual work. As he wrote, The politician is a historian not only in the sense that he makes history but also that he interprets the past by acting in the present; the historian is a politician and, in this sense […], history is always contemporary history, that is, politics.14 This remark encapsulates the spirit of this volume, because we understand the historian’s activity as inseparable from the politician’s reinterpretation of the past through present and future-oriented praxis. The two figures of the historian and the politician ideally coincide because both are necessarily positioned in the transformative arena of hegemony struggles. In the tenth prison notebook, Gramsci reflected upon and criticised Benedetto Croce’s historicism in order to achieve a higher praxeological integration of the three dimensions of history, philosophy, and politics. Whereas the entanglement of historiography and philosophy was a commonplace of the post-Hegelian historicism, the political redirection of culture was a challenge faced by the revolutionary Marxists of his time. Perhaps nobody provided a better reflection on the collective responsibility of the intellectuals than Gramsci did. Where do we stand today as intellectuals? What is the role and responsibility of scientists in our societies? Back in the 1970s, Hilary Rose and Steven Rose edited a landmark volume on science and ideology which began with an analysis of the two-sided role of science in contemporary society. As they argued, science is a means of production and, as such, directly linked with the economy, division of labour, and exploitation. On the other hand, it serves as an ideological means of justification and implementation of politics. Hence, they posed the crucial question: In the first place, where does science fall within the Marxist categories of ‘base’ and ‘superstructure’? Is it part of the productive process? This is not an abstract question, for if it is purely superstructural, then scientists, whatever the contradictions within their role, cannot be regarded as workers, but primarily as within or associated with the ruling class, either by assisting in the structural maintenance of the capitalist apparatus, like 14

Gramsci 2007, Notebook 10, p. 1242: ‘Se il politico è uno storico (non solo nel senso che fa la storia, ma nel senso che operando nel presente interpreta il passato), lo storico è un politico e in questo senso […] la storia è sempre storia contemporanea, cioè politica’.

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lawyers or accountants, or as transmitters of its ideological values, like teachers or journalists. That is, they will in general find that the contradictions of capitalist society do not oppress them but serve to protect their privileges and position. On the other hand, if science is part of the productive process, ‘scientists’ are really scientific workers who sell their labour to the capitalist in parallel with other workers; like other workers they become alienated from their creation, from the products of their labour – in a word, they are proletarians, and as such form part of the potential revolutionary forces within society.15 In sum: Are scientists workers or ideologues in our scientific world? Can such a distinction be drawn in a clear-cut manner? What does history teach us? And what is the role of historians, philosophers, and sociologists of science in the determination of the identity, goals, and agendas of the scientists? As far as methodological questions are concerned, the theory of hegemony allows us to avoid some of the most glaring blind alleys of historical epistemology today, especially in the form of the excesses of structuralism, constructivism, and postmodernism. Of the triad of knowledge, history, and politics, structuralism typically emphasises the former while obliterating or subordinating the others. In fact, how historical development is measured through the logic of scientific advance (à la Comte) and politics depends on the scientific comprehension of reality (technocracy). The key insight of structuralism is that the act of knowing boils down to arranging the items of knowledge into an adequate structure. According to structural linguistics, which constitutes the original source for this model of knowledge, language is a structure that produces meaning through the arrangement of words along syntactical and paradigmatic axes. Thus, the meaning of a word is determined by the difference between this word and its semantic alternatives. To know the meaning is to be aware of this space of possibilities. An immediate consequence of this differential concept of knowledge is that it is the structure that determines the meanings, not the other way around. Hence, the structure also determines the conditions of intelligibility for the language and, by extension, of the surrounding world. The deep intelligibility of the world, in structural and differential terms, is the central assumption of structuralism.16 Claude Lévi-Strauss applied these ideas to the anthropological study of primitive cultures.17 In his writings, he explicitly paralleled the relations between linguistic signs and the customs 15 16 17

Rose and Rose 1976, pp. xiii–xxvi, xvii. On this point see Pettit 1977 and Caws 1988. See Lévi-Strauss 1974, pp. 31–54.

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of uncivilised people in order to show that the cultural meaning of social habits is determined by the connections between mutually exclusive alternatives.18 Moreover, if structures are considered to be autonomous and self-regulating wholes, their internal dynamics seem to be completely untouched by the presence of historically and culturally situated agents. As a consequence, in this structure-centred perspective, agents are reduced to mere knots in the structure, or even epistemic ideal types. These features had a profound impact on structuralist-inspired epistemology. In a well-known work on the anthropology of science, Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts, Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar merged the structuralist approach with a constructivist understanding of science: ‘Our very specific interest in laboratory life concerns the ways in which the daily activities of working scientists lead to the construction of facts’.19 Together with a ban on the word ‘society’, they programmatically wiped out a series of epistemological dichotomies, according to a typically structuralist move: Construction refers to the slow, practical craftwork by which inscriptions are superimposed and accounts backed up or dismissed. It thus underscores our contention that the difference between object and subject or the difference between facts and artefacts should not be the starting point of the study of scientific activity; rather, it is through practical operations that a statement can be transformed into an object or a fact into an artefact.20 18

19 20

One should not conclude, though, that structures are static. On the contrary, they are characterised by both transformation and self-regulation. Structures are not merely arrangements of knowledge items, but they have a structuring action on the world. Being the conditions of possibility for the understanding of the world, they actively adapt and incorporate human experience in a system of relation. At the same time, structures also selfregulate according to precise mechanisms. Although structures are intrinsically dynamic, theorists have often been concerned with their synchronic changes, that is, structural transformations originated at one point in time by the relations between the elements. The centrality of holism and synchronicity generates two major problems for structuralism, that is, the origin of structures and the role of agents. As for the first one, it has been recognised early on that the pure analysis of structure is totally uninformative about the genetic process that brings them about. Jean Piaget formulated the problem with unsurpassed clarity: ‘structuralism, it seems, must choose between structureless genesis on the one hand and ungenerated wholes or forms on the other; the former would make it revert to that atomistic association to which empiricism has accustomed us; the latter constantly threaten to make it lapse into a theory of Husserlian essences, Platonic forms, or Kantian a priori forms of synthesis’ (Piaget 1970, p. 6). Latour and Woolgar 1986, p. 42. Latour and Woolgar 1986, p. 236.

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Accordingly, ‘reality’ and ‘nature’ are ‘the consequence of the settlement of a [scientific] dispute rather than its cause’.21 Nature and culture evaporate together with material objectivity. At the same time, agency is deprived of its subjective element. In this sense, the ‘political’ implications of structural constructivism rest in vague equations such as that given in the following claim: ‘there is little to be gained by maintaining the distinction between the “politics” of science and its “truth”’.22 With the benefit of hindsight, this distinction appears as something that can be co-opted by post-truth populism, which allots to science the status of a power game in which the stronger decides. Furthermore, the structuralist elimination of the subject creates problems at the level of political epistemology. The idea that human beings are just part of a process unfolding without the subject marginalises the political qua praxis (or agency), which is antithetical to an analysis of the objective relations of forces. In fact, structuralism posits them as a developmental logic that transcends any possibility of intentional change and re-direction. In historical epistemology, the idea that science is a process without a subject found a specific treatment in the work of Hans-Jörg Rheinberger. His Toward a History of Epistemic Things proposed a history of science as a ‘history of things’ that investigates the interrelation and permutations of scientific entities and technological apparatuses: Experimental systems […] are the genuine working units of contemporary research in which the scientific objects and the technical conditions of their production are inextricably interconnected. They are, inseparably and at one and the same time, local, individual, social, institutional, technical, instrumental, and, above all, epistemic units. Experimental systems are thus impure, hybrid settings. It is in these ‘dynamic bodies’ that experimenters shape and reshape their epistemic things.23 In Rheinberger’s view, scientists are not only dethroned of their privileged position as ‘intellectuals’ but are even stripped of their status as ‘functionaries’. They are mere ‘functions’ of the system. Here the power of analysis is enhanced at the cost of renouncing any possibility of addressing problems of cultural politics both at a methodological level (for the investigation of the politics of science) and at a reflexive level (the self-positioning of the historian and philosopher of science). 21 22 23

Ibid. Ibid. For a critique of Latour’s essentially anti-political radical postures, see Mirowski 2017. Rheinberger 1977, pp. 2–3.

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The reaction to such a bias towards the reification of thought, history, and agency has often been marked by an excessive swing to the opposite direction. Postmodernism reconceived of science as a radically subjective endeavour in which the atomised individual and his epistemic virtues take centre stage. According to Objectivity by Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, key dichotomies of epistemology should be abandoned in favour of ethical norms. ‘Once objectivity is thought of as one of several epistemic virtues, distinct in its origins and its implications, it becomes easier to imagine that it might have a genuine history, one that forms only part of the history of epistemology as a whole’.24 Such a position can be seen as exemplary of a turning point in historical epistemology, one that is marked by a deep crisis of the referent. The accompanying emphasis on the individual dimension and the ban on objective reference makes the historical a priori of science unreflected upon politically and epistemologically empty. Our contention is that political epistemology should reinstall the connection between subjectivity and objectivity without removing either of the two poles or reducing one to the other. In this sense, the theory of hegemony as a theory of subjectivation that also redirects structures offers a comprehensive perspective that connects culture and politics, society and economy, and history and agency.25 Gramsci’s thought invites us to consider the political entanglements of cultural production, and particularly of history. In an age of scientific cultural hegemony – the celebrated time of ‘knowledge economies’ – it is expedient to rethink the triad of knowledge, historicity, and politics. Far from a detached analysis, the subjectivity of the inquirer also has to come to the fore in the form of a programmatic reflection on her or his categories seen not in terms of individual whims but as a common good. Political agency has to be reassessed vis-à-vis the risks of techno-scientific fetishism, which leads to pseudo-objectivities and the alienation of individual and collective power in the name of transcendent developmental logics. This volume is devoted to a reconsideration of scientific hegemony, that is, the intrinsically political dimension of science and meta-science, which encompasses the perspectives of sociology, history, and philosophy, and historiography (the theory of history writing). This volume is ambitiously programmatic. While its primary goal is to show in which way and to what extent Gramscian notions can be useful in formulating a politically-oriented history of science, it also aims to provide scholars in

24 25

Daston and Galison 2007, pp. 33–4. On political subjectivation, see Modonesi 2014.

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philosophy and political science with examples of novel applications of their familiar conceptual tools. For this reason, the volume begins and finishes with general discussions about the conversation to which this project intends to contribute and the avenues of research it opens up. At the beginning of the volume, Agustì Nieto Galan recapitulates the long march of Gramscian studies since the 1970s and touches upon issues that have already been tackled within this framework, most notably the political and societal role of popular science. At the end of the volume, Roger Cooter contextualises the space for a Gramscian reappraisal of science studies vis-à-vis the ubiquitous presence of postmodernism and highlights the necessity of adopting Gramsci to challenge ‘the increasingly hegemonic role of evolutionary biology and psychology within critical thinking in the humanities – in art, literature, anthropology, human geography, cultural studies and, above all in academic general history writing’. These two essays act as the entry and exit points for the rest of the volume, which is organised around classical Gramscian categories. The first part deals with the hegemonic practices hidden in discourses and disciplinary struggles. The common theme running through the three articles in this section is the ideological meaning of the organisation of knowledge at both the conceptual and the institutional levels. Thus, Javier Balsa takes on the arduous task of surveying the hegemonic use of discourse, an analysis that leads him to compare Gramsci, Laclau, and Habermas. For their part, Riccardo Ciavolella and Annelies Lannoy explore how academic disciplines such as anthropology and the history of religion have become contested fields of competing political agendas. In fact, both disciplines are inherently political: on the one hand, anthropology revolves around the idea of man and it was originally a typically positivistic and Darwinian area of research – a theme that is picked up by Cooter’s final essay; on the other hand, the history of religion, particularly in a Catholic country such as France, was loaded with heavy societal and ideological implications that manifested themselves in the educational context. As Gramsci wrote in the Quaderni, any hegemonic struggle boils down to a pedagogical struggle, and Lannoy’s article shows how this principle was at work in the establishment of a chair for the history of religion in fin de siècle France. The second part takes up this latter thread to expand it in the direction of the troubled relation between science and religion. Unsurprisingly, the Jesuits feature prominently in this section. Because of the nature of their mission, their Order involved several Gramscian themes: Jesuits are intellectuals, religious men, and educators, as well as, of course, cultural politicians. The article by Matteo Realdi and the co-authored essay by Luis Miguel Carolino and Carlos Ziller Camenietzki describe these characteristics at work in two different cases, both of which occurred in the Iberian Peninsula. Although the historical

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contexts are profoundly different – Franco’s Spain and the Portuguese Empire in the seventeenth century – it is interesting to see how they unfold in very similar hegemonic patterns. The religious intellectuals addressed in the essays (Lourosa and Romañá) exploited their scientific authority to construct a common understanding that consistently combined scientific and religious projects. Even more tellingly, this combination permeates modern Jesuit Studies, which translate, at a sort of meta-level, the political objectives of their own subject matter. As Pietro Daniel Omodeo argues, apologetic practitioners of this field, who wore the mask of scientific objectivity and post-ideological pacification, often pursued the same anti-Enlightenment goals that we see under attack in Lourosa’s and Romañá’s historical cases. The theme of the role of intellectuals is evident in all sections of this book, but it is specifically discussed in the third part. Both Arne Schirrmacher and the Spanish team composed of Isabel Jiménez-Lucena, Jorge Molero-Mesa, and Carlos Tabernero Holgado analyse a repository of popular journals and look at them through Gramscian lenses. Schirrmacher uses Gramsci’s notion of folklore to reassess the classical Forman thesis (concerning the relevance of the Weimar turmoil to account for crucial developments of physics in the interwar period), insisting that popular scientific presses in Germany did not necessarily perceive the crisis in physics during the mid-1920s as a bad thing. More generally, they did not see a rupture in the ‘well-oiled’ machinery of German science, thus revealing the ‘cultural dispositif ’ at work in the formal and informal discussions of science as an institution. The Spanish anarchic press is another site where the relations between hegemony and subalternity manifest themselves with the remarkable difference that this time it is not a model of science that is propagated but rather a model of citizenship and, more often than not, of being female. The focus of these two articles, concerned with popular historical sources, is balanced by the final two articles, which address the role of scientific experts in building up their societies. Interestingly, as long as the bourgeois structure of society is maintained, the form of government does not have much influence upon it. Thus, while Lino Camprubí’s essay focuses on Franco’s dictatorship and its smooth transition to democracy, Ana Simoes, Maria Dogo, and Ana Carneiro discuss the inverse path concerning how the Portuguese republic led to a right-wing dictatorship. Both papers point out lasting connections between politics, science, and engineering within different systems of governance, and thus they also highlight how intellectuals can serve the policies of their day. The former paper shows how engineers were instrumental in the development of consensus by combining cultural and economic dimensions. Science was key to Franco’s attempt to find a new space for Spain in the geopolitical theatre; engineers accomplished this goal by elaborating ‘a programme

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of industrialisation of the Spanish economy which conveyed important transformations of the structures of production in terms of labour organisation, resource allocation and territorial management’. In the latter contribution, the disciplinary specialisation of intellectuals changed after the transition from the Republic to a dictatorship, as technicians gave way to legal theorists in the position of Rector of the University of Lisbon. However, the continuity between powerful and cultural elites was not disrupted. On the contrary, it reached the colonies of the decrepit Empire in order to propagate European culture, thus providing another example of how intellectuals are connected with the reproduction of subalternity. Finally, the last section deals with Cold War issues from both sides of the Iron Curtain. While Jaume Sastre analyses the funding policy of the influential Rockefeller Foundation, Alina Cucu discusses what was happening in the Romanian factories in the Postwar period. Sastre’s study addresses the political factors shaping the ideals of science and motivating decisions behind the funding of scientific projects. In particular, archival material related to the Rye Conference, which set the cultural policy of the Foundation, shows how Warren Weaver understood the mission of the Rockefeller as a force to ensure political stability through mass communication. On the other hand, Cucu’s essay shows that the ideology of productivity in Rumania was at odds with the reality of the factory, an ostensible tension which created a crisis of hegemony. Once again, the Gramscian concepts of hegemony and historical bloc reveal new lines of fracture through which the historian of science can open up novel perspectives on science policy. This volume originated in a wonderful workshop that took place in Barcelona in January 2014. In organising the event, the editors collaborated with Kostas Gavroglu, Agustí Nieto-Galan, Matteo Realdi, Emma Sallent del Colombo, and Matthias Schemmel; we are deeply grateful to them for their help. The Barcelona workshop was a unique moment of encounter and intellectual exchange which gathered participants from four continents and at different stages of their careers. While producing a volume was not our initial intention, the lively discussions that emerged during the workshop convinced us that we could contribute to the scholarly conversation in multiple ways. The editorial process was not straightforward and this is one reason why this volume is being published six years after the event. Several participants in the workshop felt that their manuscripts were not mature enough and we realised that some strategic areas had been neglected in the original conference. A long negotiation process began which repeatedly changed the structure of the book. Finding a publisher was also not easy due to the provocative and experimental subject of the book. However, these factors certainly do not mean that this volume has

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arrived outdated, as it were. On the contrary, the editorial process has afforded us the opportunity to re-evaluate the work of each author and to refine arguments and theses that were still embryonic in 2014. We are also very thankful to Historical Materialism for the support they have given to the intellectual and political challenge of this volume. We are further indebted to many people and several organisations that supported this project in various ways: the Centre for the History of Science at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, the Collaborative Research Centre ‘Episteme in Motion’ (at the Freie Universität Berlin) funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions which supported one of us (Massimiliano Badino) at the time of the original workshop, and the consolidator project Early Modern Cosmology which is funded by the European Research Council (GA n. 725883) and is based at the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice (Pietro Daniel Omodeo).

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part 1 State of the Art

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chapter 1

Past and Present: Revisiting ‘Gramscianism’ Agustí Nieto-Galan

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Introduction

In the early twenty-first century, Antonio Gramsci might be considered by many as a nostalgic memento of old Marxist ideas, which seem to have been erased from public debates after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the Soviet bloc, and the end of the Cold War. For younger generations, Gramsci’s name might be associated with outdated political fights, or even be totally unknown. Nevertheless, Gramsci has never disappeared from intellectual and academic debates during the twentieth century. There is much evidence proving that old Gramscian concepts, from the 1920s and 1930s, are still alive today as powerful tools of analysis of our present. Gramsci’s ideas remain a deep source of inspiration. Reading his original texts is a tremendously moving experience, which surely deserves further attention. In the 1990s, sociologist David Harris noted ‘the astonishing tendency for the figure of Gramsci to keep coming to the fore, as a leading theorist and guide, as a source of specific pieces or concepts which guide analysis, or less specifically as a kind of model of good practice, able always to “teach a lesson”’.1 Although in 2005 Harris described Gramscianism as a rather ‘clumsy’ concept,2 he stressed again the fact that Gramsci’s work has permeated the twentieth century through ongoing debates in a wide variety of fields such as social sciences, philosophy, history, humanities, discourse theory, linguistics, structuralism, poststructuralism, and postmodernism, among others. Today, entering the third decade of the twenty-first century, we face the demanding challenge of yet again revisiting this ‘classic’ from a fresh, renewed perspective, which could allow us, as scholars and as citizens, to build a new critical approach to our troubled present and particularly to provide a fresh political dimension to History of Science and Science and Technology Studies (STS) as academic disciplines. For that purpose, in recent years we have built up an international network of ‘Gramscian’ historians of science to openly

1 Harris 1991, pp. 7–8. 2 Harris 2005; see also Harris 1991.

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discuss, actively appropriate, and share his legacy. International conferences such as ‘Science as Cultural Hegemony: Gramscian Concepts for the History of Science’ (Barcelona, January 2014), ‘Past and Present: Philosophy, Politics, and History in the Thought of Gramsci’ (London, June 2015), ‘Egemonia dopo Gramsci: una riconsiderazione (2)’ (Urbino, October 2015), the Ghilarza International Summer School first held in September 2014 in Ghilarza (the small town in Sardinia where Gramsci spent his childhood and youth), and the founding of journals such as Gramsciana: Rivista internazionale di studi su Antonio Gramsci (first issue 2016) are just some recent examples of the dynamism of the community of Gramscian scholars, which this volume attempts to reflect. Although a comprehensive analysis of the varied mechanisms through which Gramsci’s thought has permeated different generations and remains appealing today is obviously beyond the scope of this chapter, I would like to provide a brief reconstruction of some of the most relevant intellectual landmarks that serve as the continuation of Gramsci’s thinking. The chapter focuses geographically mainly on the British case and thematically on cultural studies, leaving aside Marxist philosophy in the terms for instance of the ‘debunking’ of Gramsci by Louis Althusser and Perry Anderson, or the tensions between historicist vs. structuralist approaches.3 Since much remains to be done to construct a new ‘popular science’, not isolated in itself but in constant construction of counter-hegemonies, in permanent struggle with the elites of each period, I will also describe how the Gramscian framework has permeated history of science, and the history of ‘popular science’ in particular. Finally, since this text originated from the keynote speech I gave for the opening of the international conference ‘Science as Cultural Hegemony’, held in Barcelona in January 2014, I will add a coda to pay tribute to the most prominent among Barcelona’s local Gramscians, and to the manner in which they have appropriated Gramsci’s work from the 1970s onwards. Their particular local sensitivity and cosmopolitan ambition will help us to draw a more general reflection on how we can use Gramsci today.

2

The Gramscian Legacy

Although Gramsci began his intellectual production in articles for Il Grido del Popolo, Avanti! and the periodical L’Ordine Nuovo, it was only after his arrest and

3 Thomas 2009; Fluss 2012.

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incarceration in Mussolini’s prisons in 1926 that he began to produce the famous notebooks containing more than 3,000 handwritten pages: the Quaderni del carcere (Prison Notebooks), which were preserved and published after his death thanks to his sister-in-law, Tatiana Schucht, an international socialist network and Palmiro Togliatti (1893–1964), leader of the Italian Communist Party (PCI). Just after Gramsci’s death, some extracts of his letters from prison were published in the periodical Lo Stato Operaio. In 1945, after the liberation of Italy, further extracts of the letters and the first extracts from the Quaderni appeared in the PCI press. In 1947, 128 letters were published (Lettere dal carcere; Torino, Einaudi). In the period 1948–51, Felice Platone led the first Italian edition of the Quaderni in six volumes,4 but a partial translation into English had to wait until 1957.5 In fact, only in the 1970s did Gramsci’s main ideas become available to a wide English readership thanks to the Selections from the Prison Notebooks, edited by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith.6 Other critical editions and translations were released later in the 1980s.7 Throughout this long process, the Quaderni would have a deep impact on Italy, and, later, internationally. The dramatic circumstances of their writing, the epic trial of his last years and the thoughtfulness of his work assured Gramsci a well-deserved place in the history of Western political thought. Throughout the pages of the Quaderni, Gramsci worked out concepts such as hegemony and consent, political and civil society, folklore, war of position, subaltern social groups, alongside a considerable effort devoted to defining and analysing intellectuals and their role in society. The appropriation of Gramsci’s ideas was varied and complex, and to this day it remains very much dependent on the cultural contexts in which they circulate. In the 1950s, and especially after 1956, with the impact of the invasion of Hungary by Soviet tanks, Gramsci was appropriated by the Italian Communist Party (PCI) and other Western Communist parties to legitimise movements towards Eurocommunism and polycentrism. In the orthodox view, he was still a leader of a political party in society, but from a more heterodox Marxist perspective, Gramscianism favoured the role of new historical actors such as civil society, factory councils, and the crucial contribution of individuals as potential intellectuals in the face of the monolithic authority of the party. In 1950 the Fondazione Antonio Gramsci (renamed Istituto Gramsci in 1954) was

4 Platone 1948–51. See also Gerratana 1975. 5 Marks 1957; Marzani 1957. 6 Hoare and Nowell Smith (eds) 1971. For a general overview of published primary sources see Crehan 2002. 7 Forgacs and Nowell Smith 1985; Buttigieg (ed.) 1992–2007; see also Forgacs (ed.) 2000, pp. 17– 25.

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founded in Rome, aiming to preserve all kinds of records related to Gramsci’s life and thought and to steer new research on the Italian and international working-class movement. After originally gathering journals and books belonging to Gramsci, in the 1960s the Istituto obtained the original manuscripts of the Quaderni del carcere and the Lettere. In the 1980s, the Istituto became the Fondazione Istituto Gramsci.8 In the 1950s and 1960s, in a context of contestation against the economic determinism of the ‘old’ Marxism, and reaction to the failure of the socialist revolution in countries such as Germany or the United Kingdom – where the contradictions of the capitalist mode of production seemed much more obvious than in Soviet Russia – Gramsci’s ideas were rooted in the so-called New Left movement, which prioritised cultural issues of domination and social control growing out of the old materialism of the 1930s.9 The New Left was born symbolically in Oxford in 1956, its founding members including Perry Anderson, E.P. Thompson, Raymond Williams, and Stuart Hall, among others. The journal New Left Review (NLR), edited by Hall until 1961, aimed to translate the works of classic Marxist intellectuals issuing from the post-war cultural turn such as Althusser, Adorno, Lukács, and obviously Gramsci. As described by Hall: The ‘first’ New Left was born in 1956, a conjuncture – not just a year – bounded on one side by the suppression of the Hungarian Revolution by Soviet tanks and on the other by the British and French invasion of the Suez Canal zone. These two events, whose dramatic impact was heightened by the fact that they occurred within days of each other, unmasked the underlying violence and aggression latent in the two systems that dominated political life at the time – Western imperialism and Stalinism – and sent a shock wave through the political world. … ‘Hungary’ and ‘Suez’ … symbolized the break-up of the political Ice Age. The New Left came into existence in the aftermath of these two events. It attempted to define a third political space somewhere between these two metaphors. Its rise signified for people on the left in my generation the end of the imposed silences and political impasses of the Cold War, and the possibility of a breakthrough into a new socialist project.10

8 9 10

See: http://www.fondazionegramsci.org/ (last accessed 27 January 2016). Sheehan 2007. For the New Left, see Williams 1977. The movement founded its own journal, New Left Review, which is still published today. See: http://newleftreview.org. Hall 2010, p. 177.

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Some years later, in 1964, in the intellectual climate of the Cold War, Richard Hoggart became the first director of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) at the University of Birmingham, later succeeded by Hall from 1968 to 1979.11 Deeply influenced by Gramscian ideas and with a New Left spirit, the CCCS soon became a very active research centre where contemporary popular culture – Hall’s book The Popular Arts already included blues, Westerns, pulp fiction, newspapers and magazines, radio, TV and ads – was perceived as a site of ongoing struggle for power and political control.12 It aimed to demonstrate that questions of culture – including (why not?) science – were deeply political. Hall was particularly interested in overcoming contemporary debates that had trapped the analysis of popular culture between its conception as a rigid, structural ideological machine of the elites and the romantic, uncritical description of an isolated, frozen essence of the working class.13 When Hall moved to the Open University in 1980, that Gramscian framework continued to inform broadcasted courses such as the famous U203 on ‘popular culture’, produced in collaboration with Tony Bennett, David Morley, Paul Willis, and Janet Woollacott. In that context, specific, historically grounded cultural analysis confronted the abstraction and formalism of structuralism.14 As stated in Hall’s obituary in the Guardian on 10 February 2014, ‘The foundations of cultural studies lay in an insistence on taking popular, low-status cultural forms seriously and tracing the interweaving threads of culture, power and politics’.15 Tony Bennett, a key member of the Hall school, examined museums as spaces for entertainment but also for discipline and control, in which the visitors’ manners and behaviour were carefully standardised and shaped, analogously to exhibitions, shopping malls and fairs. Not coincidentally, Bennett made extensive use of Gramsci in his work and was very much concerned with the cultural mechanisms that legitimised museums in the past. He stressed Foucault’s analysis of disciplinary power but integrated Gramsci’s concept of hegemony to analyse the rhetorical strategies of every display.16 In 1989, the International Gramsci Society (IGS) was founded in Formia, Italy, aiming to promote the worldwide exchange of information on Gramsci’s life and work and its influence in contemporary culture. Under the leadership of Joseph A. Buttigieg, the editor and translator of the multi-volume critical edi-

11 12 13 14 15 16

Procter 2004. See also Harris 1991. Author’s emphasis. Procter 2004. Procter 2004, p. 49. ‘Stuart Hall Obituary’, The Guardian, 10 February 2014. Bennett 1995, pp. 5–6.

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tion of the Prison Notebooks from the University of Notre Dame, the first issue of the IGS Newsletter was published in March 1992. A decade later, in 2002, the IGS Listserv appeared and a renewed version of the website was and is still today available to all scholars. In the last decade, the International Gramsci Journal, edited by Derek Boothman, has also played an active role in spreading Gramscian scholarship online.17 Under a Gramscian umbrella, there has also been room for more radical approaches which transcend the traditional academic debates. This was, for instance, the case of Counter-Hegemony, a journal of radical socialist culture, which was launched by Jeremy Lester in 1998 for the sake of the ‘renewal and revitalization of socialist culture in both theory and practice’.18 It included frequent collaborations by art critic, writer, and painter John Berger and novelist José Saramago; reflections on jazz and black radicalism by Frank Kofsky; and articles by André Gorz, Pietro Ingrao, and Rossana Rossanda, among others.19 Meanwhile, further editions of primary sources have flourished in recent years. In 2000, for instance, David Forgacs edited an excellent Gramsci reader, in which he selected some of the most important writings on the working class, education, and culture in the period 1916–26 – mainly articles in L’Ordine Nuovo – as well as the main topics of the Quaderni, 1929–37: hegemony, historical bloc, politics, passive revolution, Fordism, intellectuals, folklore, common sense, popular culture, and journalism.20 New courses, lectures, and conferences on Gramsci have also been organised. In 2005, readings for ‘The Gramsci Discourse’, a course at the University of California, Santa Cruz, were obviously drawn from Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, but also from selections of Dante, Machiavelli, Marx, Lenin, Lukács, Croce, Gentile, Manzoni, Althusser, Marinetti, Pasolini, Hall, Laclau and Mouffe, Williams, Anderson, Jameson, and others.21 But the Gramscian framework was also extrapolated to transcultural and transnational subalternities. A landmark in this context was Edward Said’s Orientalism, a widely read and translated book that was very much inspired by Gramscian concepts. Said analysed the subtle mechanisms of Western colonial and imperial enterprise and convincingly showed how, in the context 17 18 19

20 21

http://ro.uow.edu.au/gramsci/ (last accessed 20 June 2018). http://www.internationalgramscisociety.org/igsn/news/n10_12.shtml (last accessed 3 March 2016). 1998–2013 International Gramsci Society, edited by Marcus E. Green. The page was last revised on 8 June 2013: http://www.internationalgramscisociety.org/communications/list serv.html International Gramsci Society Newsletter, Number 10 (March 2000), p. 34. Forgacs 2000; Forgacs and Nowell Smith 1985. IGS Newsletter, Number 15 (June 2005), pp. 2–6.

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of Western hegemony, the ‘Orient’ was progressively shaped as a purposeful intellectual construction in opposition to the ‘West’, and how this was legitimised through narratives of superiority in relation to the ‘other’, the distant, the exotic, the irrational, the unknown by Western merchants, soldiers, missionaries, scholars, and scientists.22 In a similar vein, Ranajit Guha and the ‘Subaltern Studies’ group have also been strongly influenced by Gramsci’s works.23 After his academic training in Britain and his work on the history of Indian peasant revolts, Guha founded a new research group which strongly opposed the tacit assumptions of Western scholarship and criticised the nationalistic tradition of Indian historiography. Guha was also interested in the role of Western science, in particular metropolitan hygiene and public health campaigns, as powerful tools for the legitimisation of imperialist discourse in the colonies. Since 1982, the series Subaltern Studies: Writings on South Asian History and Society has been regularly published in India. More recently, Kate Crehan discussed how Gramscianism has also influenced cultural anthropology through the works of Hall, Raymond Williams, Ernesto Laclau and others.24 In her view, anthropology could become a useful tool to analyse ‘hegemonic (to use the Gramscian term) and taken-forgranted certainties of what is commonly referred to nowadays as our “globalized” world’.25 Crehan stressed how the study of ‘other’ cultures risked dismissing the larger contexts in which they are embedded – as in colonial encounters – but also posed the danger of idealising and romanticising them: ‘Both of these can be seen as the other side of the insistence that these non-Western, non-capitalist worlds should be taken seriously and not judged simply in terms of their lack of western forms and social organization’.26 Equally, medical anthropology has also used Gramsci to examine the complex relations of domination and consent between doctors and patients.27 But Gramsci’s legacy has also been a frequent object of controversy. Take, for instance, Marxist historian Perry Anderson, one of the founders of the New Left Review, when he stated: ‘In any event, Gramsci never properly theorised the site of specific mechanisms of bourgeois hegemony, and failed to ground a proper 22 23 24

25 26 27

Said 1978. See also Nieto-Galan 2011a. Guha and Spivak 1988. Crehan chose the work of Marxist anthropologist Eric Wolf to stress the idea that ‘cultural sets are continuously in construction, deconstruction and reconstruction, under the impact of multiple processes operative over wide fields of social and cultural connections’ (Crehan 2002, p. 176). See, in particular, chapter 7, ‘Gramsci Now’, pp. 165–210. Crehan 2002, pp. 3–4. Crehan 2002, p. 4. Pandolfi 1992.

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revolutionary strategy as a result’.28 Nevertheless, others, such as prestigious Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm, praised Gramsci’s flexibility and argued that ‘one of the reasons why historians … have found [Gramsci] so rewarding is precisely his refusal to leave the terrain of concrete historical, social and cultural realities for abstraction and reductionist theoretical models. It is therefore likely that Gramsci will continue to be read’.29 In fact, his capacity for adaptation, his refusal of dogmatic and rigid Marxist tools of analysis and his emphasis on contingencies and particularities have probably contributed to Gramsci’s survival in our post-Marxist age.30 In his critical analysis of the effects of Gramsci on cultural studies, David Harris acknowledged that ‘Gramscian work has opened a number of areas to critical inspection in a novel and interesting way. It has been responsible for the emergence of a critical sociology of culture and for the politicisation of culture’.31

3

Gramsci, the History of Science, and the History of ‘Popular’ Science

Italian historians of science have drawn on Gramsci’s work from different perspectives, in particular relying on his diagnosis of the cultural problems of Italy, including universities and scientific communities.32 Eugenio Garin is a good example of the penetration of Gramsci’s thought into the Italian academic world, and the historiography of science in particular. Following Gramsci’s reflections on culture, Garin opened the history of knowledge in the Renaissance to a wider perspective and new interconnections, and focused on the ‘scientific culture’ of elite intellectuals while also taking into account their historical settings and broader philosophical contexts.33 In the English-language literature, as early as 1978, Morris Berman, for one, worked on the Royal Institution educational programme, understood through the analysis of science as a tool to control the tensions and contradictions of an industrial society.34 Berman’s work was in tune with some aspects of 28 29 30 31 32 33 34

Anderson 1976, p. 26. Forgacs 2000, pp. 12–13 from the introduction by Eric Hobsbawm. Holub 1992. Harris 1991, p. 195. Govoni 2002. See also Finocchiaro 1988, Finocchiaro 1999. See also papers published in Studi Storici: Rivista Trimestrale dell’Istituto Gramsci. Garin 1997. I am indebted to Pietro Daniel Omodeo and Massimiliano Badino for this information. Berman 1978.

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the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, whose main proponents, such as Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Walter Benjamin, and later Jürgen Habermas, dissected the crucial role of culture – beyond economic, material structures – in establishing mechanisms of exploitation and social control in contemporary capitalist societies.35 Some years later, in 1984, historian of science Roger Cooter followed a similar path in his work on nineteenthcentury British phrenology as a strategy for social control, and on the specific relationships between knowledge and power through the practice of that controversial science.36 Cooter expressed his view in the introduction of his book in the following terms: With the help of Frankfurt scholars, there blossomed an antidogmatic Marxist tradition willing to look hard at science and culture, while within the later orbit came the stirrings of a vigorous community of social historians, a part of whose reaching beyond empiricism involved the rediscovery of the insights on ideology and culture of the Italian theorist Antonio Gramsci.37 Two years later, in 1986, Jack Morrell reviewed Cooter’s work on phrenology in terms that deserve a full quotation: In analysing the uses of phrenology by different groups, Cooter systematically deploys the ideas of Antonio Gramsci … Gramsci developed the concept of hegemony, by which he meant the way in which a ruling group or class exerted its own moral, political and cultural values by a mixture of force, fraud or persuasion … Gramsci realized that, in the nineteenthcentury liberal regimes, persuasion, not force or corruption, was often the means preferred by ruling groups … Moreover, given the importance of persuasion and education in the struggle for power, it followed for Gramsci that knowledge and the intellectuals who produce and diffuse it are not ornamental butterflies but central ideological agents. For the social historian of popular science in a nineteenth-century liberal parliamentary democracy, the heuristic attractiveness of Gramsci’s approach is obvious yet strangely unexploited.38

35 36 37 38

Rush 2004. Cooter 1984. Cooter 1984, p. xi. Morrell 1986, pp. 736–7 (my emphasis).

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Morrell’s enthusiastic call to apply a more ambitious Gramscian framework to the history of science did not receive much attention in later decades. In Jan Golinski’s Making Natural Knowledge, for instance, science’s relationship with domination and power is extensively discussed, mainly within the framework of Michel Foucault, but the book remains silent on Gramsci’s concept of cultural domination and consent, which is only mentioned once – not by chance, in relation to Roger Cooter’s work on phrenology.39 John Krige’s more recent book, American Hegemony, emphasises the crucial role of science and technology in the United States’ strategies of ‘soft power’ during the Cold War.40 Krige defines hegemony in a broad sense as ‘a capacity, a state of being, a preponderance of power’. It becomes a very useful tool to describe how ‘political support and scientific legitimisation, supplemented by money for grants, fellowships and training programmes, were the main instruments used by the United States to reconfigure European science after the war’.41 However, he admits in a footnote that ‘there are of course other notions of hegemony, notably that developed by the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, whose analysis of the role of intellectuals in consolidating hegemony will surely bear fruit if applied to my topic’.42 Although Orientalism could be very useful to explore the role of science in the mechanisms of the construction of Western hegemony – as a ‘soft power’, which transcends violence, coercion or military force – Said’s work has been notably absent from the historiography of science. Nevertheless, Said’s Gramscian framework can be used as a source of inspiration to give voice to as yet unexplored actors, to the ‘other’, to pre-colonial science, to still-untapped sources from indigenous literature to oral interviews. In fact, postcolonial studies could take inspiration from cultural anthropology when trying to decode worldviews and values of the ‘other’, attempting to overcome Eurocentrism, analysing movements of popular resistance to foreign scientific imperialism, and further emphasising plurality and contingency instead of continuing to give priority to Western totalising schemes.43 In 1990, a year after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Robert Young published the chapter entitled ‘Marxism and the History of Science’ in the Companion to the History of Modern Science.44 He strikingly asserted that, in his view, only Ant-

39 40 41 42 43 44

Golinski 1998, p. 132. Krige 2006. Krige 2006, p. 10. Krige 2006, p. 272 (my emphasis). Kumar 1995. Young 1990a, pp. 77–86.

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onio Gramsci will become a useful reference for future historians of science when attempting to rescue the most interesting aspects of the old Marxist historiography.45 Young linked Gramsci’s thought to his idea that modern science was a powerful instrument in reifying and disguising the power relations inherent in capitalist society.46 In his own words: ‘Science enlightens and brings about progress but also alienates and oppresses’. Following Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man, Young stated: ‘The scientific world-view separates matter from mind and fact from value, while the capitalist mode of production separates the worker from the finished product and the work from the worker via the wage’.47 Young’s presence in the Companion in the 1990s is probably a sign of the continued importance of an older historiographic tradition, which might still be useful in several facets of our contemporary research. As we know, shared historical problems, ideas, schools, research methods and practices do not suddenly disappear. Historians should probably be more sensitive to continuities and progressive transformations rather than breaks and revolutions. 3.1 Popular Science Young may not have had exactly this in mind in the 1990s, but the fact is that a Gramscian framework could be particularly useful at least for the analysis of the ‘popular’ character of science both from a historical perspective and also in our present times. Like Roger Chartier, Robert Darnton and others working in the field of cultural history, Hall’s school of cultural studies was critical of the prestigious Marxist historian Edward Palmer Thompson’s approach to popular culture and to his ‘history from below’,48 in The Making of the English Working Class, which posited a genuine quasi-autonomous working-class culture.49 Hall’s school was in favour of popular culture (and we can include here popular science) as a dynamic phenomenon which was progressively constructed as part of the attempt of the ruling class to win hegemony (domination), and the forms of opposition (appropriation and resistance) to this endeavour.50 As quoted by Tony Bennett: In Gramsci’s conspectus, popular culture is viewed neither as the site of the people’s cultural deformation nor as that of their cultural self-

45 46 47 48 49 50

Young 1990b, pp. 886–97. Morrell 1986, p. 737. Young 1990b, p. 889. Thompson 1966b; Thompson 1966a. Thompson 1966a. Bennett 1986, p. xv.

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affirmation or, in a simple Thompsonian sense, of their own self-making, rather, it is viewed as a force field of relations shaped, precisely, by those contradictory pressures and tendencies – a perspective which enables a significant reformulation of both the theoretical and the political issues at stake in the study of popular culture.51 No doubt, ‘popular science’ – as a part of ‘popular culture’ – has been a contested area in academic life for decades.52 As historian of science Jon Topham recently summed up, overcoming the dichotomy between ‘popular science’ and ‘proper science’ has not been an easy task, at least for historians of science. This is probably one of the reasons why the history of science popularisation has for a long time occupied a marginal place in mainstream historiography. It was generally trapped in a diffusionist model which took for granted that scientific knowledge was first of all created and then later spread to the ignorant public, in two separate steps and spheres of expert and lay knowledge.53 Although Topham only briefly mentioned domination in his overview,54 and in particular cultural domination through knowledge in transit, the concept seemed already rooted in earlier debates. In 1990, for instance, Stephen Hilgartner’s ‘The Dominant View of Popularization’55 criticised how science popularisation was used in the past and is still often used today by scientists and experts to ensure that they themselves decide how science should be interpreted by lay people, and thus maintain their powerful, privileged social status. Even in cases where experts were able to demonstrate that the popularisers had made mistakes when disseminating certain aspects of science to the public, this would similarly reinforce their authority as the exclusive repositories of knowledge. As stressed by Roger Cooter and Stephen Pumphrey, ‘popular’ scientific knowledge has its own perception of nature, which may oppose at least partially that of the elite, and lay scientific knowledge does not necessarily coincide with the elite corpus. Their aims and motives might differ as well. They can only be properly understood in specific sites and defined local contexts.56 Thus, once 51 52

53 54 55 56

Bennett 1986, p. xiii (my emphasis). The following paragraphs are mainly based on my papers: ‘Domination, Appropriation and Resistance’, given at the international conference ‘Science as Cultural Hegemony’, Institut d’Estudis Catalans (IEC), Barcelona, 22–24 January 2014; and ‘Revisiting “popular science”’, presented at ‘Egemonia dopo Gramsci: una riconsiderazione’, Urbino (Italy), 6–8 October 2015 (unpublished manuscripts). Topham 2009. Ibid. Hilgartner 1990. See also Nieto-Galan 2016. ‘The impact of science’s popularization upon both men and women remains to be meas-

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we attribute an epistemological status to lay, popular audiences, concepts such as appropriation and resistance also become extremely stimulating. Generally speaking, knowledge is not simply transferred as if it were a material commodity; it is always transformed in unexpected and sometimes startling ways by different groups and actors. Appropriation processes should include strategies of legitimisation and legitimating spaces which often lie outside the borders and the function of established institutions, and they are always close to processes involving the construction of different counter-hegemonies. Appropriation also involves eclecticism between ongoing, hegemonic programmes and existing traditions.57 Moreover, the resistance of different groups to elite theories and technologies is particularly relevant. Every group struggles for its own organic interests and agendas – for cultural hegemony. For instance, Martin Bauer’s description of the rationale of historical actors who resisted technological changes such as textile mechanisation, steam engines, nuclear power and biotechnology at different periods in history, is particularly illuminating.58 In a framework in which the boundaries of knowledge are in constant negotiation, audiences are never passive, and knowledge in transit is never ideologically neutral, therefore the voices of amateurs, students, readers, visitors, viewers, artisans, and activists have risen in status compared to the traditional actors who have been more deeply studied from the prevailing approach to popularisation: doctors, engineers, writers, collection owners, organisers of world fairs, scientists, university professors, researchers, civil servants, teachers, advisors, popularisers, and many more. The role of the latter as organic intellectuals, in Gramsci’s words, is crucial, but the history of the former, of the other organic intellectuals, associated with the majority of audiences of science, is still largely yet to be written. For that purpose, Gramsci’s conception of folklore can be especially useful. In his view, folklore implied the empirical collection, description, and classification of local traditions and popular knowledge. Since folklore was meant to contain the sediments of earlier forms of domination, it became a necessary raw material for the permanent struggle of cultural hegemony between elite and lower classes. Therefore only after deep acquaintance with it could the discourses of experts be linked to the supposedly ‘genuine’ epistemology of the lower classes. For Gramsci, folklore did not have to be totally erased nor fully

57 58

ured, whether commercially or ideologically, whether as education or as entertainment’ (Cooter and Pumphrey 1994, p. 237). For the concept of appropriation, see Gavroglu et al. 2008. Bauer 1994.

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preserved; rather, it had to be taken as raw material for the emergence of new counter-hegemonies. As Bennett quoted from Gramsci: One can say that until now folklore has been studied primarily as a ‘picturesque’ element … Folklore should instead be studied as a conception of the world and life implicit to a large degree in determinate (in time and space) strata of society and in opposition (also for the most part implicit, mechanical and objective) to ‘official’ conceptions of the world.59 Therefore, the more elements of folklore are used, and were used in the past, as starting points for further processes of cultural domination, appropriation and resistance, the more they can provide excellent examples of a new Gramscian analysis, with sharper political analysis of the processes of knowledge in transit. In other contexts, both today and in the past, the battle for scientific authority is increasingly being waged with a vast plurality of voices and interests. There are permeable boundaries between scholarly articles, preprints, correspondence among scientists, teaching handbooks, appearances in the printed and audiovisual media and other forums of debate. In addition, active patient, consumer or user associations, ecology groups, anti-nuclear activists or groups speaking out against genetically modified foods, the new ethical concerns regarding the limits of molecular biology and other issues are perhaps examples of resistance and counter-hegemony of a new ‘popular science’ for the twenty-first century. As Massimiano Bucchi and Federico Neresini stressed in their reflection on the mechanisms of public participation in science which have recently emerged, we are probably now in a complex process of redefining ‘popular science’ with new, serious struggles for cultural hegemony: A group of activists protests against GMO outside a biotechnology research institute. The citizens of a region vote in a referendum on a new waste disposal facility. A patients’ association compiles a database on the symptoms and clinical evolution of a rare genetic disease. A group of citizens is invited to discuss the issue of embryo stem cell research and produce a final document to be submitted to policy makers. What do these examples have in common? Are they all in their own way expressions of a profound change in the terms and conditions under which scientific knowledge is produced, discussed and legitimated?60 59 60

Quoted by Bennett 1995, p. 109. Bucchi and Neresini, 2007, p. 449. See also my chapter ‘Democratic Science’ in Nieto-Galan 2016.

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This is probably the new ‘popular science’ which is emerging in our present time. It is deeply politically loaded, to the point where, from a new framework of co-production of knowledge, the political and the scientific cannot be clearly disentwined from each other.61 In this context a serious revision of the standard way in which science popularisation had been analysed until recently has brought us from the Cold War top-down, deficit model of the so-called ‘Public Understanding of Science’ (PUS) movement, to the new ‘participatory turn’; from a marginal position of science popularisation in relation to science proper to the epistemological value of ‘expository science’ as an act of communication with a significant epistemological status. It has also provided a useful revision of the expert-lay relationship in the making of scientific knowledge. And, following Bennett’s concept of the ‘exhibitionary complex’, it has brought to the fore a critical revision of the way in which we approach science museums and science centres as tools for the reproduction of a specific cultural hegemony.62 Museums have become places for standardised representations (this is especially true of the science centres),63 where official and popular culture, expert and lay culture, meet, and not always on an equal footing, since a certain cultural hegemony is imposed by the elites, ‘linked to the well-acknowledged fact that museums were places for civilizing the working classes by diverting restless minds into acceptable forms of learning and encouraging a reverential frame of mind at the magnificence of a God-created world’.64 Bennett is very much concerned with the cultural mechanisms that legitimised the birth of the modern museums and the rhetorical strategies associated with every display, a framework that can be extrapolated to science museums.65 Beyond a too simple top-down model, science popularisation and science displays are at the core of the battle for cultural hegemony in a given context.

4

Conclusion: Local Gramscians, Global Questions

I would like to close the chapter by paying a modest tribute to the most prominent local Gramscians, who in the 1970s and 1980s spread the Prison Notebooks and other Gramsci texts in Barcelona. Special mention should be made of Jordi 61 62 63 64 65

Jasanoff 2004. Bennett 1995; Nieto-Galan 2016. Bennett 1995, pp. 5–6. Forgan 2005, p. 581. Bennett 1995, pp. 5–6.

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Solé Tura (1930–2009), a Marxist intellectual and politician who back in 1966, in spite of the fierce hostility of General Franco’s dictatorship, managed to publish fragments of the Prison Notebooks in Catalan under the title of Cultura i Literatura. I still remember my deep impression when as late as 2006 I came across the book and read Gramsci’s famous paragraph that confers on all humans their ability to become philosophers or intellectuals. I quote in English as follows: … all men are philosophers … because philosophy is in the heart of language itself. It is a set of notions and concepts that goes beyond grammatically empty words; philosophy is in the common sense and in the good sense; it is in popular religion and in all the system of beliefs, superstitions, opinions, ways of seeing and acting that we find in anything that is generally known as a folklore … Is it better ‘to think’ without having a critical consciousness, in a fragmented and occasional way; that is to say, to join an external mechanically ‘imposed’ world view, or rather to consciously and critically elaborate one’s own thought, … to choose one’s own sphere of action, to actively take part in the World history, … and not accept passively the external shaping of our personality?66 Solé Tura was one of the fathers of the 1978 Spanish democratic constitution. He had joined the efforts of the commission representing the Spanish Communist Party (PCE) and the Catalan Partit Socialista Unificat de Catalunya (PSUC), which had been legalised some months after Franco’s death in 1975. He later moved to social democracy, joining the PSOE, the Spanish Social Democrat Party and becoming the Minister of Culture in Felipe González’s cabinet. Using Gramsci’s concept of hegemony, Solé Tura identified Catalan nationalism as a strategy of the Catalan elites directed at social control and political stability.

66

‘… tots els homes són filòsofs … perquè la filosofia es troba en el mateix llenguatge, que és un conjunt de nocions i conceptes determinats més enllà de paraules gramaticalment buides de contingut; en el sentit comú i en el bon sentit; a la religió popular i a tot el sistema de creences, supersticions, opinions, maneres de veure i d’actuar que es troben en tot allò que es coneix generalment com a folklore … És preferible “pensar” sense tenir-ne consciència crítica, de manera disgregada o ocasional, és a dir, “participar” en una concepció del món “imposada” mecànicament pel medi extern … o bé elaborar la pròpia concepció del món conscientment i crítica, i en connexió amb aquesta activitat mental, escollir la pròpia esfera d’activitat, participar activament en la història del món, ésser guia d’un mateix i no acceptar passivament i servilment que la nostra personalitat sigui afaiçonada de fora estant?’ (Gramsci 1966d, pp. 3–4, translation into English is mine).

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This has been, however, a controversial issue, as historians such as Josep Termes have argued convincingly for the grassroots origins of Catalanism.67 Beyond this academic debate, that Gramscian framework is still discussed today, when the political future of Catalonia as a free nation is again at stake. Manuel Sacristán (1925–85) and Giulia Adinolfi (1930–80) can be fondly remembered as a remarkable Gramscian couple in Barcelona. As a brilliant philosopher and distinguished member of the PSUC, Sacristán edited several of Gramsci’s texts and discussed some of his main concepts in local political debates.68 He edited several political, cultural journals – Quaderns de Cultura, Nous Horitzons, Mientras Tanto, and was a very active translator of Marx, Engels, Adorno, Korsch, Lukács, Marcuse, E.P. Thompson and obviously Gramsci, who can be considered his main intellectual reference. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, just before his death, Sacristán introduced nature and the environment as a new political actor suffering from exploitation and subalternity and sowed the seeds of future disciplines such as political ecology, which denounced the environmental price paid by the subaltern classes.69 His wife, Giulia Adinolfi, used a Gramscian framework for her pioneering studies on gender as another subalternity at the heart of other struggles for hegemony.70 In 1979 the couple began to edit Mientras Tanto, which aimed, among other things, at an ecologist and feminist revision of the original Marx texts. This was the time of the appearance of history of science masterpieces such as Carolyn Merchant’s The Death of Nature, when environmental and gender subalternities were already embedded in the academic debates.71 Finally, the most prolific of our local Gramscians was Francisco Fernández Buey (1943–2012). Since the 1970s, he had been working on further analysing and elaborating Gramscian concepts and became an active populariser of Gramsci’s ideas. He was one of the founders of the International Gramsci Society and a key expert on the original Gramsci texts in Spain.72 Influenced by Sacristán, Fernández Buey insisted that a systematic application of Gramsci’s framework to science as an important aspect of culture, but also to the history

67 68 69 70 71

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Solé Tura 1970. Solé Tura’s thesis was criticised by, for instance, Termes 1999. Gramsci 1970; Gramsci 1985. On Sacristán, see Benach et al 2006. On environmental issues see Sacristán 1979; Sacristán 1987; Martínez Alier 2005. Adinolfi 1980a; Adinolfi 1980b, pp. 19–22. For an interesting discussion on the feminism of Giulia Adinolfi, see Juncosa 2006, DVD 4: ‘Giulia’. ‘The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution, published in 1980, presented a view of the Scientific Revolution that challenged the hegemony of mechanistic science as a marker of progress’, Merchant 2006, p. 513. Fernández Buey 1976; Fernández Buey 1978; Fernández Buey 2001.

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of science, had yet to be developed in depth. In a way, the aim of this volume is very much in tune with Paco’s unfinished programme of spreading Gramsci’s ideas through society at large as part of his own political commitment as a citizen in Western democracies. So our local Gramscians had probably a lot in common with other scholars worldwide who searched for powerful tools to analyse subalternities and exploitation through subtle cultural mechanisms, a challenge that we face again in the early twenty-first century. It is worth mentioning here the recent publication, in 2015, of his Reading Gramsci, in the Historical Materialism series at Brill, which is presented as ‘a collection of essays with a unifying theme: the enduring relevance of Gramsci’s political, philosophical and personal reflections’.73 In all cases – Solé-Tura’s pioneering translation into Catalan, and his reflections on nationalism and cultural hegemony; Sacristán’s and Adinolfi’s inspiration for new ecologist and feminist readings; and Fernández Buey’s ambitious, unfailing scholarship and militant commitment in the public sphere – the Barcelona Gramscians reflected very well the multiple routes of learning and appropriating Gramsci’s work, and its flexibility and plasticity once adapted to different historical times and contexts. Some years ago, Geoff Andrews, an expert on politics and international relations, regretted that Gramsci’s role as an inspiring thinker for the cultural opposition to Thatcherism in the 1980s had been forgotten, leaving him a much-neglected figure, even with some ‘populist’ overtones in cultural studies, whereas Foucault seems to be a more ‘marketable’ author. But Andrews believed, and I would endorse his thesis, that Gramsci’s work can live again today to have a critical impact on all of us as citizens of globalisation, but also in the academic world. Gramsci’s ideas might support more creative political intervention and better political engagement, a useful resistance to the hegemonic discourses of globalisation, an ideological armour against technocracy, and – why not – a refreshing approach to rebuilding leftist culture.74 Perhaps Andrews’ hopes were too optimistic – he published them just before the harsh recession we are still suffering from today, in particular in Southern Europe – but it is clearly this optimistic spirit that inspires our Gramscian network of historians of science. It seeks to analyse, using old and new tools, the deep political dimension of science in the broad sense of the word,

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Fernández Buey, 2015. See: http://www.brill.com/products/book/reading‑gramsci (last accessed 3 March 2016). Andrews 2007. http://www.lwbooks.co.uk/journals/soundings/debates/left_futures9.ht ml (last accessed 29 November 2007). See also Andrews 2005.

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including both the hard sciences and the social sciences, but also technology and the humanities – history of science in particular – as academic disciplines. There are still hot Gramscian issues to be discussed today by historians of science, which deserve further attention: the role of professional scientists as organic intellectuals; the political dimension of scientific practice, in particular in contemporary problems such as climate change, biotechnology, the pharmaceutical industry, nanomaterials; the nature of ‘popular science’ as a crucial element in the present struggle for cultural hegemony and social control; the inevitable asymmetries and subalternities of any knowledge in transit through a specific society or at a transnational level; the close link between new technocracies – economic ones in the present recession, for instance – and social control; the crucial importance of scientific education and its deep political implications. No matter the exact level of our analysis, we will be keen to revisit Gramsci in an innovative, original, and creative way for his useful application not only to our academic environment but also to the worrying challenges of our present citizenry. There are many more connections, appropriations, transfers of ideas across continents and Gramscian schools and societies than those sketched in this chapter. So, adding new data to the already outlined genealogy of Gramscian thought from the 1920s to the present might perhaps be a good indication that this is still a very useful framework for fresh critical analysis of the past and the present of our scientific culture, for a new understanding of popular culture and popular science in our present times. In 1957, the famous writer and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922–75) published his collection of poems Ceneri di Gramsci (The Ashes of Gramsci), as a symbolic meditation over Gramsci’s grave in the Non-Catholic Cemetery in Rome, and appropriated concepts such as subalternity and hegemony for his battle against the power structures of his time, such as the Catholic Church and even the PCI, which had expelled him for his homosexuality. Pasolini developed a bitterly critical discourse against the new emerging consumer society in postwar Italy, in which a new cultural hegemony based on the new media of the capitalist elites had emerged to irreversibly subvert a deeply rooted popular culture and weaken the strategies of resistance in the face of the passive consent of the younger generations.75 More than half a century later, Pasolini’s diagnoses seem particularly clever and useful for our present time, and his verses remain an emotional tribute to Gramsci:

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Pasolini 1957; Ward 1995.

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And you, here, banished with your hard, unCatholic grace, registered among the dead foreigners: Gramsci’s ashes … Torn between hope and disillusion, I draw near, having chanced into this spare green corner, before your grave, your spirit here at rest among these trees.76 76

Sartarelli 2014, p. 173.

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part 2 Disciplinary Struggles

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chapter 2

The Concept of Hegemony in Discourse Analysis Javier Balsa

This chapter offers a brief outline of how the concept of ‘hegemony’ has been thought about and applied within the field of Discourse Analysis.1,2 In addition, some tension points between these uses and the theory of hegemony – both in its Gramscian and Laclausian versions – will be identified. This review of the field and its critical analysis are part of a larger work that seeks to provide a systematisation of the theory of hegemony. Such a theory would be based on a general Gramscian approach, into which some contributions from Laclau’s perspective could be reintegrated, especially in relation to how hegemony, in its most specifically ideological aspect, is constructed from the disarticulation/rearticulation of signifying chains, rhetoric playing an important role in this.3 Unfortunately, there are very few contributions by the Laclausian school regarding how to study the discursive-linguistic processes that lead to these articulations. It is quite striking that a school which usually stands for a ‘Theory of Discourse’4 barely dialogues with the field of Discourse Analysis.5 It is true that there are significant theoretical differences between these two traditions around the very concept of ‘discourse’, but this is no reason to ignore the whole methodological toolkit developed by Discourse Analysis, at least in order to approach the linguistic aspects of discourse.

1 A preliminary version of this text was presented in the Workshop ‘Egemonia dopo Gramsci: una riconsiderazione’, Urbino, 20–21 October 2014. 2 Discourse Analysis comprises a number of different approaches that analyse the language in use. It was developed from the 1970s by, among others, Angenot, Charaudeau, Ducrot, Fairclough, Gumperz, Kerbrat-Orecchioni, Maingueneau, van Dijk, and Wodak. 3 Balsa 2011. 4 Some works concerning Laclau’s theory refer to it as ‘Theory of Discourse’ or ‘Discourse Theory’ (see, e.g., Torfing 1999, Townshend 2003), and the programme directed by Ernesto Laclau at the University of Essex was called ‘Ideology and Discourse Analysis’. 5 Thus, for instance, in the book precisely called Discourse, David Howarth only offers brief references to a single discourse analyst, Norman Fairclough. What is more, this author is left aside because, according to Howarth, he has a restricted view on discourse, while for Laclau and Mouffe discursive practices are a synonym for the whole system of social relations (Howarth 2000).

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The need to study the contributions that could be made to the theory of hegemony by Discourse Analysis would apply to both a Laclausian and a Gramscian perspective. This is because the Gramscian tradition has also been unable to move forward in the incorporation of methodologies for the analysis of discursive processes, despite the recent theoretical reassessments of the centrality that Gramsci gives to language in the construction of hegemony.6 In short, for these reasons, I believe it is important to move forward on these matters regarding the connections between Language Studies and, more specifically, the field of Discourse Analysis and the theory of hegemony.7 It is worth clarifying that not all the traditions related to the analysis of language have used the concept of hegemony. Even several authors with a Marxist affiliation, such as Michel Pêcheux, do not use this concept in their work; nor do they mention Gramsci’s contributions.8 Nevertheless, there are two great traditions in Discourse Analysis that have granted a prominent place to hegemony in their theoretical formulations and in their concrete analyses: on the one hand, the French-speaking tradition of the ‘Sociocriticism Theory’ of Marc Angenot, in which the concept of hegemony has a central role; on the other, what has been called ‘Critical Discourse Analysis’, which is more a heterogeneous movement than a school of thought, led by a group of English- (and German-) speaking authors, among whom Teun van Dijk, Norman Fairclough, and Ruth Wodak stand out. Even though the latter makes use of the concept, she has not explicitly reflected upon it, in contrast to the other two critical discourse analysts who have done so. As usual in the social sciences in central countries, particular traditions or ‘schools’ remain almost completely isolated within their own language barriers.9 Thus, there are few or no points of contact between French-speaking and English-speaking schools of thought.

6 See Frosini 2010, Green and Ives 2010, Ives 2004a and 2004b, Lo Piparo 2010 [1987], Orlandi 2007, among others. 7 This overview does not include a consideration of the use of the concept of ‘hegemony’ in studies on the constitution of national languages, or on the imposition of some languages, particularly English, at a global scale. 8 Most of the Latin American linguists, who have followed the theoretical and methodological perspective of Pêcheux, do not use the concept of hegemony. Besides, they only draw on Gramsci in a very general way (see, for instance, the work of Teresa Carbó, Julieta Haidar or Irene Fontes, to mention just the most renowned theorists). 9 This phenomenon of national and linguistic limitations continues to amaze those of us who live on the periphery and who – perhaps due to this relatively marginal position – are used to readings that take several perspectives into account without so many limitations regarding nationality or language.

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Hegemony in Teun van Dijk’s Theory

Originally, van Dijk had an outstanding career in Textual Linguistics, a subfield in which he remains one of the main international sources, but he then became interested in cognitive matters related to beliefs and social representations. In this line of work, he published a book which set out to offer a farreaching discussion of ideology from a multidisciplinary perspective: Ideology: A Multidisciplinary Approach.10 In this thick volume, van Dijk uses the concept of hegemony quite centrally, but although he takes it directly from Gramsci, he neither performs a detailed analysis of Gramsci’s work, nor mentions the observations on language contained in the Prison Notebooks.11 Admittedly, this accords with the general methodology of van Dijk’s book, which was explicitly written as an elaboration of personal ideas and confines itself to merely mentioning the sources of particular concepts. In this regard, he eclectically combines contributions from different social disciplines and schools of thought, such as those of Billig, Schütz, Moscovici, Bourdieu, Hall, Habermas, Searle, and Foucault, among others. Within this framework, van Dijk clearly differentiates hegemony from the direct imposition of dominant ideas. That is, for van Dijk, hegemony includes the more subtle processes that enable the persuasive construction of consensus on the social order through the manipulation of the minds of citizens. Ideological hegemony at its fullest takes place when the dominated groups are unable to distinguish between their own interests and attitudes and the interests and attitudes of the dominant groups. Dominant groups build this hegemony through the transformation of the recipients’ context models. For van Dijk, the mind simplifies the processes of information reception; for this purpose, it has internalised certain context models that allow it to quickly differentiate between the utterances it considers to be a description of what happened, and the ones it considers to be just someone’s opinion about what happened. Therefore, in order to achieve domination, the most important thing is not so much controlling the content of discourses, but attaining legitimisation or delegitimisation for the speakers and their communicative situations. In

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Van Dijk 1998. The bibliographical reference is Selections from the Prison Notebooks, published in New York in 1971, which is based on Italian editions. However, van Dijk does not include specific quotations of any fragment of the notebooks, but only general references to this work. When he mentions the notebooks, he also refers – in a general way – to the works of Adamson, Femia, and Hall on Gramsci.

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this way, it could be that certain utterances would be interpreted as objective descriptions and, thus, perceived – in the minds of the dominated recipients – as straightforward descriptions of ‘facts’, whereas other utterances would be perceived merely as opinions. Several discursive structures enable the persuasive manipulation of mental models in favour of ideological domination. For instance, in terms of communicative situations, it is crucial to present some speakers as neutral. As regards the issue of content, a central strategy in the construction of hegemony is the emphasis on positive communication about ‘us’ and negative communication about ‘them’, and vice versa. Overall, this conceptual framework, and its corresponding toolkit for textual analysis, have allowed van Dijk and his followers to carry out substantial advances in the knowledge of discursive processes connected to ideological domination (his studies on racism stand out, especially).12 However, since his earliest discussions on the use of the concept of ‘hegemony’, some limitations have become apparent in this theoretical perspective. Hegemony cannot exclusively hold through the construction of a negative image of the dominated groups. This framework can work for the exclusion of marginalised minorities, but not to grant hegemony to the majorities, something that is key to the construction of hegemony. At the same time, the egocentric component around which van Dijk’s ideas turn is based on the hypothesis that there is a dichotomy between ideology – which would belong to a group – and culture – which would be national and shared by everyone, and therefore not part of ideology. This qualitative differentiation would not be compatible with a view that defines common sense and a particular national culture as a field of dispute, as is the case in the hegemony theories with Gramscian or Laclausian roots. In any case, it is true that it could be interpreted – following some linguists such as Alejandro Raiter13 – that common sense is a product of the dominant discourse’s triumph and, for this reason, it would be ideologically deactivated.14 A second point of tension between the conceptualisation of van Dijk’s hegemony dynamics and a theory of hegemony (in both its Gramscian and its Laclausian frameworks) is the central place this author grants the concept of ‘manipulation’. To him, manipulation would be made up by strategies that con12 13 14

Van Dijk 1991 and 2009. Raiter 2003. It is possible to trace, both in van Dijk’s and in Raiter’s theories, some Saussurean-based perspective regarding language (or culture) being a shared phenomenon and, therefore, of a non-ideologised nature.

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trol the minds of the audience and manage to impose some consensus in favour of particular interests. ‘Manipulation’, in van Dijk’s theory, involves distinguishing between manipulative discourse and non-manipulative discourse – the latter would offer, in turn, adequate information and would perform some legitimate persuasion. That is, manipulation is seen as a form of illegitimate communicative interaction. Throughout this approach, van Dijk refers directly to Habermas’s ‘Theory of Communicative Action’.15 The problem is that, first, there are practical and theoretical difficulties in setting up a clear dividing line between manipulative processes (which would distort communication) and emancipatory processes (which would not distort it).16 Secondly, the Habermasian approach is not compatible with Gramsci’s perspective on language, nor with his conceptualisation of hegemony. As Ives has stated, Habermas’s ‘admission of impurity, of distortion from the ideals inherent in all communication oriented toward reaching an understanding, is based precisely on the notion of a “pure” language in which power differences and relationships do not exist’.17 Ives argues that ‘Habermas retains idealist assumptions about language, and as a result his theory cannot approach the real power relationships that are inherent in linguistic interaction’.18 While ‘unlike Habermas, Gramsci sees the inextricable role of ideology (in the non-pejorative sense) in the process of creating norms of conduct and changing people’s action, including their speech’.19 ‘Gramsci’s concern with language shows the extent to which, because meaning is socially produced in history, consent is the product of past coercive and non-coercive structures, the history of which might have been forgotten to a greater or lesser extent’.20 First, Habermas derives, from Charles Peirce, the idea that ‘the communication of investigators requires the use of language that is not confined to the limits of technical control over objectified natural processes’, and ‘this communicative action is a system of reference that cannot be reduced to the framework of instrumental action’.21 Then, Habermas extends this idea to the public

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Habermas 1984 and 1987. The presupposition is that there would be a ‘discourse ethics’, which for van Dijk would be a component of the foundations of Critical Discourse Analysis. It is impossible to set this demarcation, since the distinction is not just a question of argumentative fallacies, which would actually be logically determinable (Forchtner 2011). Ives 2004a, pp. 168–9. Ives 2004a, p. 140. Ives 2004a, p. 169. Ives 2004a, p. 136. Habermas 1971, p. 137.

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sphere,22 and defines ‘a type of reason, communicative reason, that guides a category of action separate from the exercise of illegitimate power, violence, or coercion’.23 On the contrary, ‘in situations of concealed strategic action, at least one of the parties behaves with an orientation to success, but leaves others to believe that all the presuppositions of communicative action are satisfied. This is the case of manipulation which we mentioned in connection with perlocutionary acts’.24 This is the foundation for the concept of ‘manipulation’ used by van Dijk. Notwithstanding, it is not easy to simply dismiss the whole idea of ‘manipulation’. Whenever there is a reference to a certain discursive operation that seeks the covert introduction of a particular significance, a conceptualisation in terms of ‘deceit’ or ‘manipulation’ remains. Therefore, it is possible that we would need to find some place for this concept and its function within a theory of hegemony. In that case, this should be done from a less rigid perspective, perhaps not postulating a categorical division between legitimate and illegitimate persuasion. Finally, van Dijk maintains that ideological processes are consolidated at the mental level. Most scholars of hegemony have not granted this centrality to the mind. The emphasis of the analysis is mainly on institutions, ideological apparatuses and political organisations, or, in any case, discourses. However, there is no good argument in favour of not considering, with some centrality, the mental level when studying hegemony. In this respect, in Notebook 24, Gramsci offered a methodological – though it has often been interpreted (in my opinion, wrongly so) as theoretical – criticism. He said that ‘Evidently, it is impossible to have “statistics” on ways of thinking and single individual opinions’ in order to have ‘an organic and systematic picture of the real cultural situation and the ways in which the “common sense” is really manifested’; and that only ‘the systematic review of the literature that is most widely circulated and most accepted by the people’25 remained as an option. We can see that Gramsci did not deny the usefulness of knowing what groups and subjects think individually. In my view, recent broad developments in interview techniques (from the most open to the most structured) now make it possible to produce data on beliefs that should be incorporated into the study of hegemony.26 22 23 24 25 26

Habermas 1984. Ives 2004a, p. 163. Habermas 1984, p. 332. Gramsci 1975, pp. 2268–9. Translation from Forgacs 2000, p. 391. In any case, the mental level is, in van Dijk’s theory, excessively reduced to the conscious

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Hegemony in Norman Fairclough’s Theory

The other author on ‘Critical Discourse Analysis’ who has granted quite a central place to the concept of hegemony, and who has even worked on it in great depth, is Norman Fairclough. He draws the concept not only from Gramsci’s theory, but also from that of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe.27 Thus, he can see discourse as part of a struggle for hegemony, in which one operates by articulating, disarticulating, and rearticulating discursive elements, and achieving acceptance only for certain significances. In addition – also in line with Laclau – for Fairclough, resistant interpretations can never be overridden, for, in discourse, antagonism is a constant.28 However, Fairclough notes that he does not share Laclau’s non-differentiation between discursive and non-discursive phenomena; and, besides, he criticises the lack of textual analysis. Fairclough succeeds in giving greater depth to his analyses of discursive processes in the construction of hegemony by explicitly invoking Voloshinov’s and Bakhtin’s ideas.29 This allows him to think about hegemonic domination based on a dialogic model: the dominating people pay attention to the discourse of the subjects to be dominated, and they elaborate a discursiveness which includes elements of the latter’s discourse.30 For Fairclough, there also remains another form of domination, that of a monologic nature, which consists of the

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level; and it would be plausible to make it more complex with more psychoanalytic contributions, especially the way in which Stavrakakis does (for instance, Stavrakakis 1999), though this would obviously give rise to new methodological problems. In all his works, Fairclough uses Gramsci’s Selections from the Prison Notebooks, published in 1971 (the same work cited by van Dijk, though the British edition). References to the Gramscian approach are always general, and there are no precise quotations of any fragments of the Notebooks. From Laclau’s work, he mentions the books Hegemony and Social Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (1985) and Emancipation(s) (1996), and the article ‘The Impossibility of Society’ (1983). This situation could also be conceptualised in Gramscian terms, such as the irreducibility of ‘good sense’ that comes with practice, over any hegemonic construction, over any attempt to conceal the domination. But Fairclough does not make this connection to Gramsci. We do find this question (linked, in turn, to the later Wittgenstein) unfolded in Nun, though from a perspective that is closer to Political Science than to Linguistics (Nun 1989). Fairclough 1992. It is well known that Voloshinov and Bakhtin stated that language is intrinsically dialogic (Voloshinov 1986 and Bakhtin 1986). However, there would be some kinds of discursiveness that are less dialogic than others. To Voloshinov, a monologic discursiveness would be an abstraction (this is why we say ‘less dialogic’). Nevertheless, Bakhtin does use the term monologic to describe some kinds of discourse, and this is the sense used by Fairclough.

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inflexible imposition of rules, norms, and conventions, but which – precisely – would not be hegemonic domination.31 From Bakhtin’s theory, Fairclough also derives the concept of interdiscursivity, which refers to the hybridity of discourse genres that would allow, for instance, the penetration of business discourse into the field of education, as can be seen in a study undertaken by Fairclough himself.32 Fairclough is not much concerned with making his theoretical articulations consistent with the approaches of Gramsci, Laclau or Voloshinov-Bakhtin. However, I believe that the conception of language brought forward by Voloshinov and Bakhtin (for whom significances are not fixed in language) works as an excellent meeting point between Gramsci and Laclau. This way, a structuralist view of language – and thus, also, a systemic perspective on hegemony as an imposed totality – can be avoided. It helps us think not about the hegemony, but about struggles for hegemony, such as those between the different kinds of discursiveness that try to impose, at each juncture, some significances and replace others. This process, when paying attention to reception, could also be thought of as the degree of interpellative effectiveness achieved by some equivalence chains. This perspective of language as a struggle for hegemony is better stated with the outline of the relations of force, which constitutes the core of Gramsci’s proposal.33 But, as I stated before, Fairclough does not provide this kind of theoretical consideration. In general terms, he accumulates perspectives in quite an eclectic fashion, which would not be negative per se. This way, he takes and combines elements from Foucault, Bourdieu, Giddens, Pêcheux, and Habermas, among others.34 What would actually be a shortfall is the fact that he does not theoretically address the relations between theoretical approaches that are so different from one another. In this respect, perhaps the greatest issue – as in van Dijk’s case – would come from the inclusion of Habermas, though in this case the difficulties are greater, since his incompatibility with Laclau’s perspective is even more explicit than his incompatibility with Gramsci’s. As Norval has emphasised, Habermas proposes a deliberative model of democracy centred in agreement through discursive processes based on rules of communicative 31

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Monologic discourse is the one that refuses to turn on itself, which does not include the discourse of other speakers, and does not listen to others or pay attention to their reception. In this sense, a non-hegemonic domination can be seen as the imposition of a code in a monologic fashion. Fairclough 1993. Regarding discourse genres, we have found Martin and Rose’s formulations quite useful (Martin and Rose 2008). Frosini 2010 and Balsa 2020. Chouliaraki and Fairclough 1999.

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actions. This model is clearly different from a poststructuralist model based on disagreement, and in which rhetoric plays a positive rather than a negative role.35 Laclau, in his answer to Norval, holds that a Habermasian model can only function if there is a high degree of social homogeneity, something that is far away of the reality.36 Going back to Fairclough, it is worth mentioning that he is one of few authors to have more clearly moved forward with the systematisation of some of the textual operations that enable hegemonic domination – in particular, the construction of the equivalence chains on which hegemony stands in Laclau’s view.37 In a similar line of research, trying to make operative the ideas of Laclau and combining them with Fairclough’s elaborations, are the works by Louise Phillips and Marianne Jørgensen.38 However, neither Fairclough nor Phillips and Jørgensen take into account the function of figures of speech in constant slippage, which for Laclau are fundamental in the processes of construction of hegemony.39 The fact is that disarticulations and rearticulations in equivalence chains are possible because of discursive ambiguities, since the relationship of equivalence is full of ambiguity: ‘two terms, to be equivalent, must be different – otherwise, there would be a simple identity. On the other hand, equivalence can only be reached by subverting the differential character of those terms’.40 It is for this reason that, for Laclau, rhetoric – and, in particular, an ambiguous use of its figures – is at the foundation of the construction of hegemony.41 This is an issue that has yet to be fully studied and even less used in analyses.

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Norval 2004. Laclau 2004. These operations can be found in his book/manual Analysing Discourse (Fairclough 2003). Jeffries has also studied these discursive operations in depth, adding the contributions of Stylistics to Fairclough’s elaborations (Jeffries 2010). Phillips 1996 and 1998, and Jørgensen and Phillips 2002. In particular, Laclau developed this topic in ‘The Politics of Rhetoric’ (Laclau 1998), a text that Fairclough does not mention. Later, he returned to these matters (Laclau 2014). Laclau and Mouffe 2001 [1985], p. 128. For Laclau, there is no original literalness: all discourse is rhetorical. Therefore, he suggests that the distinction between catachresis and metonymy would only be possible if there were an ‘uncontaminated frontier between the proper and the figural’, which is impossible. And ‘the very possibility of a hegemonic relationship depends on … keeping an unstable equilibrium between … catachresis and metonymy’ (Laclau 2014, pp. 89–90). What is more, he also states that ‘all metaphoric aggregation [is] ultimately grounded in (reversible) metonymic displacements’ (Laclau 2014, p. 92). We could add that, in this way, constant slidings are built into the textual dynamics which expand the equivalence chain, managing to rhetorically avoid Logic’s rigour. At the same time, while these sedi-

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In Fairclough’s rhetorical devices, he does grant an important place to metaphor. He references, among others, George Lakoff’s work, and sees metaphor not just as a stylistic ornament, but as a practice that structures the way we think and act. He also holds that metaphors tend to become naturalised, since by losing their historical origin, they are no longer perceived as contingent. It is possible here to clearly visualise the points of contact between Fairclough’s conception and the interesting observations Gramsci makes on language as something essentially metaphoric, while at the same time seeing metaphors as the bearers of historical dynamics.42 Neither Fairclough nor Lakoff, however, refers to Gramsci’s ideas about this. To conclude the comments on Fairclough, we shall consider the linguistic foundation for his ideas about discursive operations: the Systemic Functional Linguistics of Michael Halliday.43 This perspective conceptualises the linguistic system as a wide series of lexical and grammatical choices available to speakers, who can take up some and leave others aside, granting a particular significance to their utterance. For instance, we choose certain verbs to describe a single situation, to describe a participant as performing mental or material processes, or we choose a specific grammatical structure so that it constitutes an agent for such processes or a mere patient of processes carried out by others. In this way, functional grammar offers a whole set of tools for the analysis of how the construction of meaning takes place in one’s textuality, and how this influences power relations.44 This perspective on functional grammar shows several points of contact with how Gramsci addresses the question of grammar in Notebook 29, not as something purely syntactic-formal, but as closely connected to semantics.45

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ment metaphoric analogies in the common sense, the discursive formations change. And, through catachresis, political identities are consolidated. A critical analysis of these issues can be found in Balsa 2019. Gramsci 1975, pp. 1426–8, 1438–9, and 1473–6. Halliday 2004. We have found this perspective quite useful, on the one hand, to analyse the construction of meanings (in particular, in analysing processes and participants) and, on the other, to observe how there appear, in clause complexes, tangled equivalence chains in which a large amount of signifiers are articulated in a very tight fashion, sometimes in ambiguous relationships with each other (Balsa 2014). Gramsci 1975, pp. 2341–51. Among other things, as Peter Ives has analysed, for Gramsci, grammatical forms would operate by enabling or blocking future possibilities. An interesting example of these matters is the work of Patricia Dunmire, in which she employs elements from Halliday and from Fairclough (not from Gramsci, though) in order to analyse George W. Bush’s discourse in support of the invasion of Iraq in accordance with how he textually constructed future possibilities (Dunmire 2005).

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However, it is worth stating that Halliday does not use the concept of hegemony, at least not in his best-known texts. Neither do the authors who, based on Halliday’s work, have developed the ‘Critical Linguistics’ approach (which is quite surprising, given that it is a left-leaning linguistic tradition). Within this trend, names such as Roger Fowler, Robert Hodge, Gunther Kress, and James Martin stand out. They are more focused on textual analysis than on discourse analysis; perhaps it is precisely for this reason that they have developed more accurate instruments for analysis, and have also broadened the study to include images and their articulation with texts. Among them, Martin and White, in their study on valuation, have systematically incorporated the issue of dialogism (drawing directly on Voloshinov’s and Bakhtin’s theories) into the analysis of subjective aspects of language and, particularly, the study of the discursive manifestation of the affective plane.46 This whole line of analysis is connected to the studies on modality, a function of language through which the locutor’s commitment to their own utterances becomes manifest. These matters are related to the plane of feelings and affections, which, as we know, are – for both Gramsci and Laclau – highly significant in the construction of hegemony, but have scarcely been systematically studied.47

3

Hegemony in Marc Angenot’s Theory

As previously stated, the other tradition of discourse analysis that makes extensive use of the concept of hegemony is the one developed by Marc Angenot. He picks up this concept directly from Gramsci, but just like van Dijk and Fairclough, he does not seem to have performed any detailed work on the Notebooks; nor does he refer to Gramsci’s thoughts on language.48

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Martin and White 2005. In my study on clause complexes (Balsa 2014), I have been able to observe the way in which these grammatical structures enable the incorporation of appreciative, affective, and ethical signifiers, whose meaning most probably will slide across the whole clause complex, making attitudinal elements rhetorically build a coherence which does not always have the logic of clauses (Martin and White 2005, p. 215). Regarding the difference between the logic of argumentation and the logic of appearance, see Fairclough 2003, pp. 94–8. He refers to the French edition by the publishing house Gallimard (translation from Gerratana’s critical edition). However, the use of this rigorous edition does not seem to translate into a deep study of the Notebooks. The references are always general with no specific quotation of any fragments of text. Furthermore, he does not mention any of the critical studies on Gramsci’s work.

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The main innovation brought forward by Angenot’s approach is his attempt to take the whole array of social discourse into consideration. To this end, in his monumental book 1889, Un état du discours social, he analyses everything that was published in French throughout a whole year.49 He obviously does not seek to reproduce everything that was published, but to capture the systems and the rules that went through all the discursive files, which to him constitute hegemony. This is because, for Angenot, hegemony is not the same as dominant ideology, but is essentially composed of rules. Rules that establish, for instance, what can or cannot be said, or how discourses can become cohesive, even rules that set out how to know and how to mean what is known. These hegemony rules work as an interdiscursive dominance, which is present in the multiplicity of discursive fields and makes them an organic whole. Angenot explicitly states that hegemony, seen this way, is equivalent – on the plane of doxy (public opinion) – to Kuhn’s concept of ‘paradigm’ and Foucault’s notion of ‘episteme’ on the plane of scientific theories. As a system of rules, hegemony manages to always present itself as its own denial, in the sense that it does not censor explicitly, but asserts that everything can be said. In this way, hegemony hides behind the fiercest debates. This discursive hegemony is, for Angenot, the result of relationships of force and of the interests of all social interlocutors. His theory is based on the modern nation-state, understood as built on a social space that is unified by the expansion of the extended ‘public sphere’.50 Despite being socially determined, for Angenot, hegemony does not belong to a single class. However, simultaneously, it is the dominant class that profits from it for two reasons: on the one hand, because it can be recognised in the styles, forms, micro-stories, and plots that make up the legitimised discourse, which are more in tune with the lifestyles and ethos of privileged classes. On the other hand, these classes are much more

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Angenot 1989a. He took into account everything that was published in France, Belgium, and Switzerland. Somehow, he seems to have moved a step beyond the enterprise proposed by Gramsci in the paragraph of Notebook 24 we have already cited, where he stated that ‘the systematic review of the literature that is most widely circulated and most accepted by the people’ could be carried out. The fact is that Angenot set out to analyse not only the most widespread works, but everything that was published within a year. It is true that this analysis, due to its essentially synchronic nature, paid less attention to the effect of what Gramsci pointed at – in the aforementioned paragraph – as the sediments of the trends of the past. He picks up this concept explicitly from Habermas. Nevertheless, Angenot makes it clear that he does not share the latter’s idealised view of language. Therefore, the problems we have already discussed regarding the difficulty of reconciling Habermas with a theory of hegemony will not arise here.

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prepared to handle the linguistic abilities required by the legitimised discourse. In turn, to the dominated classes, this discourse looks strange, and learning it, especially in terms of the ability of producing their own discourse, requires huge effort. To sum up, in this review of Angenot’s approach, we shall briefly state the components that – in his theory – would make up the discursive hegemony: (1) a legitimate language, a ‘national language’; (2) a category of topics that establishes what can be debatable and what can be plausible, which is thus connected to commonplaces, but also to a ‘gnosiology’ (a set of rules that determine the cognitive function of the discourses); (3) fetishes, ‘untouchable’ topics, such as the Nation, the Army or Science, and also taboos; (4) a pragmatic norm, which defines the legitimate enunciator in its core; (5) the partially pre-made ‘problems’: objects whose existence and consistency do not seem to cause any doubts, since everybody is speaking about them; (6) some dominating elements of pathos, i.e. ‘tempers’ and ‘moods’ that are proper for legitimate enunciators; and (7) a topological system, which sets up a division between the discursive tasks, determining specific fields (with their subgenres and sector styles). Several of these elements show clear connections to Gramsci’s ideas on language (such as the issue of a national language or the role of common sense, or even the consideration of hegemony in relation to veracity).51 However, as we have stated before, Angenot does not specify these possible connections. Instead, his references are to Aristotle’s, Voloshinov-Bakhtin’s,52 Ruth Amossy’s and Oswald Ducrot’s approaches.53 On the other hand, the concept of the ‘preconstructed’, in discourse analysis, certainly refers to Pêcheux’s theory, though no mention of this author is found in Angenot’s works. This set of components constitutes a baseline for an interesting methodology on the discursive aspects of the construction of hegemony. Nevertheless, in my view, there are some limitations to Angenot’s approach to hegemony. The main problem is that the whole framework scarcely leaves a space for the 51

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The thoughts on legitimate language and on the different abilities the classes have based on it have clear points of contact with Gramsci’s elaborations on this matter, both in the Notebooks and in the writings of his youth (see Orlandi 2007). However, Angenot does not cite Gramsci on this. The significant place of ‘common sense’ within Gramsci’s work is well known. And, finally, his reflections on the relationship between hegemony and truth, mainly included in Notebook 11, turn out to be quite incisive. See Balsa 2018. Regarding the theoretical relationship between Angenot and Voloshinov-Bakhtin, see Martínez 2015. A digression regarding Ducrot: Soledad Montero has outlined interesting connections between his theory and Laclau’s (Montero 2012).

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struggle for hegemony. Everything that is said seems to become completely subsumed in the dominant discourse, even transgression. It is worth mentioning, however, that Angenot criticises a ‘totalitarian view of language’ according to which it would not be possible to leave its boundaries. He identifies Barthes, Foucault, philosophical ‘Deconstructivism’, and even Habermas – because of his pessimism regarding the advance of instrumental reason – with this perspective.54 In response to this discouraging view, Angenot holds that there is no empirical analysis which justifies such a totalitarian image, since studies show that hegemony is in constant motion, and always leaves a possibility for ‘domination to be dominated’ through critical work. Nevertheless, despite these clarifications by Angenot, reading his work produces a different impression. The hegemonic discourse shows a tremendous ability to manage the co-optation of dissident voices and to fragment resistances. This is why true heteronomous breaks with the hegemonic discourse are only located on the margins. The problem is that this marginal position would make it very difficult for any new discursiveness to contest hegemony. Therefore, it is not easy to see, in the whole of Angenot’s scheme, how hegemony could be contested. It is possible to set out the hypothesis that Angenot’s methodological approach, focused on performing a synchronic, and – from a systemic perspective – quite a structural analysis of the global system (always referring to ‘a’ social discourse, to ‘the’ hegemony), makes it difficult to see the public space as a field of dispute for hegemony. However, with a more dynamic view, focused on the struggle, it would be possible to more clearly open the possibility for the dominated not to be always confined to the margins, but to actively play their part at the centre of the discursive confrontation itself.

4

Prospect: Towards a Theory of Discursive Operations in the Construction of Hegemony

To conclude, I would like to address a series of elements that have been elaborated in the different schools of Discourse Analysis and Language Studies in general which I consider to be useful as a contribution towards a theory of hegemony. First, it would be extremely fruitful for studies to broaden, at least basically, Angenot’s holistic perspective, so as to consider, at least for a specific

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topical field, the whole set of public discourses. Thus, an attempt could be made to discover the rules that go through and provide cohesion to all, or most, discourses. According to the distinction suggested by Foucault, the way in which certain kinds of utterance objects and positions are constructed and imposed – i.e. a discursive formation – could be studied.55 And, within that, it would be possible to discover the unfolding of different, and even opposite, theorisings or conceptual articulations, which would make up the discursive strategies. However, this overall perspective should avoid a view that underestimates the ability counter-hegemonic forms of discursiveness may have to struggle for what is sayable and desirable. The imposition of a full hegemony is rather an exception, and what we always find are struggles for hegemony, in an outline that can be explained by the Gramscian image of the relations of force. The fact is – taking up Voloshinov’s theory – that the sign is a field for ideological struggle. What we find is a constant dispute over significances; that is why we should speak about ‘significances’ in dispute instead of fixed ‘meanings’. The ability that subaltern sectors have to battle over significances is strengthened by the fact that the hegemonic interpellation itself must take the dominated people’s enunciation – in a dialogic fashion – into account, as Fairclough has emphasised. And, in this operation, it must legitimise, at least partially, this discursiveness. Therefore, hegemony always has a contingency quota. The processes of the construction of hegemony, then, lack the brutality, the head-on approach, of non-hegemonic domination. On the contrary, these processes are in fact subtle. The critical analyst will have to collaborate in making it easier to become aware of the discursive-communicational processes at work in the consolidation of this domination. Along these lines, the analyses of cognitive processes brought forward by van Dijk are useful, but so is the series of elements related to discursive hegemony explained in detail by Angenot. In turn, functional grammar and the tools for discourse analysis suggested by Fairclough can become an excellent basis on which to move forward in the study of the discursive operations that constitute hegemony, from the most elementary level of lexicalisation to the most complex level of the interweaving of discursive genres. In terms of the study of the discursive operations that play a role in the construction of hegemony, the main issue that I believe has not been much developed in these authors’ theories is that of rhetorical strategies (ranging from the ambiguous use of figures of speech and the recourse to implicit

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Foucault 1969. See an example in Balsa 2017.

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topoi, to the display of a logic of appearance that, with strong evaluative elements, would replace the logic of argumentation). In sum, I believe that deepening the relationship between Discourse Analysis and the theory of hegemony could be fruitful for both. On the one hand, the goal of studying the construction of hegemonic domination and hegemonic struggle can offer Discourse Analysts a fresh orientation to work that often seems to be limited to an excessively descriptive level of the use of linguistic resources. And, on the other, the whole wealth of the methods of Discourse Analysis and of the traditions of rhetoric can offer scientific rigour to theorisings on hegemony, which have generally been restricted to more speculative approaches or, at least, have not taken into account the level of concrete interpellative efficacy.

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chapter 3

Hegemony and the Political Subject in Anthropology Riccardo Ciavolella

1

Introduction

When thinking about the relationship between Gramsci and anthropology, scholars have usually chosen to analyse either the way in which Gramsci formulated his philosophical anthropology and criticised the social sciences or how anthropologists later referred to and used his work. These two issues seem to require two different approaches. The first one is philological and philosophical, which seeks to understand what Gramsci thought of the anthropology of his time, his criticism of positivism and naturalism in the social sciences, and his contribution to the formation of a historicist version of the latter. The other approach is a more ‘applied’ one, with anthropologists drawing on Gramsci’s ideas and concepts, especially subalternity or hegemony, as tools for developing concrete scientific studies. This chapter intends to develop a joint approach to the philological and the applied perspectives, by tackling both the broader framework of Gramsci’s viewpoints on humanity, society, and history, and, in a critical perspective, the history of how anthropologists have tried to translate his ideas into a science of humankind in history and society. This will lead us to reconsider the meeting with Gramsci as an opportunity for political anthropology to be a science of man intended as a political subject. A better understanding of Gramsci’s ideas on history, human nature, society, and culture could actually shed new light on how to engage in a process of translation of Gramscian theory into a concrete scientific practice. This could undoubtedly help a discipline like anthropology, and especially political anthropology, which has been highly receptive to integrating Gramsci’s generic notions into its vocabulary, but which has often done so superficially, without recasting them into the historical context and philosophical framework of their production. In particular, political anthropology began to refer to Gramsci at the same time as poststructuralism gained a growing influence in the discipline: this has led to an incoherent use of Gramsci, producing ambiguities in using the Gramscian idea of the formation of a historical political subject with the poststructuralist reference to ahistorical structures. Since the publication

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of the Prison Notebooks, initially in Italian in the 1950s and then in English in the 1970s, Gramsci has become one of the most influential thinkers for anthropology, from post-war Italian anthropologists to contemporary political ones. In particular, his concepts and reflections have assisted a more politicised reading of social relations, of cultural domination, and of people’s forms of resistance among popular or subaltern social strata. Nevertheless, an ambiguity has often persisted in anthropologists’ use of Gramsci. While some have offered an antihistoricist representation of hegemony as an infinitely self-reproducing form of cultural and political domination, others have developed an idealist-populist vision of subaltern culture and politics insisting on the capacity of the masses to retreat voluntarily from the historical relations of power. In other words, anthropologists’ reading of Gramsci often oscillates between the idea of the immutability of power from above on the one hand, and emancipation in the microforms of resistance of ordinary subaltern people on the other. Both ways of integrating Gramsci into the ‘science of man’ miss some crucial aspects of his reading of history and society, insisting either on a structural or an idealist Gramsci. As is widely known, Gramsci’s philosophy of praxis is an articulation of a scientific interpretation of society and history, and of a political engagement for transforming it. This idea also relies on a particular philosophical anthropology. If we consider, as Gramsci did, ‘human nature’ as a network of ‘social relations’, our reading of history and society can overcome some dichotomies and epistemological dilemmas that contemporary social sciences like anthropology, but also cultural studies and social history,1 have been facing in recent decades: between historical necessities and collective will, economism and idealism, subjectivity and objectivity, and structure and movement in history. The core of Gramsci’s analysis of humanity, society, and history is to see human beings as collective actors of historical changes – but also of possible historical continuities – in practice, as political subjects. If society and culture may resemble an ‘object’ of scientific scrutiny, they can only be understood by assuming them as historically produced and politically forged by historical subjects, transforming any social or cultural science into a political and historical one. This is even more important when we try to understand the history of subaltern groups, for whom the constraints of history, economy, and cultural and political domination seem to dramatically reduce the possibility of any project of emancipation. Far from a sociology of domination as a structural form continuously reproducing itself, Gramsci’s interest in interpreting society and history is to understand the conditions – both as limits and possibilities –

1 Hall 1980; Thompson 1961 and 1978.

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for the emergence of a historical political subject among subaltern and popular groups, leading to its catharsis from a pure economic-corporate situation to an ethical-political praxis. It is in light of this that it becomes possible to reconsider the history of anthropology, and more specifically of political anthropology, and its use of Gramsci in efforts, since the end of World War II, to understand the limits and possibilities of ‘political subjects’ in history. My considerations will begin with a description of Gramsci’s criticism of the social sciences of his time, especially anthropology and folklore studies. This allows for a better understanding of his ideas about human nature and society and about the impossibility of isolating an objective nature or an objective history outside the will and practice of human beings. Gramsci’s philosophical anthropology and comments on science as history bring us to inquire into his perspective on the issue of historical and political subjectivity and on his efforts to make that subjectivity a historical force of progressive transformation and emancipation. In the second part of the chapter, I will analyse the way in which political anthropology and related disciplines have tried to describe and interpret the issue of political subjectivity in history. I will do this in particular by discussing the dichotomy between structure and agency, and by referring to different, and sometimes approximate, readings of Gramsci on these issues. In conclusion, I will argue that a deeper understanding of Gramsci’s perspective on the study of humanity, society, and history through the issue of the political subject can shed new light on that disciplinary debate.

2

Gramsci’s Anthropology on the Possibility of a ‘Science of Man’

2.1

Naturalism in the Social Sciences and Folklore Studies, or the Absence of Politics In Gramsci’s time, anthropology and sociology were so deeply influenced by positivism that the discipline was considered a sort of ‘natural’ science of culture and society. Gramsci’s ideas on human history developed from an opposite perspective. Regarding a close disciplinary relative of anthropology like sociology, many scholars have underlined Gramsci’s harsh criticism of a discipline that, in his time, was mainly characterised by positivism and by the idea that a science of society was a simple transposition of natural science to human affairs.2 As Filippini and Rosati explain, Gramsci was not necessarily against the metaphor of society as an organic ensemble, proposed in sociology by the

2 Migliaro and Misuraca 1978; Filippini 2008; Pastore 2011.

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likes of Spencer, Comte, and Durkheim. Nor was he against the utility of formulating hypotheses on the functioning of society through quantitative sociology or statistics, which Gramsci called ‘the law of great numbers’ (Q7 § 6). But these, for Gramsci, had precisely to remain hypotheses: they served to simplify reality and to limit the possibilities of historical transformations, without being able to inform sociologists and philosophers with an anticipatory knowledge of historical developments. Gramsci’s critique of sociology took on its full meaning within the frame of his critique of determinism: by looking for social laws, like biologists do in the natural world, the sociologist runs the risk of overlooking the historical process – which although made by humans cannot be predicted by them – at the origin of the production of society. It is in the same vein that Gramsci condemned anthropology as a positivistic and naturalistic science. His targets were, among others, the Italian school of criminal anthropology and the ethnographers of folklore and popular culture. As regards criminal anthropology, Cesare Lombroso and his followers explained a social and historical phenomenon like criminality by supposing a natural inclination towards it. For Gramsci, this ‘naturalistic’ position was self-declared ‘scientific’ (Q25 §8), possible only by refusing to understand the social basis of violence and the historical origins of ‘barbarianism’ in relation to the social disarticulation of nineteenth-century Italian popular life (Q1 § 27, Q25 §8). At the same time, this ‘science’ denied its own historicity, by affirming the objective validity of its theories, as corresponding to the ‘natural’ social reality they intended to describe, and of its biology-like categories – such as ‘race’ – as perfectly corresponding to the social reality to which they were applied. In other notebooks (Q7 §3, Q11 §45), Gramsci insisted that this notion of ‘science’ as a sort of ‘Esperanto’, or objective and ahistorical universal knowledge, paradoxically resembles the attitude of ‘primitive peoples’ towards any other people, what we now call ‘ethnocentrism’: calling themselves ‘men’ and all the others ‘barbarians’, so that ‘[the philosophical and scientific Esperantospeakers] transform in a moral judgement or in a psychiatric-like diagnosis what should be a mere historical judgement’ (Q11 § 45).3 Gramsci similarly criticised those positivist intellectuals who wanted to describe the culture of popular groups as ‘folklore’. As is widely known, Gramsci introduced a posit-

3 I do not have the space here, but it would be worth comparing Gramsci and Lévi-Strauss in respect of ‘primitive’ science or the ‘savage’ mind. The critique of ethnocentrism of scientific modernity is strikingly similar, in particular with this reference to, in Lévi-Strauss words, the ‘barbarian’ as ‘first and foremost, the one who believes in the barbarism’ of others. Nevertheless, some similar perspectives lead the two thinkers to opposite positions as regards the relationship between science and history (Lévi-Strauss 1952, 1962).

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ive approach to folklore raising it to the status of ‘conception of the world’, one of the main contributors to the formation of ‘common sense’. But he was still deeply critical of those intellectuals, influenced by Romanticism and positivism, who ‘went to the people’ in order to describe and classify their manners and beliefs in the same way that an entomologist could do with insects and with no other interest than a taste for the picaresque (Q27 § 1). Both criticisms of criminal anthropology and folklore studies intended to highlight the (reluctant) historicity of these ‘scientific’ approaches to the study of social reality. This meant for Gramsci to stress the political motivations of these sciences despite their pretended objective neutrality, their impacts on the ‘common sense’ and the way in which people conceived politics. Racist and criminal theories, for example, served as crude ideologies to justify the uneven development of Italy’s northern and southern regions, and to deny its historical and social origins, as Gramsci showed through his criticism of Alfredo Niceforo’s theories of an Italian racial divide.4 More generally, Gramsci argued that a positivistic look at society led to an artificial separation in people’s minds of society and the state. If society, with its own laws, can be an object of scientific study, with its own descriptive categories corresponding to reality, it can be considered immune to the negative influence of politics, and furthermore, of a state which also preserves its autonomy from society (Q15 § 10). In an astonishing twist linking science and politics, Gramsci argued that sociology had founded its ‘natural evolution’ and ‘rational foundations’ in parliamentarism, a political form in which social issues are treated technically and not as political problems residing in the relations of power between state and society. For Gramsci, this produced a tragic separation of sociology from political science, and the emergence, in the positivistic domain, of a moralistic and ahistorical critique of the corrupt practices of governing elites (Q3 § 47). The latter was treated as a simple manifestation of a naturalised anthropological inclination to bribery and fraud, rather than a historical phenomenon to be understood through the study of the relation between state and society and the development of social and political relations. As regards folklore studies, the political dimension of the issue was even more important. A positivistic approach to popular culture was eager to represent common-sense understandings of popular classes as something outside history and therefore outside any possibilities of transformation. Actually, while agreeing that folklore is a fragile conception of the world and less systematic and coherent than philosophy or science, Gramsci conceded that popu-

4 Niceforo 1901; see also The Southern Question of 1926 and Q1 §44, Q7 §30, Q19 §24.

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lar classes might transform their cultures in parallel to the transformation of social settings and power relations. That was actually the political objective of Gramsci: the understanding of popular, fragmented conceptions of the world in order to build a new culture – accompanying the new hegemony of a popularised philosophy of praxis – that is, a new popular subject able to play a political role in the transformation of society. Gramsci’s political project in his reflections on the social sciences becomes clearer when we look at his views on subalternity. But it is worth gaining a deeper insight into his anthropological philosophy in order to fully appreciate the centrality he gave to politics in his understanding of society and history.

3

From Object to Subject: Human Nature as Society, History, and Politics

For Gramsci, the diffusion of positivistic scientism is intimately linked to the success of vulgar materialist interpretations of society and history, both in popular conceptions and in intellectual elaborations. Once again, the target of this critique is any determinism in explaining society, which takes the form here of mechanical materialism. Actually, for Gramsci, the philosophy of praxis is certainly a historical materialism, but this does not mean that materialism can be easily reduced to a mechanical determinism based on the material conditions of life, which would resemble a sort of historical fatalism preventing people from conceiving any potentiality in changing reality through praxis and will. This is clear in his widely known critique of Bukharin’s Popular Essay on Marxist Sociology, in which the Soviet intellectual tried to give Marxism the status of social science with, for Gramsci, all the fallacies he recognised in sociology (Q4 §13); or in all those passages where Gramsci criticises ‘economism’, the tendency being to explain everything in terms of interests and instrumental manipulations. In a short paragraph on ‘culture’ (Q17 § 12), Gramsci uses the example of a situation in which a financial elite governs a country: it is easy to recognise, but this affirmation only concedes that facts are determined by interests. In reality, the economic factor is ‘only one of the ways in which the deeper historical process presents itself’. Furthermore, ‘it is this deeper historical process that the philosophy of praxis intends to explain’: it is ‘a philosophy, an “anthropology”, and not a mere canon of historical research’. In order to criticise sociological and economic determinism, Gramsci also directly engages with philosophical anthropology when discussing ‘human nature’ and responding to the question ‘What is man?’ (Q7 § 35). Here, he criticises a naturalistic definition of humanity and progressively shows how it

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should be understood. He does this first in social terms, then in historical and cultural terms, and finally in political terms. Note Q7 § 35 on Materialism and Historical Materialism starts by questioning Feuerbach’s affirmation ‘Man is what he eats’, presumably developing his thinking by relying on Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach which Gramsci knew.5 Gramsci argues that the literal meaning of the sentence reveals an overly simplistic materialism by expressing a deterministic link between what man eats and what he thinks.6 Nevertheless, the sentence is in part true if we consider that eating is ‘one of the expressions of social relations in their complex’ – a sort of Maussian ‘total social fact’ – a crucial factor of social reproduction. This shift in the interpretation of eating as forging humanity is only an example or a pretext for Gramsci to illustrate a crucial point in his understanding of ‘human nature’: there is no biological or natural basis that makes men human, only society (and history). ‘Human nature’ becomes an oxymoron because the good definition of it is ‘the complex of social relations’. By affirming this, Gramsci formulates a negative judgement on ‘anthropology’ as a science since it presumes that human nature precedes human history. Actually, the recognition of the social nature of humanity also means regarding man as a historical being. Social interactions can give way to unintended outcomes, then producing social change. This is because the ‘complex of social relations’ is characterised by contradictions, with social groups engaged in the flux of history, with forces pushing for their differentiation and competition. In the same notebook (Q7 §35) and then in another where he develops his critique of Bukharin’s essay (Q11 §17), Gramsci argues that the universalist conception of ‘man in general’ can only remain speculative. It should perhaps be obtained through the historical and concrete unification of humankind, when the world will appear as objective, but only as long as this objectivity affirms a ‘universal subjectivity’. Processes of association and federation of different social groups exist, but they are historically developed and not a precondition for human existence and social life. Human history is marked by a dialectical and not a formal or utopian unity, especially between classes. This has a dramatic consequence for the social sciences: any science with the objective of understanding man as a social and historical being should go beyond any

5 Frosini 2001. 6 This also should be compared to Lévi-Strauss’s critique of pure functionalism, especially of Malinowski’s idea of any form of social organisation and cultural value as satisfying an elementary need. Lévi-Strauss famously argued, using the culinary example, that food should not only be good to eat, as Malinowski argued, but also good to think, insisting on the importance and the relative autonomy of the cultural domain.

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search for an objective external reality and accept the subjectivity of the world. This is not to say, as common sense and Bukharin’s essay intend, that reality is an artificial creation of a subjective consciousness. Rather, reality, which is composed of both the historical-natural and the historical-social worlds, exists according to how man thinks of it philosophically and produces it through practice. This also introduces the cultural, reflexive or philosophical dimension of social life. In a world of contradictions and opposing social bodies, a crucial point is the way in which different social subjects think of themselves in relation to others, insisting alternatively on egalitarianism or difference. And as they can only express themselves in history and society, where social subjects are disaggregated, the sociality, historicity and philosophy of humanity becomes ‘political’. ‘Everything is political’, wrote Gramsci in those pages: if human nature is to be social, and thus historical, it is also philosophical due to the historicity of how subjects think of their opposition or convergence. And finally, it is political, as this astonishing passage from another notebook clearly shows: Man is to be conceived as an historical bloc of purely individual and subjective elements and of mass and objective or material elements with which the individual is in an active relationship. To transform the external world, the general system of relations, is to potentiate oneself and to develop oneself. That ethical ‘improvement’ is purely individual is an illusion and an error: the synthesis of the elements constituting individuality is ‘individual’, but it cannot be realised and developed without an activity directed outward, modifying external relations both with nature and, in varying degrees, with other men, in the various social circles in which one lives, up to the greatest relationship of all, which embraces the whole human species. For this reason one can say that man is essentially ‘political’ since it is through the activity of transforming and consciously directing other men that man realises his ‘humanity’, his ‘human nature’.7 In this reasoning, Gramsci interrelated two types of ‘subjectivities’, which one can normally think of independently: the subjectivity of man’s gaze in interpreting the world, intended in epistemological terms, and the subjectivity intended as a political and historical subject. If Gramsci affirmed that man is

7 Q10 § 88; SPN, pp. 681–2.

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not a natural but a political being, what kind of social science or science of man can replace the naturalistic or objectivist one? Is there a science of the political subject?

4

The Subalterns: Historical Subjects Striving to Become One Collective Political Subject

In order to understand what Gramsci might consider a science of the political subject, we can directly refer to his propositions concerning the study of subaltern groups. Gramsci tried to understand the historical possibilities and limits for their transformation into a political subject actively involved in the transformation of society. To do that, he firstly criticised the studies of his times that tried to explain the conditions, but also the mentalities of subaltern groups. One of the most important and recurrent examples of these studies in the Notebooks is Henri de Man’s Au-delà du marxisme (Beyond Marxism)8 (Q3 § 48, Q4 §48, Q11 §66, 69), published in Italian by Alessandro Schiavi for Laterza, under the supervision of Croce (Q11 §63).9 The Belgian socialist sociologist was one of the first to carry out social inquiries among the working classes, addressing not only the issue of work conditions, but also workers’ psychologies, motivations, and aspirations. At first sight, this may resemble Gramsci’s view of subaltern groups as historical subjects, as it introduces the issue of consciousness in addition to structural and material conditions. Nevertheless, Gramsci harshly criticised de Man’s work since it reduced the issue of subjectivity to that of individual psychologism. Actually, through a positivistic description of workers’ visions and ethical values, de Man argued that workers aspired to different things than the revolution promised by Marxism in their name. For Gramsci, de Man was similar to ‘a zoologist observ[ing] insects’ (Q11 § 66). Gramsci accepted the necessity and usefulness ‘of studying objectively what people think of themselves and of other people’, but he rejected the idea that people’s consciousness should be maintained as unchangeable through time. The pessimism of a look at the effective aspirations of workers should not neutralise the possibility that those workers may engage in a historical process for the formation of a collective will, that is in Gramsci’s view, of a political subject. In the famous paragraph on Spontaneity and Conscious Leadership, Gramsci argued that de Man’s acquiescent attitude towards workers’ limited aspirations

8 De Man 1927. 9 Schiavi 2004.

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was conservative and resembled the attitude of the ‘admirers of folklore who advocate its preservation’ (Q3 §48). ‘Nonetheless’, Gramsci continued, ‘de Man has an incidental merit: he demonstrates the need to study and work out the elements of popular psychology, historically and not sociologically, actively … and not descriptively, as he does’. Thus, it is politics that can bring historical change and can take subaltern subjects out of the muddying terrain of historical necessities, structural constraints and deterministic laws: out of fatalism that makes appear history as unchangeable. It is then that politics can transform the masses from a passive social body responding to the sociological laws of great numbers into political subjects reopening the outcomes of history: ‘It should be observed’, Gramsci wrote in a paragraph criticising both de Man’s and Bukharin’s works, ‘that political action tends precisely to rouse the masses from passivity, in other words to destroy the law of large numbers’ (Q7 § 6). Gramsci’s historiography becomes clearer when we look at those paragraphs in which he directly discusses the methodologies of historical analysis, to grasp ‘the relationships between structure and superstructure’ (Q4 § 38). Here, Gramsci argued that historical analysis should overcome the separation between mechanical interpretations of society insisting on material conditions as a form of historical necessity (economism) and idealist interpretations of historical developments as the by-product of individual will and intention (idealism), a separation that also accompanied that between the identification of ‘permanent’ and ‘occasional’ dynamics, or between ‘immediate’ and ‘efficient causes’ of history. Both perspectives should be merged, in particular, for the study of the ‘relations of forces’ between different social groups, whose contradictions, as we have seen, are at the basis of society and history. Gramsci distinguishes three different moments of articulation of the ‘relationship of forces’ that one can analyse as three different steps or degrees in the balancing of structure and conscience of those social forces in conflict. First, there is ‘a relationship among social forces, strictly tied to the structure, independent of human will’, that is determined by the degree of development of material conditions and relations of production. This relationship being ‘naturalistic’, it can be analysed by science, and even by ‘hard sciences’. But this analysis of the objective relationship of social forces is only useful if it can allow for ‘the study of whether the necessary and sufficient conditions exist in a society of a transformation, that is, it controls the realism and viability of the various ideologies born in its own territory’ (Q4 §38). After that, in the second moment, it is necessary to study the political ‘relationship of forces’; that is, to ‘evaluat[e] the degree of homogeneity and self-consciousness achieved by the various social groups’. At this stage, too, the historical analysis can study these political relationships by differentiating the degrees of cohesiveness in how social groups identify themselves,

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as a common political subject, from those groups that recognise themselves as similar in terms of activity or class because of a simple common economic situation, to those groups who understand that their own interests should overcome their ‘corporative’ dimension and aspire to become the interests of other social groups in an expanding dynamics of social hegemony. The third and final moment of the ‘relationships of forces’ is the military and politico-military; that is a situation in which the different social forces act concretely on the battlefield of hegemony. As the development of these ideas in Notebook 13 shows, this historical analysis is important for Gramsci insofar as it allows for understanding the possibilities for a catharsis from an economic-corporative situation to an ethicalpolitical one. This is especially important for those groups that Gramsci famously defined as ‘subaltern’. The development of the question, especially in Notebook 25, shows that for Gramsci subalternity is produced by structural dynamics, but also that subalternity should be appreciated in terms of capacities and potentialities of political action. In recent theoretical debates drawing on Gramsci, there have been discussions about the significance of ‘subalternity’ in relation to the concept of class – that is, that of materially produced social groups – with scholars, like Ernesto Laclau,10 often insisting on the possibility of drawing on Gramsci’s vision in order to take Marxism out of economic determinism in the formation of social groups and political subjects. Gramsci’s reflections on the relationship between structure and superstructure11 and on the relationships of social forces show that, for him, subaltern groups should be appreciated not as trapped in economic-corporative or ethico-political moments, but for their capacities to move from one moment to the other. In other words, to become a political subject or to move from a condition of class in se to that of a class per se. Apart from a necessary economic and sociological analysis, a dynamic study of the political potentialities of subaltern groups becomes crucial. For Gramsci, the problem of subaltern groups, beyond the specific material condition of their situation, is that they ‘are always subject to the initiative of the dominant classes’ in the struggle for hegemony. Thus, in Notebook 25, Gramsci proposes some ‘methodological criteria’ for the study of all the stages of politicisation and ‘the history of subaltern groups’. These stages closely reflect the different moments in which the ‘relationships of social forces’ articulate. They range from ‘the objective formation of social groups’ to the ‘affirm[ation] of an integral autonomy’ of subaltern groups in forming their

10 11

Laclau and Mouffe 1985; Laclau 2000. Williams 1973.

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political initiative in the battle for hegemony. They are, in practice, the stages of the formation of a political consciousness. Ultimately, Gramsci intended a social science of the political subject as an inquiry into the political potentialities for subaltern groups to engage in an ‘autonomous political initiative’. And this is how we should now compare Gramsci’s thinking with the developments of anthropology in treating the same issue, often by referring to specific understandings and readings of Gramsci’s work.

5

Populism, Third-Worldism, and the Political Consciousness of Colonised Subjects

Italian anthropologists Ernesto de Martino and Vittorio Lanternari were the first in the discipline of anthropology to read Gramsci’s Notebooks and to integrate his ideas and notions into an intellectual project of knowing subaltern cultures, especially in Southern or rural Italy. Some months after the first publication of the Prison Notebooks in the Platone-Togliatti edition, de Martino, a Crocean historian of religions, was won over by Gramsci’s writings and especially by the Osservazioni sul folklore (Observations on folklore). De Martino engaged in the study of cultural and especially religious popular expressions, showing how religious practices and beliefs were a way for peasant societies to react to destiny and nature and affirm their cultural presence in history.12 Politics as an object of study was very far from de Martino’s perspective. But his article of 1949 ‘Intorno ad una storia del mondo popolare subalterno’ (‘For a Story of the Popular and Subaltern World’)13 shows that this ethnology of religion and popular culture was in reality an intellectual contribution to the political project of showing how rural subaltern groups were inscribed and participants in history, contributing to the broader post-war populist movement of Italian radical intellectuals. De Martino thus engaged in the debate around the potentialities of folklore to transform into a new popular culture and to make subaltern groups active in history. This project was very Gramscian, in the sense that Gramsci was interested in subaltern cultures as embryonic manifestations of marginal people’s rebelliousness against cultural and political hegemony. But Gramsci also formulated, at the same time, a sharp political criticism of popular culture and resistance as unable to transform society. As a Marxist and a political activist, Gramsci thought that only a more structured political con-

12 13

De Martino 1948, 1958, 1959, 1961. De Martino 1949.

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sciousness and organisation could transform and then emancipate subaltern cultures: when they are in ‘a state of anxious defence’, people are ‘subject to the initiatives of the dominant classes, even when they rebel’ (Q3, § 14). Gramsci opens up the possibility that elementary forms of resistance can be something more than mere passive resistance or, in his own words, a mere ‘fact’. They may not, however, be enough for emancipation, unless these molecular forms are brought ‘to the surface’ by active political engagement for the transformation of historical blocs connecting economy and culture. Gramsci’s interpretation of folklore posed a dilemma to anthropologists between, on the one side, a populist insistence on people’s capacity to express their cultural autonomy and their creativity as a way of resisting dominant culture, and, on the other side, a historicist invitation to move beyond those embryonic popular forms of cultural rebelliousness. De Martino’s attempt to respond to this dilemma and his main contribution to the debate was the discussion of the possibilities for a ‘progressive folklore’.14 De Martino developed this notion thanks to his reading of Gramsci and of the Soviet ethnologists’ interpretation of folklore as a transformative popular contribution to revolution.15 He was also influenced by his experience in the Resistance army, and by the popular culture of workers and peasants that he met in Northern Italy (Romagna) during the Second World War.16 For the anthropologist, experiences of resistance and traces of popular contestation in poems and songs seemed able to turn into a popular cultural commitment to the transformation of society. Despite his references to Gramsci, de Martino was strongly criticised by the Italian Communist Party for his ideas about folklore and popular culture as tools of emancipation. Indeed, as shown by Cesare Luporini’s reaction,17 the party appropriated Gramsci’s more modernist side and his criticism of any traditionalism about popular culture, insisting rather on the mission of the working class as the true revolutionary subject in a modern society like post-war Italy.18 In 1965, all the intellectuals working on popular cultures were also criticised from an autonomist perspective, with Alberto Asor Rosa describing as ‘populist’ and ‘Gramscianist’ (gramscianismo) anyone who, ‘while going towards the people and before coming to it, transforms it into a myth’.19

14 15 16 17 18 19

De Martino 1951c. Sokolov 1945. De Martino 1951a and 1951b. Luporini 1950a and 1950b. Severino 2003. Asor Rosa 1988.

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The first Italian anthropologists referring to Gramsci for the study of popular and subaltern subjectivities were then trapped into the debates concerning Gramsci’s positions on those issues. Was Gramsci a ‘populist’ insisting on the potentialities of popular rebelliousness or was he an ‘elitist’ criticising it as disaggregated? Was Gramsci a ‘traditionalist’ retracing the history of marginal and dispersed subaltern groups or was he a ‘modernist’ insisting on the leading role of the working class? We now know that actually Gramsci was both and perhaps even sought a dialectical synthesis of these polarities, but it was normal for a science like anthropology at that time to insist on the more ‘populist’ orientations of his thinking, especially in studying marginalised subaltern groups like peasant societies, which disconnected the notion of ‘subalternity’ from that of the ‘working class’. Although partial, this translation of Gramsci in anthropology in the 1950s allowed de Martino and other anthropologists, especially Vittorio Lanternari,20 to attempt another type of translation which was innovative for that time, opening up an increasing differentiation of the social subjects that can be considered ‘subaltern’. In fact, following Gramsci, de Martino and Lanternari understood marginal and subaltern groups not as outside of history, but clearly as inscribed into the historical movement of their time. In the 1950s, this meant trying to compare and then translate the situation of the peasant groups of Southern Italy with that of other subaltern groups of the world, and especially Third-World colonised societies. De Martino’s Gramscian article of 1949, well before the anthropological self-analysis of the 1970s and 1980s, already criticised the link between ethnological naturalism, bourgeois society, and colonial imperialism. As such, de Martino and Lanternari, in a way, anticipated many of the issues discussed by postcolonial anthropology and criticism, and made of the Italian Southern Question a sort of paradigm for understanding the Third World. Indeed, in the 1950s, political anthropology was reflecting on popular cultures and especially religious expressions in the colonised world, such as millennial and prophetic movements, as a political affirmation of colonised peoples entering history. I refer in particular to the Manchester school and the work of Max Gluckman, who at that time had conceived of the Mau Mau in Kenya as a local form of emerging anticolonial movement. In 1956, Gluckman organised a seminar in Manchester on popular social movements in comparative perspective starting from what he was studying in Africa. He invited three speakers: historian Norman Cohn on Medieval millenarianism; anthropologist Peter Worsley on the cargo cults in colonial Melanesia; and Eric Hobsbawm

20

Lanternari 1954, 1960, 1972.

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on pre-industrial forms of social movements in Europe. All three interventions became masterpieces in the social sciences: Cohn’s The Pursuit of the Millennium,21 Worsley’s The Trumpet shall sound22 and Hobsbawm’s Primitive Rebels.23 The latter two in particular share a common view on popular cultural movements: they are, in a way, an imperfect anticipation of a more conscious political movement that will later emerge. In that sense, Worsley talked of new Melanesian anticolonial rituals as a form of proto-nationalism, while Hobsbawm talked of popular rebellions, like that of the Lazzaretti’s millennial movement, as pre-political. Worsley was the first to publish and comment in English on some of Gramsci’s letters from prison in The New Reasoner in 1959,24 but he would develop a deeper discussion on Gramsci some years after his reading of the cargo cults.25 By contrast, in the 1950s, Hobsbawm was directly engaging with Gramsci and applying his ideas to his studies. From that perspective, in 1960, one year after the publication of Primitive Rebels, he wrote an article in Italian in Società,26 the same journal in which de Martino had published his article on the history of the subaltern and popular world. In a similar manner, Hobsbawm called for a convergence of political anthropology and Gramscian theory, through social history, but as Carlo Ginzburg has recently noted,27 he did this without making any reference to de Martino’s work (perhaps not to transgress the official line of the Italian Communist Party). It is important to note that Hobsbawm insisted that Gramsci’s historicism would emancipate political anthropology from any remaining ahistorical naturalism. This turned out to be a problem for the Gramscian legacy in the social sciences for those studying popular politics, especially in peasant societies. Anthropologists or subaltern scholars like James C. Scott28 and Ranajit Guha29 have strongly criticised Hobsbawm and his notion of the pre-political. They argue that it would implicitly depict popular social movements as something still lacking consciousness in comparison to a modern Marxist political initiative. This criticism of Hobsbawm’s notion is in part justified, but it also had some implications on how Gramsci was interpreted by these authors. Guha, for example, still considered Gramsci as a topical reference, but like 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29

Cohn 1957. Worsley 1957. Hobsbawm 1959. Gramsci and Worsley 1959. Worsley 1997 and 2013. Hobsbawm 1960. Ginzburg 2013. Scott 1999. Guha 1983, p. 6.

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other anthropologists of resistance,30 he has made use of only some parts of Gramsci’s work. While eluding or even criticising Gramsci’s call to produce a new hegemony by acquiring an upper level of political consciousness and organisation, these authors have studied the emergence of anti-hegemonic discourses in different subaltern groups by relying only on his interpretation of the ‘negative’ potential of popular subversion, the defensive subaltern political action which manifests itself through ‘a series of denials’ and a ‘generic’ anger towards the powerful (Q3, 323). For other scholars of resistance31 and theorists with libertarian orientations,32 Gramsci is even rejected for denying any political consciousness or intentionality to the ‘spontaneity’ of popular groups. For example, in James Scott’s view,33 Gramsci’s theory of cultural hegemony is another version of the German ideology, seeing every cultural proposition as inevitably at the service of the dominant classes.

6

Gramsci beyond Poststructuralism: A Comparison with Bourdieu’s Sociology

Scott’s and Guha’s readings of Gramsci are profoundly influenced by the general intellectual debate of anglophone critical scholarship in which the writings of Gramsci were ‘discovered’ after the publication of the Notebooks in the 1970s. Within cultural studies in Britain and political anthropology in the United States, the discussions were on poststructuralism. As other critical studies developing at that time, such as cultural, subaltern, and then postcolonial studies, political anthropology was indeed elaborating on the relationship between structure and agency or resistance, and on the forms of political expression ‘from below’. This debate over poststructuralism required anthropologists to mobilise philosophical and sociological references from French Theory that at that time was infiltrating the American and British academia.34 The joint use of French Theory and Gramsci has produced in political anthropology opposite interpretations of the latter. Gramsci thus is trapped in debates that originate from poststructuralist theory. As we have seen in the previous section, some scholars see in the concept of hegemony the idea of cultural domination, which, being based on absolute consensus between rulers and 30 31 32 33 34

Keesing 1992, p. 225. Feierman 1990. Day 2005. Scott 1985, p. 336. Cusset 2003.

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ruled, infinitely reproduces itself. Others consider Gramsci an inspiration for analysing popular forms of resistance, cultures and spontaneous subaltern philosophies from the perspective of political emancipation. In a way, anthropologists have, I would say, ‘poststructuralised’ Gramsci. This is not an issue of anachronism: Gramsci himself called for a translation of theories throughout space and time, even with the beneficial eventuality of going beyond Gramsci himself in original ways that better fit contemporary times. The critique of this ‘poststructuralisation’ is rather important because, I argue, it is in a poststructural tone that Gramsci has been introduced in international political anthropology. Kate Crehan has noted that one of the main problems with bringing Gramsci into anthropology, especially in English, was reading him through interposed interpretations, particularly through what she calls the ‘light’ reading of the concept of hegemony,35 generally associated with Raymond Williams’s use of it.36 The ‘light’ reading of Gramsci implies that ‘discourse’ is the only field of political conflict: power and domination are identified only in the imposition of discourse, in the work of inculcation, in the production of consent, and in the uniformity of behaviours and thoughts. For this reason, the main anthropologists who worked with Gramsci’s ideas did so by combining his notions of hegemony and common sense with Pierre Bourdieu’s ‘modes of domination’, ‘symbolic violence’, ‘doxa’, ‘habitus’, and ‘practice’. This is the case of Sherry Ortner, one of the most important contemporary American anthropologists who has worked on the Sherpa of Tibet, on feminist theory, and on the concept of ‘class’ in the USA. From a theoretical point of view, Ortner has made one of the most important and influential contributions to the study of agency and structure, and she has done so by importing from across the Atlantic Bourdieu’s theory of practice and Gramsci’s theory of hegemony.37 Despite the usefulness and the refinement of this approach, what is striking for us is that Ortner holds Bourdieu’s idea of orthodoxy as equivalent to Gramsci’s hegemony. The same is true in John and Jean Comaroff’s famous analysis of colonialism in Southern Africa.38 In their seminal work on the anthropology of colonialism, these anthropologists tried to show that the colonial regime in South Africa introduced a logic of domination that entered the minds of the colonial subjects and shaped their practices and behaviours. This process is explained invariably as a colonial hegemony or ideology, with 35 36 37 38

Crehan 2002, p. 172. Kurtz 1996. Ortner 2006. Comaroff and Comaroff 1991.

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cross references to Gramsci and Bourdieu.39 To explain the Gramscian hegemony, the Comaroffs expressively paraphrase Bourdieu’s definition of doxa: hegemony would be ‘that part of a dominant worldview which has been naturalized, and having hidden itself in orthodoxy, no more appears as ideology at all’. Hegemony would be the consequence of inculcation by the dominant ideology: that is to say, the transformation of the dominant thought in common, everyday, incorporated subjects. In part, this rapprochement between Gramsci and Bourdieu makes sense. For Bourdieu the ‘ideological power’ represents ‘a specific contribution of symbolic violence (orthodoxy) to political violence (domination)’.40 This definition is not without recalling the notion of hegemony, understood as ‘a combination of force and consensus’ (Q13). But this rapprochement too easily equates hegemony with doxa, and turns Gramsci’s idea of hegemony into an ideology of the dominant classes strictly and integrally incorporated in the practice of inactive and unconscious subjects. In 2011, Michael Burawoy sought to compare Gramsci and Bourdieu.41 The British sociologist stressed the many similarities in their thoughts, while recalling Bourdieu’s reluctance to engage in a real confrontation with the theories of Gramsci.42 In his writings, we only find a few references, although very significant ones, to the question of intellectuals43 and of political and unionist representations.44 One common point of interest for anthropologists is the place given to supra-structural aspects and the critique of ‘economism’. In reality, Bourdieu went even further in that direction than Gramsci, as he renounced making explicit any connection between discourses and material conditions, and identified the ‘struggle for symbolic classification’ as autonomous from the issue of ‘class’ or of what he called ‘classes on paper’. This was also a critique not of a specific interpretation of Marxism as mechanical materialism, such as in Gramsci, but a general critique of Marxism as an overwhelming theory of the conversion of capital to the non-material areas of social life, like culture and symbolic action. Nonetheless, for political anthropologists, Gramsci and Bourdieu were similar in ‘enhancing the cultural fact’, since both authors inform a critical theory capable of presenting culture as a field of forces and conflicts,

39 40 41 42 43 44

Comaroff and Comaroff 1991, p. 125. Bourdieu 1977b, p. 406. Burawoy 2011. Bourdieu 1987, p. 39; Bourdieu 2012. Bourdieu 1989a, p. 109. Bourdieu 1981, p. 5.

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and to explain thoughts and behaviours as the results of a historic struggle for hegemony or symbolic capital.45 Another fundamental aspect, which explains the connection made between Gramsci and Bourdieu in political anthropology, is the notion of practice, possibly translatable by Gramsci’s praxis, and its relationship to the question of consciousness. The idea of habitus and practical sense46 as an implicit knowledge incorporated into practices may converge with the Gramscian notion of common sense, or of knowledge embodied in the activity of the worker. Anthropologists have thus found an analogy between Bourdieu’s distinction of practice and consciousness and the Gramscian idea of two potentially contradictory states of consciousness of the workers: one implicit in their action that associates them with a ‘class in itself’ engaged in the practical transformation of reality, and the other explicit or verbal, which uncritically reproduces the ideas imposed from the outside by the dominant classes (Q11: 1385). Anthropologists often also connect this with E.P. Thompson’s dual consciousness,47 or Anthony Giddens’s distinction, on the same line of Bourdieu, between practical consciousness and discursive consciousness.48 These distinctions prove useful for political anthropologists who try to interpret the forms of political action and thinking, which are by definition, in Gramscian terms, neither a ‘hundred per cent conscious’ nor ‘completely spontaneous’ (Q3 §48: 329, 332). But beyond this convergence, the positions of Gramsci and Bourdieu diverge on the identification of the organic relationship between practice and consciousness. If for Gramsci the opposition between practice and consciousness is only a conceptual distinction, one that is blurred in the continuous translation of theory and practice in human activity, for Bourdieu it reflects the opposition between practice and discourse, which is constitutive of social reality. Bourdieu placed a strong emphasis on the reciprocal autonomy of the practical and ideological spheres, especially when treating the issue of resistance. Resistance to domination can only take form in one sphere or the other, because there is no significant link between practical and discursive activity. In the practical sphere of social life, resistance is possible when there is a discrepancy between different forms of habitus, or a contradiction in patterned behaviours, which opens up to the possibility for the social actor to produce an unexpected effect in reality and thus bring social change. As Crehan has pointed out in a comparison between Gramsci’s common sense and 45 46 47 48

Wolf 1999, p. 44. Bourdieu 1980. Thompson 1991, p. 11. Giddens 1984.

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Bourdieu’s habitus,49 the latter is bound to a structuralist perspective. It is considered, in Bourdieu’s words, to be a ‘system of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures’.50 Practical change has almost nothing to do with collective consciousness and will, both of which are at stake in Gramsci’s perspective. For Bourdieu, resistance in the ideological and discursive sphere of social life is still possible, but it takes a different form and responds to different and autonomous logics than in the practical one. It consists of heterodoxy, or of ‘demystification of orthodoxy’, which is only possible through sociological criticism. This sociological demystification of power remains independent of practice,51 unless we consider sociology itself as the unique practical activity to accede to reflexivity.52 For Bourdieu, then, most of social life is constrained between the determinations of practical activity and its slight changes emerging in the liminal discrepancies of habitus. Meanwhile, only sociological criticism can aspire to reveal the reality – even if a socially constructed reality – of power relations. This is very different from Gramsci for whom the distinction between practical consciousness and ideological consciousness is only ‘quantitative’ and not ‘qualitative’ (Q3 §48: 331). Thus, for Gramsci, it is up to politics, and not to sociology, to reaffirm the organic link between practice and consciousness and to operate the ‘passage’ from one dimension to the other: from the spontaneous movement to conscious leadership, from daily practice to conscious action. The difference between Gramsci and Bourdieu on the relationship between practice and consciousness is also clear when we look at the issue of intellectuals and of the representation of the masses.53 For Bourdieu, the intellectual is a ‘bourgeois’ released from his immediate necessities, which would normally dominate the practical activity of the social actor. Therefore, for Bourdieu, if the intellectual aims to ‘represent’ the dominated social groups, this representation will always be fictitious, since the intellectual evolves in a completely different social dimension. From this perspective, we can better understand one of the few references Bourdieu has made to Gramsci’s writings and theories. In his article on ‘Political Representation’,54 Bourdieu explicitly criticises Gramsci’s notion of the ‘organicity’ of intellectuals: their organic nature is always related

49 50 51 52 53 54

Crehan 2013, pp. 107–10. Bourdieu 1977a, p. 72. Bourdieu 2001a, pp. 210–11. Bourdieu 2001b. Bourdieu 1977b and 1981. Bourdieu 1981.

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to their own interests as a section of the ruling class separated from the dominated class they rather intend to represent. The intellectuals inevitably come to play a detached role in society and to develop a sort of ‘corporatism’ for protecting their own interests even if and when they are claiming universal values.55

7

Conclusion

This scrutiny of divergences in the approaches of Gramsci and Bourdieu can help us to better understand the ambiguities and discrepancies of political anthropologists in ‘poststructuralising’ Gramsci. In fact, this mixed appropriation of Gramsci and French Theory does not understand the contrast between a structural view of society on the one hand and Gramsci’s philosophy-historypolitical triad on the other, which is, to remain in the Bourdieu-Gramsci comparison, a contrast between a sociological theory of domination and a revolutionary political theory. In her recent book, Charlotte Nordmann has recalled Rancière’s criticism56 of Bourdieu’s sociology as a descriptive theory of domination.57 After having disavowed structuralism, the French philosopher accused sociologists of being unable to recognise those forms of popular emancipation that are not embedded in the unconscious practice and imprisoned by the symbolic confirmation of the same social hierarchies. Certainly, on this point, other authors have highlighted Bourdieu’s ability to foster social change through political commitment and the historical transformation of radical events. For example, in this perspective, Bourdieu manifested an interest, especially in his late years, for the work of some anthropologists working on subordinate groups of political mobilisations.58 The fact remains that, in the sociological theory of Bourdieu, the freedom of the subject often seems confined to a simple ability to position itself differently from the symbolic point of view but within the same social configuration. The dominated classes find themselves, in the words of Bourdieu, compelled to make a virtue out of necessity: the workers begin to love what they can buy, trying to imitate the consumption of the upper classes. There is no questioning of values. People will eventually desire what is possible to achieve and be content with that. On this point, the prospect of Gramsci is

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Bourdieu 1989a, p. 109. Rancière 2002. Nordmann 2006. See, e.g., Bensa and Bourdieu 1985.

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starkly different. As we have seen, Gramsci was very critical of approaches to sociology like that of Henri de Man, who also thought that the revolution was impossible because the workers did not dream of a radical change, but only aspired to partial improvements to their lives that seemed possible in the ‘naturalised’ social context. Indeed, de Man wrote, in similar terms to Bourdieu, that ‘the reason why the bourgeoisie is now the upper class, is that everyone wants to be the bourgeoisie’. As we have seen, this type of sociological reasoning for Gramsci is problematic, since it tends to a naturalisation of the social reality. Gramsci criticises the ‘fatalistic theory’ of those who believe that everything is justified by the ‘social environment’ (ambiente sociale). If the individual accepts the idea that his condition is the inevitable product of an external force, then ‘the world and history would still be motionless’. The social reproduction that seems inevitable in Bourdieu’s sociological perspective should be overcome by introducing a political dimension which opens up the possibility of an historical subject: ‘political action aims, precisely, at rousing the multitudes out of their passivity, that is, at destroying the law of large numbers. How can this law, then, be considered a sociological law?’59 There are no better words to highlight the importance of the human factor and of man as a political subject in criticising sociological determinism, than those in this excerpt from Gramsci’s Mechanical determinism and activity-will: This is why it is essential at all times to demonstrate the futility of mechanical determinism: for, although it is explicable as a naive philosophy of the mass and as such, but only as such, can be an intrinsic element of strength. Nevertheless, when it is adopted as a thought-out and coherent philosophy on the part of the intellectuals, it becomes a cause of passivity, of idiotic self-sufficiency. This happens when they don’t even expect that the subaltern will become directive and responsible. In fact, however, some part of even a subaltern mass is always directive and responsible, and the philosophy of the part always precedes the philosophy of the whole, not only as its theoretical anticipation but as a necessity of real life.60 In conclusion, I would argue that a close reading of Gramsci’s ideas on humankind, history, and society can bring new nourishment to political anthropology

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Q11 § 25: 1430; see also Q3: 328. Q8 § 205.

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and help it in going after a rather ahistoricist analysis of relations of domination. Gramsci’s insights on the potential for the emergence of the political subject can then help to bring back the political and projective dimension of history and social life.

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chapter 4

‘The Common Cult of the Historical Truth’: The Formation of History of Religions in France and the Role of Socio-cultural Elites Annelies Lannoy

In the late nineteenth century, history of religions was institutionalised as an autonomous scientific discipline at several French state institutions.1 In 1879, a chair for history of religions was created at the prestigious Collège de France (henceforth CF), and seven years later the École Pratique des Hautes Études (henceforth EPHE) saw the birth of a department of sciences religieuses. Religion had long been the object of critical scientific enquiry, but the institutional emancipation of the sciences religieuses from the methods of the sciences sacrées would have to wait until the Third Republic and its radical laicisation programme. The new chair at the CF and the department at the EPHE replaced the faculties of Catholic theology at the French universities, which had been cut off from state funding in 1885 and ceased to exist soon thereafter.2 The academic changes were part of the far-reaching educational reforms through which the republicans tried to reduce the influence of the Church in society. Part of the same reform, the famous Jules Ferry Laws (promulgated 1881–82) decreed that public primary education (the école laïque) was to be free and strictly nonreligious.3 Since the centenary of these events, the connection between the institutionalisation of history of religions and republican ideology has received ample scholarly attention. We know that the first holders of the new chairs were ardent defenders of the young Third Republic.4 Their public discourse was deeply shaped by the assumption that the new discipline would establish ‘le culte commun de la vérité historique’ (‘the common cult of the historical 1 The events in France ran parallel to the institutionalisation of religious studies in several other European countries (e.g. the Netherlands and Belgium); see the contributions to Molendijk and Pels 1998. 2 Cabanel 1994, pp. 43–4; Despland 2001, pp. 5–7; Poulat 1987. 3 For excellent studies on the école laïque, see Auspitz 1982, Gontard 1976, and Ognier 2008 (among many others). 4 See especially the seminal work of Cabanel 1994 and 2003 on the first, almost all LiberalProtestant chair holders. We will come back to the importance of the French Liberal Protestants for history of religions.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004443778_006

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truth’).5 It was argued that this common pursuit would dissolve religious and ideological differences. The non-theological study of religion by means of history, philology, and other scientific methods would bring freedom of thought, or, put differently, it would help liberate French society from clerical control. The privileged voices of scholars of religion in the debates concerning the laicisation of French public education turned them into powerful allies of the new regime. In his reflections on the dynamics of power in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century nations, Antonio Gramsci made the famous distinction between forceful coercion on the level of the political society (e.g. by armed forces), and consent obtained through the exercise of cultural hegemony in the civil society, by which he referred to the backing of social domination by means of persuasion or on the basis of a subtle coercion through ideas.6 Intellectuals, he explained, are essential agents for the conceptualisation and the socialisation of the values, worldviews, and meanings which are transmitted via science, education, religion, etc. and internalised in the subjects of a nation as the ‘common sense’. When narrowed down to science,7 Gramsci’s ideas entail that there is no such thing as neutral and unbiased scholarship which operates independently from the interests of a particular socio-economic class; each scholar contributes ‘in a more or less conscious way, to the construction of a specific hegemony, serving specific elites’.8 Since Gramsci’s concept of cultural hegemony was largely based on his historical analyses of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europe, it will come as no surprise that it is especially relev-

5 The words belong to Albert Réville, who was the first (Liberal-Protestant) professor of the history of religions at the CF and the first director of the Département de sciences religieuses at the EPHE. They are part of Réville’s preface to the first volume of the series Bibliothèque de l’ École Pratique des Hautes Études. Sciences religieuses (1889), p. xii, quoted in Laplanche 2006, p. 31. 6 The specialist literature on Gramsci’s theory of cultural hegemony is vast. Not being an expert myself, I have greatly profited from reading Bates 1975; Jackson Lears 1985; Thomas 2009 (especially Chapter 5); Hoare and Sperber 2015 (especially part II, 5). 7 On the importance of the Gramscian framework for the history of science: Nieto-Galan 2011a; on the usefulness of the concept of hegemony for modern science of religion: Wood 2001. Note that Gramsci’s concept of ‘the intellectual’ was intentionally broad: ‘All men are potentially intellectuals in the sense of having an intellect and using it, but not all are intellectuals by social function’ (Gramsci 1999, p. 3). Among the ‘intellectuals by social function’, Gramsci not only included the ‘professional’ intellectuals, such as journalists, academics or writers. He also included priests, teachers, politicians, lawyers, policemen, etc., all of whom acted as direct and indirect ideological agents: Gramsci 1991, p. 5 sq.; Hoare and Sperber 2015 (part II, 2); Nieto-Galan 2011, p. 457. 8 Nieto-Galan 2011a, p. 458.

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ant for understanding the complex relationships between science of religion, politics, and society in the France of that time. Modern scholarship has repeatedly pointed out – even if not in Gramscian terminology – that by controlling the academic setting for the production of scientific knowledge on religion, the young Third Republic sought to exercise cultural counter-hegemony against the dominant presence of the antirepublican Catholic Church in French society.9 But while the link between French anti-clerical politics and science of religion has been thoroughly studied, the intricately interrelated social history of the young discipline could not count on the same amount of scholarly interest. Was the institutionalised history of religions – with its close connection to the Third Republic – used by the ruling bourgeoisie as an instrument to consolidate their elitist positions? And, if so, how exactly did their worldviews infiltrate the scientific narratives on the history of religions? So far, Ivan Strenski is the only scholar to have addressed these questions.10 The present chapter aims to complement his scholarship on late nineteenth-century France. It will examine the social dynamics within the early twentieth-century discipline through a case study of Alfred Loisy’s appointment to the chair of history of religions at the CF in 1909.11 This study will reveal the largely unknown role of an influential network of bourgeois republicans who actively tried to control the discipline, not only for the sake of the greater republican cause, but also to protect their own elitist position in French society. Congruent with the Gramscian theory of hegemony, this chapter hopes to demonstrate that it is only by a nuanced and nonreductionist appreciation of the subtle role of socio-cultural and socio-political backgrounds, in addition to the role of religious beliefs, anti-clericalism, racial ideas, etc., that one can gain truly comprehensive insight into the nineteenthand early twentieth-century history of French religious studies. Alfred Loisy (1857–1940) was a French Catholic priest and an expert in the historical-critical and comparative study of Early Christianity and ancient Judaism. One of the main exponents of Roman Catholic Modernism, he was excommunicated from the Church in 1908 because of his historical-critical ideas on the origins of Christianity and his urgent plea to modernise Cath-

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Cabanel 1994, p. 43; Despland 2001, pp. 8–9; Gardaz 1995, pp. 97–8; Poulat 1987, pp. 61–7. Cf. Strenski 2002 and 2003. We will summarise his findings on fin-de-siècle France in the following section. In this study, I focus on the role of social backgrounds and socio-political views in the appointment of Loisy. For a more extensive study of his appointment, with an investigation of the roles played by anti-clericalism and anti-Semitism, I refer to my book on Loisy (see Lannoy 2020).

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olic faith and scholarship.12 One year later, he was appointed to the chair of history of religions at the CF, where he stayed until his retirement in 1932.13 The polemical elections of 1909 are very well documented. Substantial parts of Loisy’s private correspondence and that of relevant contemporaries have been preserved.14 These unpublished and mostly unstudied letters not only allow us to identify the elitist network behind the appointment, but also to analyse their motives and strategies. Although this is explicitly not our main aim here, the present chapter has the additional benefit of contextualising Gramsci’s own observations on the progress of science of religion (especially on Early Christianity) and on Catholic Modernism in Italy. Loisy himself and several members of his scientific network (e.g. the Italian Modernist priest Ernesto Buonaiuti) attracted Gramsci’s attention. However disparate and short the notes on these scholars may be, they do provide some insight into the reasons for Gramsci’s nuanced evaluation of Catholic Modernism. After a concise account of the institutional history of religions in nineteenth-century France (§1), we therefore include a short digression about Gramsci’s remarks on ‘scientific-religious Modernism’ (§ 2).15 The third part of the chapter is dedicated to the case study on Loisy.

1

Sciences Religieuses in Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century France

To fully grasp what was at stake during the election campaign at the CF in 1908, we need to take a step back in time and briefly discuss the major develop-

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Arnold 2007, Hill 2002, and Jodock 2000 (among many others) provide excellent accounts of Catholic Modernism. See also, more recently, Praet and Bonnet 2018. During that time he developed a rich oeuvre in the field of comparative religion, which is generally less well-known than his Modernist work. Recently, interest in Loisy’s ‘postModernist’ career has been increasing. See, e.g., Roessli 2013; Praet and Lannoy 2017. For a comprehensive account of his work on comparative religion, see Lannoy 2020. Our case study is mainly based on the correspondence between Loisy and the Marquise Arconati Visconti (preserved in the Bibliothèque nationale de France, henceforth BnF) and on the correspondence between Franz Cumont and Arconati (preserved in the Castle of Gaasbeek, Belgium). Introductions for Arconati and Cumont follow in part 3, which will also provide detailed references to the archive materials used in this chapter. The term is Gramsci’s: see Q14 § 52. Note that when we discuss Gramsci’s views, our focus is on science of religion. For his extensive reflections on religion and the position of the Church in Italian society, see: Adamson 2013; Fulton 1987; Portelli 1974 (again, among many others).

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ments in the French history of religions since the late nineteenth century.16 It has already been noted that long before their institutionalisation, the so-called sciences religieuses, which sought an unbiased study of religion, had been progressively detaching themselves from the reigning theological approach to religion.17 Significant impulses for the scientification of French religious studies came from critical Bible exegesis (developed in Liberal-Protestant Germany) and, starting from the 1840s, also from philology which introduced the influential method of comparative mythology.18 A strong advocate of these two traditions was the French ex-Jesuit Ernest Renan. His immensely influential and controversial Vie de Jésus (1863) famously argued that the Bible should be subjected to the same critical methods as any other historical text.19 Renan’s critical ideas on Christianity cost him his position at the CF in 1862. But after the Second Empire collapsed, his fate changed. After the installation of the Third Republic, proclaimed by Léon Gambetta following Napoleon III’s defeat in the FrancoPrussian War (1870–71), Renan was quickly restored to his chair (of Hebrew). To process the recent military defeat and the traumatising annexation of AlsaceLorraine, the new republican regime invested great efforts in stimulating positive science, technology, and education, which were regarded ‘as pathways to national resurrection’.20 Science of religion took up a central position in this cultural renewal process. The strong opposition of scholars like Renan against the control of Catholic theology over scientific knowledge on religion ran perfectly parallel to the unremitting republican efforts to minimise clerical

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For extensive overviews of the methodological developments in the young discipline and their intimate connection to contemporary political events, see: Cabanel 1994; Laplanche 1999; Simon-Nahum 2002; Strenski 2002 and 2003. Simon-Nahum 2002, p. 2; on the origin of the French terminology, see Poulat 1987, pp. 53– 4. In comparative mythology, too, Germany took up a leading position with Friedrich Max Müller, who worked in Oxford. On Müller’s reception in France, see Laplanche 1987, pp. 39–40. On Renan, see, most recently, Priest 2015, and the contributions to Laurens 2013. Note that Gramsci was well acquainted with Renan’s work. See, e.g., his interesting comment on Renan in Q3 §1 (Gramsci 2011, II, pp. 6–7), where he discusses the validity of the category of ‘the French intellectual’. Gramsci typically rejects a reductionist explanation which claims that the particularity of an intellectual is solely explainable by nationality, and quotes Renan as an example: ‘Renan qua Renan is by no means a necessary product of the French spirit; in relation to this spirit, he is an original, arbitrary, unforeseeable (as Bergson says) phenomenon. Nevertheless, Renan remains French, just as a human being while yet human remains a mammal; but his value, as in the case of the human being, lies precisely in his difference from the group into which he was born’ (the emphasis is Gramsci’s). Priest 2015, p. 191, and Paul 1985.

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control.21 In the late 1870s, the republicans commenced the institutionalisation of religious studies. Although the notion of neutralité was prominent in their argumentations, the political debates were polemical.22 The question as to whether religion could be the object of unbiased scientific research exposed an unbridgeable gulf between anticlerical republicans and Catholic monarchists. During a much-quoted intervention in the Chamber, Catholic deputy Mgr. Charles-Émile Freppel explained why, from a Catholic perspective, the answer could only be negative: Either this investigation, this comparison and this criticism will be in accordance with Catholic teachings, and then why has theological education been suppressed at the State Faculties, if you seek to achieve the same goal? Or this investigation, this comparison and this criticism will be in conflict with Catholic teachings, and in that case you abandon the neutrality on behalf of which you have suppressed the faculties of theology, in practice if not legally. There is no middle ground.23 The republicans who, by 1879, had achieved a political majority in the Senate and the Chamber, obviously disagreed. Seven years later, the new department of sciences religieuses (EPHE) took residence in the buildings of the then closed faculty of Catholic theology of the Sorbonne.24 Interestingly, the Parisian faculty of Protestant theology escaped from being closed down until the Law on the Separation of Church and State of 1905. The main reason for this faculty’s escape from the ongoing laicisation of higher education was the fact that the Liberal Protestants were a powerful religious minority in the early Third Republic.25 In the 1870s and 1880s, Liberal-Protestant scholars of religion successfully positioned themselves as experts in matters of religious instruction. In 1880, the then Minister of Public Instruction Jules Ferry appointed the Liberal-Protestant scholar Albert Réville by decree to the new chair at the CF.26 Some years later, several of the chairs at the new depart-

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Strenski 2003, p. 120. In spite of his republican recuperation, Renan himself was a monarchist: Priest 2015, p. 180. Cabanel 1994, pp. 42–4 and passim; Despland 2001, pp. 5–6; Poulat 1987, pp. 61–3. Quoted in Poulat 1987, p. 70; Despland 2001, p. 6. All English translations of French texts in this chapter are mine. Laplanche 2006, p. 26. For this part on Liberal-Protestant scholarship, I summarise the findings of Cabanel 1994 and 2003; Strenski 2002 and 2003. Cabanel 1994, p. 43.

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ment of the EPHE, which was directed by Albert Réville, also went to LiberalProtestant scholars.27 Their hegemony over French institutional religious studies lasted for about two decades, and coincided with the most intense exercise of republican counter-hegemony against Catholic monarchism.28 Although we cannot discuss this issue in much detail, it is important for our case study to understand why a republican politician like Jules Ferry was so convinced that these scholars – with their distinct denominational profile – were still the best candidates for the newly created ‘neutral’ chairs. A first reason was that the ruling Opportunistes (moderate centre-left republicans) wanted to avoid at all costs to appoint scholars with the profile of an ‘homme de combat’, who could jeopardise the much emphasised aura of ‘neutralité’. The second, equally important reason resided in the political compatibility of the Liberal Protestants. Patrick Cabanel has conclusively shown that their scholarship on religion articulated the ideals of the Republic.29 Thirdly – and for our purpose most importantly – Liberal-Protestant methodology conveyed specific worldviews which corresponded with those of the ruling republican elites on a deeper sociological level. Between the Second Empire and the Third Republic, the scientific study of religion underwent an important methodological shift. While the former was the era of grand theories like comparative mythology, which developed a general theory about the (one) origin of all religions, the latter marked the elevation of a strictly historical, supposedly non-theoretical methodology. As Strenski has argued, this ‘histoire historisante’ reacted against dogmatic theological impositions on the ‘historical facts’, but, by extension, it entailed a general hostility towards any form of theoretical thinking on religion.30 The fieriest advocates of this positivist, historicising study of religion were LiberalProtestant scholars like Albert Réville, who had studied with the LiberalProtestant pioneers of historical-critical exegesis and comparative religion in Germany and the Netherlands.31

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Aside from Albert Réville, important names were the Old Testament scholar Maurice Vernes, the systematic theologian and philosopher Auguste Sabatier, and the historian of religions Jean Réville, son of Albert Réville (see below). For good introductions to these scholars, who all worked at the EPHE, see Strenski 2003, pp. 69–121. On the conflict between left-wing anti-clerical republicanism and right-wing Catholic monarchism in the young Third Republic, see Fortescue 2000, p. 32sq. See Cabanel 1994, pp. 47–9 for the example of Maurice Vernes, who explicitly underlined the importance of ‘admirables exemples de patriotisme’ in the Old Testament for the dissemination of republican ideology. Strenski 2003, pp. 109–14. Cabanel 1994, p. 58.

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Although the Liberal Protestants heavily emphasised their strictly objective approach, there was a variety of religious beliefs and socio-political worldviews shimmering through their study of religion.32 These scholars typically adopted a deistic interpretation of Christianity, and combined a highly individual spirituality with a strong awareness of each individual’s moral obligations. Their public discourse on religion was seen as fairly neutral by non-Protestant bourgeois republicans, because it bore an intimate connection with the rationalist free thought and the humanistic positivism that were flourishing in these circles.33 Moreover, the strongly individualistic undertone of this science of religion was thoroughly compatible with the worldviews of the bourgeois elites who were in charge of the early Third Republic. In their scientific narratives, the Liberal-Protestant touch showed in a focus on myth, religious beliefs, and ‘sentiment religieux’.34 These scholars furthermore adopted the then widely popular evolutionary accounts of history of religions. In an attempt to make history of religions more scientific, ancient and contemporary religions were classified into types of religion which were believed to represent stages in the progressive development of mankind. But the parameters used for the classification, such as the level of morality and individual spirituality, revealed a Christian-centred outlook.35 Starting from the 1890s, the professed universality of the Liberal-Protestant conception of religion met with increasing criticism. The late nineteenth century saw the rise of new methodologies in religion studies, including religious psychology, anthropology, ethnology, and sociology. While showing some interest in a psychological approach, the Liberal Protestants were generally sceptical about the other methods. More often than not, these clashed with their own views on religion and on history of religions. A good example is William Robertson Smith’s highly influential theory of totemism which strongly highlighted the social nature of religion and was generally negatively received

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For the sake of concision, I focus on the features of Liberal-Protestant scholarship which were criticised by the Durkheimians and by Loisy, but it is important to note that the first representatives of the institutional science of religions made valuable progress in their objectification of religion. Furthermore, we cannot discuss the differences between individual Liberal-Protestant scholars. On this subject, see Strenski 2002, p. 161sq. Liberal Protestantism was often considered as ‘a form of free thought touched with Christianity’, see Strenski 2003, p. 82. On French nineteenth-century free thought, see Priest 2015, pp. 195–6 (with bibliography). Cabanel 1994, p. 60. To avoid an anachronistic evaluation, it should be noted that this Christian-centred outlook was also characteristic of many contemporary scholars who no longer considered themselves Christian.

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among Liberal-Protestant scholars. In stark contrast to their negative reaction, Smith’s focus on ritual and community greatly appealed to a group of scholars who were about to break the Protestant hegemony: the school of Émile Durkheim.36 While Durkheim himself worked at the Sorbonne (from 1902), two of his pupils – his nephew Marcel Mauss and Mauss’s close collaborator Henri Hubert – managed to secure a position at the EPHE in the early 1900s (by strategically disguising their methodological profile).37 Once appointed, they fiercely attacked the methods of their Liberal-Protestant colleagues. The Durkheimians had serious problems with the Protestants’ exclusive focus on inner spirituality, and their neglect of the inherently social character of religion. For Durkheim, Mauss, and Hubert, religion was an abstraction of social and cultural realities in society; the divine was a mirror and consolidator of social relations. Instead of privileging myth, the Durkheim school took a special interest in cult. The Année sociologique team furthermore proposed a functionalist approach, and believed that meta-historical theory was essential for a truly universal explanation of how religion works. Naturally, the Durkheimians’ own methodology of religion also conveyed specific worldviews. A first difference with the Liberal Protestants was that many Durkheimians were agnostics or atheists, although Durkheim and Mauss – who had been born into Jewish families – both had a complex relationship to Judaism.38 Secondly, the socio-political orientation of the school was different. While many Liberal-Protestant scholars supported the (bourgeois) ‘radical republicans’, many Durkheimians sympathised with socialism.39 The famous anthropologist and sociologist Marcel Mauss (to whom we will return since he was Loisy’s main rival for the chair at the CF) was a militant socialist. As a student, he had been a member of several Marxist student movements (such as the Parti Ouvrier Socialiste Révolutionnaire): ‘He was one

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On the clash between the Durkheimians and the Liberal Protestants of the EPHE, Cabanel 1994, pp. 61–7; Strenski 2002 and 2003, p. 152 sq. It should be added that the Durkheimians not only reacted against Liberal-Protestant historicism, but also against historical materialism, see Durkheim’s letter to Mauss (June 1897), see Besnard and Fournier 1998, p. 71: ‘[F]rom the Année sociologique will emerge a theory, which, in perfect contrast to historical materialism which is so coarse and simplistic in spite of its objectivist tendency, will consider religion, and no longer the economy, as the matrix of social facts’. Literature on Durkheim’s sociology of religion is vast; for good introductions, see Alexander and Smith 2005 (with contributions by such experts as Robert Bellah and Marcel Fournier). Strenski 2003, pp. 152–5. Strenski 2003, p. 10. Again, we cannot enter into the details of the wide differences between the members of the school. Durkheim’s relation to socialism was complex. See Fournier 2005, pp. 48–51.

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of the militant students who wished to deal “a fatal blow to the intellectual dictatorship of the bourgeoisie”’.40 To conclude this brief account, it is important to observe that the opposition between the sociological-anthropological approach of the Durkheimians and Liberal-Protestant historicism mirrored great shifts in early twentiethcentury French politics and society. Modern scholarship on the early Third Republic has shown that the enormous efforts of the ruling bourgeois elites to reduce clerical power were disproportionate to the weak measures taken to change the asymmetrical power relations between social classes.41 To be sure, primary education was now free and compulsory, and girls’ education was initiated, but secondary and higher education remained very difficult, if not impossible, for lower social-class groups to access.42 Social and political power mostly remained in the hands of the upper bourgeoisie. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the social question came to the forefront of the political agenda.43 Opposition against the governing moderate republicans came from both the radical republicans and the different socialist parties,44 and was reinforced by the traumatising events during the Dreyfus Affair. In 1899, the strongly anti-clerical republican left united in opposition against the governing moderate republicans. The so-called Bloc des Gauches comprised the radical republicans, under the lead of Émile Combes, the socialist parties, of whom Jean Jaurès was the leading figure, and several other left-wing parties.45 In 1902, the Bloc won the elections, and started its drastic anti-clerical politics under Prime Minister Combes, which culminated in the 1905 Law on the Separation of the Churches and State.46 In 1904, however, the socialists withdrew from the Bloc and the different French socialist parties united in the Parti socialiste unifié, of which Mauss was a militant member.47 In 1905, the Combes government fell. Between 1906 and 1909, the time of our case study, the radical republican cabinet of Georges Clemenceau was in charge. It was a time of intense social

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Fournier 2006, p. 34. Mayeur and Rebérioux 1987, p. 153. Mayeur and Rebérioux 1987, p. 88. On the bourgeois backgrounds of the republican politicians between 1880 and 1914, see Paul 1985, p. 26. For the Marxist opposition against the ‘bourgeois Republic’, see Stuart 1992, p. 223 sq. For a concise introduction to the very complex socialist landscape in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century France, see Mayeur and Rebérioux 1987, pp. 137–46; Conklin, Fishman, and Zaretsky 2015, pp. 101–5. For more information, see Mayeur and Rebérioux 1987, pp. 214–20. Mayeur and Rebérioux 1987, pp. 227–40. Mayeur and Rebérioux 1987, p. 260.

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unrest with multiple strikes of the working classes and uprisings by agrarian militants, which Clemenceau violently suppressed.48 Class conflict was violently resurgent and broke apart the once united socialists and radicals. It is in light of these social and political tensions that we need to analyse the elections for the newly vacant chair of history of religions at the CF in 1908. Given the enormous importance of religion and education in the turbulent republican politics of that time, the importance of this chair – a much-desired weapon in the struggle for cultural hegemony in society – can hardly be overestimated. The Separation Law of 1905 had renewed the public debates about the necessity of religious instruction in the école laïque. The new holder of the chair at the prestigious CF would have a privileged voice in these debates. A lot was at stake in 1908.

2

A Short Digression: Catholic Modernist Scholarship on Religion and Gramsci

After the death of its first holder, Albert Réville, the chair of history of religions at the CF remained in the hands of the Liberal Protestants, as his son Jean Réville took over. But one year after his appointment, Jean Réville’s untimely death, on 6 May 1908, left the controversial chair vacant once again. Just two months earlier, on 8 March, the Church had promulgated the vitandus excommunication of Alfred Loisy, a grave condemnation which not only banned him from the Church, but also decreed that Catholics were to avoid any contact with him. Initiated in biblical exegesis and history of religions by Renan, Loisy’s critical, comparative research on ancient Judaism and Early Christianity radically conflicted with the teachings of the Catholic Church.49 He urged the Church to modernise Catholicism, so that Catholic scholars could study religion with the same intellectual autonomy as their Liberal-Protestant and non-religious colleagues. In 1893, Loisy was dismissed from the Institut Catholique in Paris, where he had held the chair in biblical studies. In the first decade of the twentieth century, under anti-Modernist pope Pius X, more drastic measures were taken against Loisy and like-minded priests.50 Several were excommunicated,

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Baal 1981, p. 441. The bibliography on Alfred Loisy’s Modernist work is extensive. For excellent studies, see Hill 2002; Talar 1999; the contributions to Laplanche, Biagioli, and Langlois 2007 and Amsler 2013 (among many others). These measures started under Leo XIII, but the campaign significantly intensified under anti-Modernist pope Pius X. See Hill 2002, pp. 192–7; Jodock 2000, pp. 1–8.

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a large number of their writings were put on the Index, and, starting from 1910, the clergy was forced to take the anti-Modernist oath, which condemned any form of critical approach to the Bible and reaffirmed all Catholic dogmas.51 Moreover, a secret network of spies was installed under the name of the ‘Sodalitium Pianum’ or ‘Sapinière’ in 1909, headed by the intransigent priest Umberto Benigni, who ‘initiated an ecclesiastical reign of terror that served integralism in politics and hunted Modernists under every tree’.52 In our previous account of the French history of religious studies, no Catholic scholars were mentioned. Understandably, their official level of participation in a discipline which had been institutionalised as part of the republican laicisation politics, was low. In the last few decades, the progressive disclosure of private correspondence between scholars of religion has shown that the common conception of Modernism as a strictly inner Catholic movement should actually be revised. Several French Modernist scholars set up scientific collaborations with their colleagues in secular religious studies, and thus helped to advance the discipline.53 Their fear of anti-Modernist reprisals, however, compelled them to work behind the scenes, publishing their work anonymously or under pseudonyms. To come now to Gramsci’s notes on Modernism, it is important to mention the parallel between the Italian and the French Modernist priests with regard to their contribution to the scientific history of religions.54 Several Italian Modernists, like the historian of Christianity Ernesto Buonaiuti and his close friend, the historian of Roman religion Nicola Turchi, thoroughly advanced the underdeveloped historical-critical study of religions in Italy in the late nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth.55 In the 1910s, when the secular study of religion began to flourish in Italy, they collaborated with pioneering historians of religions like Raffaele

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On the anti-Modernist oath, see Talar 2010. Portier 2013, p. 42. On the ‘Sapinière’, see Poulat 1969. Gramsci included a brief comment on the Sodalitium in notebook 5 (revised in notebook 20), see Gramsci 2011, II, p. 267. See, for instance, the collaborations that came into being for the publication of the Revue d’ histoire et de littérature religieuses, anonymously directed by Loisy and the Latinist Paul Lejay (Institut Catholique): Lannoy 2015. See also the scientific relations between the Belgian secular scholar Franz Cumont and Modernist priests Louis Duchesne, Paul Lejay and many others, see Bonnet 2007. The Italian context for the study of religion was very different from the French context. In Italy, history of religions was only institutionalised in the 1910s. See Spineto 1999, pp. 606– 7; Filoramo 2015. On Italian Modernism, see Botti and Cerrato 2000; Scoppola 1961 (among many others). See below for Buonaiuti.

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Pettazzoni.56 But in spite of these efforts, the Modernist cause could, in general, count on little sympathy in the Italian secular world. As Natale Spineto explained: The socialists, as well as Benedetto Croce and Giovanni Gentile regarded the Modernist question as a problem within the Church, in which one should not get involved. They did not accept a movement founded on divine transcendence and they argued that the Modernists basically had two options: to submit to the [ecclesiastical] authority or to abandon the Church.57 The fact that several Modernist priests wanted to remain part of the Church, in spite of the fact that their scientific conclusions conflicted so radically with almost all Catholic doctrines, and even when they were sanctioned for the reforms they proposed, met with little comprehension from scholars who were not Catholic. Gramsci wrote many notes on Catholic Modernism, classified under the heading ‘Catholic integralists, Jesuits, modernists’.58 That he attached great importance to the subject becomes especially clear from the following comment he made to himself: It is necessary to collect all the material possible and to compile the essential bibliography concerning this topic, Catholic integralists, Jesuits, modernists: they are the three main divisions of Catholicism in politics, they are the forces contending for hegemony in the Roman Church.59 In Notebook 14 (§52) Gramsci distinguishes between ‘scientific-religious modernism’, which aims for an intellectual reform of the Church, and ‘politicalsocial’ modernism, which aims for a more socialist and democratic form of Catholic politics.60 Except for this note and a brief remark about Loisy’s theology in Notebook 11 (§44), Gramsci never drew attention to ‘scientific-religious modernism’. As the quote suggests, he mostly focused on the general political position of Modernism within the Church and its relation to other intra-

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On these collaborations, see Spineto 1999, pp. 604–5; Lannoy 2014. Spineto 1999, p. 606. Notebook 20, which included revisions of these notes, was fully dedicated to the subject ‘Catholic Action – Catholic integralists – Jesuits – Modernists’. Gramsci 2011, II, p. 269. Gramsci 2014, Notebook 14, § 52.

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Catholic forces. Ultimately, he wanted to understand how these internal struggles affected the Church’s external position towards socialism and liberalism. His notes paint a very generalising and homogeneous picture of Modernism. Roland Boer has rightly noted that this conception of Modernism was probably based on the intentionally systematising definition the Church itself had provided of Modernism in anti-Modernist documents such as the encyclical Pascendi dominici gregis (1907).61 But contrary to the picture painted by the Church, the Modernists were never more than a very loosely interconnected group of liberals who wanted to introduce a more progressive mindset in Catholicism. They differed widely in scientific opinions, religious attitudes, and areas of focus. Gramsci’s evaluation of ‘political-social modernism’ has been discussed at length elsewhere.62 The question we want to pursue somewhat further is why he never discussed Modernist scholarship of religion. Boer has convincingly argued that Gramsci’s Marxist background and communist project easily explain his predominant interest in ‘political’ modernism.63 While this is no doubt the main reason for his silence, it is still interesting to observe that Gramsci frequently noted scientific progress in the field of history of religions. Driven by his desire to gain a deep understanding of the role of Catholicism in Italian society, he took a particular interest in the history of Christianity, to which the Modernists had made substantial contributions.64 In several of his Quaderni, he studied the historical role of Christianity in Western civilisation, with specific attention to primitive Christianity and the Reformation, which were, not unsurprisingly, also the main areas of research of the Modernist historians. In spite of their different approaches, interests, and analyses,65 there is a noteworthy parallel between Gramsci and the Modernists, in that they all understood the hegemonic power of historiography of religion: they studied the past in order to give their (completely divergent) reform programmes an historical legitimisation. When Gramsci referred to contemporary scholarship in history of religions, he usually discussed the work of secular Italian scholars like Raffaele Pettazzoni, Adolfo Omodeo, and Luigi Salvatorelli who all regularly read the pub61

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Boer 2007, p. 235. On the term and the characterisation of ‘Modernism’ as an organised movement with a central doctrine in the anti-Modernist encyclical Pascendi dominici gregis (1907), see Portier 2013, pp. 16–19. Boer 2007, p. 235 sq. Boer 2007, p. 237. For a comprehensive reconstruction of Gramsci’s notes on the history of Christianity, which were scattered throughout the Notebooks, see Portelli 1974, pp. 55–121. For Gramsci’s revolutionary account of primitive Christianity, see Portelli 1974, pp. 55–63.

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lications of Modernist scholars.66 Omodeo (who wrote a biography of Loisy67) and Salvatorelli also wrote reviews of the first historiographical studies of Modernism which started to appear in the early 1930s, and of Loisy’s autobiographical Mémoires (1930–31). Several of these reviews reached Gramsci in prison, and they probably were the most important foundation for his reflections on Modernism.68 Aside from Gramsci’s political research interest, a second reason for his silence on scientific-religious Modernism may very well be the fact that he probably started to take a real interest in Modernism at a time when it had already been suppressed by the Church. The most innovative and critical Modernist publications on the history of religions had been published in the first decade of the twentieth century.69 After the severe measures taken by Pius X between 1907 and 1910, Modernism died a quick death: some scholars left the Church, while others remained priests but stopped publishing their critical research. Notable exceptions were Ernesto Buonaiuti and the French priest and historian of Catholic dogma Joseph Turmel. Both continued to publish critical articles on Early Christianity until their excommunication in 1926 (Buonaiuti) and 1930 (Turmel).70 Not unsurprisingly, both scholars caught Gramsci’s attention. In Notebook 5 (§1) he made a comment on Buonaiuti which perhaps further explains his silence on Modernist scholarship.71 In this note Gramsci briefly discusses the hostile relationship between Buonaiuti and Benigni, the head of the anti-Modernist spy network. By observing that Buonaiuti had still contributed to a journal edited by Benigni (‘Buon66

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A notable example is his long comment on Raffaele Pettazzoni’s La mitologia giapponese, in Notebook 5, see Gramsci 2011, II, pp. 305–8. In this note, Gramsci follows the lead of Italy’s pioneering historian of religions, and compares Shintoism, Buddhism, and Christianity. For biographical and bibliographical introductions to Salvatorelli, Omodeo, Pettazzoni, see Filoramo 2015; Mazza and Spineto 2014. Initially, Omodeo refuted Modernism as ‘a compromise not worth having’, but gradually his appreciation of their historico-religious research grew. See Momigliano 1987, p. 86. For Loisy’s biography, see Omodeo 1936. See, for example, Gramsci’s note on Salvatorelli’s review of Félix Sartiaux’s study Joseph Turmel, prêtre historien des dogmes (1931) and of Turmel’s Histoire des dogmes (1931), in Gramsci 2014, Notebook 14, § 52. As an example, we refer to Loisy’s L’ Évangile et l’ Église, which was published in 1902. Buonaiuti was excommunicated several times, but managed to remain in the Church until his vitandus excommunication in 1926. On Buonaiuti, see Guerri 2001 and Lannoy 2014 (with more bibliography). Turmel lost his faith in 1886, but remained in the priesthood in order to destroy Catholic dogma from within. He used a wide array of pseudonyms to publish his critical scholarship on Christianity. See Talar 2012 (also with more references). I only discuss Gramsci’s comment on Buonaiuti; for his comments on Turmel, see Boer 2007, p. 236. Gramsci 2011, II, p. 268 (= Notebook 5, § 1).

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aiuti, however contributed to Benigni’s Miscellanea in 1904’), Gramsci subtly denounced the hypocrisy of Buonaiuti, who had repeatedly submitted to the sanctions of the Church before his final excommunication.72 In other notes on the Modernists, too, Gramsci repeatedly insisted on the Modernists’ conniving strategies. On the one hand, almost all of the Modernist scholars initially went through a phase (of varying length) in which they genuinely believed it would be possible to reform Catholicism, and sought compromises. On the other hand, as Gramsci suggested, Buonaiuti (as well as other exponents of Modernism) was indeed a strategic mastermind, who did not shy away from skilful plots to avert the anti-Modernist measures taken against him.73 This surely also explains why the ‘political’ manoeuvres of the Modernists diverted Gramsci’s attention from the real impact of their science of religion inside and outside of the Church. Similar perceptions of the Modernist scholars as ‘hypocrites’ in anti-clerical French milieus had made it very difficult for Loisy to secure the vacant chair in 1909.

3

Case Study: Loisy’s Appointment to the CF74

3.1 Loisy’s Rivals The CF has long been a prestigious research institution, known for its scientific independence and the innovative research of its chair holders.75 There are no permanent chairs for specific subjects. The daily administration of the CF is taken care of by the Administrateur, but the main power over the institution resides with the assembly of professors. They decide on the subjects of the vacant chairs and, normally, also on their holders, who are formally appointed by the Minister of Education. The assembly proposes two candidates to the Minister, the most apt candidate being presented ‘en première ligne’, the second ‘en seconde ligne’. Usually, the Minister follows the advice of the assembly, but there have been notable exceptions in the history of the CF.76 For scholars who applied for a vacant chair it was imperative to gain the 72 73 74

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Gramsci 2011, II, p. 269 (= Notebook 5, § 1). See Lannoy 2014, for Buonaiuti’s scheme with Pietro Gasparri (Secretary of State under Benedict XV) to avoid taking the anti-Modernist Oath. Loisy’s appointment has briefly been discussed by Fournier 2002, pp. 153–5, Leroy 2010, and Benthien 2015, pp. 210–13. For a more elaborate study of Loisy’s appointment (with extensive analyses of all candidates, the election campaign, and procedures), see Lannoy 2020. On the history of the CF and its election procedures, see Benthien 2015, pp. 193–201. See, e.g., the affair around Père Scheil and Charles Fossey for the chair of Assyriology in

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internal support of the professors of the CF, and to have sufficient political support. Loisy’s most important rivals for the chair were Marcel Mauss (EPHE), Egyptologist George Foucart (son of CF professor Paul Foucart), Old Testament scholar Maurice Vernes (EPHE), and archaeologist and historian of Mediterranean religions Jules Toutain (EPHE).77 Loisy’s election was anything but an easy victory. It was only after five voting rounds that he obtained the necessary majority. During his intense campaign, Loisy had grown a solid fan base, but he never became the favourite for the position. His Catholic past simply raised too much controversy and suspicion, even among those who had sympathy for what he had suffered at the hands of the Church. In 1879, the then Administrator had publicly opposed the creation of the history of religions chair for fear it would jeopardise the scientific independence of the CF.78 Aside from the deep-seated resistance from conservative Catholic milieus and from several anticlerical chair holders, it was this concern which explains why several professors who did not belong to any of the aforementioned groups were wary of the candidacy of a scholar who most certainly had the public image of an ‘homme de combat’.79 The vote itself was secret, but from Loisy’s correspondence we can infer that his candidacy found most support among progressive Catholics and liberal anticlerical scholars.80 At first sight, the most important arguments pro Loisy seemed to have been his solid scientific reputation and his battle against the Church. While progressive Catholics sympathised with Modernism, several supporters of Combes’s anticlerical politics saw in Loisy the incarnation of the republican value of ‘Freedom of Thought’. But these two factors were not the only, and most likely not the most

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1905, as noted in Benthien 2015, pp. 206–8, and Lannoy 2020. Scheil was proposed ‘en première ligne’, but because of the anti-clerical climate of that time, the then Minister of Education appointed the second candidate Fossey. There were other procedures for chairs which were created by the State and assigned to a scholar by decree, and for chairs funded by a private individual, who would choose the holder him/herself. An example of the first case is Albert Réville’s appointment (by Ferry) in 1880. An example of the second is the chair the Marquise Arconati Visconti (see below) endowed for Gabriel Monod. For more extensive introductions about the candidates, see Benthien 2015, p. 210; Loisy 1931, p. 37 sq.; Lannoy 2020. The Administrator was Édouard de Laboulaye (one of the driving forces behind the Statue of Liberty). For his objections, see Poulat 1987, pp. 66–7. See the letter of Henri Bergson to Alfred Loisy of 7 February 1909, BnF NAF 15646, f° 161, where Bergson promises Loisy to convince his ‘confrères’ that Loisy’s candidacy was not ‘une candidature de combat’ (his emphasis). See especially Loisy’s correspondence with the Latinist Louis Havet, who included numerous lists of prospective voters in his letters to Loisy. See, e.g., Havet to Loisy, 23 November 1908, BnF NAF 15654, f° 292.

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decisive reasons for his election. To identify the other, much better concealed reasons, we first need to introduce Loisy’s main rival. From the very moment the chair became vacant, Marcel Mauss81 was widely acknowledged as the favourite, so much so that his support team was thoroughly shocked that in the end he did not even make it as the candidate ‘en seconde ligne’.82 In the previous elections for the chair of history of religions Mauss had been second in line after Jean Réville, and in 1908 he seemed to have a very decent shot at winning. He had the support of the Jewish and philo-Semitic professors of the CF, and of those who favoured his sociological methodology. Furthermore, there were professors who sympathised with Mauss’s political ideas, and finally we should also mention the role of personal friendships, either with Mauss, or with colleagues of the CF who were in favour of Mauss. The final point that explained the high hopes of the ‘Mauss team’, draws our attention to the enormous influence of contingent voting strategies on the final outcome of the elections. Most Protestants supported the LiberalProtestant Vernes, but they were a minority at the CF. But more importantly, the not insignificant amount of reactionary Catholic votes were distributed between two candidates, George Foucart and Jules Toutain,83 which made it unlikely that one of them would make it to the second round of voting. The calculated guess of Mauss’s supporters was that in the second round Mauss would become the ‘church’s candidate against an excommunicant’.84 The victory of Mauss seemed assured. What went wrong? 3.2 The Marquise Arconati Visconti And Her Jeudistes From Loisy’s autobiography and correspondence, we learn that he did not take the initiative to apply for the vacant position.85 Shortly after Réville’s death, he was approached by two professors of the CF who invited him to apply: the Latinist Louis Havet and the historian of Medieval France Joseph Bédier. Two other professors who quickly became involved in Loisy’s campaign were French literature professor Abel Lefranc and hispanist Alfred Morel-Fatio. Bédier, Lefranc, and Morel-Fatio lead us to the central figure behind Loisy’s appointment. All three scholars were Jeudistes, members of the Parisian salon held by the Mar-

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On Mauss, see Fournier 2006; Dianteill 2013 (among many others). Fournier 2006, p. 154. Jules Toutain became second in line, mainly because of the unsuccessful voting strategies of Mauss’s supporters, see Benthien 2015, p. 212. Interestingly, neither of these two candidates was politically conservative or Catholic. The words are Salomon Reinach’s, quoted in Fournier 2006, p. 153. Loisy 1931, p. 33. Confirmed by the letter of Louis Havet to Loisy, BnF NAF 15654, f° 277–8, and the letter of Arconati Visconti to Loisy, BnF NAF 15646, f° 38.

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quise Arconati Visconti, a very powerful personality in the French intellectual life of that time. Right after his decision to enter the race (in June 1908), she started to write to Loisy and quickly asserted herself as his campaign leader.86 Arconati and her elitist network are the key to understanding Loisy’s appointment. Marie-Louise Arconati-Visconti (1840–1923) was the daughter of the French journalist Alphonse Peyrat, who was one of the founding fathers of the Third Republic and a close friend of Gambetta.87 She grew up relatively poor, but married the wealthy Italian Marquis Gianmartino Arconati-Visconti, who died two years into their marriage and left her with an enormous fortune. Imbued with the radical republicanism of her father and his political friends, the Marquise was fiercely anti-clerical, liberal, and patriotic. She took great interest in French and international politics, and was a close friend of eminent republican politicians, such as Gambetta, Combes, Joseph Reinach, and Henri Brisson, who were regulars at her salon. The Marquise not only had strong ideals; she also had a strong and eccentric personality. Her letters are full of fiery statements on her political and personal enemies (and she had a lot of them), with ample use of exclamation marks and even outright swearing.88 We also know that she allowed no other women to her salon.89

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The active correspondence between Arconati and Loisy is extensive (more than 1,000 letters between 1908 and 1923). Arconati’s letters to Loisy are preserved in the BnF, NAF 15646–8, most of them are undated. Loisy’s letters to Arconati are preserved in the Victor Cousin library of the Sorbonne: MSVC 282–4. This account of Arconati is based on Baal 1981 and 1994; Cumont 1978; Laforêt 1939 and personal research of her correspondence with Loisy and Franz Cumont. Cumont’s Souvenirs (Cumont 1978) of the Marquise (published posthumously) are an important source of information because he was a close friend of Arconati, but did not avoid more delicate issues (like the rumour that Arconati had been the mistress of Gambetta, which he denied, see p. 14). Arconati’s letters to Cumont are kept in the archives of the Gaasbeek Castle, which Arconati inherited from her husband and gifted to the Belgian state in 1921. They have not been catalogued and are almost all undated. When referring to letters from this corpus, we will use the indication ‘Gaasbeek’. Cumont’s letters to Arconati are preserved at the Victor Cousin Library, nº 267–70. The correspondence amounts to almost 1,000 letters (1905–23). Large parts of this correspondence were scanned and transcribed by a team coordinated by Jan Nelis at Ghent University (in 2015, as part of the FWO-project 3G019409). Special thanks go to this team and to the helpful staff of Gaasbeek and the Victor Cousin archives. Numerous curses were directed against Jean Jaurès (I will come back to their turbulent friendship). She further blurred traditional gender lines by occasionally dressing up as a Renaissance page. On her gender transgressions, see Harris 2009, pp. 241–4.

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As a woman, Arconati was cut off from active participation in French politics, but she found multiple ways to compensate for her lack of direct political power and to propagate her values and ideals in French society. She first of all accomplished this by strategically financing a whole series of leading research and artistic institutions, such as the Sorbonne, the CF, the EPHE or the Louvre, which bought her an enormous amount of institutional power.90 It is important to point out how well she understood the power of ‘Science’ (written by her with capital letter), and more specifically of history. While she funded a wide array of good causes (see below), political campaigns, and artistic projects, her pet project was the promotion of historical research, notably of the liberal republican kind. Franz Cumont, a famous Belgian historian of religions and close friend of Arconati, explained in his Souvenirs that she carefully selected scientific projects that were in line with her own ideology.91 In light of her intervention in the elections at the CF, it is particularly important to underline her close affinity with the Liberal-Protestant historicist tradition of the historian Gabriel Monod, who also was a lifelong friend of hers. Although Arconati herself was not religious, and at times even anti-religious, we will see that she found a common ground with Liberal-Protestant bourgeois intellectuals like Monod, in that they shared an individualistic mindset and radical republican socio-political values. Arconati’s influence was further extended through the powerful network she meticulously constructed as a salonnière. She held two salons for ‘esprits d’élite’:92 one on Tuesdays for her acquaintances of the artistic and literary world (artists, writers, curators, etc.), another on Thursdays for a more heterogeneous circle of politicians, scholars, and high-ranking officials. In the two decades her salons took place (from the late 1890s until WWI), the composition of the Jeudistes constantly changed. Aside from the politicians Combes, Reinach, and Brisson, we should especially mention the temporary attendance of Jean Jaurès, to whom I will return.93 The academic world was represented by the aforementioned professors of the CF, and occasionally by two Belgian 90

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To give only a few examples: she funded libraries and museum collections, created chairs at universities, financially supported scientific journals (such as Monod’s Revue historique and later Loisy’s Revue d’histoire et de littérature religieuses). For an overview of the causes Arconati funded for the University of Paris, see Charmasson 2014. Cumont 1978, p. 10. The term is Cumont’s, see Cumont 1978, p. 6. Cf. below, on Cumont’s own elitism. Others were Joseph Magnin, Antonin Dubost, Henri Roujon, and the Belgian liberals Émile de Mot and Paul Hymans. For the complete list (with introductions) of the attending politicians and scholars, see Cumont 1978, pp. 23–32, which was completed by Baal 1981, pp. 436–7.

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scholars: historian of religions Franz Cumont and medieval historian Henri Pirenne. Two other regulars were the administrator of the Comédie-Française Jules Clarétie and the director of Fine Arts (and former secretary of Jules Ferry) Henri Roujon. Much more research is needed on this network, but it is clear that its high-profile members covered an extensive range of influence in several segments of French society.94 Although there were substantial differences between the Jeudistes (professional occupations, specific political ideas, etc.), they shared more than just a few basic traits. They were all Dreyfusards (Alfred Dreyfus was a friend of Arconati and occasionally attended the salon95) and strictly anti-clerical. Most of them were radical republicans who had supported the politics of Combes, and the majority of the network was non-religious. Furthermore, the Jeudistes had similar socio-economic backgrounds, belonging to the middle and upper bourgeoisie. Their common social spectrum was a determinant factor for the general political views of this network: most of the Jeudistes were vehemently anti-socialist at the time of the elections at the CF.96 It would, however, be a grave mistake to impute their anti-socialism exclusively to their class background. Several of these bourgeois radicals had a very complex set of social attitudes. The Marquise herself is a perfect example of this complexity.97 On the one hand, Arconati was proud of her modest upbringing.98 But on the other, she was enormously attached to the elitist status her late husband’s name and fortune had granted her.99 The ambiguity of her views is articulated further by her position towards less privileged social classes. She used large parts of her fortune to improve the lives of the working classes. She supported Joseph Reinach’s initiatives to stop the sharp rise of alcoholism among factory workers, she funded scholarships for secondary education (which were to be equally divided between boys and girls100), and she set up relief funds to 94 95 96 97 98 99

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The most extensive studies about the salon are Baal 1981 and 1994, which focus on its political ideas. For Arconati’s salon during the Dreyfus Affair, see Harris 2009. On Arconati and the Dreyfus Affair, see Cumont 1978, pp. 20–2; Harris 2009. For the correspondence between Arconati and Dreyfus, see Oriol 2017. Baal 1994, pp. 102–3. For analyses of the socio-political views of other Jeudistes, see Baal 1994, p. 438sq. Cumont 1978, p. 10. Her correspondence with Cumont demonstrates that she felt superior even to this scholar whose family belonged to the Belgian haute bourgeoisie. In an undated letter (Gaasbeek) she addressed Cumont as ‘mon cher ami’ (‘my dear friend’), explaining that she no longer wanted to use the more formal title of ‘Monsieur’. She invited Cumont to return the favour by henceforth addressing her as … ‘ma chère Marquise’ (‘my dear Marquise’). See the article preserved in the file with Arconati’s letters to Loisy, BnF NAF 15646, f° 102 (newspaper article, source unknown).

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support the families of injured firemen and policemen.101 For Arconati, as for most of her Jeudistes, social justice for the suffering working classes was an important republican value,102 but, for these bourgeois elites, there were clear limitations to the dimensions this necessary social reform should adopt, and to the urgency with which it should be realised. This becomes especially clear from Gérard Baal’s articles on the position of Jean Jaurès in Arconati’s salon, and from my own study of the Arconati-Cumont correspondence. Baal demonstrated that the friendship between Jaurès, Arconati and her Jeudistes especially flourished between 1902 and 1904. At the time of the Bloc, socialists and radical republicans shared the idea that, once the clerical question was definitively settled, it would be time to start thorough socio-economic reforms. But in the end, these reforms failed to happen, and in the years after the Bloc, differing views on national crises (e.g. the strikes organised by French revolutionary syndicalism) and international politics (the Moroccan Crisis and the upcoming War with Germany) drew the socialists and the radicals further apart. As Baal has conclusively shown, the attachment of the radical republican bourgeoisie to the existing social order was essential to understand why Jaurès and the Jeudistes parted ways, but it was not the only reason.103 Equally important in understanding the growing anti-socialism of the Jeudistes after 1904 were their patriotism and their strong belief in an authoritative state which used force in times of national and international conflicts when necessary.104 Arconati hated Jaurès’s international pacifism (which was the necessary condition for national social reform) and strongly condemned his alliance with the revolutionary left, which would, in her view, plunge France into anarchy and chaos. A good illustration of these differing views (and of Arconati’s peculiar style) can be found in a letter from Arconati to Cumont, which was probably written in March 1911, when Jaurès re-joined the salon after having been refused entrance in 1910 because of his support for the strike by French rail workers: Yesterday, Thursday, official comeback of Jaurès, enormously happy to see this circle of professors again – He didn’t dare – he is sitting opposite me – to get started, especially because a little later, I said to him in that soft tone of mine, the one you know so well: with regard to class struggle, the rise of the proletariat, the socialisation of capital, the advent of the col101 102 103 104

See Laforêt 1939, p. 51; Cumont 1978, p. 34. For a good illustration, see Baal 1981, p. 439, and Baal 1994, p. 104 for the similar opinions of Monod, J. Reinach, and Bédier. Baal 1981, p. 441. On nationalism as bourgeois hegemony in fin-de-siècle France, see Stuart 2006, pp. 29–48.

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lectivist order in Humanity … I don’t give one single damn: order in the streets, a strong national defence, these are the two vital necessities, the two main courses of the people’s food, and all the rest is nothing more than bread crumbs [literally ‘confiture’: jelly] (easy comparison, when one is eating).105 3.3 Loisy as Arconati’s ‘Anti-Mauss’ From Arconati’s correspondence with Loisy, it is abundantly clear that she was one of those anti-clerical republicans who liked the symbolic message his appointment would send out to the Church. Loisy’s struggle to separate science from religion and Combes’s recent separation of Church and State were in effect two sides of the same coin: The great controversies which will arise from your two last books, will likely allow to definitively accomplish a separation which is just as important, just as comprehensive as the one between the French Republic and the Roman Church: the one between the Church and Science.106 But when one takes a closer look at her correspondence, it becomes clear that her intervention in the elections was also an attempt to prevent the appointment of Mauss. It is absolutely striking how much more often Arconati insists on the complete unsuitability of Mauss than on the symbolic importance of Loisy’s appointment. Completely oblivious to her own ideological projections on ‘Science’, she pointed out in her letter to Loisy of 30 June 1908: Mauss is very busy but he doesn’t have what it takes. He is far more occupied with the socialist party [socialisme unifié] than with Science. They say he’s intelligent but he’s much more of a sociologist than a historian, and the history of religions should be studied from a historical point of view. I have no confidence whatsoever in the sociologists. They usually use solemn and pseudo-scientific formulas for useless clichés.107 Naturally, Arconati never explicitly admitted that her antipathy towards Mauss was motivated by her own anti-socialism, but she happily underlined the link between Mauss’s socialism and sociology, and she liked to insist on the political 105 106 107

Arconati to Cumont, undated (1911; Gaasbeek). Baal 1981, p. 444sq. showed that these ideas were shared by several Jeudistes (Bédier, Roujon, and others). Arconati to Loisy, 8 July 1908, BnF NAF 15646, f° 44. Arconati to Loisy, 30 June 1908, BnF NAF 15646, f° 40.

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motivations of those who were in favour of Mauss.108 We also know from her correspondence with other Jeudistes that several of them considered Mauss first and foremost as ‘le candidat d’un petit groupe d’ anarchistes’ (‘the candidate of a small group of anarchists’) and not as the serious scientific candidate he really was.109 Arconati herself frequently lapsed into ad hominem arguments against Mauss (especially blaming him for being talkative and lazy), and she formulated two ‘scientific’ objections: 1) Mauss had barely published anything; and 2) sociology of religion was politics rather than ‘Science’. For Arconati, ‘Science’ was ‘History’. Without entering here into a comparative study of Loisy’s and Mauss’s bibliography, it may be useful to point out that in 1908 Loisy’s list of publications was indeed larger than that of Mauss, but together with Henri Hubert, Mauss had already published his Essai sur la nature et la function du sacrifice (1899). This work was at that time (and indeed remains) vastly more influential for the comparative study of religions than Loisy’s publications of that time (and everything he would publish later).110 It is highly unlikely that Arconati’s ‘scientific’ objections were based on personal knowledge of Mauss’s work. We know from Cumont’s Souvenirs that she took very little interest in religious studies.111 In reality, her evaluation echoes the condescension several scholars of her salon expressed towards Durkheimian sociology. As a case in point we may refer to the Belgian scholar Franz Cumont, a very well-respected expert in Greco-Roman and Eastern religions, archaeology, and ancient astrology who would later also become a close friend of Loisy.112 Intense historiographical research on Cumont has shown that he applied several methods in his scholarship of religion,113 but sociology of

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See, for example, Arconati to Loisy, 13 July 1908, BnF NAF 15646, f° 55: ‘During my last salon, Bédier said to Jaurès, who – as a socialist – favours Mauss: “Mauss has written only two articles, and not a book, and he spends the whole afternoon chatting at the Library of the Sorbonne” ’. Cf. the letter of Morel Fatio to Arconati, undated, BnF NAF 15646, f° 82. With this point about the lesser influence of Loisy’s work, we do not wish to diminish its considerable scientific value. For a scientific evaluation of Loisy’s contribution to the history of religions at the CF, see Praet and Lannoy 2017. Cumont 1978, p. 7. Another highly influential scholar for Arconati was Monod, see Lannoy 2018. For a concise biography of Cumont, see Bonnet 1997, Praet 2012. The rich correspondence between Cumont and Loisy is preserved at the BnF, NAF 15651 (letters of Cumont) and NAF 15644 (letters of Loisy). Nine letters of Loisy are kept in the Cumont archives in the Academia Belgica (Rome). The edition and accompanying study have recently been published in two volumes: Lannoy, Bonnet, and Praet 2019. See, for instance, Praet 2013, especially pp. 132–4, for Cumont’s eclectic methodology for the study of ritual.

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religion never found a place in his eclectic methodology. The later correspondence between Cumont and Loisy (1909–40) contains several passages which reveal especially Cumont’s contempt towards sociology of religion.114 When Cumont resigned from his position at the University of Ghent during the socalled ‘Affaire Cumont’ (1910–11),115 Loisy suggested the possibility of applying for a chair at the CF, perhaps eventually even having his own chair. In his letter of 13 July 1911, Cumont answered: My dear friend, Thank you for your good wishes, but beware not to abandon your chair, and, especially: don’t die. You’d be replaced by some smoky sociologist who would no longer teach history of religions because he simply wouldn’t understand what ‘history’ means.116 Such criticism certainly derived from the fact that the meta-historical, theoretical approach of the Durkheimians contrasted with Cumont’s own pronounced scientific interest in historical research on specific ancient religions, and their transformations in changing historical and geographical circumstances.117 But although Cumont never explicitly related his dislike of sociology to his own (nuanced) antipathy towards socialism, it seems reasonable to surmise that there were also subtle socio-political motives at play.118 In 1908, when the Jeudistes approached Loisy, the former priest had a famous reputation as a fiery defender of ‘history’ and, equally importantly, he was not known to be a socialist (see below for his political views). In spite of the criticism he repeatedly formulated against the Liberal-Protestant conception of religion, the methodology of the Catholic priest had always shown at least one unmistakable similarity to this tradition: his struggle to emancipate history from theology turned him into an equally strong advocate of a positiv114 115

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I return to Loisy’s position in the following section of this chapter. The Catholic Minister of Education refused to appoint Cumont to the chair of Roman history at Ghent University, because of the negative effects of Cumont’s work on the pagan mystery cults for the self-proclaimed originality of Christianity, and because of his liberal political profile. Much research has been done on the Affaire, see Bonnet 2005, Praet 2015 (with more bibliography), and most recently the contributions of Praet and Bonnet to Praet and Bonnet 2018. Cumont to Loisy, 13 July 1911, BnF NAF 15651, f°106. It should, however, be added that recent scholarship by Danny Praet has shown that Cumont’s own historical research was also underpinned by a ‘philosophy of history of religions’, which was a highly original synthesis of elements of different philosophical schools (especially Comte and Hegel), see Praet 2015. We will briefly return to elements of social elitism in Cumont’s history of religions in the following section.

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ist ‘just the historical facts’ approach. But why did Arconati and her Jeudistes (including Liberal Protestants like Monod and Morel-Fatio) prefer Loisy over the Liberal-Protestant candidate Maurice Vernes? There is a good possibility that they simply considered Loisy a more powerful candidate against Mauss, and of course there was the symbolic anti-clerical value of his appointment. Whereas Vernes would get the Protestant votes, Loisy could count on the votes of the progressive Catholics as well as at least a part of the anti-clerical republicans. Was it, then, their strong desire to stop Mauss which made the Jeudistes overlook a number of important differences between Loisy’s ‘History’ and that of the Liberal-Protestant school? In the following part of this case study, we will take a closer look at Loisy’s history of religions and try to determine to what extent it was congruent with the worldviews of Arconati’s network. But first, let us briefly discuss how this network managed to get Loisy appointed. If there was one thing upon which all those involved in Loisy’s campaign agreed, the Jeudistes and other scholars like Louis Havet and Henri Bergson, it was that drawing the anti-clerical or the anti-sociological (read anti-socialist) card was out of the question. Both moves would suggest that Loisy’s candidature – if successful – was orchestrated by the radical republican government, and this could cause serious political tensions in the already very turbulent years of Clemenceau’s Prime Ministry, not to mention the damage it could do to Loisy’s scientific reputation. In the end Loisy obtained a victory in the internal elections at the CF, and his appointment followed the normal procedure, but Arconati did mobilise her political friends to ensure sufficient political support. Out of fear that the governing radical republicans would refuse to ratify Loisy’s election by the CF, she asked Combes and Brisson to talk to Clemenceau and to Gaston Doumergue, then Minister of Education: Combes, who knows Doumergue well, told me yesterday that he would in any way stand up against Clemenceau if he did for you what he has done for Scheil.119 Brisson will take care of Doumergue, everything will be fine – just not a word about this to anyone we need to avoid that your appointment becomes political.120

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See above, note 83 on the ‘Affaire Scheil’. Clemenceau had been one of the fierce supporters of the decision against ratifying the election of the Dominican in 1905. Arconati to Loisy, 9 July 1908, BnF NAF 15646, f°47. The emphasis is Arconati’s. Arconati also mistrusted Doumergue because she thought he was too philo-Semitic. On the importance of anti-Semitism in Loisy’s appointment, see Lannoy 2020.

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The correspondence between Arconati and Loisy furthermore shows that she carefully advised Loisy on how to approach the individual professors of the CF, during the customary visits each candidate paid to them in anticipation of the elections. And she also paid some visits herself, aided in this endeavour by Morel-Fatio, Bédier, Monod and Lefranc.121 Yet another way in which Arconati tried to influence the election process was by bringing her money into play. At the very beginning of Loisy’s campaign, she spread the rumour that she would fund a chair for Loisy at the EPHE if the CF refused to appoint him. But later on she realised that this strategy worked counterproductively and she then replaced her initial threat with one she deemed more effective: I hope for the Collège that everything will proceed well, because if you were not appointed, if considerations other than Scientific ones motivate the professors, I will withdraw the million [francs] which I bequeathed to the Collège. And I will certainly not be too embarrassed to tell this to M. Levasseur when I get back to Paris.122 3.4 Loisy’s History of Religions and Cultural Hegemony Can we say now that Loisy’s history of religions implicitly and/or explicitly legitimised the values and ideology of these bourgeois elites? The question calls for a very nuanced answer. Loisy’s scientific oeuvre is extensive, his historical views and underpinning worldviews are complex, and they underwent substantial transformations during the course of his long career at the CF (1909–32). A complete survey of his ideas lies beyond the scope of this chapter. Instead I will confine myself to a general account, and focus on the views Loisy developed during his first years at the CF.123 But first a few comments about his background and social views. Although Arconati made repeated efforts to integrate him in her network of Jeudistes, Loisy was never ‘one of them’. He rarely attended the meetings, mostly using the pretext of his poor health. Whereas his strict diet must have 121

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She not only visited several professors at the CF, but also tried to win influential non-CF scholars like Salomon Reinach to Loisy’s cause. For Reinach’s role in the elections (he was in favour of Mauss), see Lannoy 2020. Arconati to Loisy, 16 October 1908, BnF NAF 15646, f° 72. Our general overview of Loisy’s ideas is mainly based on four texts he published during his first years at the CF: 1) the programmatic text of his inaugural speech (Loisy 1909); 2) his contribution to the debates about the introduction of history of religions in the école laïque (Loisy 1910); 3) his review of Durkheim’s Formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse (Loisy 1913a); and 4) his popularising account on the history of religions in La Revue Bleue (Loisy 1913b).

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been an important reason for him to stay away from the lunches over which the Jeudistes usually met, there were certainly other issues at play.124 First of all, Loisy was not what one would call a sociable person. He was a solitary scholar who followed a rigid work schedule (usually starting around 5am). Whenever possible, he escaped Paris to take refuge in his house in Ceffonds, in the Champagne countryside. It is probably not an exaggeration to say that he preferred the company of his chickens over that of Parisian high society. Both socioeconomically and socio-culturally speaking, Loisy was definitely an outsider with regard to the Jeudistes. Although his salary at the CF was more than decent, he was certainly not as wealthy as most Jeudistes. A farmers’ son, he voluntarily lived a simple life that was very different from their bourgeois tastes. He did not go out and did not travel, except to Ceffonds. In his letters to Cumont, Loisy often wrote that he envied the worldly lifestyle of the Belgian scholar, who travelled a lot for work and for pleasure, but these comments often contain traces of mock self-pity. Aside from his social background and introverted nature, Loisy’s general lack of interest in French politics also explains the distance between him and the Jeudistes.125 He shared their republicanism (otherwise any kind of friendly relation with Arconati would have been impossible), but not their fiery attitude to politics. In one of her letters to Cumont, Arconati complained to her Belgian friend: ‘Loisy cares as little about the Republic as I do about the pope’.126 Loisy did not share Arconati’s (and her network’s) strong condemnation of sociology of religion, most likely because he did not share the socio-economic background and the socio-political views that underpinned their ‘scientific’ depreciation. We have little historical evidence to reconstruct Loisy’s political views between 1908 and 1909, but we do know that he was sympathetic towards Le Sillon, the French political branch of Catholic Modernism, which stood for a profoundly socialist Catholicism.127 Arconati considered Le Sillon as the culmination of evil, for it was not only Catholic but also socialist.128 Rather than politics or social background, the solid foundations for Arconati’s and Loisy’s

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For the following biographical information, see Lannoy 2012, p. 51. This radically changes during and after WWI, when national and international politics come to the forefront of Loisy’s letters to Cumont, and those to Arconati. Arconati to Cumont, undated (probably 1910, Gaasbeek). Le Sillon was condemned by the Church in 1910 and it dissolved soon afterwards. See Mayeur 2006. In an undated letter to Cumont (probably 1910, Gaasbeek), Arconati severely condemned Le Sillon: ‘To tell you the truth, I have always considered “Le Silon” as a dangerous mistake of our time’.

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long-lasting friendship was their mutual admiration for one another’s sharp wit and non-conformism, and their shared hatred of the Church. After his appointment, Loisy did not delay in distancing himself from the anti-sociological opinions of his voters. In 1909, he gave a programmatic inaugural speech at the CF in which he tried to soothe his colleagues’ minds after the contentious election. Addressing himself to his anti-clerical opponents, he emphasised that he would adopt an unbiased, non-religious approach.129 And for the former supporters of Mauss, he formulated the explicit aim to develop a historical method that would establish a compromise between the valuable approaches of psychology, anthropology, philology, and … sociology.130 Loisy also announced he would dedicate his first years at the CF to the comparative study of sacrifice, which was, in effect, a very Maussian subject of research. The main reason for this choice was his interest in a comparative study of the Eucharist,131 but one also needs to stress that his emphasis on the merits of various theoretical paradigms and his focus on sacrifice implied a significant break with his Liberal-Protestant predecessors. In the Durkheimians Loisy found allies for his long-standing battle against their individualism and neglect of ritual.132 But Loisy and the sociological school came to similar scientific conclusions from very different starting points. The main reason for Loisy’s anti-individualism resided in his Catholic past, and it is this Catholic background which also explains why, in several regards, the gulf between Loisy and the Durkheimians was very large. In his critical review of Durkheim’s Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse (1912), Loisy agreed that religion was an essential motor of social history, but he criticised Durkheim’s highly functionalist approach to religion. Such an approach implied a complete demystification of religion, which Loisy was not ready to accept. He also had a problem with the fact that Durkheim took his lead from the study of the primitive Australian Arunta tribe to come to conclusions about religion in general. For Loisy, this equation of ‘inferior’ primitive religions and ‘superior’ religions (like Christianity) was taking things much too far.133 While Loisy was definitely more sympathetic towards sociology than the other members of Arconati’s scholarly network, his narrative on the overall history of religions and especially his views on the future of religion were more or

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Loisy 1909, p. 27. Loisy 1909, pp. 34–5, 37. On how Loisy succeeded in realising such a methodological compromise, see Praet and Lannoy 2017. See Praet and Lannoy 2017. On Loisy’s objections to Liberal-Protestant individualism, see Hill 2002, p. 103. Loisy 1913a, pp. 45–6.

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less in line with the beliefs that circulated in Arconati’s free-thinking network. Loisy published them for the first time in a popularising article entitled ‘Les données de l’histoire des religions’ (‘Basic Facts About the History of Religions’) which was published in La Revue Bleue, a very widely read, centre-left journal, in 1913. His article provided a typically evolutionary account of the history of religions. Loisy’s account was congruent with the beliefs of most Jeudistes in that it presented Christianity as a superseded phase of religion.134 According to Loisy, the history of religions was a three-phase evolution, starting from primitive magico-religious cults (accessible through ethnological research on contemporary primitive tribes of, e.g., Africa135), which then developed into national religions (e.g. the ‘State religions’ of ancient Rome, Egypt, Persia …), and finally into salvation religions, which centred on the individual religious agent and his relation to the divine.136 Participation in this final type of religion is based on individual choice, which gives it a more universal scope than the national religions, where participation is guaranteed by birth. Christianity belonged to the third type of religion, but Loisy explained that it was only a phase in a still ongoing evolution towards increasingly humanist manifestations of religion.137 Loisy’s conception of the history of religions includes a nuanced view on the relationship between the role of the individual and the community. He tended to focus more on the collective character of religious transformations,138 and during and after WWI, he increasingly adopted a societal approach to religion. In his philosophical essay La Religion (1917) he expressed the hope that the future would bring a ‘religion de l’humanité’, which would realise humanity’s true liberation from an alienated god conception and establish a postChristian, truly humanist society.139 At the same time, Loisy always emphasised that the ‘religion de l’humanité’ was based on the collective efforts of morally responsible individuals, and he was very aware of the existence and import-

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Loisy 1913b, p. 748. This discourse of Western superiority (‘sociétés inférieures’, Loisy 1913b, p. 744) is omnipresent in European history of religions of that time. For the link between Gramsci and Edward Said, who uncovered these mechanisms, see Nieto-Galan 2011, p. 458. For an analysis of the subtle usage of racial theories by Loisy’s friend Franz Cumont, see Scheerlinck, Praet, and Rey 2016. On this scheme, see Praet and Lannoy 2017. Loisy 1913b, p. 749. See the recent research by Praet and Lannoy 2017. The concept of the ‘religion de l’ humanité’ is regularly discussed in the correspondence between Loisy and Cumont, see Bonnet and Lannoy 2017. For Cumont’s conception of the ‘religion de l’ humanité’, see Praet 2015.

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ance of individual spiritual needs.140 It may be instructive to mention that we find a very similar resistance against a dichotomy between the individual and the community in the scientific work of Franz Cumont, who – generally speaking – tended to pay more attention to individual spirituality and to religious beliefs.141 Cumont and Loisy certainly had their personally motivated points of interest, but both scholars were too much aware of the enormous complexity of human history to rely on simple binary categories in their attempts at comprehending it. If there is one thing about Loisy’s and Cumont’s scientific narratives which may really be indicative of their different socio-economic backgrounds and social worldviews, it might be their different evaluations of popular religion and ‘high’ religious culture. For the bourgeois Cumont, the opposition between the religion of the lower social strata and that of the intellectual ‘élites’ was an important hermeneutic key for religious change in the ancient world.142 According to Cumont, the evolution of Roman religion was a continuous dialectic between the superstitious, largely immobile masses and the rapidly progressing elites, who incorporated new philosophical insights in their intellectualist religion and were the sole agent of religious change. Popular religion adopted the religious innovations of the intellectual elites, but always did so with delay, and the superior beliefs of the elites were merely layers on a ‘substrate’ of primitive superstitions of which the masses could not let go. Loisy occasionally distinguished between popular and intellectual religious culture, but the distinction does not serve as a frame of interpretation for the history of religions, and, to my knowledge, he never evaluated the former as inferior to the latter, unlike Cumont. While there seem to be no signs of elitism based on social class in Loisy’s scientific work, we do find instances of pronounced intellectual elitism. Loisy had a well-developed sense of intellectual superiority, but it was explicitly directed against anyone whom he regarded as unintelligent, irrespective of their social class background. This elitism especially comes to the fore in his article ‘De la vulgarisation et de l’enseignement de l’histoire des religions’ (‘On the Popularisation of the Teaching of the History of Religions’), which he published in 1910 and perhaps most emphatically articulated the elitist views that circulated in the Arconati network. With this article, the new professor at the CF participated

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For these views, see especially La Religion (Loisy 1917). On Cumont’s reflections on the relationship between myth and ritual, see Bonnet 2007. I have studied this mechanism in Cumont’s magnum opus on the evolution of Roman afterlife conceptions, Lux Perpetua (1949), see Lannoy 2010.

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in the republican debates about whether some sort of instruction on religion as a cultural phenomenon should be introduced in primary and secondary public education.143 The advocates of the idea made ample use of Albert Réville’s rhetoric about ‘the common cult of the historical truth’. Claiming to possess the scientific truth about the history of religions (and Christianity’s superseded position in it), they often represented themselves as those in charge of the liberation of the ‘masses ignorantes’.144 Interestingly, Loisy explicitly stated that it was not just the Catholics who were in dire need of ‘the scientific truth’, although his article focused most on this group. He explained that this was also the case for those people who declared themselves atheists, not because they really were atheists, but because they liked the social status that, in their view, came with such a self-designation.145 Loisy himself was very much in favour of a course in history of religions in the curricula of the école laïque. The existing divergence of ideas on religion, especially between Catholics and people who had renounced the Christian faith, Loisy explained, was the cause of deep ideological disruption in French society. While children of non-Catholic parents knew hardly anything about religion, children raised in Catholicism only knew the anti-scientific Catholic version of the facts.146 According to Loisy, state-controlled scientific education on religion would enhance social cohesion. The aim of the new course should not be to aggressively unconvert Catholic children.147 Loisy regarded the decatholicisation of French society as an inevitable, almost self-fulfilling event.148 Teachers should act as a sort of moral guide during this process, and manuals on the history of religions should especially focus on the universal ethics which Christianity contains. All in all, we may conclude that Loisy was too much his own man to uncritically adopt the values and beliefs of the elites who had supported him. In some respects, he clearly consolidated the cultural hegemony of Arconati’s network (e.g. his views on the de-catholicisation of French society, the post-Christian humanism, etc.), and in his paper on religious instruction we see him adopt a similar paternalistic attitude towards ‘la masse ignorante’. But Loisy carefully detached his intellectual elitism from the broader social elitism that reigned in French bourgeois society. Just like the history of religions he studied, his social

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Ognier 2008, p. 94 and passim. Loisy 1910, p. 109. Loisy 1910, p. 111. Loisy 1910, pp. 108–9. Loisy 1910, p. 142. Loisy 1910, pp. 143–5.

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and political views, his socio-economic background, personality, and ideology are simply too complex to fit into a single mechanistic scheme of explanation. Modern history of religious studies in late nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury France tend to interpret the relation between the scholar and his object of study through the lens of the religious and political identity of the scholar in question. The benefit of the Gramscian framework resides in the fact that it entails a truly comprehensive and non-reductionist approach. It does not exclusively address the link between science and politics, or between science and religion, but instead deals with the various factors within the intricate interrelations of politics, religion, and culture in their entirety, and it especially allows us to uncover the social power structures and hegemonic structures that underpin these relations. While religion and politics are absolutely crucial to understand the making of history of religions in France, I hope that my case study has shown that social class backgrounds, socio-economic concerns, and related socio-political interests were definitely also at play.

Acknowledgements This chapter has benefited immensely from the comments offered by this volume’s editors, Massimiliano Badino and Pietro Omodeo, to whom I am extremely grateful for their help. Further thanks go to Jan Nelis, Danny Praet, Corinne Bonnet, and Boris Demarest for their helpful remarks.

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part 3 Science and Religion

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chapter 5

‘Jesuit Science’ and Cultural Hegemony: A Political-Historiographical Critique Pietro Daniel Omodeo

The Counter-reformation sterilized this swarm of popular forces: The Society of Jesus is the last great religious order – reactionary in its origin and authoritarian, with a repressive and ‘diplomatic’ character – that marked with its birth the hardening of the Catholic organism. […] Catholicism has become ‘Jesuitism’. Antonio Gramsci, Q11, 13841

∵ ‘Jesuit Science’ is a bizarre plant flourishing in the field of historical studies in the early modern period.2 While other historiographical species such as ‘German Physics’ or ‘Proletarian Science’ have been equated and banned for their impure ideological pedigrees,3 religiously tinged con-species, such as ‘Islamic Science’, have been replaced by more nuanced ones such as science in Islamicate societies.4 As for the sub-species of Christian Science, ‘Jesuit Science’, it is propagating at an extraordinary pace. First articles, and then edited volumes 1 ‘Ma la Controriforma ha isterilito questo pullulare di forze popolari: la Compagnia di Gesù è l’ultimo grande ordine religioso, di origine reazionario e autoritario, con carattere repressivo e “diplomatico”, che ha segnato, con la sua nascita, l’irrigidimento dell’organismo cattolico. […] Il cattolicesimo è diventato “gesuitismo”’. My translation. I quote from the Gerratana edition of Quaderni del carcere (Gramsci 2007), which I will abbreviate as Q followed by the number of the notebook and the page of the critical edition. 2 This essay is a contribution to the the ERC consolidator project EarlyModernCosmology, which received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme (GA 725883). 3 See, among others, Eckert 2012. On ideological problems linked to Marxist approaches to science see, among others, Young 1977/1978. 4 For a critical assessment of the applications of the qualification ‘Islamicate’ coined by Marshal Hodgson in order to refer to non-religious phenomena within cultures comprised of predominantly Muslim communities, see Brentjes et al. 2016, especially p. 135.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004443778_007

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and monographs on the subject have appeared and multiplied, so that it has become fairly common to encounter this keyword in the titles of scholarly works.5 The claim and concern of this chapter is that today ‘Jesuit Science’ only prima facie refers to a historical problem, that is, the investigation and comprehension of scientific debates involving scholars belonging to the Jesuit Order during early Modernity.6 By taking a closer look at the ongoing discourse, one realises that this category has gradually become a euphemism; indeed, it has become a camouflage that conceals a historiographical and epistemological commitment in favour of theology-led revisionisms in the history and philosophy of science. The most recent approaches to Jesuit Science are marked by an enthusiastic defence of Jesuit spirituality and missionary apostolate as key elements of the progress of early modern science. Such claims, as I will argue, are consistent with cultural hegemonic programmes of the Church and its institutions, especially the teaching and scientific ones. Such revisionism directly implies a reassessment of the relation between science and religion, but it also has implications for our overall understanding of modernity and postmodernity. A correct understanding of the issue at stake requires a clarification of the ideological drive behind recent developments in historiography and of its political meaning in present-day cultural and political struggles. In the following I first introduce the new body of scholarly work on Jesuit Science. While the authors in this expanding field present their studies as objective and post-ideological, I stress the limits of these claims, which are both methodological and institutional. Authors’ claims to disinterest and objectivity are too often in contrast with the support that this cultural production receives from wealthy Catholic institutions. Catholic universities and publishers, for their part, are quite explicit about their mission and aims.

5 In a recent essay, Nick Wilding has argued: ‘Catholic science […] has become an important object of exploration for the historians of science over the last generations. […] The emergence of Jesuit science studies as a valid subject within the history of science has, though, deracinated it from the broader and changing field of Counter-Reformation history; a reintegration would be beneficial for both fields’ (Wilding 2013, p. 319). 6 Although the expression commonly used in historiography is ‘Early Modern Period’, I will alternatively employ the expression ‘Early Modernity’ to stress the seminal relevance of the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries for the ‘Project of Modernity’ and avoid obliterating the prescriptive meaning of historiographical categories such as Rinascimento, Renaissance, and Neuzeit. I derive the concept of ‘Project of Modernity’ from Heller 1999. For a discussion of the ideological risks entailed in the naturalisation of ‘Modernity’ as a descriptive but not prescriptive category, see Habermas 1983, Ch. 1.

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Secondly, I take a step back to consider past controversies over Catholic cultural hegemony, as they cast light on Gramsci’s perspective and contemporary developments. Echoing the views of Risorgimento authors such as Francesco De Sanctis, Gramsci pointed out the lasting effects of post-Tridentine Church politics over Italian culture, in a context in which Inquisitorial coercion constituted the violent side of the Counter-Reformation while Jesuit cultural activities constituted the educational and propagandistic side of hegemony. His analysis is particularly useful to reflect on the interconnection between cultural production and intellectual history, on the one side, and Catholic politics and struggles for hegemony, on the other. These historical-methodological considerations lay the groundwork for my discussion of Catholic appropriations of science. I begin with epistemology, focusing on the French conservative historian of science Pierre Duhem and his rehabilitation of Inquisitor Bellarmine’s epistemology vis-à-vis that of Copernicus and Galileo. Just as Duhem’s apologetic efforts were based on a decontextualised reductionism that isolated certain theoretical claims, more recent forms of reductionism isolate technical issues, as can be illustrated on the basis of studies on the calendar reform implemented by the Jesuit mathematician Clavius in the late sixteenth century. In addition, I discuss the appearance of apologetic readings of the Copernican issue and of the Galileo Affair. Subsequently, I deal with more general cultural issues: terminological shifts evinced by revisionist Jesuit Studies and their opportunistic use of postmodernity. Finally, I tackle a crucial aspect of Catholic struggles for hegemony: education. This leads to concluding remarks about present-day educational and cultural Catholic politics. Their concentration in the United States of America, owing to the hegemonic positioning of this country, assumes global relevance after religion has come back as a crucial factor in society and national and international politics since the end of the Cold War era.

1

A New Corpus Jesuiticum

Today, historians of science are witnessing an increasing number of Jesuit Studies publications. The experts in the field can boast that a new body of studies has been established: When I look at all the new articles and books that the Jesuitica Project [of the Catholic University of Leuven] lists every week, I suspect that there is enough scholarship and interest in the history of the Society of Jesus and individual Jesuits to fill a new journal. I am particularly impressed with

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the amount of new scholarship appearing in English. There is a climate of interest and acceptance for scholarship on the Jesuits in the Englishspeaking world that did not exist thirty to fifty years ago. When I obtained my Ph.D. in 1964 studying the Jesuits, or the Catholic Church generally, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was not the path to rising in the historical profession in the USA and Canada.7 Robert A. Maryks and Jonathan Wright, the editors of a new journal entirely devoted to Jesuit Studies, launched it in 2014 with this quotation taken from the historian of the university, Paul F. Grendler. They added: ‘Because scholarship on Jesuit history has recently become so abundant, the Journal of Jesuit Studies aims at helping scholars to find their bearings in this rapidly growing field of studies’.8 Even if we restrict our consideration to the subcategory of Jesuit Science, the growing number of publications appearing under this label is remarkable.9 Actually, the first uses of the expression ‘Jesuit Science’ were rather timid. Donald L. Baker, in ‘Jesuit Science through Korean Eyes’ (1982–83), mainly used the expression to refer to an instrumental use of scientific knowledge by Jesuit mis-

7 Maryks and Wright 2014, p. 1. 8 Maryks and Wright 2014, p. 2. 9 Among the most significant publications in which the label ‘Jesuit Science’ explicitly appears in the title: ‘Jesuit Science through Korean Eyes’ (Baker 1982/83); ‘Jesuit mathematical science and the reconstitution of experience in the early seventeenth century’ (Dear 1987); Jesuit Ideology and Jesuit Science: Scientific Activity in the Society of Jesus, 1540–1773 (Harris 1988); ‘Boscovich, the Boscovich Circle and the Revival of the Jesuit Science’ (Harris 1993); ‘Jesuit Science Between Texts and Contexts’ (Biagioli 1994); ‘Confession-building, Long-distance Networks, and the Organization of Jesuit Science’ (Harris 1996); ‘From “The Eyes of All” to “Useful Quarries in Philosophy and Good Literature”: Consuming Jesuit Science, 1600–1650’ (Gorman 1999); ‘The Cultural Field of Jesuit Science’ (Feldhay 1999); ‘Mapping Jesuit Science: The Role of Travel in the Geography of Knowledge’ (Harris 1999); The New Science and Jesuit Science: Seventeenth Century Perspectives (Feingold 2003); ‘Jesuit Science in the Spanish Netherlands’ (Vanpaemel 2003); Jesuit Science and the Republic of Letters (Feingold 2003); ‘The trading zone communication of scientific knowledge: An examination of Jesuit science in China (1582–1773)’ (Huang 2005); ‘Benedictus Pereirus: Renaissance Culture at the Origin of Jesuit Science’, (Blum 2006); ‘Jesuit scientia and Natural Studies in Late Imperial China, 1600– 1800’ (Elman 2006); ‘Jesuit Science after Galileo: The Cosmology of Gabriele Beati’ (Magruder 2009); Ferdinand Verbiest and Jesuit Science in 17th Century China: An Annotated Edition and Translation of the Constantinople Manuscript (1676) (Golvers and Nicolaidis 2009); Missionary Scientists: Jesuit Science in Spanish South America, 1570–1810 (Prieto 2011); ‘Maximilianus Hell (1720–1792) and the eighteenth-century transits of Venus: A study of Jesuit science in Nordic and Central European contexts’ (Aspaas 2012); ‘Early Modern Jesuit Science. A Historiographical Essay’ (Rabin 2014).

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sionaries in their attempt to evangelise China. At the same time, his use of the term hinted at the embedding of the Jesuits’ natural and technical knowledge in a specific system of values. It specifically referred to their strategies to transfer to other cultures natural and technical knowledge together with their beliefs and religion.10 In the early 1990s, the expression ‘Jesuit Science’ still sounded vaguely provocative and ironical, for instance in Mario Biagioli’s use in ‘Jesuit Science Between Texts and Contexts’, an essay review of Ugo Baldini’s and of Father William A. Wallace’s reappraisals of Jesuits as partners or perhaps even as teachers(!) of Galileo Galilei.11 Steven J. Harris, one of the scholars who contributed the most to launching and establishing ‘Jesuit Science’ as a label, admitted that the expression is perhaps ‘too crude’.12 Yet, instead of renouncing it, he invited historians to make sense of this reified construct: The juxtaposition of ‘Jesuit’ and ‘science’ is neither inexplicable nor selfcontradictory; rather, it presents us with the challenge of trying to discern underlying patterns of coherence in the hope of finding how the pieces fit together.13 In his PhD dissertation entitled Jesuit Ideology and Jesuit Science (1988), Harris was the first to make a systematic use of the expression ‘Jesuit Science’. Therefore, he felt the necessity to define, justify, and explain it. He closely connected it with ‘ideology’, because he saw Jesuit Science as an approach to science (that of the Jesuits in early modernity) informed by a specific set of values, especially obedience and discipline. These values were encompassed by the category of ‘apostolic spirituality’ and referred to the dissemination of the Catholic creed through education, political connections, and missions.14 As to the concept of 10

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Baker 1982/83, e.g. p. 207 (referring to ‘[Ricci’s] borrowing of European advances in science and technology to promote Western religion’) and p. 230: ‘He [the Korean scholar Yi] could not be convinced that he should worship a foreign God by men he viewed as mere technicians – talented technicians, it was true, but technicians nonetheless. He was susceptible to no Copernican revolution in values through the influence of Jesuit science’ (emphasis added). Biagioli 1994. Harris 1996, 287. The entire volume 3/1 of the journal, in which this essay appeared, was dedicated to the topic ‘Jesuits and the Knowledge of Nature’. Ibid., 289. Harris 1988, p. 25: ‘The Ignatian strategy was to conquer the world through the world; that is, to conquer the world for Christ by using worldly tactics’. Cf. p. 241: ‘The ultimate goals of [these apostolates] were, of course, salvation of souls and preservation of Roman Catholic Church’.

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ideology – which has disappeared from subsequent studies in Jesuit Science – Harris presented it as a neutral heuristic instrument, assuming that the historian can observe the past from an extra-ideological position.15 In other words, his reflection on past ideology did not go so far as to include a self-reflection on the historian’s own positioning and the set of assumptions underlying his approach. Harris regarded the history of science as a de-ideologised discipline, in which ‘a refreshing independence from the polemics and apology of the older literature’ could be achieved.16 In one place, Harris even used the expression ‘cultural hegemony’ with reference to what he called ‘Jesuit apostolate’,17 but attributed to this Gramscian concept the vague meaning of ‘predominance in cultural matters’ ignoring its original socio-political and critical meaning. After Harris’s seminal treatment of Jesuit Science in its connection with values and ideology, Mordechai Feingold made the effort, going in a different direction, to separate science and religion in the treatment of the scientific achievements of early modern Jesuits. In Jesuit Science and the Republic of Letters (2003), Feingold maintained that Jesuit scientists pursued their scientific interests often independently of their religious mission or, at least, that one can evaluate the scientific dimension independently of the religious one. The latter claim implied that the worth and influence of their scientific endeavour could be separated from the apostolic mission: The aim […] [of this reconstruction] is to get past the stereotypes that surrounded the Society of Jesus during the first 200 years of its existence and evaluate the scientific dimension of its intellectual contribution, independent of its religious mission.18 Furthermore, whereas Harris argued from a systemic perspective for the interdependency between Jesuit values and scientific practices, that is, for the interdependency between ideology and knowledge,19 Feingold embraced an indi-

15

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Harris 1988, p. 24: ‘The model of ideology I adopt is intended as a nonevaluative explanatory-descriptive model applicable to the Society as an organized social movement. It therefore abandons many of the pejorative connotations associated with historical and colloquial usages. In this model, an ideology is seen as a distinctive configuration of ideas and values, which serves to direct and coordinate the thoughts and actions of its adherents. […] Just as an ideology entails a scale of social values that act as a guide to behavior, so it also possesses a scale of cognitive values that act as a guide to thought’ (emphasis added). Harris 1988, p. 6. Harris 1988, p. 28. Ibid. See e.g. Harris 1988, pp. xxiii–iv: ‘Such shifts [the growth of Jesuit interest in the mathem-

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vidual-oriented perspective. From the latter viewpoint, the scientific efforts of Jesuit scientists can be appreciated precisely as achievements often conducted in spite of the constraints of their Order (e.g. hierarchy, obedience, and censorship). By shifting the angle from institutions to individuals, and from systemic functions to subjective intentions, Feingold focused on a series of cases of censorship and self-censorship, and of limitations and ‘tribulations’, suggesting that one can see many Jesuit scientists as the victims rather than the protagonists of the scientific and cultural policy of their own Order. Feingold explicitly aimed to open up a space for a de-ideologised treatment of Jesuit participants in the early scientific debates. For this purpose, he isolated their scientific contributions from larger patterns of cultural politics as well as individual actors from their institutional settings. However, the cost of such a treatment is to push the political side to the margins as irrelevant for the understanding of the Jesuits’ cultural production. ‘The contests that embroiled the Jesuits during the early modern period […] were as much over cultural hegemony as over religion – though one should not assume, as historians often do, that the former was merely an extension of the latter’.20 Despite appearances, it should be clear that this reference to ‘cultural hegemony’ departs from the Gramscian meaning, according to which confessional and religious matters are questions of cultural hegemony since they imply strategies of social control through the construction of consensus. In the passage quoted, it simply means ‘scientific leadership’ or ‘excellence’. In Feingold’s eyes, this depoliticisation and insulation from institutional and ideological considerations had the ostensible advantage of undermining apologetic attempts to reassess the religious dimension of science (past and present). Harris and Feingold represent two different perspectives on the study of past contributions to science by Jesuit scholars. The former emphasises the scientific production of early Jesuits within and owing to the ‘long-distance networks, and the organization’ of their Society.21 The latter points rather to the individuals who were capable of great achievements in spite of the context and therefore ‘the conditions under which Jesuit publications saw light obliges us to give them the same charitable reading they were given by some contem-

20 21

atical and natural sciences] cannot be easily attributed to the initiative of a single person, either within or outside the Society. They are more readily explained in terms of broad social or socio-cultural forces. That is, such a large-scale shift in interest is essentially a phenomenon of the collectivity, and thus its explanation must also be collective in nature’. Feingold 2003a, p. 2 (emphasis added). Harris 1996.

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poraries’.22 In both cases the reassessment is supported by the consideration that today’s historiography should supersede the polemics and apologies of the past. As we have seen, Harris initially pinpointed the ideological dimension of Jesuit Science as the indispensable hermeneutic framework to address the topic. Programmatically, he confined this difficulty to the historiography of the past, and called for a de-ideologised inquiry of early Jesuits and their scientific activities: The generally hostile conditions threatening the Society at the end of the nineteenth century, help explain one of the great frustrations encountered by students of Jesuit history; namely, the seemingly ubiquitous polemical and apologetic uses Jesuits and non-Jesuits alike have made of the historical record. The provocative decrees of the first Vatican Council, the severe reaction to them in Bismarckian Germany known as the ‘Kulturkampf’, and the rhetorical extremes of the heated debates on the relationship between ‘science and religion’ were all ominous preludes to the Society’s burst of historiographical activity.23

2

Limits of the Post-ideological Neutrality of Jesuit Studies

Among the representatives of the new trend toward an allegedly impartial scholarship, John W. O’Malley stands out as the author of several meticulous works on the history of the Jesuit Order, among them The First Jesuits.24 He was one of the organisers of the huge international conference ‘The Jesuits: Culture, Learning, and the Arts, 1540–1773’ held at Boston College in May 1997. The proceedings of this conference can be seen as a turning point in the affirmation of Jesuit Science Studies.25 O’Malley and his collaborators were very satisfied with their success, as attested by the numbers: ‘Some hundred and twentyfive scholars from around the world participated, and about fifty formal papers

22 23 24

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Feingold 2003b, ‘Preface’, p. 25 (emphasis added). Harris 1988, p. xxv. O’Malley 1993. For instance, by Feingold 2003, p. vii: ‘[The] overall [negative] perception of the Order and the cultural production of its members was perpetuated by generations of historians, whose interpretative framework has tended to swing between the polemical and the apologetic. Only recently have scholars begun seriously to transcend centuries of preconceived belief by granting the Jesuit experience rigorous and disinterested scrutiny’. Emphasis added. Among other contributions, it includes Feldhay 1999, pp. 107–30, and Harris 1999.

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were delivered’.26 However, it can be argued that this new impetus did not originate from neutral terrain. Two out of four organisers were themselves Jesuit Fathers while another one (the aforementioned Harris) was (or was to soon become) professor at the Jesuit Institute, Boston College. O’Malley is himself a Roman Catholic priest and a member of the Society of Jesus.27 A conflict between intended historical and critical disinterest and institutional frameworks thus emerges if one considers the declared mission of the organisations and institutions scholars work for. O’Malley, for instance, is a professor of the Department of Theology in the ‘oldest Catholic and Jesuit university’ in the United States of America, Georgetown (Washington, DC). It was established in 1789 by the Jesuits and proudly advertises its loyalty to ‘our Jesuit values’ on the web.28 Hence, the question that arises is whether loyalty to these values can also allow for a critical assessment of Jesuit history or whether it creates a climate of celebration a priori excluding any negative judgement. As to Boston College hosting the conference ‘The Jesuits: Culture, Learning, and the Arts’, it is presented on its official website as ‘committed to maintaining and strengthening the Jesuit, Catholic mission of the University’.29 In fact, the Society of Jesus founded this university in 1863. The official Mission Statement of the Jesuit Institute is explicit about its normative role: [It] exists to aid Boston College in its endeavors to attain this coherence, in its identity and growth as a Catholic Jesuit university. The purpose of the Institute is to foster the Jesuit, Catholic character of Boston College precisely as a university. The university should be more a university because it is Catholic and Jesuit. Founded in 1988 through an initial gift of the Boston College Jesuit Community and a matching gift from the University, the Institute sponsors personal research, academic exchange and collective inquiry about the issues that emerge at the intersection of faith and culture.30 26 27 28

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O’Malley et al. 2000, p. xiii. http://explore.georgetown.edu/people/jwo9/ (accessed 27 September 2014). As one reads on the official web page, http://www.georgetown.edu/about/ (accessed 27 September 2014). Cf. the page ‘Jesuit & Catholic Identity’ (http://www.georgetown.edu/ about/jesuit‑and‑catholic‑heritage/index.html) (accessed 27 September 2014): ‘The ideals and principles that have characterized Jesuit education for over 450 years are central to Georgetown’s mission and character’. The web page itself is entitled ‘Jesuit, Catholic Tradition: Finding God in all things’. http:// www.bc.edu/content/bc/about/tradition.html (accessed 26 September 2014). This page is not existent anymore. The text, in a shortened version, can be found at: https:// www.bc.edu/bc‑web/sites/global‑engagement/formation‑and‑reflection.html# (accessed 3 September 2020).

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The conflict of interest is evident. ‘Nemo judex in causa sua’, as the adage goes (None should be a judge in his own cause). Can critical approaches to the history of the Jesuit Order emerge from this environment? Can self-legitimation on the part of Jesuit institutions be excluded from scholarly publications stemming from this institutional context? In what way does this embedment of Jesuit scholarship within Jesuit institutions affect scholarly research and results? In a recent monograph, the post-apologetic historian O’Malley makes ironic comments about the contrasting past views of the Jesuits, using a captivating title: Saints or Devils Incarnate? Studies on Jesuit History.31 At first sight, one could think that the title is a double hyperbole. Jesuits, one might assume, were normal people. Hence, they were neither devils incarnate nor saints. The last chapter of the book refutes this impression. The title goes: ‘The Many Lives of Ignatius of Loyola: Future Saint’. O’Malley the scholar can joke about the holiness of Ignatius. O’Malley the Jesuit cannot. Most importantly for our present concern with disinterested research and the dismissal of apology in the study of the Jesuit past, the volume Saints or Devils Incarnate? inaugurates a new series: Jesuit Studies: Modernity through the Prism of Jesuit Science. Its editor, Maryks, is associate professor at Boston College and editor-in-chief of the peer-reviewed quarterly Journal of Jesuit Studies issued since 2014. The journal surprisingly does not experience the financial constraints so common in the humanities, judging by the following announcement on the publisher’s official web page: ‘This is a fully Open Access journal, which means that all articles are freely available online, ensuring maximum, worldwide dissemination of content. Thanks to generous support of the Boston College Institute for Advanced Jesuit Studies, all article publication fees are waived’.32 The editorial board of the Jesuit Studies series is not of the kind one would call impartial and detached: out of 14 scholars, four are members of the Society of Jesus, and six (including the aforementioned four) plus the editor are appointed by Jesuit institutions (Boston College, Heythrop College, Fordham University, and the Jesuit School of Theology, Santa Clara University) or by Catholic universities (De Paul University and Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú). The apologetic mission is, however, not explicit, as this might disqualify the endeavour presented as purely scientific and motivated by a historiographical interest aimed at addressing thus-far neglected topics in an even-handed manner: ‘Associated with the Journal of Jesuit Studies, the Jesuit 31 32

O’Malley 2013. http://www.brill.com/products/journal/journal‑jesuit‑studies (accessed 8 October 2014). At present, the list of supporting institutions is longer: https://brill.com/view/journals/ jjs/jjs‑overview.xml (accessed 3 September 2020).

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Studies book series will target those areas of scholarship on Jesuit history in its broader context that have been lamentably neglected but it will also invite contributions of important but hard to find monographs in other languages, which shall be encouraged to be translated’.33 It is to be expected that new studies on Jesuit Science will be published, as contributions to fill the gap of lamentably neglected historical inquiry. The change in Harris’s perspective through the years is telling evidence of a shift from a revaluation of Jesuits’ contributions in the history of science to the celebration of their special way to science. The caution that Harris showed in his early work, and the link he established between Jesuit Science and ideology, dissolved in subsequent publications on the same topic, especially after he became an employee of a Jesuit institution. In the academic year 1999–2000, he benefited from a visiting fellowship grant of the Jesuit Institute at Boston College, with the project ‘Jesuit Science, 1540–1773: Representing Nature in the Age of Confession’. In the description of the project, the critical tone of the dissertation has been substituted by a very rosy picture, in which ‘ideology’ has disappeared, ‘obedience’ has been replaced with ‘instruction’, ‘apostolate’ with ‘information-disseminating resources’ and, so to speak, the maxim ‘ad maiorem Dei gloriam’ with ‘ad maiorem Scientiae gloriam’: His [Harris’s] premise is that the ability and incentive of early Jesuits to pursue the natural sciences stemmed from a combination of their overseas missions’ information-gathering capabilities with informationdisseminating resources of Jesuit colleges and universities. Harris says the success of the Jesuits’ foreign missions depended on their ability to train and assign trustworthy confreres who would be willing to work under instruction, and provide reliable reports of new lands, peoples and other phenomena. These in turn were utilized by Jesuit faculty teaching and writing on astronomy, geography, natural history, botany and other scientific areas.34 Moving from these premises, Harris reassessed the so-called ‘Merton thesis’, according to which Puritan ethics was a decisive factor in English science in the century of Robert Boyle, Isaac Newton and the Royal Society.35 Harris reversed 33 34 35

http://www.brill.com/publications/jesuit‑studies (accessed 27 September 2014) (emphasis added). http://www.bc.edu/bc_org/rvp/pubaf/chronicle/v7/my28/grants.html (accessed 8 October 2014). The link is not existent anymore (3 September 2020). Harris 1989. Merton presented his theses concerning the relation between science and

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this thesis, or at least expanded it, in order to value ‘Jesuit spirituality’ as a decisive factor in the scientific activity and teaching during early Modernity. The active engagement in the world in the name of ‘Christian service’ and as part of their ‘apostolic mission’ as well as the ‘sanctification of learning’ are elements that should account for Jesuits’ scientific successes. Note that, in this perspective, the context loses its neutrality or its externality relative to Jesuit Science. It becomes an integral and positive part of the scientific endeavour. Such a perspective is openly embraced by the author of the most important and up-to-date history of the Jesuits’ science, Augustín Udías Vallina, S.J. In the concluding, historiographical chapter of his Jesuit Contribution to Science: A History, Udías acknowledges Harris as the first to aptly address the question about the specificity of Jesuits’ engagement with science.36 By contrast, he dismisses Feingold’s perspective for his assumption that belonging to the Jesuit Order was, more often than not, an obstacle to the activity of Jesuit scientists, due to doctrinarian enforcement, interior control within the Order and even preventive forms of self-censorship. Himself a Jesuit and a geophysicist, Udías defends the apostolic and symbolic significance of priest-scientists who embody the ‘unification of Catholic wisdom and secular learning’.37 He evidently sees himself as the epigone of a long tradition marked by a special way to science. In this optic, he strengthens the Mertonian argument further, stressing that such specificity has its core in ‘Ignatian spirituality’.38 At the centre of the Jesuits’ scientific endeavour is the service to God which, Udías confesses en passant, ‘for St. Ignatius […] is understood as a service to the Church’.39 Thus, in his eyes, a science in the service of the Church and an education system that is instrumental to its hegemonic strategies are no shortcomings at all, but rather a plus-value that deserves to be admired and extolled. Certainly, the language he uses is deceiving: spirituality is the substitute for ideology; apostolic work would be better understood, in Gramscian terms, as a cultural-hegemonic project.40

36 37 38

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religion in seventeenth-century England in his classic of Weberian sociology of science, Science, Technology and Society in Seventeenth Century England (Merton 1938). Udías 2015, p. 235. Udías 2015, p. 240. Its four tenets are the idea of finding God in all things, the union of prayer and work, the search for the greater glory of God, and the work on the ‘frontiers’ (the apostolic work brought to ‘places and situations where the Christian message is not yet known’). Udías 2015, pp. 237–9. Udías 2015, p. 237. Cf. Udías 2015, p. vi: ‘A few years after its founding in 1540 by Saint Ignatius of Loyola, the Society of Jesus undertook its educational endeavor as a key instrument of its apostolic work’. And p. vi: ‘Moreover, I try to find a relation between the scientific work of the Jesuits and their spirituality’.

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Old Ideologies? A Retrospective

Recent Jesuit studies have a tendency to dismiss past criticism by simply claiming that it was always inspired by malice. In these studies, it is often claimed that historians neglected Jesuits for too long due to prejudice: Almost from the moment of its founding in 1540 by Ignatius of Loyola and his companions, the Society of Jesus suffered from misunderstanding, some positive, much of it negative. Myth and misinformation abounded […]. Not until the mid-twentieth century did historians begin to dispel some of the myths of early modern Catholicism, but only with John O’Malley’s The First Jesuits (Harvard University Press, 1993), which has been translated into ten languages, did a new era open in the study of the Society of Jesus.41 In recent secondary literature, it is often maintained that negative judgements on the Order and its history were owing especially to the defamation of hostile critics and of their uncritical followers. In the best cases, it was the result of misunderstandings. This might be true for English-speaking scholarship but it can hardly be accepted as generally valid for those Catholic countries and cultures where a thorough reflection on the lasting impact of the Jesuits and the postTridentine Church has been carried out from the sixteenth century onwards. However, the prejudices denounced by Jesuit historians mostly refer to nineteenth-century historiography. And indeed, scholars who welcomed Italy’s unification and the constitution of the new State especially reflected on the cultural implications of post-Tridentine Catholicism and its institutions for the intellectual development of the popolo-nazione.42 In particular, the conflict between the Church and the nuova scienza (the ‘new science’ that, according to a shared understanding, included the natural sciences as well as postAristotelian Renaissance philosophies) was central to the reflection on the past and future of the country. Episodes of intolerance and persecution directed towards dissidents (above all the execution of Bruno, the banning of the Copernican theory, and the trial and condemnation of Galileo) were seen as political crimes with long-lasting consequences for Italian culture. Looking back at this tragic past, the leading historian of Italian culture of the Risorgimento, Francesco De Sanctis, in his Storia della letteratura italiana – which,

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Markys, ‘Foreword’ to O’Malley 2013, p. xi. Cf. Durante 2004.

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in many ways, is a political-intellectual history of Italian culture in general – pointed to the interconnection of Counter-Reformist forms of control, on the one hand, and the propagandistic and educational methods employed by the Jesuits, on the other. They concurred to shape culture and society according to the religious-political line emerging from the Council of Trent.43 His perspective – the roots of which can be traced back to the polemics of the Enlightenment – informed later generations of Italian scholars, including Gramsci.44 On the opposite front, after the unification of the Italian Peninsula (1861) at the expense of the papal monarchy (20 September 1870), Jesuits engaged through their journal Civiltà Cattolica in an ideological struggle against the liberal intellectuals who supported the new State. Within these polemics, the history of the Jesuit Order and of the achievements of its exponents was hotly debated.45 The contrast between the new Italian State, ruled by liberal elites, and the Vatican created a de facto separation of the political apparatus and large sectors of civil society, largely dominated by the Church. The tension between a lay State and a Catholic-permeated civil society, which informs Gramsci’s analyses, lasted up to Mussolini’s time and anticipated later scenarios such as Solidaność Poland and perhaps today’s Cuba. In the developments of the post-Risorgimento political-religious confrontation in Italy, the Jesuit Inquisitor Bellarmine was beatified (1923), sanctified (1930) and eventually elevated to the dignity of a Doctor of the Church (1931). In this manner Pius XI realised and even exceeded the original project of sanctification conceived by Urban VIII as early as 1634.46 The process of sanctification of Bellarmine took place in a particularly dark period of European history, marked by the rise and establishment of Fascisms. As Gramsci remarked in his Prison Notebooks, this apotheosis can be understood only against the background of the evolving relations between the Church and the State, of the expansion of the Jesuits’ influence within the Catholic Church and within society and of the eventual collaboration between the Fascist State and the Vatican.47 In those years, the Patti Lateranensi (Lateran Accords, 1929) secured Benito Mussolini the support of Pius XI at the cost of a series of economic and civil concessions to the Church, including the teach-

43 44

45 46 47

Cf. De Sanctis 1996, Ch. 19, ‘La nuova scienza’. Cf. Saitta 1911, pp. 62–3. For a judgement on historiographical positions on the Renaissance and the Counter-Reformation during the Risorgimento, see Croce 1929, esp. pp. 3–19, Ch. 1, ‘Controriforma’. Spaventa 1911, e.g., p. 10. Cf. Koch 1934, p. 185. Omodeo 2011, pp. 41–8.

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ing of religion in public schools. The new political liaison eased the transfer of the editorial project of the Monumenta Historica Societatis Jesu from Madrid to Rome. This was a vast operation aimed at presenting archival documents relative to the early years of the Jesuit Society to learned scholars and thus to induce a reappraisal of its history.48 The reasons for Bellarmine’s sanctification should not be searched for far from these events. According to the entry in the Dictionnaire de théologie catholique (1932) by the Jesuit Xavier-Marie Le Bachelet, the major theological merits of Bellarmine were genuinely political.49 As one reads there, the significance of his strenuous opposition to the Reformation and to all heresies should not be restricted to his polemics against doctrines such as the Lutheran servum arbitrium. Rather, Bellarmine’s doctrine included issues such as the affirmation of the primacy of the Roman pontiff, his indirect power over the worldly sphere, and the superiority of his divine monarchy over human civil powers. In other words, its actual significance rested in the possibility to translate his politicaltheological theories in terms of an indirect control of civil society by means of education and propaganda. Borrowing from Gramsci, we can say that Bellarmine was sanctified as a representative and theoretician of Catholic hegemony in modern societies.

4

Gramsci’s Analysis of Jesuit Politics and the Catholic Positioning within Modern Society

Gramsci reflected on the cultural-political dimension of the Concordato of 1929 in a long note on the Rapporti tra Stato e Chiesa (Relations between State and Church). The agreement between Italy and the Vatican created ‘an interference of sovereignty in the territory of one State’ (Q16, 1866) in spite of the fact that, from a legal viewpoint, ‘concordats were verbally presented as international treatises’ (Q16, 1866). Indeed, the concordat conferred a privileged position on the Church within the State. The economic agreements included in the concordat were the price Fascist Italy had to pay for the Church’s commitment ‘not to hinder the exercise of power but rather to favour and support it’ (Q16, 1867). In other words, the Church was entering the political arena by supporting the party and government that signed the concordat, not the State tout court. Concretely, this meant ‘the public recognition of special political privileges to a cast

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See Koch 1934. Le Bachelet 1932.

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of citizens within the State’ (Q16, 1867) in virtue of their controlling function in culture and education. Gramsci was convinced that the Church would not limit itself to the ‘intellectual and moral formation of the youngest’ but ‘would try to implement its full program’ (Q16, 1872). University education was a target, too. Since the university is the ‘mechanism selecting individuals of other classes that will become part of the personnel in the government, administration and direction’ (Q16, 1868), the levelling of Jesuit Catholic and public universities would make the formation of public personnel inhomogeneous and undo one of the main achievements of the Risorgimento, that is, the independence of the Italian State from the Church. A new ‘lay-religious amalgamation’ was emerging (Q16, 1869). Gramsci wrote that ‘the Church […] cannot be satisfied with the sole formation of priests. It aims to permeate the State (following Bellarmine’s theory of the indirect government)’ (Q16, 1871). The sanctification of Bellarmine also sanctioned the triumph of the Jesuit faction within the Catholic Church. According to Gramsci, the Jesuits (or ‘Jesuitism’) constituted one of the ‘parties’ in competition for the control of the Church. It was opposed by the ‘Modernists’ on its left and the ‘Integralists’ on its right (Q14, 1712). In the past, as he remarked, the factions of the Church took the shape of religious orders. Such groups were usually reabsorbed and disciplined within the ecclesiastical hierarchy in order to soften the heretical tendencies that were implicit ‘in any innovations in the womb of the Church if they are not promoted by its centre’ (Q6, 833). Gramsci saw the ecclesiastical factions of his time as akin to political parties giving different responses to the emergence of mass society. The Integralists constitute ‘a European tendency of Catholicism that is politically positioned at the extreme right’ (Q20, 2088). They are traditionally linked ‘to the reactionary classes and especially to the land-owning aristocracy and big land-owners’. On the opposite side, the Modernists are closest to the popular classes, ‘hence, [they are] favourable to reformist socialism and democracy’. From the viewpoint of dogma, the latter fostered ‘an intellectual reform of the Church’ (Q14, 1711). However, as a matter of fact the two extremes, Integralists and Modernists, are on the same front in their opposition to the most fierce and influential party, that of the Jesuits (Q20, 2088). The latter are the party of ‘opportunism’ and ‘centrism’ (Q20, 2088). Its main goal is to arrest and reabsorb the so-called ‘apostasy of the masses’ – the emergence of the popular classes as a political subject in the aftermath of the French Revolution. Jesuit activities, reinforced by the lay association Azione Cattolica (Catholic Action) and centrist Catholic parties, aimed to guarantee a large popular basis in support of Catholicdemocratic movements (Q20, 2101). Such a programme and these manoeuvres

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seemed to Gramsci to be the most lucid and effective programme of appropriation, discipline, and centralisation of the most dangerous of ‘modern heresies’, mass movements. The constitution of Catholic parties appeared to him a realistic and up-to-date measure. It took into account the decline of the Church due to its transformation from a total institution encompassing the entire society (in the Middle Ages) to ‘one party among others’.50 However, these measures and the democratic programme of the centrists were contingent and precarious. In fact, according to the Bellarminian principle of indirect control of politics, all cultural and political strategic efforts were subordinated to the interests and prerogatives of ecclesiastical power. Recent events showed that the Church rapidly abandons its ‘party’ as well as its ‘social doctrine’ as soon as ‘men of the Providence’ enter the political arena as savers of the Fatherland, especially in moments of deep political and social crisis (Q9 and Q13, 1194–5 and 1619–22). This happened already with the Church’s support of the clerical-reactionary politics of Napoleon III (Q1, 119) and, more recently, with Mussolini (Q5, 546) and ‘Hitlerism’ (Q20, 2103).51

5

How the History of Science Can Serve Catholic Revisionism: Pierre Duhem and His Epigones

In the Prison Notebooks Gramsci regarded Bellarmine as the historical and symbolic point of reference for Catholic agendas of hegemony. He also shared the widespread image of him as an inquisitor responsible for the clash between the Church and ‘modern culture’ – whether the clash with the philosophy of immanence symbolised by Bruno or with (positivist) science symbolised by 50

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Cf. Q14, 1714: ‘[Il Cattolicesimo], è passato dal godimento incontrastato di certi diritti, alla difesa di essi e alla rivendicazione di essi in quanto perduti. Che sotto certi aspetti la Chiesa abbia rinforzato certe sue organizzazioni è certo incontestabile, che sia più concentrata, che abbia stretto le file, che abbia fissato meglio certi principi e certe direttive, ma questo significa appunto un suo minore influsso nella società e quindi la necessità della lotta e di una più strenua milizia’. On several occasions, Gramsci looks at Napoleon III’s seizure of power after the revolution of 1848. He conquered the ‘popular dregs’ by means of a nationalist demagoguery (Q19, 2054) that shows profound similarities with the advent of Fascism in Italy. In both cases the ‘historical events culminated with a great heroic personality’ (Q13, 1619). The analogy between Napoleon III and Mussolini also applies to their religious politics and the collusion with the Vatican. Gramsci speaks of ‘Bonapartism’ or ‘regressive Caesarism’ to ‘express the situation, in which the struggling forces are balanced in a catastrophic manner, that is, their balance is such that continuing the struggle cannot end except with reciprocal destruction’ (Q13, 1619).

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Galileo.52 Indeed, this role as a persecutor of scientific and philosophical innovators was one of the major shadows obscuring the bright image of the political Saint and Doctor of the Church in the eyes of cultivated people at the beginning of the twentieth century: Was Bellarmine not the inquisitor who persecuted many intellectuals, philosophical and theological dissidents? Was he not the person who most directly contributed to Bruno’s death sentence and who communicated to Galileo the prohibition to disseminate the Copernican heresy? Did he not play a role in the condemnation of the heliocentric theory of 1616? It was of course the task of a historian of science to disperse these clouds. The chauvinist physicist and historian of science Pierre Duhem had already undertaken this assignment in the first decade of the twentieth century.53 In a classic-to-be of the history of science, ΣΩΖΕΙΝ ΤΑ ΦΑΙΝΟΜΕΝΑ: Essai sur la notion de théorie physique de Platon à Galilée (To Save the Phenomena: An Essay on the Idea of Physical Theory from Plato to Galileo),54 Duhem offered a reassessment of the epistemological positions of the Church in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries based on the anachronistic projection of later philosophical categories onto the past. In particular, Duhem reinterpreted Henri Poincaré’s conventionalism as a modern form of Pauline scepticism, which he used to retrospectively blame Copernicus and Galileo for their realism and, on the opposite front, to commend ‘cautious’ theologians such as Andreas Osiander, Bellarmine and Urban VIII for their attempts to preserve those scientists from epistemological errors. In other words, Duhem rehabilitated the Renaissance Jesuit and inquisitor Bellarmine as a pure philosopher of science, as the one who tried to teach to the stubborn Galileo the philosophical lesson that science, in particular astronomy, is only fictionalist. It should be noted that such treatment dismissed as irrelevant all juridical and political aspects of the events that led to Galileo’s condemnation and abjur52

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Q6, 809: ‘Il Bellarmino condusse il processo contro Galileo e redasse gli otto motivi che portarono Giordano Bruno al rogo. […] Il processo di Galileo, di Giordano Bruno, ecc. e l’efficacia della Controriforma nell’impedire lo sviluppo scientifico in Italia. Sviluppo delle scienze nei paesi protestanti o dove la Chiesa ⟨era⟩ meno immediatamente forte che in Italia. La Chiesa avrebbe contribuito alla snazionalizzazione degli intellettuali italiani in due modi: positivamente, come organismo universale che preparava personale a tutto il mondo cattolico, e negativamente, costringendo ad emigrare quegli intellettuali che non volevano sottomettersi alla disciplina controriformistica’. Note that the image of the Jesuits in France was marred, in the nineteenth century, by their support of the monarchy and Napoleon III and their direct or indirect role in the Dreyfus affair. Their order was banished from France from 1901 to 1923 as a result of quarrels concerning education and the separation between the Church and the State. Cf. Woodrow 1984, pp. 114–15. Duhem 1908.

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ation of heliocentrism, as well as the cultural line imposed onto Catholics by Counter-Reformist Rome, and the asymmetry in the power relations between the inquisitors and the people they tried, not to mention the relations of force between Rome and other powers in Italy and beyond.55 In Duhem’s narrative these aspects became invisible. Accordingly, the Copernican issue was reduced to a dialogue about the epistemological status of hypotheses and the empirical demonstrability of the heliocentric planetary theory. In the long run, the success of Duhem’s revisionism rested on isolating epistemology and science from wider cultural contexts. In its main points, this approach anticipated later internalist accounts of the Scientific Revolution; thus the Cold War historian of science par excellence, Alexandre Koyré, would present the rise of modern science in the sixteenth century as a ‘spiritual revolution’.56 A curious complementary tendency to Duhem’s implicit distinction between Bellarmine the scientist and Bellarmine the inquisitor is witnessed by recent interpretations of Galileo, evident in the division between his intellectual and experimental activity on the one hand and his faith on the other: ‘Galileo was both a scientist and a believer; it was Galileo the scientist who wrote, Galileo the believer who recanted’.57 No doubt Galileo was a believer. However, what would have been the consequences for his life, if he did not recant? Arguably, after Galileo’s (partial) rehabilitation under Karol Wojtyła, more efforts were undertaken for a double rehabilitation, of Galileo as a Catholic who supported the reconciliation of Scripture with science, and of Bellarmine as a far-seeing philosopher of science.58 According to this line of thought, both discussants were correct ‘in their own right’ in their ‘exchanges’ over the Copernican system and natural science. The methodological limitation of this interpretation consists in isolating two actors from their historical framework. It neglects the real and symbolic meaning of Galileo’s condemnation and the asymmetrical relationship between an inquisitor and his interlocutor at a social, political and cultural level.59 Such fragmentary treatment downgrades the condemnations of the Copernican planetary theory and of Galileo to the

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On the functions and functioning of the Inquisition in the Italian peninsula, a reference work is Prosperi 1996. Koyré 1943. I discuss this in Omodeo 2016a, esp. pp. 73–6. Langford 1966, p. 180. Representative of this trend is Fantoli 2003. Luigi Firpo’s scholarly work is a standard reference for issues of Inquisitorial persecution of intellectuals. Carlo Ginzburg, especially in Il formaggio e i vermi (Ginzburg 1976), has initiated a strand of studies on the persecution of the popular classes.

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rank of mere episodes (later ‘enlarged’ by ‘hostile’ historians). Since the Copernican issue, as Sheila J. Rabin complains in crude terms, ‘has traditionally been used as the proof that the Catholic Church and the Jesuits were anti-science’,60 an exculpation of the inquisitor requires that the events be presented either as historically insignificant or as a misunderstanding. At the same time, Galileo could be enrolled in support of the Jesuits’ cause by arguing, along with father Wallace, for his Jesuit legacy as far as methodology and logical reasoning are concerned.61 As to Bellarmine’s celebrated ‘philosophy of science’, it is opportune to stress that his rejection of the Copernican planetary theory was not based on scientific conventionalism in the modern sense but rather on considerations about the hierarchy of various forms of knowledge: theological, natural, and mathematical. In accordance with a typically Jesuit Scholastic approach, he assigned to theology and biblical exegesis precedence over natural inquiry and mathematical astronomy. On this account, biblical passages and the Church tradition could and should decide natural issues such as terrestrial motion. These theoretical positions are not as completely outdated as one would hope. Politically influential theo-conservative philosophers revive them in publications with scholarly impact. For instance, the former Berlusconi Senator Marcello Pera penned an ‘Apology of Bellarmine’ that has appeared in the Cambridge Companion to Galileo. In this apology, he reappraised Bellarmine’s theological position relative to science: The aim of this essay is to maintain that the independence principle [science and religion belong to, and are competent on, two different domains: nature and faith] cannot be accepted by a Catholic believer, because although it favors science it may damage faith.62 In order to reinforce his thesis, Pera eventually quoted the views of Pope Pius XII.63 He presented the anti-modernist encyclical Humani generis (1950) as an epistemological reference for believers also leading to the reappraisal of Bellarmine’s ‘limitation principle’. According to it, science should be controlled by faith. The latter sets the boundaries of the former. Pius XII’s encyclical attacked,

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Rabin 2014, p. 96 (emphasis added). Wallace 1991. Pera 1998, p. 368. Pera 1998, pp. 382–5. For the context of Pius XII, it might be expedient to mention the Vatican’s collusion with Fascism, as reconstructed by Finchelstein 2010, esp. Ch. 4 ‘A “Christianized” Fascism’.

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among other things, Darwin’s evolutionism. Pera’s reappraisal goes far beyond old defensive strategies: it is in fact a commitment to a different modernity and to cultural politics which rally the spirit that animated inquisitorial practices, trials and condemnations during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.64

6

Technical Reductionism as a Means of Historical Revisionism: The Case of the Gregorian Calendar Reform

Reductionist tendencies in the history of science have re-emerged in more recent Jesuit historiography. For instance, they are particularly evident in the treatment of the Gregorian calendar reform accomplished in 1582 by the Jesuit mathematician and astronomer Christopher Clavius, often presented as the founder of the Jesuit way to science.65 Most historians of science have restricted their judgement on that reform to its technical aspects, such as its accuracy, the employment of Alfonsine and Copernican astronomical tables, discussion of the expediency of subtracting a leap day from the Julian calendar every 100 years with the exception of years divisible by 400, and the like.66 From a technical viewpoint this reform was a success. Still, this should not induce historians to reduce any objection or resistance against it in early Modernity to a mark of backwardness, as Rabin did in her essay ‘Early Modern Jesuit Science: A Historiographical Essay’ in the first issue of the new Journal of Jesuit Studies: [Clavius’] most famous accomplishment [was] the reform of the calendar. And for those who think that Protestantism was per se more amenable to reform of astronomical sciences than Catholicism, it is worth noting that the reform of the calendar, also a major accomplishment in astronomy, was not adopted in England because it was considered Catholic until the mid-eighteenth century.67

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The theological-political agenda of Pera is no mystery. It is a call for the rediscovery and recovery of the Christian roots of the Occident, particularly of Europe, as presented in his and Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger’s (later Pope Benedict XVI) Without Roots: The West, Relativism, Christianity, Islam (Ratzinger and Pera 2006; originally published in Italian in 2005). Cf. Romano 1999. Cf. Feldhay 1999, p. 109: ‘No study about Jesuit science, the variety of subjects comprising it, and its capacity for production, reproduction, and transmission can be told without mentioning Christoph Clavius, the figure most responsible for promoting it and fashioning its basic physiognomy’. See for instance Casanovas 1996. Rabin 2014, p. 95.

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It can be doubted that Clavius’ reform was a major accomplishment in astronomy which can stand up to comparison with achievements such as Reinhold’s astronomical tables, Brahe’s cometary theory, or Kepler’s laws of planetary motion.68 But this is not the main point here. The issue is the political dimension of science as an instrument of hegemony, that is to say, of direction and consensus within society. As a matter of fact, Clavius’ contemporaries, especially in Protestant countries but also in the Orthodox countries and even in Catholic Europe, were astonished that the pope arrogated the right to impose a reform that concerned at once the civil, the political, and the religious spheres. Adoption of the calendar reform was not perceived as a technicality. In the context of the confessional conflicts of the time, accepting this measure meant acknowledging the authority and superiority of Rome not only in matters of faith but also in politics and society. On what basis could the pope expect that civil authorities throughout Europe would embrace the Catholic calendar? The calendar controversy between Protestants and Catholics famously opposed scholars such as Kepler’s mentor, the Tübingen mathematician Michael Mästlin, against Jesuits such as Clavius and Antonio Possevino. This was by no means a quarrel about the possible solutions of a technical problem – which would also admit other possibilities – but a confessional and political conflict.69 The proceedings of the Vatican conference on the Gregorian Reform of the Calendar celebrating its 400th anniversary (1582–1982) offer an example of technical reductionism. While the volume deals extensively with the technical problems of the calendar and their treatment from the Council of Nicaea up to the sixteenth century, only one chapter is dedicated to the inter-confessional tensions that followed the promulgation of the calendar in 1582. In one of the contributions to the volume, August Ziggelaar, S.J., first acknowledges the confessional character of the measure but then makes a claim for its universality, thus incurring a non sequitur: ‘The Pope presented his bull in 1582 as an imple-

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Cf. Pantin 1996. The nineteenth-century historian of the calendar reform Ferdinand Kaltenbrunner distinctly perceived the divisive character of the papal imposition of the new calendar. Kaltenbrunner 1876, pp. 410–11: ‘Nun aber war es zu spät. Einst hatten die Väter des Basler Concils die Kalenderreform verschoben, um nicht neuen Grund zur Zwietracht zu geben. Zur Zeit, als Gregor XIII die Bulle “Inter gravissimas” in die Welt sandte, befand sich die Christenheit wieder in zwei Lager gespalten, und was damals zu Basel vermieden worden war, trat jetzt ein. Auch in der Zeitrechnung standen sich nun die Parteien gegenüber, wieder um das Osterfest geführt, wie einst, als der nun vom Pabstthum verbesserte Kalender noch keine festen Formen angenommen gehabt hatte’. For a recent overview of the large number of Renaissance publications pro and contra the calendar, see Steinmetz 2010.

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mentation of the decrees of the Council of Trent and thus as an act of the Counter-Reformation, but […] the decree of 1582 is an ecumenical act’.70 In the brief conclusive chapter, ‘The Reaction of Astronomers to the Gregorian Calendar’, Heribert M. Nobis includes the objections of Protestants but always tempers them with a refutation of some sort and a hint at Protestants’ tendentiousness. Yet Nobis also remarks: ‘For Rome the reform was primarily […] a religious concern’.71 Indeed, it was as religious as it was political since it concerned issues of authority, sovereignty, and cultural hegemony. To sum up, the clarification of technical aspects involved in reforms and activities based on scientific knowledge, no matter how useful and interesting it might be, should not lead to oversimplifications concerning the political and religious meaning and impact of those reforms. Technical appreciation should not coincide with appreciation tout court. Such a transgression into another genus from technical reconstruction to cultural-political endorcement, should be considered illegitimate.

7

Bias toward Historical Revisionism: The Copernican Question Revised

According to the new spokesmen for the Jesuit cause, traditional historiography put too much emphasis on the Copernican issue, which, in the end, should be regarded as a marginal topic in the broad context of modern science. It has even been argued that the 1616 prohibition of the Copernican system had a positive effect since it ‘allowed for its study as hypothesis’ and ‘the Jesuits took full advantage of this’.72 Against such provocative statements, it is expedient to simply recount the central meaning that the Copernican system acquired in the scientific developments of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, at a time when Galileo undertook to bring mechanics and astronomy together, Kepler envisaged the possibility of implementing a celestial physics and Descartes opened up a novel methodological and natural perspective in support of his postCopernican cosmology. The impact of the condemnation of 1616 and of Gali-

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Ziggelaar 1983, p. 227. Cf. Ziggelaar 1983, pp. 201–2: ‘The decree of 1582 was issued with papal authority. It is written in the form of an apostolic letter or papal bull. […] From the very start of the apostolic letter Pope Gregory appeals to the authority of the Council of Trent’. Nobis 1983, p. 245. Rabin 2014, p. 98.

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leo’s trial in 1633, and the long-lasting consequences these events had on the developments of modern European culture, can hardly be underestimated. While Galileo, confined to house arrest, could have his late works published only outside Italy, and Descartes renounced the publication of Le Monde to avoid persecution, ‘the Jesuits took full advantage’ of the situation, indeed. The case in point is the most celebrated seventeenth-century Jesuit astronomer Giovanni Battista Riccioli. He was the author of a huge astronomical work, in folio, programmatically entitled Almagestum novum (The New Almagest, 1651). This Ptolemaic restoration contains, among other things, the most remarkable effort to affirm geocentrism after Galileo and Kepler. The fourth section of the second volume, ‘De systemate Terrae motae’ (‘On the System with the Earth in Motion’), is a 200-page rejection of geo-kinetic planetary models. Here, Riccioli passed in review all arguments he could gather and conceive against heliocentrism. His motivations are revealed by the conclusion of the section, which contains a reprint of the Inquisition decree of 5 March 1616 prohibiting the Copernican system, a list of passages of Copernicus’ De revolutionibus censored by the Index, and the 1633 condemnation of Galileo and his abjuration. Riccioli regarded these documents as the final word in the controversy over Copernicus’ system. Power is not merely accidental or external to Riccioli’s astronomical work and epistemology. Rather, obedience to Rome and Catholic dogma is crucial to his refutation of heliocentrism. The censorial note in the Almagestum novum appears as the premise rather than the conclusion of his reasoning. Copernican contemporaries were inclined to connect such confessional petitiones principii to Loyola’s spiritual precept concerning intellectual submission: ‘To maintain a right mind in all things we must always maintain that the white I see, I shall believe to be black, if the hierarchical Church so stipulates’.73 For instance, the German physicist and politician Otto von Guericke, in his famous Experimenta nova (New Experiments, 1672), questioned whether, after the Inquisition decree of 1616, obedient Catholics should be able to undertake an investigation of astronomy independent of dogmatic concerns, that is, based on reason and experience instead of faith: Those who follow either the peripatetic school or the papal decree of 1616, which was carried out by the Congregation of the Cardinals […], are forced to accept no other system but that [revolving] around the immobile Earth. Yet, they could devise nothing else but the Tychonic [geo73

Saint Ignatius of Loyola 1996, ‘Rules to follow in view of the true attitude of mind that we ought to maintain [as members] within the Church militant’, rule 13, p. 358.

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heliocentric system] […]. They have to embrace and advocate it, no matter whether it is true or false. A question [hence] arises: in this manner, is a true astronomy (or a correct and just coordination and disposition of worldly bodies) possible?74 The problem of the ‘scientific ethos’ is not to be confused with claims about being ‘good Catholics’, sometimes advanced as an excuse for Jesuits’ dogmatism.75 The most grotesque attempt at historical revisionism in this matter is a recent apologetic book by Christopher M. Graney, Setting Aside All Authority: Giovanni Battista Riccioli and the Science against Copernicus in the Age of Galileo. The main thesis lies in the subtitle and is repeated many times throughout the book: in the seventeenth century, science was ‘against the Copernican system’.76 Graney contends that ‘pure reason’ and ‘independence from all authority’ characterised Riccioli’s adherence to geocentrism (in the geo-heliocentric variant), while the supporters of the Copernican system were motivated by religious fervour.77 As far as Riccioli’s disinterest is concerned, he limits himself to quoting a few bland passages in which the Jesuit astronomer asserted the independence of his judgement. Graney seems to believe that the issue of authority can be simply elucidated by discussing a few arguments brought forward against Copernicus. He selects the ‘strongest’ and assesses their coherence and tenability. Out of the 77 anti-Copernican arguments presented in New Almagest II 9, they only amount to a few objections.78 As to religiously-tinged Copernicanism, Graney’s discussion of the relationship between science and religion in the cosmological debates of early modernity is remarkably superficial. He isolates a particular figure, the Dutch astronomer Philips Lansbergen, and frames his stances as representative of the attitude toward religion of all those who embraced the Copernican system. Lansbergen argued that the enormous dimensions of the stars bear witness to God’s omnipotence and Graney uses this to demonstrate the ‘anti-Copernican reliance on “scientific” arguments to support their views, and Copernican reliance on “religious” arguments to support theirs’.79 In support of this surprising claim, Graney quotes passages by

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Omodeo 2014, pp. 320–1. Rabin 2014, p. 96. Graney 2015. See e.g., p. 75. Graney 2015, p. 8. I discuss the details in my review (Omodeo 2017). Graney 2015, p. 63.

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Copernicans emphasising the role of God as the Creator of the universe. He fails to notice that these commonplace statements are almost as ancient as astronomy and that in early modernity they were used to support the arguments of heliocentric astronomers as well as of their opponents. In general, his modest knowledge of the context of early modern science leads him to frame science and religion in terms of hypostases, or universal categories transcending history, and to neglect their concrete historical conformations. His suggestion to reassess the ‘scientific’ basis of the condemnation of the Copernican system in 1616 is outrageous;80 it neglects the history of the Inquisition and censorship and softens the gravity of the persecution that many faced simply because of their ideas. The historically relevant question is not just whether the supporters of geocentrism associated with the Catholic establishment had tenable physical or mathematical arguments, but by what means the Copernican controversy (like other scientific controversies of the time in Italy) was dispelled. Unfortunately, by the time Riccioli decided to publish his 77 arguments against Copernicus together with a copy of the official documents condemning the Copernican system and Galileo, no supporter of the Copernican system could publicly address his arguments in Italy. ‘History has not been kind to the anti-Copernicans’ – Graney laments in his conclusion.81 This is easily said. One ought to remind Graney that no anti-Copernican was ever tried, persecuted, censored, prohibited or sentenced to jail or to death because of his cosmological and philosophical views. Thus, his claim that ‘science was against Copernicus’ appears as a misleading euphemism in which ‘science’ is a substitute for ‘the Inquisition’. This rewording does not help us understand the cultural tensions of early modern scientific culture, nor does it do Riccioli’s scientific merits justice to use him in a revisionist attempt to downplay responsibility in some of the worst cases of intolerance in early modern intellectual history. Graney’s apologetic book perhaps does not seem to merit much scholarly attention. However, it was by no means a marginal publication. On the contrary, its publisher is a major academic press, which advertises on the web as follows: Established in 1949, the University of Notre Dame Press is the largest Catholic university press in the world, and a scholarly publisher of distinguished books in a number of academic disciplines […]

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Graney 2015, p. 68. Graney 2015, p. 141.

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Located on the University of Notre Dame campus, the Press is a publishing partner with several university departments, programs, and institutes. Through those efforts, it extends the reach and reputation of the University while fulfilling its charge to advance intellectual exploration and knowledge.82 The high visibility of such a publisher lends credibility to Graney’s work, which has already received the approval of reputed scholars in the history of science and several positive reviews.83 At the same time, its publication venue suggests that this apologetic book is a contribution to a broader revisionist strand, supported by American Catholic institutions, bearing witness to the fact that the deprecated ideological disputes of the past are not over.

8

Reversing Roles: Portraying the Jesuits as Victims

One remarkable aspect of revisionist historiography is its strong bias toward terminological reversals, in which the roles of victim and perpetrator become confused, alongside the meaning of dichotomies such as ‘critique’ versus ‘tradition’, ‘argumentation’ versus ‘authority’, and ‘reason’ versus ‘prejudice’. In other words, we face a reversal of values that I would synthesise as ‘antiEnlightenment’. According to this reversed perspective, traditional (to wit negative) historiography is that stressing the intrinsic limits of the Jesuit cultural enterprise which intentionally perpetuated the cult of tradition, acquiescence in violent means to impose cultural uniformity, and submission to the principle of authority in society as well as in science. Jesuits can appear as the victims of traditionalists, that is, those following the tradition linking Galileo to Descartes and the French Enlightenment of Voltaire, Jean-Baptiste D’ Alembert and Denis

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http://undpress.nd.edu/about (accessed 13 May 2016). Although the University of Notre Dame (ranked among the top 20 American universities) is no Jesuit foundation, it is committed to a religious mission (‘the formation of an authentic human community graced by the Spirit of Christ’) within a Catholic framework: ‘[Mission:] The Catholic identity of the University depends upon, and is nurtured by, the continuing presence of a predominant number of Catholic intellectuals. This ideal has been consistently maintained by the University leadership throughout its history. What the University asks of all its scholars and students, however, is not a particular creedal affiliation, but a respect for the objectives of Notre Dame and a willingness to enter into the conversation that gives it life and character’ https://www.nd.edu/about/mission‑statement/ (accessed 13 May 2016). http://undpress.nd.edu/books/P03169?keywords=setting+aside#reviews and http://undp ress.nd.edu/books/P03169?keywords=setting+aside#description (accessed 13 May 2016).

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Diderot. Moreover, historical revisionism is connected with attempts to discredit not only the critics but also the victims. Galileo stubbornly infringed a veto to teach the Copernican system; hence, he had to be punished according to the laws of his time.84 Bruno should be thankful to his executioners because his ‘vain’ speculations would not have been acknowledged otherwise.85 Along the same lines, it might be argued that the Inquisition ‘was progress from the viewpoint of jurisprudence’.86 According to his biographers, Bellarmine was once deeply upset by the execution of a heretic. Historians have speculated whether this was Bruno or somebody else.87 To be sure, it is likely that some Jesuit scientists suffered for the constraints and censorship of their Order and the Catholic Church. Such inner conflicts emerge from the biographies of Jesuits confronting the limits that their superiors or their organisation imposed upon them. Nonetheless, we should not forget that the members of an institution share responsibility for

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Fantoli, in his conciliatory monograph on Galileo, Copernicanism and the Church, remarks (Fantoli 2013, p. 194): ‘That Galileo’s responsibility for the prohibition of the Copernican system was also an important one has been maintained […] in “apologetic” writings by Catholics. According to these authors it was, as a matter of fact, Galileo’s imprudence and his misplaced zeal in insisting on the Church’s acceptance of Copernicanism, but without his supplying sufficient proofs for it, together with his intrusion into the field of Biblical exegesis that caused the Church to take an abrupt position which, otherwise, it would have been able to avoid’. Fantoli, however, is not dismissive of the Church’s responsibilities in the anti-Copernican decree of 1616 and the condemnation of Galileo, in 1633. See p. 339: ‘Galileo, with his tactical errors, must undoubtedly bear a weighty part of the responsibility for the fact of the condemnation. But the responsibility for the way in which the condemnation occurred, and especially for the abjuration, falls without a doubt on the shoulders of the Church of those times and specifically on the organs and on the methods which were used in the exercise of the Church’s authority’. Feldhay 2000, pp. 332–3: ‘Bruno’s vulnerability […] was not simply a historically contingent fact that casually brought upon him a tragic end. It was a structural feature of his position in a cultural field that rejected him, but that, in other ways, was manipulated by him in a paradoxical attempt [in his Italian philosophical work] to invent, ex nihilo, a whole discourse, including a completely new set of discursive rules and the concept of an omniscient author. […] The circumstances of his imprisonment by the Venetian and Roman Inquisition dramatized his loneliness and provided the occasion for turning a life story into a powerful cultural icon. […] What could not be gained in his real life was achieved through death: what seemed ridiculous in his own discourse was transformed by culture into a universal moral value’. A recent popularising article on the origins of the Inquisition by the medieval historian Lothar Kolmer entitled ‘Hast du niedergekniet?’ was accompanied by the subtitle: ‘Trotz Folterqualen und Todesurteilen: Die Inquisition war rechtshistorisch ein Fortschritt’ (Kolmer 2014). Cf. Firpo 2000, pp. clix–clx.

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decisions and actions contributing to the efficiency, reinforcement, and expansion of their own institution and to the fulfilment of its strategies and aims. These degrees of responsibility are certainly different and can be indirect but cannot be obliterated. In our case, as Mario Biagioli has remarked, it would be wrong to begin a contextualizing analysis of the Jesuit mathematicians only after they had already become mathematicians of the Society of Jesus and were faced with a range of constraints and resources which framed their later decisions and claims. By doing so, […] [one] gets close to naturalizing the context of Jesuit science as if this was the only world in which these practitioners could operate – a methodological move which then tends to present their cosmological and methodological choices as the ‘natural’ result of such a context.88 In general, the impersonal treatment of cultural and political decisions and actions as descending from institutional or historical mechanisms is ethically disputable. At the very least, such explanations cannot replace reflection on the responsibilities of historical actors. In fact, the image of the Jesuits as victims contrasts with the quantitative data relative to their expansion and success. These figures concern the incredibly large number of their scientific or pedagogical publications during early Modernity: A religious corporation, consisting largely of university-trained theologians and ordained priests formally committed to the ‘care of souls’, was able to produce a corpus of some 5,000 published titles touching on virtually every branch of the natural and mathematical sciences and a corps of priest-mathematicians, priest-astronomers, priest-philosophers, and priest-naturalists continuously active for nearly two hundred years.89 Furthermore, the Jesuits’ success can be quantified by counting the number of colleges and universities belonging to their educational network. They amounted to ‘about 700 schools of all kinds in Europe in 1749 and another 100 in the rest of the world’.90 These are indicators of an international organisation controlling the most extended network of teaching institutions in early modernity. 88 89 90

Biagioli 1994, p. 645 (emphasis added). Harris 1996, p. 288. Grendler 2014, pp. 7–25.

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In the face of this data, it is hardly conceivable that the stability of the Jesuit organisation could suffer from prejudices expressed by some intellectuals, however influential, such as their former pupils Descartes, Voltaire, and Diderot. According to conspiracy theories, the philosophes were able to spread rumours that eventually led to the suppression of the Order in the eighteenth century. Most likely, this was the result of political clashes between the Church and the rulers of Catholic States, beginning with Spain and Portugal, that is to say, countries that were not historically home to the Enlightenment movement. As has recently been stressed in a study on the suppression of the Jesuit Order, the Jesuits were neither the victims nor the targets of anybody. Rather, they were one of the great forces in the [political and cultural] battlefield which advanced its program in a harsh conflict against other [forces]. In the end they were defeated, not because they succumbed to extraneous circumstances, but because, after they fought and won many other dramatic battles, they incurred their Waterloo.91

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Rewriting Modernity: Postmodern Opportunities for Conservative Agendas

While an inquiry into the history of science in all its facets, including all actors and contextual factors, has to be welcomed as an improvement relative to earlier crypto-positivist assessments of science and its history, revisionist narratives jeopardise this project at its roots and undermine the possibility of critical historiography. Recent attempts to revise Jesuit Science in its specificity, thus including its connection with values, should be seen as a part of new reactionary tendencies. The rehabilitation of the ‘Jesuit experience’ as such is mirrored by scholars’ celebration of and support for a different way to modernity, namely that embodied by the Jesuit project. In its radical version, the Jesuit Science thesis can be formulated as follows: there are both an alternative science and an alternative modernity exemplified by Jesuit Science that have been thus far neglected but need to be reassessed. The cultural presupposition for such claims, it seems to me, has been 91

Renda 1993, p. 16: ‘I gesuiti non furono né la vittima né il bersaglio di alcuno, ma una delle grandi forze in campo, che sostenne le proprie ragioni in aspro conflitto con altre. Alla fine essi furono sconfitti, ma non perché succubi di circostanze a loro estranee, bensì perché, dopo aver combattuto e vinto tante altre clamorose battaglie, finirono per incappare nella loro Waterloo’. My translation.

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the extreme relativisation of science and historiography. In fact, the sceptical, postmodern turn toward narrativisation in history opened up a space of legitimacy for Jesuit Science as such. If ‘reason’ is just a fetish of the Enlightenment, theo-conservatives can claim, why could we not base our knowledge on a principle of authority? If ‘science’ is a historical product, why should we not put all alternatives at the same level? For instance, why should the geocentrism of Riccioli not be (at least) considered on the same plane with Galileo’s heliocentrism? Why should Descartes’ natural philosophy be considered less bizarre than the Aristotelianism of his Jesuit adversaries? Why could we not treat the Jesuits as victims of their intellectual opponents? Why can we not treat those condemned by the Inquisition or marginalised by exponents of the official cultural line as arrogant provocateurs? Let me stress, first, that there is good reason to be concerned about the rhetorical possibility of equating victims with executioners, those who make institutional mechanisms work and those who are persecuted by them, those who are in power and those who are not, as well as those who benefit from a hegemonic position and those who struggle to affirm a heterodox viewpoint. One of the historians who contributed most to the study of institutionalised mechanisms of control and persecutions in early modernity, Carlo Ginzburg, cautioned against ‘the sceptical theses based on the reduction of historiography to its narrative or rhetorical dimension’, arguing that the limitation of relativism is ‘at once cognitive, political, and moral’.92 In History, Rhetoric, and Proof, he insisted that, although interpretations might diverge, a principle of reality will always limit the horizon of possible legitimate interpretations: [Historical] sources are neither open windows, as the positivists believe, nor fences obstructing vision, as the sceptics hold: if anything, we could compare them to distorting mirrors. The analysis of the specific distortion of construction [interpretation] […] is not incompatible with the refutations inflicted by the principle of reality. Knowledge (even historical knowledge) is possible.93 In other words, historicism and historical scepticism do not coincide. We can add, as a corollary, that historical epistemology, while pointing to the historicity of the theoretical basis for scientific concepts, explanations, and practices, does not imply that anything goes.94 That rational demonstration and empir92 93 94

Ginzburg 1999, pp. 1 and 20. Ginzburg 1999, p. 25. It might not be a coincidence that Paul Feyerabend found in Jesuit apologies arguments

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ical experience evolve historically does not mean that these basic elements of the scientific enterprise can be renounced. By contrast, argumentation by authority and faith are essentially incompatible with modern scientific culture even though they interacted in many ways with its historical development. Even if one indulges in the narrativisation of historiography, one must take note that, while this offers some opportunity for legitimating other ways to modernity and to science, nonetheless the instrumental use of this opportunity by conservatives infringes on a basic tenet of postmodern discourse: the call for self-reflection and self-relativisation. To be sure, these are incompatible with neo-Catholic foundationalism. In particular, self-reflection means making the political and cultural agendas underlying specific strands of historical investigation explicit and not disguising them as objective and disinterested. The missing link in Jesuit revisionism is the explicit connection between historiography and religion-cum-politics or, to put it more succinctly, a treatment of religion as politics. Indeed, the political dimension is the missing or marginalised element in most recent accounts of Jesuit Science despite the fact that it is crucial for both an assessment of the history and the historiography of the Jesuits.

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Jesuit Education as a Matter of Cultural Hegemony: Past …

I should now address a crucial issue in the history of the Jesuits’ cultural activity: education. This has been celebrated in recent studies for its relevance in the dissemination of mathematical and natural knowledge during early modernity.95 Undeniably, Jesuit colleges propagated mathematical and empirical knowledge and formed proficient mathematicians and physicists such as

95

for his anarchic epistemology. See Feyerabend 1975, pp. 192–3: ‘It is interesting to see that Cardinal Bellarmine, though by no means an anarchist, was guided by considerations very similar to those just outlined: he wants social peace. “Galileo did not himself show much concern for the common, ignorant people, the ‘herd’ as he called them, in his rather snobbish attitude to all who were not great mathematicians and experimentalists of his own type. Even if, as he suggested, they should lose their faith through being told that the Earth was speeding round the Sun at a rate of eighteen miles per second, still Copernicanism must be preached in season and out of season. The common man […] was a person very dear to the heart of Bellarmine and he could not understand Galileo’s headlong precipitancy in forcing an issue that might trouble the faith of the simple when he could so easily have kept his intuitions, as scientists do today, for debate and quiet study among his peers” ’ (Feyerabend 1975, citing Broderick 1961, p. 366ff.). The most important study is probably Romano 1999.

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Torricelli, Descartes, Mersenne, Fontenelle, Volta, and Laplace (all of whom, however, dissociated themselves from Jesuit pedagogy).96 This should not make us forget, however, that it is not a historiographical projection to say that Jesuit schools were instrumental to the cultural policy of Rome. It was not only the opponents to the expansion of their educational system, but also the early Jesuits themselves, who distinctly saw their political and propagandistic mission as aiming at the establishment of post-Tridentine Catholic consensus. In the seventeenth century, for example, the Jesuit historian Daniello Bartoli boasted about the success of the pedagogy of his Order emphasising that in their schools the children of Catholics ‘received the milk of pure doctrine’ (han preso il latte della pura dottrina) while ‘the children [of heretics] were transformed into Papists’ (i figliuoli [degli eretici] si trasformavano in Papisti).97 In particular, university professors and civil authorities perceived the Jesuit expansion in the field of education as a clerical and Roman infiltration threatening their political and cultural autonomy as early as the sixteenth century. In Catholic countries, especially in France and Italy, university professors often blocked the Jesuit penetration in order to save their independence. Heated quarrels took place in two of the most prominent medieval universities, namely Paris and Padua. The Parisian quarrel reached its peak in 1564. In that year the University opposed the Jesuit Order in a trial about the legitimacy of the Jesuits’ teaching in Paris and their ambition to be included in the teaching body of the prestigious institution.98 They had established a college in town, the Collège de Clermont, thanks to influential supporters but their practices infringed on the traditional separation between clergy and lay teachers, since they opened their classes to students not belonging to their Order, for free. The University of Paris refused to institutionalise this situation and to receive Jesuit teachers as part of its body. As a response, the Jesuits appealed to the Parliament and went to court to contest the issue. On that occasion the lawyer and historian Étienne Pasquier defended the university (lay) interests in front of countless people curious about the outcome (à la veue d’une infinité de personnes, qui attendoient quel seroit l’ evenement). In his speech, he offered a genuinely political viewpoint on the controversy. He claimed that the presence of a militant order professing unconditional loyalty to the papacy threatened the autonomy and the security of

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For a list of Jesuit-educated scientists, see e.g. Feingold 2003, p. 38. Bartoli 1994, pp. 263–4. Cf. Trocmé Swany 1985.

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France just as it would that of any other State. Moreover, he attacked the tactics of expansion of the Order. That they charged nothing for their classes was especially seen as an illegitimate means to drive students away from the classes held by regular professors, who made a living from the fees paid by students. Pasquier questioned the disinterest of the Jesuits and observed that only ignorant and naive people (une peuvre et idiote populace) could believe in their impartial magnanimity, according to the motto: nemo suis stipendiis militat (nobody goes to war at his own expense).99 He stressed the Jesuits’ ability to amass great riches thanks to ‘occult’ sponsors. In particular, he suggested that behind their Parisian project one could detect a political agenda connected to the interests of Rome and Madrid. The Parisian trial ended ambiguously, as Pasquier admitted: ‘[the Jesuits and the University] both lost and won their cause, since they were not included in the University body but they also were not prevented from continuing their public lectures’.100 In later years, as one reads in Pasquier’s historical work Recherches de la France, the Jesuits revealed their political bias towards the pro-Spanish party during the civil war opposing Catholics, Huguenots, and the in-between party of the politiques. Among the most terrible actions that were ascribed to Jesuit influence, Pasquier counted the attempt at regicide by a Clermont College pupil, Jean Châtel. In 1594 this young man stabbed Henry IV, unpopular with radical Catholics for his Calvinist past and dubious conversion. After that assassination attempt, the Jesuits were banned from France. They would come back only in 1603 on condition of swearing loyalty to the King. Seen as militant supporters of the papacy, they benefited from circumstances favourable to their party but bore the cost of the tensions between states and the Roman Church not only in France but also in other countries. For instance, in 1606 the Senate of Venice expelled them from the Republic for security reasons at a moment in which its relations with Rome were most strained. Anti-Jesuit polemics in Padua were even more heated than in Paris. The Jesuits founded there a sort of counter-university that competed with the public one. In 1591, in a famous oration delivered before the Doge and the Venetian Senators, the philosopher Cesare Cremonini denounced the Jesuits’ educational project as it was undermining the reputation of the Venetian university as well as the authority of the Republic. As he reported, the Jesuits legitimated their anti-Studio (anti-University) on the basis of a Papal bull. Such legitimation 99 100

Pasquier 1633, p. 335. Pasquier 1633, p. 312: ‘Chacun perdit et gagna sa cause. Car ils ne furent agregez au corps de l’ Université, mais aussi ne leur fut il defendu de continuer leurs lectures publiques’. My translation.

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was in breach of the teaching statutes promulgated and recognised by Venice. Like Pasquier, Cremonini stressed the historical link between the University and the political authority. The University, with its philosophers and lawyers, had always offered the Republic advisors on legal, political and cultural matters.101 Cremonini presented the conflict between religious and lay institutions as a renewal of the medieval conflict between Guelphs and Ghibellines in the time of the University’s founder Emperor Frederick II, renowned for his conflicts with the Pontiff. Students from the two Padua universities, respectively called the ‘Bovisti’ (those attending the public University of Bo) versus the ‘Gesuiti’ (attending the Jesuit college), had already engaged in excited confrontations that risked escalation. The controversy ended with the Senate of Venice’s decision to fully support the requests of the University. Its decree (23 December 1591) prevented Jesuits from teaching public classes, because these were patently in competition with the University supported by the State. Anti-Jesuit measures at Paris and Padua were particularly visible owing to the prestige of these institutions. However, these were only two of many conflicts in the panorama of Jesuit expansion in the European educational system of early Modernity. Many quarrels, especially in the German territories, ended with the inclusion of the Jesuits or their appropriation of institutions of higher education (e.g. Vienna and Würzburg in the 1590s).102 In general, Jesuits benefited from influential political support. They were able to exploit con-

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Cremonini particularly denounced the Jesuit strategies to attract students: ‘Do I have to restrict myself to one single point to show that the Jesuit Fathers established an antiStudio? These Fathers produce their own syllabus [Rottolo]. They print it under the title of Padua University of the Society of Jesus [Gymnasio Patavino Societatis Jesu] as if Padua had another University besides that of the Venetian Republic. They announce it publicly following the University ceremony, that is, through an exhortatory oration directed to all the youth aimed at attracting them at the expense of the others. Moreover, they attach it all over the town, in order to circulate it even more publicly. They also have their schools; they ring the bell; they have an established programme for their classes. They make everything public in the same manner as the University of Your Serenity. Please, consider whether this endeavour is just a school for their novices, as they declare, or rather a manifest competition against the University of the Republic. From this competition, the University’s dignity is notably diminished since the students’ attendance is less than it was in the past’. My translation from Cremonini 1878, p. 493. Cremonini’s Oratione can also be found in Cremonini 1998, pp. 53–70. One can still refer to Favaro’s reconstruction of the Jesuit expansion in higher education at the end of the sixteenth century and in the early seventeenth century (Favaro 1878, pp. 409–14). See also Hellyer 2005.

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fessional tensions, presenting themselves as defenders of Roman orthodoxy against Protestant heresies. As a matter of fact, their interests were also in competition with those of the exponents of the humanistic culture whose chairs they targeted. In their strategies to penetrate the University they often appropriated first the teaching of Latin and rhetoric and then tried to occupy other chairs in the faculties of philosophy and theology.103 As has been remarked, the European expansion of the Jesuits led to the constitution of ‘two academic cultures’,104 opposing Counter-Reformist Jesuits to university humanists and professors who had incorporated into their teaching fundamental elements of humanistic culture such as the direct study of sources employing philology. Considering the academic opposition to Jesuit education, the Jesuit historian Bartoli listed the Maestri di scuola (University professors) among the fiercest adversaries of the Jesuits, together with the ‘heretics’.105

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… and Present

In matters concerning education, the tensions between civil authority and Church were present since the very beginning of the Jesuit project in Paris, Padua and elsewhere. The suppression of the Jesuit Order in the eighteenth century marked the beginning of one of the most important endeavours for many modern States, namely the creation and organisation of public educational systems independent of the Church. Actually, education is the culturalpolitical issue par excellence. Education is, in fact, the sphere where the struggle for cultural hegemony becomes heated and is brought into focus. In modern societies, as Gramsci remarks in the Prison Notebooks, intellectuals are formed by a complex educational system (Q12, 1517) into those who exert the functions of ‘social hegemony’ (that is, the function of leadership, imparting directions and securing consensus in civil society) and ‘political government’ (Q12, 1519). Hence, pedagogy is in itself a matter of leadership and organisation, that is, it is a political activity. The question we have to face in dealing with Jesuit Studies is whether the appraisal of Jesuit teaching, in particular its cultural-political dimension, is merely a hermeneutic problem only referred to past institutions. To dispel this doubt, one can consider the manner in which Jesuit historians working in Jesuit

103 104 105

Cf. Julia 2002, p. 23. Grendler 2009, p. 217 ff. Bartoli 1994, p. 256.

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universities intertwine past and present when they write on education. The celebration of past glories resounds well into the present and vice versa: In 1548, just a little over 450 years ago, ten members of the recently founded Society of Jesus opened the first Jesuit school in Messina in Sicily. […] It was also a crucial event in the history of schooling within the Catholic Church and in Western civilization. Within a few years, the Jesuits had opened some thirty more primary/secondary schools, but also the socalled Roman College, which would soon develop into the first real Jesuit university (Gregorian University). […] By 1773, the year the Society of Jesus was suppressed by papal edict, the Jesuits were in charge of some 800 educational institutions around the globe. The system was almost wiped out by the stroke of a pen, but after the Society was restored in the early nineteenth century, the Jesuits with considerable success especially in North America, revived their tradition.106 The fact that Jesuit education is not only a matter of the past for Jesuit institutions such as Georgetown College and Boston College is stated clearly on their official web pages. One could additionally mention the manner in which Saint Peter’s University presents itself as part of the network: Founded as a Jesuit college in 1872 by two Jesuits who rowed from Manhattan across the Hudson River to Jersey City, Saint Peter’s is part of perhaps the greatest teaching organization the world has ever known. For nearly five centuries the Catholic order of priests known as the Jesuits have built a global network of renowned colleges and universities. Saint Peter’s University is one of 28 Jesuit institutions in the United States that include Georgetown University and Boston College.107

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Concluding Remarks

O’Malley has pointed out the implicit consequences of terminological choices in history writing. He especially criticises the category of ‘Counter-Reformation’ 106 107

O’Malley 2013, p. 198. Quotation from the official web page of this institution, where its Jesuit roots and mission are extolled: http://www.saintpeters.edu/jesuit‑identity/ (accessed 5 October 2014).

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alongside that of the ‘Catholic Reformation’, and urges their dismissal because they appear to be ‘inadequate and sometimes misleading as designations for what the early Society of Jesus was about’.108 What’s in a name? I gradually and reluctantly arrived at the conclusion that at least in this instance there was a great deal in a name. Names may be no more than pointers, but this name [Counter-Reformation] pointed in certain directions and not in others. This name told us what we were talking about. Conversely, if we did not know what name to use, we to some extent did not know what we were talking about. I came to agree, that is, with Alfred North Whitehead: ‘… definitions – though in form they remain the mere assignment of names – are at once seen to be the most important aspect of the subject. The act of assigning names is in fact the act of choosing the various complex ideas which are to be the special object of study. The whole subject depends on such a choice.’109 Should we not extend this remark to the terminological choice of ‘Jesuit Science’? If the choice of Jesuit Science as a name demarcating the area of study is to truly accord with Whitehead’s statement, then this designation must not only include theoretical spheres of inquiry, but cultural and political ones as well. The historiographical label ‘Jesuit Science’ can perhaps have a soft meaning as a keyword simply referring to studies investigating scientific biographies of scholars who belonged to the Jesuit Order, their special achievements in some scientific field or their perspective on certain cultural debates. However, radicalised and problematic uses have emerged. Accordingly, ‘Jesuit Science’ can designate a special approach to science, typical of those belonging to the Jesuit Order. Its legitimacy, radical neo-apologists claim, should be acknowledged alongside other possible approaches to science on the basis of a historicalrelativistic principle. In this case, the claim is that Jesuit Science was an equally viable (if not better) historical alternative to other scientific developments, for instance, to the classical (anti-Scholastic) line connecting Copernicus to Galileo, Descartes, and Newton. Instead of studying historical interactions, contexts, and discursive advances, this second, stronger meaning isolates and opposes traditions and modernities. It conveys the message that the specifically Jesuit approach to science should be reappraised. This ideological use of Jesuit

108 109

O’Malley 2000, p. 2. O’Malley 2000, p. 4. O’Malley’s quotation refers to Whitehead 1906, p. 2.

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Science has to be criticised, especially for the historical and historiographical prescriptions that it implies. Positions that fall between these two are more or less openly apologetic. Their political bearing is problematic and revealing of an expansion of Catholic culture, especially in the United States. According to apologetic tendencies, a historical imperative allots to the scientific practices of the Jesuits neutrality and impartiality, which is regarded as a quality of scientific inquiry itself. This claim is indeed ahistorical in its essence since it projects an image of science derived from contemporary discourse onto a historical context in which it does not fit, as I argued through examples showing the inseparability of theoretical and hegemonic considerations in a series of historical cases. Moreover, a misguided historiographical imperative can be traced in the apologists’ claim that the achievements of the Jesuits in the past should be assessed objectively and impartially, implying that the agonistic dimension of conflict should be ignored. This means either to isolate theses and positions from their historical-cultural context, especially from the political-ideological sphere, or to reassess the particular path to modernity taken by Jesuits precisely for the insertion of science into a specific system of values (a sort of ‘anti-Enlightenment’). In the first case, apologetic historians select a certain set of elements regarded as relevant for the history of science at the expense of others … and do so in a partial and subjective way. By contrast, a historically ‘aware’ reconstruction of modern science cannot conceal conflicts where they existed, since those conflicts are constitutive of the historical reality to be investigated as well as of the historiographical writings concerning this reality. Besides, the reassessment of the so-called ‘Jesuit experience’ or of the ‘Jesuit path to modernity’ implies a favourable positioning relative to the historically given link between science and religion, between public education and private education, as well as between dissent and the legitimation of power and authority, in politics as well as in religion and culture in general. However, as soon as values and ideals are concerned, no neutral historiography becomes possible. In this case, neutrality would mean tendentiousness. As I pointed out, scholarship in Jesuit Studies has gradually found valid strongholds in US Catholic institutions and, more generally, it has become established primarily in English-speaking academia, whence it irradiates outward. Moreover, a post-ideological and post-apologetic disinterest is its selfdeclared approach, but this pious intention is in contrast with the fact that Jesuit institutions largely sponsored the expansion of the field. Many scholars are either linked with these institutions or are themselves members of the Order, as is the case with many of those who have fostered (and financed) novel research on the history of their own tradition. For apologists and exponents of

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the Jesuit tradition, advancing English scholarship at the international level has the advantage of bypassing the critical debates on the Jesuit legacy developed in Catholic countries that are non-Anglophone. In this case, Anglophone linguistic hegemony can be used to marginalise critical approaches and historiographical traditions that emerged from different contexts while US struggles for cultural hegemony assume global dimensions. In the face of the expanding scholarship produced by the Anglo-American world, critical viewpoints might appear local, provincial, and old-fashioned – most notably, the criticism resting on the French Enlightenment or on the Italian Risorgimento. Following Gramsci, we should regard cultural perspectives as revealing of political agendas and intellectuals as organically inserted in collective projects. Accordingly, we ought to raise the question about the political embedment of a proliferating Jesuit Science. Its main locus is US Catholic academia, hence the connection between these tendencies and the legitimation of the cultural agenda of these institutions. Pedagogy, as Gramsci said, means leadership and politics.110 The Church was for him a model of connection between leaders and the masses that, however, he regarded as ‘exterior’ since it did not aim to elevate the masses but, instead, maintained them in their subaltern position (Q16, 1862). Following this line of thought, one should further ask about the political impact of Catholic education and cultural production. A tentative answer can be given only by taking into account some data. First, the Catholic Church is the largest religious community in the United States. It counts about 68 million people, that is, more than 20% of the population.111 Catholic voters carry weight in national elections. The United States Council of Catholic Bishops is well aware of the importance of their political commitment, as one can read in an official declaration: The separation of church and state does not require division between belief and public action, between moral principles and political choices, but protects the right of believers and religious groups to practice their faith and act on their values in public life.112

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Q12, 1523: ‘[…] importa la funzione [dei membri di partito] che è direttiva e organizzativa, cioè educativa, cioè intellettuale’. According to the think tank Pew Research Center, Catholics make up 20.8% of the US population, but the figure varies depending on the state (e.g. in California it is 28%, in Massachusetts 34 %). http://www.pewforum.org/religious‑landscape‑study/religious‑traditio n/catholic/ (accessed 18 May 2016). http://www.usccb.org/issues‑and‑action/faithful‑citizenship/church‑teaching/catholics‑i n‑political‑life.cfm (accessed 14 May 2014).

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This commitment includes ‘counsel[ing] Catholic public officials’. The ‘concern’ brought forward most eminently concerns abortion. Moreover, the stress on marriage and the family clearly excludes liberal politics on gender rights. On these and other matters (‘human life and dignity, marriage and family, war and peace, the needs of the poor and the demands of justice’), Catholics are expected to conform their political action to religious guidelines. Between the religious leaders and Catholic politicians there supposedly exists a pedagogical relation akin to that between politicians and the people.113 Is this not a reversed Gramscian principle? The weight of the Catholic religious component in US politics does not escape the ruling class, at least judging by recent events. On 23 September 2015, President Barack Obama officially received the Jesuit Pope Francis in the White House with a welcome ceremony followed by a private speech. The next day, on 24 September 2015, the Pope visited the Capitol and delivered a speech to the Senate and House of Representatives in a Joint Session of the Congress. This rapprochement of the highest Catholic authority and the US establishment is reminiscent of the concordat politics discussed by Gramsci in the Prison Notebooks. Ultimately, the success of the Church as a ‘party’ in the political arena rests on its capacity to exercise hegemony in society. This hegemony is a political-pedagogical leadership in which education and culture play crucial roles. The expansion of research fields such as Jesuit Studies legitimises the principles and origins of Catholic institutions of higher education. Their growth is at the same time a product and a factor of the political expansion of the Catholic presence and influence in US politics. Eventually, given the hegemonic position of the USA in the world, such cultural and political phenomena have a global impact. The disproportionate development of Jesuit Science studies in the history of science and early modern philosophy is symptomatic of a time of increasing religious hegemony in academia, education, society and politics. Religiously-tinged reformism in cultural history is not neutral and disinterested, nor is it objective and postideological. Rather, it is the other face of societies in which theo-political agendas and collusions are becoming more the rule than the exception. 113

‘We need to continue to teach clearly and help other Catholic leaders to teach clearly on our unequivocal commitment to the legal protection of human life from the moment of conception until natural death’ (ibid.).

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chapter 6

‘O pobre intelectual’: Manuel Lourosa, Astronomy, and the Political Restoration of Portugal in the Seventeenth Century Luís Miguel Carolino and Carlos Ziller Camenietzki

1

Introduction

In the early 1640s, in the aftermath of the coup d’ état that brought an end to six decades of Habsburg rule over the Portuguese crown (the so-called Restauração, or Restoration, of 1640), the Portuguese Inquisition was asked to censor a book expressing strong opinions in favour of the new political status quo: ‘A Mathematical Prediction. A Political, Physiological, Democratic, Ethical, Aristocratic, and Theological Treatise’ [Alvitre mathematico. Tratado politico, physiologico, democratico, ethico, aristocratico e theologico], by the physician Manuel Gomes Galhano Lourosa.1 Despite being an ecclesiastical tribunal, the Portuguese Inquisition worked largely as a ‘state’ tribunal,2 one part of the collection of tribunals and councils that formed the Portuguese political system during the ‘ancien regime’.3 This was also not the first time that Lourosa had faced this coercive state apparatus4 and again having his book rejected and this time with its author criticised: ‘the poor man does not understand anything’, the censor stated.5 The publication of Lourosa’s A Mathematical Prediction was specifically declined on the grounds that it virtually subverted the monarchical order. The censor6 duly explained:

1 Lourosa 1641. 2 Bethencourt 2009, pp. 318 ff. 3 Nevertheless, Giuseppe Marcocci and José Pedro Paiva have recently stressed the fact that the Portuguese Inquisition was able to pursue its own strategy to some extent. Marcocci and Paiva 2013. 4 As the Inquisitorial report details, this was indeed the third time that Lourosa had submitted this type of work for publication. 5 ‘O pobre homem não ata cousa com cousa’. Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo (ANTT), Lisboa, Conselho Geral do Santo Oficio (CGSO), Maço 45, doc. 65, fol. [1r.]. 6 We were unable to identify him because of the illegibility of his personal signature.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004443778_008

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I never approve of the lack of deference while referring to the king of Castile, especially calumniating personal errors instead of those of government. Royal people are always privileged people and must indeed be respected as such, especially being a Catholic king.7 As a consequence of this censure, the book was never printed. The manuscript, preserved in the National Library of Portugal, constitutes a unique document portraying the intersection of political and scientific themes in the struggles of the mid-seventeenth century in Portugal. In early modern Europe, medicine and astrology ranked among the ‘scientific’ fields that held stronger social appeal and political usages. In the case of astrology, as it was regarded as a source of information relevant not only to human life but also to understanding the physical world, this was promoted at courts, universities and at gatherings held in urban squares. By providing information and cultural prestige in addition to political authority, astrology became a political tool.8 Court astrologers often took up the role of political advisors; rulers explored and exploited popular beliefs in astrological influences to promote their political agendas; claimants to political power legitimised political revolts by means of astrological influences. This seems to have particularly been the case during the civil revolutions that shook Europe in the seventeenth century. It is well known, for example, that during the English Civil War, the astrologer and leading parliamentarian, William Lilly, tried to intervene in the troubling political events of his time by predicting the death of King Charles.9 As elsewhere in Europe, astrology also played a particularly empowering role in critical moments in Portugal, such as those that followed the annexation of the Portuguese kingdom by the Spanish Habsburg monarchy in 1580, and the later Portuguese rebellion in 1640.10 Within this context of political turmoil, Manuel Gomes Galhano Lourosa emerged as a key figure. A medi-

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‘Não aprouo nunqua a descomposição no falar da pessoa do Rej de Castella, principalmente caluniando em erros pessoaes e não do gouerno. As pessoas reaes são sempre priuilegiadas, e deuem ser respeitadas mormente hum Rej catholico’. ANTT, CGSO, maço 45, doc. 65 (ref. 4), fol. [1v.]. Curry 1989 and Drévillon 1996, among other historians of early modern astrology, have emphasised the close relationship perceived to exist between astrology and politics. A comprehensive and up-to-date approach to the historiography on the relationship between science and astrology in the early modern period features in Vanden Broecke 2014. Geneva 1995. On the political uses of astrology during the English Civil War, see Curry, 1989. Carolino and Camenietzki 2006.

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cine graduate from the University of Coimbra, Lourosa depicted himself as an ornament to the medical profession, which he practised in Almada, a town near Lisbon. Lourosa was also an astronomer, having authored a voluminous treatise on the comet of 1664.11 Furthermore, he was a famous astrologer and celebrated author of astrological almanacs. He was indeed the most successful almanac-maker of seventeenth-century Portugal, publishing from 1637 to 1675. Lourosa made use of his scientific reputation and academic authority to have an impact on the course of political struggles in the aftermath of the Restoration of 1640. However, unlike Lilly and the vast majority of astrologers concerned with politics, he did not put forward extraordinary prophecies based on astrology. Instead, he made recourse to the social prestige of his persona scientifica to influence ‘public opinion’ in favour of the Restoration cause. In doing so, Lourosa consciously deployed science in his struggle for hegemony. Reflecting on Gramsci’s contribution to a Marxist theory of politics, Eric Hobsbawm emphasised the role of political action in creating a new hegemony. As he observes: ‘The basic problem of hegemony, considered strategically, is not how revolutionaries come to power, though this question is very important. It is how they come to be accepted, not only as the politically existing or unavoidable rulers but as guides and leaders’.12 In this process, education (and, more particularly, control over education13) is crucial, since it mediates the relationship between intellectuals and the population.14 Thus, historians of science and science education have stressed the importance of examining the formal contexts of education. Being critical in inculcating moral values, science teaching plays a vital role in the process of any social group establishing a cultural hegemony.15 This became clear in the nineteenth century when the emergence of a developed capitalistic society gave rise to a plethora of civil servants, military officers, and engineers, who exercised a

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Polymathia exemplar. Doctrina de discursos varios. Cometographia meteorologica do prodigioso e diuturno cometa, que appareceo em Novembro do anno de 664 (Lisbon: António Craesbeeck de Mello, 1666). Hobsbawm 2011, p. 328. As Morera puts it, ‘The problem of the creation of a new hegemony is that of elaborating a critical and self-conscious conception of the world and thus confronting the prevalent world view, “ ‘mechanically’ imposed by the external environment.” This critical distance, however, is not easily gained; it necessitates a process of learning and, inevitably, it brings into focus the question of the control over this process, of the relation between intellectuals and the masses’ (Morera 1990, p. 24). Landy 1986, p. 66. Nieto-Galan 2011a, pp. 7–12.

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strong cultural influence over society and whose education took place in the technical and polytechnic schools promoted by nineteenth-century democracies.16 Nevertheless, together with formal schooling, Gramsci identified another dimension of the educational process wherein the struggle for political hegemony and the securing of power was crucial: ‘public opinion’. As Gramsci explains, influence over public opinion was particularly critical in the aftermath of the collapse of absolute states, when the bourgeois class made use of the organs of public opinion, such as newspapers, in order to create support for the liberal regimes of the nineteenth century, and especially in the case of Italy.17 As Gramsci argues, while analysing the coercion/consent relationship in the production of social conformism in harmony with the interests of the ruling group: This problem is the correspondence ‘spontaneously and freely accepted’ between the acts and the admissions of each individual, between the conduct of each individual and the ends which society sets itself as necessary – a correspondence which is coercive in the sphere of positive law technically understood, and is spontaneous and free (more strictly ethical) in those zones in which ‘coercion’ is not a State but is affected by public opinion, moral climate, etc.18 Public opinion plays a key role in the creation of consent in civil society, leading individuals to freely accept the system of values inculcated by the leading rulers or, alternatively, to embrace counter-hegemonic struggles. Public opinion thus emerges in the Gramscian theory of political action as the central arena for political dispute and, therefore, as the main concern of intellectuals. In this context, newspapers and other genres of mass culture constitute vital tools in the political education of people and therefore instruments of political action. In a similar way to the professor who, in formal schooling, actively promotes consent, the intellectual involved in the production of mass culture contributes decisively to creating a new hegemony.19 For this reason, scholars have 16

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As Gramsci notes, ‘in the modern world the category of intellectuals, understood in this sense, has undergone an unprecedented expansion. The democratic-bureaucratic system has given rise to a great mass of functions which are not all justified by the social necessities of production, though they are justified by the political necessities of the dominant fundamental group’. Gramsci 1971, p. 13. Gramsci 1975, Q12, p. 1520. Gramsci 1971, p. 69. Gramsci 1971, pp. 195–6. Gramsci 1975, Q6, p. 757. Scholars have stressed the importance that Gramsci attributed to public opinion in the

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stressed the theoretical prominence and impact of Gramsci in the domain of mass culture critical studies. For example, while discussing the legacy of Gramsci, Marcia Landy argues: The most significant aspect of Gramsci’s contribution to critical thinking lies in the area of developing theories of mass culture. He came closer than any members of the Frankfurt School to proposing a dynamic view of the importance and the operations of mass culture not only as an agent of consent but also as an important factor in the encouragement of counterhegemonic practices.20 The early modern period was a period of profound political reshaping throughout Europe, from the Spanish Monarchy, British parliamentary regimes, the Dutch Republic, German-speaking states to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. In this period of political instability, the press, and particularly the popular press (or large-scale press) played a key role in establishing hegemony over civil society. Jeffrey Sawyer makes this point clearly for the case of early seventeenth-century France, a time when the struggle for domination of Louis XIII’s government gave rise to the publication of a myriad of political pamphlets.21 David Zaret argues that the ‘printing revolution’ was instrumental to the rise of a democratic public sphere in early modern England.22 Not by chance did José Antonio Maravall, while studying the social and political impact of the Spanish Siglo de Oro theatre, characterise baroque culture as a ‘culture of the masses’.23 In this chapter, we focus on the Portuguese case. The aftermath of the 1640 Portuguese Restoration was a period of extreme political instability, when the ruling political groups had to create a new balance among the prevailing political forces. Amid this political turmoil, when the traditional nobility and higher clergy risked losing the political leadership, replaced by other groups and political actors, in particular classes with lower social status, intellectuals such as Manuel Lourosa played crucial roles. We shall argue along Gramscian lines that, by building a successful career in the sphere of mass-consumption literature, the physician and astrologer Lourosa deployed his scientific authority to influ-

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process of achieving hegemony. For example, Adamson 1980, pp. 219–20, Bates 1975, p. 363, Fontana 2000, p. 309, Urbinati 1998, p. 377. Landy 1986, p. 58. Sawyer 1991. Zaret 2000. Maravall 1987.

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ence public opinion, a power which he deliberatively placed in the service of the Restoration cause. In doing so, he became exceptionally well positioned to win support and consent from the social strata not yet detached from the old regime. We shall make this point by looking into the role of ‘popular literature’ in the struggle for hegemony in the early modern period. In particular, we examine the process through which Lourosa exploited the scientific prestige of his writings in order to intervene in the political arena. This will lead us to correspondingly consider not only Lourosa’s works and his political agenda, but also the profile of his readers. We shall conclude with a short discussion of the ultimate fortune of Lourosa’s political project. However, before delving into these topics, we first provide a brief account of the Portuguese political situation in the seventeenth century.

2

Lourosa and the Political Dispute Ongoing in Seventeenth-Century Portugal

In 1580, Portugal entered the realm of the European ‘composite monarchies’, a system in which different monarchies, despite preserving their jurisdictional autonomy, fell under the sovereignty of a common ruler.24 These were the cases, for example, of the Stuart rule over Scotland, England, Ireland, and Wales, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth or the Habsburg Spanish monarchy which ruled over Aragon, Castile, León, Navarre, Sicily, the Low Countries, some German-speaking territories and overseas territories in America and the Philippines. In 1580, the Portuguese kingdom joined this intricate composite state governed by the Spanish monarch Felipe II. Following the battle of El-Ksar-el-Kebir (the Battle of the three kings), which took place in Morocco in August 1578 and saw the death of the Portuguese king Sebastião (1554–78) and a significant part of his higher nobility, the Portuguese throne was left with no direct heir. This opened the way for the king of Spain Felipe II (1527–98), who was a collateral descendant of Portuguese king Manuel I (1469–1521), to become king of Portugal after a military incursion in 1580. To some extent, this was a predictable final outcome of a dynastic policy that prioritised strengthening familiar relations with the Castilian rulers. The increasing difficulties that the Portuguese economy and overseas ‘empire’ faced as the sixteenth century progressed, in conjunction with the cultural Castilianisation of the Portuguese court elite, facilitated the integration of

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Koenigsberger 1986, Elliot 2009.

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the Portuguese kingdom into the Spanish Habsburg empire. Military coercion, the defeat of the Portuguese pretender to the throne, António, Prior of Crato (1531–95) in the Battle of Alcântara, in August 1580, consummated the so-called ‘dynastic union’ of Iberian monarchies. As happened with the most composite monarchies, the Iberian ‘dynastic union’ was built on mutual assent between the Crown and the traditional ruling class, with King Felipe II’s rule supported by most of the traditional Portuguese aristocracy and higher clergy. Yet, the political stability and the prospects of the long-term survival of the new political status quo had to face popular hostility. Although evident from the very beginning of the ‘dual monarchy’, the rise of political opposition emerges particularly clearly in the 1620s, when criticism of Felipe IV’s rule (1587–1645) became widespread and easily noticeable in the political writings then circulating in Lisbon and other cities. Economic depression and the massive engagement in European wars strengthened the case for concentrating power under the Count-Duke of Olivares, the ‘prime minister’ of Felipe IV. Accordingly, the traditional elites that had initially backed the Habsburg composite rule tended to be increasingly deprived of their political and economic privileges and accordingly expressed their political unease in a variety of mass publications, which swelled the stream of literature that clearly opposed the existing political setting.25 Following the constant increase in wartime taxation and the outbreak of the Catalan Revolt (Guerra dels Segadors), a coup d’état, carried out by a group of nobles and strongly supported by the urban population, took place in Lisbon on the 1 December 1640 (the so-called Restoration), inaugurating the Bragança dynasty, whose first king was João IV (1604–56). After the Restoration, a torrent of publications dealing with politics, the war with Spain, and emerging political actors flooded the kingdom’s main cities. The first Portuguese newspaper, the Gazette (Gazeta), for example, dates from this period of political turmoil, in print between 1641 and 1647.26 The Gazette and other popular publications spread fresh news of the war against Spain or the startling political events that stirred the everyday life of Lisbon, such as the beheading of the first Secretary of State after the Restoration, in 1643.27

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Probably the most explicit of such publications opposing Habsburg rule was by João Pinto Ribeiro; Discurso sobre os fidalgos e soldados portugueses não militarem em conquistas alheias dessa coroa (Lisbon: Pedro Craesbeeck, 1632). Scholars with different interests and concerns have recently studied the Gazette. See, for example, Sousa 2011. Sound and comprehensive accounts of the history of Portugal, in English, including the period of the so-called Iberian Union, are provided by Disney 2009, and Marques 1976.

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Politics was a matter of public dispute and this kind of mass circulation publication had a say in the shaping of political events. In this context, a new political actor emerged, the so-called Repúblico (a Republican, someone concerned with the res publica). These were intellectuals who discussed politics in the public sphere and theorised about a better political regime. Repúblicos were neither theologians nor canonists. They usually wrote in Portuguese instead of Latin. Indeed, as in other European countries, popular literature worked by and large as the main political tool of the Portuguese Repúblicos.

3

Struggling for Hegemony: The ‘Popular Literature’

Lourosa was one of the Repúblicos who turned to public opinion to persuade the lower social groups to directly intervene in the new political order launched by the Restoration coup d’état. His book A Mathematical Prediction: A Political, Physiological, Democratic, Ethical, Aristocratic, and Theological Treatise, a typical Repúblico work, represented one part of this project for political intervention. Within it, he praises the Restoration and publicly supports King João IV and the Bragança cause. He also goes further and emphasises the role played by the urban middle class, attributing political importance to this social group, which, from Lourosa’s perspective, should be taken into account in the new state of affairs by the victorious party. According to his perspective, the urban middle class, to which he belonged, were the true champions of the Restoration cause, and the real supporters of João IV, noting that only few nobles had backed the coup d’état.28 In so doing, Lourosa embodied the political aspirations of the urban middle class and sought to foster the political consciousness of this class. The title of the book A Mathematical Prediction, with its publication peremptorily denied by the Inquisition, did not do justice to its contents. As the work of an eminent astrologer and almanac-maker, one would therefore expect this book to set down the astrological foundations for an upcoming major political change. Nevertheless, the book is rather lacking in astrological considerations. Instead it basically constitutes a celebration of Portuguese independence from Spanish Habsburg rule. It is most likely that Lourosa decided to call it a ‘mathematical prediction’ so as to draw on his intellectual prestige as an accomplished astrologer. Despite the effective content of the book, the prospect of publishing it as a somewhat divinatory work would allow him

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For example, Lourosa 1641, fol. 52v.

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to reach the larger audience he was seeking to influence and mobilise in favour of the Restoration cause. In fact, A Mathematical Prediction aimed at strengthening the Restoration cause by providing a political explanation for the event. At odds with the typical literature produced by jurisconsults and supported by the ruling ‘ancient regime’ elites, Lourosa did not enter into a legal discussion to account for Portuguese independence. For this Repúblico, the key point to Portuguese independence was not whether the Spanish King Felipe II had a legal right to the Portuguese crown, nor was it the validity of waging war against Spain based upon the argument that Spanish troops had brought about a usurpation manu militari of the Portuguese kingdom in 1580. The main issue, according to Lourosa, was the way in which the Spanish authorities had ruled Portugal for six decades: they had ruled the Portuguese kingdom badly. As he put it, in praising the Restoration: That iron age, so painful and so hard, during which everything was great wickedness, severe insolences, clear frauds, huge perfidies, unrestricted covetousness and, at last, where rare traces of truth existed or no shadow of it (I declare), nor safe and manifest loyalty, that iron age has just finished.29 This line of argument is consistent with the feelings of the urban professional and mercantile classes. From the point of view of tradesmen, shopkeepers, and artisans, the hypothetical usurpation of the royal succession rights, the oaths imposed upon Portuguese noblemen and people’s deputies to the court of Felipe II, which celebrated the unification of the Portuguese and Spanish Crowns, or even disrespect for ancient rights, did not appear as critical to their concrete political experiences. The ethos of the urban professional and mercantile classes was not built upon the ideas of ‘honour’, ‘loyalty’ or ‘oath’ as the nobles conceived of things, but principally upon notions such as respect for contracts and commercial assurance.30 In this context, political practice 29

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‘Acabou-se já aquela idade de ferro tão penosa e tão pesada em que tudo eram grandes maldades, desaforos feros, enganos palcados, traições enormes, cobiças desaforadas e finalmente vestígios poucos da verdade, digo nem sombra dela, nem lealdade segura e manifesta’. Lourosa 1641, fols. 22r–22v. Historians of law have demonstrated how notions such as ‘oath’ and ‘honour’ were understood differently in the early modern period depending on the social context in which they were used. Despite often applying the same expressions, the nobility and mercantile classes held increasingly divergent interpretations of these concepts. Among many others, see the seminal work by Paolo Prodi (Prodi 1992).

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emerged as a crucial topic. By stressing the political practice of the Spanish ruling power, Lourosa was doubtless in tune with the urban professional and mercantile classes.31 In A Mathematical Prediction, Lourosa urged the Portuguese to support King João IV, whom he depicted as a king endowed with all the characteristics of a perfect ruler. He gathered the Portuguese nobility and praised those noblemen who, following Horace’s tenet according to which ‘it is a supreme and delightful achievement and a great honour to die illustriously and generously for the fatherland [pátria]’,32 had risked their lives in the 1640 coup d’ état. Yet, unlike the majority of early modern writers who usually portrayed the popular classes as a throng of anonymous and uncontrollable people, Lourosa maintained that the popular classes were the guarantors of Portuguese independence: ‘You, who are brave though humble-born, pluck up your courage and do not be afraid because heaven is with you!’, exclaimed Lourosa.33 As Lourosa’s A Mathematical Prediction remained only in manuscript form, it would certainly have failed to achieve the social impact its author would have wished for. Nevertheless, Lourosa’s political agenda found its way out through the publication of his astrological almanacs. Astrological almanacs were cheap, popular, and ephemeral booklets, which constituted one of the most successful genres of mass-consumption literature. Astrological almanacs usually consisted of the following contents: a prologue, wherein the author often presented his views on astrology and politics; information on the astronomical and astrological events in the coming year (eclipses, planetary conjunctions); astrological prognostications (the so-called juízo do ano); information on the phases of the moon and its influence on the tides; a calendar of religious and civic events; other utilitarian material, such as medical advice, and news on current events, such as wars, noble families, etc. Typically, alongside the prologue, the astrological prognostication comprised the core element of astrological almanacs throughout the greater part of the seventeenth century. Unlike events in England, where the collapse of official censorship during the Civil War gave rise to the ‘halcyon days of English astrology’,34 astrological almanacs in Portugal remained under the strict control of the ‘state’ and eccle-

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Camenietzki 2014 provides a detailed account of Lourosa’s political ideas. ‘Dá sumo gosto e doçura e à volta disto grande honra o morrer ilustre e generosamente pela pátria’. Lourosa 1641, fol. 33v. ‘Vos que sois briosos, ainda que humildes no nascimento tomai alento, e não temais porque tendes o céu por vos’. Lourosa 1641, fol. 52v. Curry 1989, pp. 19 ff.

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siastical censorship, including the Inquisition. Portuguese almanacs therefore do not include any concrete predictions regarding royal deaths and political affairs. Nevertheless, seventeenth-century almanac authors commonly established relationships between ‘astrological rulers’ and human events, such as changes in the course of a war, especially during the independence war against Spain.35 In doing so, this genre of mass literature paved the way for raising political awareness. As almanacs not only included material for almost every segment of society, but also came at a cheap price, they had a profound impact on the social and cultural landscape.36 Lourosa was perfectly aware of the social and political power of almanacs and tried to exploit this accordingly. Nevertheless, to become an influential and successful astrologer, Lourosa had to establish his own trademark. Indeed, despite changing printing houses quite often during his career as an almanacmaker, Lourosa was successful in preserving the fundamental characteristics of his almanacs. His almanacs were published annually, in a small format (in octavum), with an average of 24 pages, although with slightly fewer pages when he first started out publishing. The title and the cover page were simple and distinctive. From time to time, the cover page included an astrological engraving, such as the representation of Mars in the 1644 almanac,37 or a sylvan scene in the almanac for 1666.38 This was Lourosa’s distinctive trademark. The readers who looked for his astrological booklets at the beginning of every year would find it easy to distinguish Lourosa’s from the wide array of astrological publications on sale in Lisbon, Évora, and Coimbra. Lourosa’s almanacs covered the usual topics of this sort of publication. Yet, unlike other almanac-makers in seventeenth-century Portugal, he was particularly sensitive to political issues. He quite often informed his readers of news about wars and educated them about the political difficulties facing the Portuguese monarchy. His source of information was most probably the newspaper Gazette (Gazeta) through which fresh news entered into general circulation. Provided with such information, in the 1660 almanac, for example, Lourosa warned the Portuguese people to tend to the country’s fragile independence as the war between Portugal and Spain was still being waged. He then stated: ‘If we are the true descendants of Luso, let us be the true defenders of

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On Portuguese astrological almanacs, see Carolino 2002. See, among other studies, Bollème 1969, Capp 1979, Carolino 2002, Casali 2003, Corona 1991, Curth 2007. Lourosa 1643. Also used in Lourosa 1659 and 1664. Lourosa 1665.

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the fatherland [patria]; let us not sleep; let us be vigilant, laying hold of the sword; let us wait for our moment of glory’.39 As astrological almanacs, as with every publication, were submitted to the Inquisition before publication, Lourosa could not disclose further details or explicitly present his political ideas. However, year after year, while providing news about the course of the war against Spain, Lourosa did try and push his readers into becoming engaged supporters of the Bragança cause. For example, in the 1654 almanac, a year influenced by Mars according to the Portuguese astrologer, Lourosa urged his readers not to neglect the war efforts: ‘Although we have Venus as the almuten [ruler of the Ascendant] of the year, we should not be asleep and neglect arms, because Mars, in this year of 54, plays a great part’.40 Thus, unlike his book A Mathematical Prediction, which was not accepted for publication by the Inquisition, in his astrological almanacs, Lourosa sought to exploit astrological content to the greatest possible extent (that is, as far as the Inquisition would allow him to go). Planetary influences over certain people and countries, which were generally accepted as shaping the outcomes of major collective events through the general predisposition for war, for example, were mentioned by Lourosa. However, unlike the case of astrologers during the English Civil War, he advanced with no specific prognostication regarding politics. Here again, the Inquisition remained vigilant, and there was little room for predictions susceptible to fostering speculation around the extent of human free will. Nevertheless, almanacs still remained privileged instruments of propaganda and social cohesion in favour of the political state of affairs established by the revolt of 1640.41 Indirect evidence suggests that Lourosa was successful in making himself conspicuous as an astrologer, an almanac-maker, and, one could add, a Repúblico. For example, Francisco Manuel de Melo (1608–66), a celebrated writer and influential politician who played an important role as a diplomat for King João IV in several European courts, referred to Lourosa in

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‘Se he que somos verdadeiros descendentes de Luso, sejamos em tudo verdadeiros defensores da patria, abramos o olho, não durmamos, estejamos álerta com a espada na mão, esperemos a ocasião de honra’. Lourosa 1659, fol. 3r. ‘Inda que tenhamos a Venus por Almutem do anno, não durmamos descuidados das armas, pois Marte tem neste anno de 54 muita parte’. Lourosa 1653, fol. 5v. Yet, in the almanacs written by Lourosa, there is no actual reference to any astrological theory justifying the Restoration movement. When mentioned in these popular publications, ‘heavens’ meant not the astrological heaven, but the divine heaven: ‘Heaven preserves those who defend us from those who offend us so much. Let us be aware, because God is with us, interested in the defence of Portugal’. Lourosa 1643, fols. 3v.–4r.

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1650 as a ‘recognised diviner of times and novelties’.42 In these mass distribution publications, intermingled with a variety of information, Lourosa urged his readers to support the Bragança cause and, incidentally, to claim their role in the new political developments. This then raises the question of whether Lourosa’s readers shared a social and political identity.

4

Lourosa’s Readers

Gramscian scholars have argued that Gramsci perceived ‘class’ as a historical concept.43 The development of class consciousness thus derives not only from the historical development of productive relations but also involves the formation of value systems and ideologies.44 Thus, from a Gramscian point of view, the study of the relationships that intellectuals establish with the social groups involved in the process of production is crucial to understanding why some groups manage to succeed in building oppositional hegemonies. In such processes, intellectual prestige plays a crucial role. As Gramsci stresses: the ‘spontaneous’ consent given by the great masses of the population to the general direction imposed on social life by the dominant fundamental group; this consent is ‘historically’ caused by the prestige (and consequent confidence) which the dominant group enjoys because of its position and function in the world of production.45 Lourosa was a university-trained physician who carried out his professional life in Almada, a city near Lisbon. However, to just what extent was he conscious of representing a social class? Studies of early modern professional categories have demonstrated that professional groups, such as painters, entered a new social condition in Portugal at the turn of the sixteenth century. This new social condition, which granted painters a new role in their productive relationships, was achieved by systematically contesting the rules that bound them to medieval corporations. In this struggle for a new social and professional status, the individual and collective petitions clearly reveal that Portuguese painters had

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Manuel de Melo 1981, p. 415. Morera 1990, p. 30. The emphasis on the role of ideology, contingency, and individual intellectuals is undoubtedly Gramsci’s chief contribution to Marxist social theory. Gramsci 1971, p. 12. Gramsci 1975, Q12, p. 1519. On this discussion, see Billings 1990.

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developed a professional class consciousness that stretched beyond the corporativism of the 1570 to 1630 period.46 Examination of Lourosa’s almanacs also suggests that this physician was not only conscious of his social positioning but also had a clear idea of his target audience, the urban middle classes. This becomes particularly evident in the controversy that led him into opposing Francisco Guilherme Casmach (1569– 16--) in the 1640s. Casmach was a court savant and graduate in medicine from the University of Salamanca who, after the Restoration of 1640, achieved the post of Royal Surgeon.47 Alongside some works in medicine and surgery, Casmach authored two astrological prognostics, the Almanach Prototypo (1644) and Brachylogia Astrologica (1646), dedicated respectively to Queen Luíza de Gusmão and to the Portuguese nobility.48 Unlike Lourosa’s popular almanacs, the almanacs produced by Casmach were elegant booklets addressing the high ranks of society. Not only were their titles quite unusual for this sort of literature, but their layouts and contents were distinctly rich when compared with the common almanac. The frontispiece of Almanach Prototypo featured a distinctive frame and included a vivid dedication to the queen. It also contained an unusual Latin poem by theologian Diogo de Paiva de Andrada – a distinguished ideological supporter of the Restoration movement – and the graphic representation of the astral chart for 1645.49 Such luxury had its price and Casmach’s almanacs were much more expensive than the common almanacs. Brachylogia Astrologica, for example, cost 40 réis, 10 times more than the popular almanacs.50 That is to say, Casmach’s almanacs clearly targeted a wealthier social class. Longer phrases, copiously interspersed with Latin quotations, also denote the higher level of literacy of Casmach’s readers. In the early 1640s, in the immediate aftermath of the Portuguese Restoration, an extraordinary invasion of locusts, which significantly damaged the plantations in southern Portugal, triggered considerable controversy between Lourosa and Casmach. Regardless of the arguments,51 the controversy reveals a tension between two types of socially differently oriented intellectuals, a ‘philosopher, astrologer, and surgeon to their Royal Majesties’52 on the one hand, 46 47 48 49 50 51 52

Serrão 1983. On Francisco Guilherme Casmach, see Inocêncio Silva 1858–1923, II, pp. 388–9. Casmach 1644 and 1646. Casmach 1644, [fols. 4r. and 4r.]. Casmach 1646, [fol. 1v]. On the controversial relationship between Lourosa and Casmach, see Carolino 2002, pp. 55–61. As Casmach presented himself on the frontispieces of Almanach Prototypo and Brachylogia Astrologica.

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and an urban professional astrologer and local physician on the other. Vexed by Casmach’s alleged usurpation of his ideas about the invasion of locusts, Lourosa outlined a severe critique of Casmach in his astrological almanacs. He accused his opponent of being a snob attempting to cover up his ignorance in astrological matters both by exploiting his social and economic condition and by making use of pretentious strategies to impress his audiences. In his 1647 almanac, Lourosa stressed how recourse to peculiar titles and expressions and the making of odd prophecies based upon the uncertain character of astrology was nothing but a ruse used by Casmach to veil his lack of knowledge. As he put it: By this adverse shortcut [the uncertainty of astrology] walks a certain visionary of these our times who, taking himself as an astrologer, fancies in his Almanach Prototypo signing inventive prologues and, in Brachyologia (whose title in full displays limits because of the brevity of his own knowledge), put forward chimerical and nauseous notions.53 He developed his critique by alluding to the social issue dividing the two astrologers. ‘I do not spend as much as the rich can, but I spend to the level of my wealth’, Lourosa stated.54 Unlike Casmach, Lourosa’s aim was to become a popular astrologer. He depicted himself as a popular, self-made astrologer, living in a village far away from the Court milieu.55 Lourosa claimed that, while studying medicine at the University of Coimbra, he had occupied his leisure time by studying astrology.56 His talent for astrological science was further facilitated by his melancholic character, which he regarded, in keeping with the astrological tradition,57 as ‘fitted to speculate on meteors and secrets of nature’.58 Analysis of the astrological almanacs that he produced for almost four decades also demonstrates how he intentionally addressed his astrological works to a wider audience, which included the urban professional classes. Not only 53

54 55 56 57 58

‘E por este mal seguido atalho caminha certo mistico destes nossos tempos, que por jactarse Astrologo phantazea no seu Almanach prototypo acinados prologos inuectiuos, e na Brachyologia (cuja nomeclatura ostenta em tudo breuidades por limitado na profição de suas letras) inuenta annotações chymericas e nauseatiuas’. Lourosa 1647, fols. 4v.–5r. Lourosa 1647, fol. 6v. Lourosa 1650, fol. 2v. Lourosa 1666, fols. 4v–5. See, for example, Klibansky, Panofsky, and Fritz Saxl 1979. ‘A primeira seja a minha natural inclinação, que he melancholica, propria pera philosophar meteoros, e segredos naturaes’. Lourosa 1650, fol. 1v.

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were the prices of his almanacs much cheaper when compared with those of Casmach, but Lourosa also decided to systematically compose his texts using short phrases, especially in the utilitarian content of the almanac, thus allowing people with lower literacy skills to access and make use of his booklets. Early modern Portugal is traditionally described as having high rates of illiteracy. Due to the lack of accurate census data for the periods prior to the nineteenth century, historians and demographers usually project nineteenthcentury estimates into the past, consequently assuming that illiteracy was particularly high in the early modern period. However, Rita Marquilhas has put forward an innovative interpretation. While studying the reading and writing abilities of Inquisitorial defendants, Marquilhas demonstrates that literacy rates in seventeenth-century Portugal were comparable, for example, to those in English society of the same period. Assuming the ability to sign a document as a proxy for literacy levels, Marquilhas reveals that literacy was particularly high in urban contexts. In cities such as Lisbon, Évora, and Coimbra, about 65 percent of Inquisitorial defendants could sign their name. Those who had more familiarity with writing belonged to socio-economic groups such as the clergy (around 100 percent were able to sign), the nobility, high-ranking public servants and officials, scholars and students, tradesmen and Inquisitorial personnel. The functional literacy levels of these groups were around 90 percent. Professional groups, such as shopkeepers, artisans, pilots, sailors, local nobility, and local officeholders, also revealed high levels of literacy with over 50 percent being able to sign their name.59 These were the audiences for whom Lourosa wrote. Urban professional and mercantile classes, including lawyers, physicians, and clergy, as well as tradesmen, shopkeepers, and artisans with different levels of literacy were all among the readers of his astrological almanacs.

5

The Fortunes of Lourosa’s Political Project

Lourosa was an engaged advocator of the Restoration cause ever since the early 1640s. He used his intellectual prestige as the most accomplished almanacmaker in Portugal to mobilise the popular classes in favour of the Bragança dynasty. His ultimate goal, however, was that of defending the political interests of the urban middle classes to which he proudly belonged. Yet, by the late 1660s, following the great political turmoil that followed the 1640 Restoration during

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which different groups disputed political power, this changed radically. In 1667, a coup d’état, with support from the traditional aristocracy, established the would-be king, Pedro II, in power. It was a turning point in Portuguese politics. It meant, by and large, the end of two decades of political dispute. The 1656 death of João IV had left a political vacuum that would soon be filled, first by Queen Luísa de Gusmão, who acted as regent for Afonso VI, and then by a group of influential courtiers and diplomats led by the Count of Castelo Melhor, for whom the rule of a king (Afonso VI) seemed the most appropriate and proper way of asserting the political rights of the Lisbon bourgeoisie – that is to say the bankers and the main Lisbon businessmen – and, to a lesser extent, of the urban classes.60 The 1667 coup d’état, orchestrated by Pedro II on the grounds that Afonso VI was mentally incapable of holding his position, brought a halt to the rising interests of the subaltern classes. Backed by the traditional aristocracy, Pedro II inaugurated a process of political centralisation that would later pave the way to the founding of a (quasi-)Absolutist regime in Portugal under João V in the early eighteenth century. Lourosa’s writings witnessed this change in the political landscape. In the wake of the Restoration of 1640, when the aristocratic and highly hierarchical society was going through an organic crisis, Lourosa produced a long pamphlet that fuelled the political upheaval. A Mathematical Prediction, by turning the spotlight on the group of noblemen that carried out the rebellion that led to the Restoration with the support of the middle and professional urban classes, strove to reverse the traditional political pactum based upon privilege. As Lourosa expressed this in A Mathematical Prediction, the legitimacy of the new political actors of the 1640s stemmed from their decisive action in deposing a political ruler whose governmental rule had proven abusive. The publication of A Mathematical Prediction was rejected by the Inquisition. Nevertheless, Lourosa did not give up promoting his political agenda. The almanacs he authored after the Restoration encouraged the Portuguese people to support the Bragança cause, the political independence of Portugal and concomitantly the political rights of the social groups that backed the Bragança kings and regents. In the next few decades, as the political dispute turned in favour of 60

Indeed, compared to the aftermath of the Restoration of 1640, the rule of Castelo Melhor was less inclusive from the social point of view and, partially due to that, less capable of generating broad political support from the urban middle classes. The change in international politics, with the end of the Thirty Years War, peace between France and Spain, and the conquest of Pernambuco (Brazil) by the Dutch Republic also deepened the perception that there was little room for internal divisions. English-language introductions to the complex political situation in Portugal during the second half of the seventeenth century include Disney 2009, vol. 1, pp. 221–48 and Marques 1976, pp. 322–33.

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the traditional aristocracy and public opinion became increasingly domestic, Lourosa’s almanacs lost their political appeal. In fact, Lourosa himself seemed to have been subdued by the political recomposition of the early modern Portuguese state. Analysis of the trajectory of this Repúblico, from the vigorous and active A Mathematical Prediction of 1641 to the domestic-focused almanacs published in the 1670s, reveals that Lourosa and the Repúblicos of 1640 failed to establish an alternative cultural hegemony. This also demonstrates just how critical the role of the intellectuals is in creating consent and in changing the political and social relationships that exist in the world of production.

6

Concluding Remarks

Like many other astrologers in seventeenth-century Europe, Lourosa sought to intervene in the course of political events that risked subverting early modern societies. As with some other astrologers, he stood for a political party which arose out of the coup d’état with the goal of bringing to the fore the political rights of the urban middle classes. However, unlike the majority of his counterparts, Lourosa did not attempt to step into the political arena by putting forward extraordinary prophecies. The Portuguese astrologer used his prestige as physician, astronomer, and astrologer to mobilise his contemporaries. In doing so, he consciously acted in the sphere of public opinion in order to support the new political state of affairs that resulted from the insurrection of 1640 and to simultaneously determine its evolution. In his almanacs addressed to the urban middle classes, he urged his contemporaries to support the Restoration cause from the perspective of the interests of the urban milieus. Furthermore, as is quite clear from his treatise, A Mathematical Prediction, Lourosa attributed a special role to the urban middle classes in this new struggle for political power. By assuming this role, Lourosa distinguished himself as an organic intellectual who nevertheless struggled to achieve political leadership through persuading his contemporaries that a Bragança monarchical regime would be the best option, a regime in which the middle urban classes were the true champions of the Restoration movement and would play a decisive role. In this process of simultaneously nurturing consent in favour of the political regime, Lourosa explored the sphere of public opinion. By extolling the virtues of the Restoration of 1640 and stressing the role of its partisans in his widely distributed astrological almanacs, Lourosa tried to establish a new cultural hegemony that might have eventually led to the establishment of a different political arrangement in which the balance of power would tilt in favour of the urban middle classes on actually taking them into account. In 1668, the ascent of Pedro II to

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the Portuguese throne brought to an end the crisis which had first originated in the 1640 coup d’état. The traditional ruling classes established new, strong and durable alliances that would lead to the establishment of an absolute state in Portugal in the late seventeenth century. Lourosa and the urban middle classes were ultimately to be defeated. Yet, this case bears witness to the fact that public opinion was a key arena for political dispute even before the collapse of absolute states and the emergence of the nineteenth-century parliamentarian regimes to which Gramsci devoted such a great deal of reflection.

Acknowledgements We would like to thank Pietro Daniel Omodeo and Massimiliano Badino for their sharp and helpful comments and suggestions, which helped improve an earlier version of this chapter. Research for this work was partially supported by the FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia as part of the ‘Projeto Estratégico (Ref. UID/SOC/03126/2013)’ and by the CNPq – Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico.

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chapter 7

Cosmology, Religion, and Cultural Hegemony: The Scientific Apostolate of Antoni Romañá in Early Francoist Spain Matteo Realdi

1

Introduction: Cosmology in the Ruins of the Spanish Civil War

A popular book entitled Los Atrayentes Problemas de la Moderna Astronomía (The Attractive Problems of Modern Astronomy) circulated in Spain in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War (1936–39). Its author was the Jesuit father Antoni Romañá i Pujó (1900–81), then recently appointed as the director of the Observatory of Cosmic Physics of Ebro. The observatory, founded in 1904, belonged to the Society of Jesus and was located in Roquetes, a small town in Catalonia halfway between Barcelona and Valencia. In that book, issued in late 1940 by the publisher Redención,1 Romañá reported in enthusiastic terms on current research on the Solar System, the stars, extragalactic nebulae, and the universe at large. In particular, his readers could learn that there was no intermediate answer to the question of the origin and evolution of the universe, but that two options were available: either a beginning, ‘which amounts to confessing its production by a Superior Being’,2 or an infinite cosmic duration, this being the picture supported by materialists like Friedrich Engels (1820–95).3 According to Romañá, the models describing an expanding universe, commonly accepted from 1930 onwards,4 were compatible with the necessity of God’s intervention. Conversely, the continuous and eternal movements of matter advocated by Engels formed an absurd and 1 Redención (‘redemption’) was a brand new publisher based at the Alcalá prison in Madrid. It was implemented with the aim to rehabilitate convicts through their work in printing books and a weekly magazine, ‘an idea – as it was reported in the national press – so generously inspired by el Caudillo’, i.e. Francisco Franco (1892–1975) (ABC Madrid, 2 August 1939). Significantly, the first issue of the magazine Redención appeared on 1 April 1939, the very last day of the Spanish Civil War. 2 ‘[L]o que equivale a confesar su producción por un Ser Superior’, Romañá 1940b, p. 154. 3 On Engels’s view on cosmogony, see the chapters ‘Time and Space’ and ‘Cosmogony, Physics, and Chemistry’ from Engels 1947. 4 On the discovery of the expanding universe, see Kragh and Smith 2003.

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unscientific theory, which was contradicted by thermodynamic laws such as the conservation and degradation of energy. Entropy proved that the world could not be eternal.5 As a logical consequence, the cosmic recession was the evidence of a universal expansion that could not last for an infinite time. Otherwise, one should expect to observe a sort of powdery universe as the result of the degradation of stellar and galactic matter, something contrary to direct experience. A continuous pulsation of the universe, alternating phases of expansion and contraction, was not physically acceptable either. Consequently, [T]he true workers of Science … have been led by their knowledge to [the knowledge of] a Creator God … Those who, in the name of Science, have dared to reject [Him], … have tried to use knowledge superficially acquired and not properly assimilated, in order to base vain considerations on it. Always has the saying been true: ‘A great deal of science, leads to God; little science, separates from God’.6 Besides the specific use of ‘workers’ (obreros), a word that evoked a certain social class and the related political and social divisions exacerbated during the civil war, the pivotal aspect of Romañá’s rhetoric is the dialectical contrast between true and false scientific approaches, which endorsed and denied the creation of the world, respectively. This contrast was in fact a leitmotif in Romañá’s popular publications and public speeches, most of which were published and delivered during the early Franco dictatorship (1939–59).7 The kind of narrative constructed by Romañá is the subject of this chapter, together with his institutional activity as one of the main representatives of astronomy in the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, the National Research Council founded by Franco’s government (hereafter CSIC). These two aspects – science popularisation and institutional role – were strictly linked in Romañá’s agenda. They formed the core of his scientific apostolate (apostolado

5 This approach, based on thermodynamics arguments, can be seen as a further use of the socalled entropic creation argument, the history of which has been reconstructed in detail in Kragh 2008. 6 ‘[L]os verdaderos obreros de la Ciencia … se han visto conducidos por sus conocimientos al de un Dios Creador … Los que, en nombre de la Ciencia, han osado negarlo, … han querido utilizar conocimientos adquiridos superficialmente y no bien asimilados, para apoyar sobre ellos sus elucubraciones vanas. Siempre ha sido verdadera la sentencia: “Mucha ciencia, lleva a Dios; poca ciencia, aparta de Dios” ’, Romañá 1940b, pp. 166–7, emphasis added. 7 Franco’s dictatorship lasted until 1975.

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científico), a notion that combines Romañá’s values, ideas, actions, and public presence, and that will be described in this work. I show that Romañá’s scientific apostolate can be properly interpreted in terms of a specific programme. This programme was aimed at building consensus around the necessity of a Catholic dimension in the understanding of the natural world. In his popular publications, Romañá presented a nonconflicting, harmonious relationship between astronomy and religion. As Maurice Finocchiaro has remarked in the case of science, religion, and the Galileo affair, ‘[e]ven … within the notion of harmony, it is extremely important to distinguish the direction of influence, whether from religion to science or from science to religion’.8 I will argue that Romañá’s narrative as well as his scientific apostolate pointed in a precise direction with regard to the positions of science and religion in society. In popularising astronomy as a discipline harmoniously subordinated to religion, Romañá advocated the role that a religious institution like the Catholic Church could play in rescuing science from the menace of atheism and materialism. That is, the theme of science and religion was instrumental in Romañá’s agenda in supporting a hegemonic position of the Church in society, in line with Spanish National Catholicism. Another aspect that emerges from the analysis of Romañá’s popular articles is a certain emphasis put on the Jesuit contributions to modern science. Furthermore, as a representative for astronomy within the CSIC’s organisational scheme, Romañá was especially committed to fostering the activity of the Jesuit Ebro observatory. I will argue that these aspects of Romañá’s scientific apostolate reflect his effort to consolidate the position of the Society of Jesus in the context of the Catholicisation of science and culture advocated in Franco’s Spain. As recent studies have demonstrated, the Franco dictatorship was not indifferent to science. Scientists were instrumental to the regime in legitimating its policies, and, in turn, they took advantage of the regime that had come into power after the Spanish civil war. This account of Romañá’s scientific apostolate supplements the literature on the mutual relation between science and power in Franco’s Spain, with a case from the area of professional astronomy.9

8 Finocchiaro 2001, p. 115. Among the vast literature on the relationships between science and religion, see for instance Brooke 1991, Brooke and Cantor 1998, Fantoli 2010, Finocchiaro 2009, Lindberg and Numbers 1986, Moore 1992, Osler 1998. 9 For recent studies on physics and power in Franco’s Spain, see Herran and Roqué 2013, and Roqué and Herran 2012. See Anduaga 2009 and 2012, for a historical analysis of geophysics and meteorology during Francoism, respectively, and Camprubí 2014 for engineering. There is still a historiographical lack regarding the case of professional astronomy and astrophys-

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Dealing with this historical reconstruction, I have drawn inspiration from concepts such as cultural hegemony and the role of intellectuals, as analysed by the Italian political leader and revolutionary thinker Antonio Gramsci (1891– 1937). This Gramscian approach is described in the first section, after a brief overview of Romañá’s biography. In the following sections, I focus on Romañá’s public and institutional spheres of action. After the description of the events surrounding his appointment as the director of the Ebro observatory (section 2), I address his involvement in the organisation of Spanish astronomy within the CSIC (section 3). Finally, I analyse the main subjects that characterised his popular works on scientific cosmology (section 4). Romañá was active in this regard during the first two decades of the Franco regime. His ambition to disseminate a religious dimension of science gradually decreased from the mid-1960s onwards, as I indicate in my concluding remarks.

2

The Portrait of Romañá in a Gramscian Framework

Born into a wealthy bourgeois family of Barcelona, in 1917 Romañá began his noviciate (noviciado) in the Society of Jesus, in which he was officially incorporated in 1935. He studied philosophy, science, and theology in Barcelona and Valencia, as well as in Vals-près-le-Puy (France). In 1929 he was awarded his doctorate in the exact sciences from the University of Madrid, the only university in Spain that granted the doctor’s title, with a dissertation on the spatial generalisation of Whittaker’s formula for closed orbits. Appointed vice-director of the Ebro observatory in 1934, Romañá later was the director of this institution from 1939 to 1970. During that long period, he was the spokesperson for Spanish astronomy in the CSIC section devoted to physical sciences (Patronato Alfonso X El Sabio), a section of which he was eventually the president during the 1970s. Furthermore, he was a member of well-known Spanish academies and societies, and of international scientific commissions as well. In his scientific articles, published mostly in Spanish journals and international conference proceedings, Romañá made contributions mainly in solar physics, geomagnetism, and

ics in the context of science and power in Francoism. An exception in this regard is Vergara 2012, which presents a comparative analysis of some of the cosmological debates in Franco’s regime, with reference to Romañá’s approach too. The activities of amateur astronomers during Franco’s dictatorship have been described in Ruiz Castell 2016, whereas some aspects of astronomy popularisation during Francoism are presented in Nieto Galan 2013.

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seismology.10 These topics were essential in the broader study of the relations between the earth and the sun, in line with the traditional observational practice of the scientific institutions belonging to the Society of Jesus.11 Conversely, Romañá’s popular writings and public speeches were focused essentially on astronomy, its history and achievements, and its relation with religion. As reported in the Diccionario histórico de la Compañía de Jesús, Romañá was a ‘“priest-scientist” who found a way to practice his double loyalty to the Church and the world of science in a special synthesis’.12 Such a synthesis is also mentioned in the biography of Romañá written by the Jesuit father Josep Oriol Cardús (1914–2012), his main collaborator and his successor as director of the Ebro observatory. According to Cardús, the sphere of the religious person, who is ‘in principle separated from the affairs of the world, and that of the scientist deeply involved in the world in which he develops his tasks’,13 were complementary in the ‘human personality’ of Romañá, ‘whose work as a scientist, carried out within the Church, served to demonstrate in practice that the Church does not oppose scientific progress’.14 Romañá’s activities throughout his career have been documented in several historiographical works. However, so far historians discussing Romañá have focused on his organisational skills and his effective role in establishing collaborations with foreign scientific institutions.15 As a result, various questions about how Romañá combined his scientific approach and his religious conviction, and about the context in which he did this, remain largely unanswered. In particular: What societal model did he advocate through his words and works? What, if any, was the ideological purport of his apologetic argument and his institutional role, in the context of the cultural environment of post-civil war Spain? And to what extent did his agenda fit in with Spanish National Catholicism? Certain concepts provided by Gramsci offer an effective interpretive grid to analyse Romañá’s life and work within the framework of science and society after the installation of the Franco regime. A first key notion of Gramscian

10 11 12 13 14 15

For the publications of Romañá until 1976, see Borràs i Feliu et al. 1979. For an analysis on the Jesuit scientific tradition in the nineteenth and twentieth century, see Udías 2003, pp. 1–14, and Udías 2015, pp. 235–46. ‘[U]n “sacerdote-científico” que acertó a ejercer su doble fidelidad a la Iglesia y al mundo de la ciencia en una singular síntesis’, O’Neill and Domínguez 2001, p. 3405. ‘[E]l del religiós, en principi separat del afers del món, i el del científic, profundament encarnat en el món en el que es desenvolupa la seva tasca’, Cardús 1995, p. 1403. ‘[E]l seu treball com a científic, realitzat en el si de l’Església, servia per demonstrar pràcticament que l’ Església no s’oposa al progrés científic’, Cardús 1995, p. 1435. See García Doncel and Roca Rosell 2007, pp. 137–63, and Fernández Pérez 2009, pp. 87–8.

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inspiration is cultural hegemony.16 Although in Gramsci’s notes there is no unique definition of hegemony, this concept can be generally interpreted in terms of direction rather than domination.17 That is, it refers to the dynamic process of establishing social consensus and consciousness around the worldview of a certain group, which is, or struggles to be, the dominant one. What is fundamental in this process of awareness is the role of the intellectuals. They are the very agents of cultural leadership in civil society, which is the place where, according to Gramsci, different private organisations coexist, such as the family, churches, educational systems, trade unions, etc.18 In Gramsci’s view, ‘[a]n independent class of intellectuals does not exist, but rather every social group has its own intellectuals’.19 In particular, intellectuals organic to the hegemonic class disseminate its ideas and legitimise its actions in the public sphere, and create consensus about a hegemonic system of values without the coercive force of the State. In this sense, Gramsci pointed out that ‘[p]ublic opinion is strictly linked to political hegemony. It is the point of contact between civil society and political society, between consensus and force’.20 Gramsci elaborated these and other conceptual tools in a Marxist framework, in order to shed light on historical processes in social and political life in Italy from the eighteenth century to the rise of Fascism. Beyond these historical and theoretical limits, the concepts of cultural hegemony, social consensus, and intellectuals provide a convenient vocabulary to investigate the dynamics between culture and power. In particular, these concepts can be used to analyse the role played by scientists as ‘Gramscian intellectuals’ in legitimating certain worldviews. In the case of Romañá, the analysis is focused on his scientific apostolate and his different domains of action. Romañá himself illustrated the aims and primary concerns that characterised his own scientific apostolate as follows: [T]o testify the active presence of the Church in the domain of science, to contribute in a spirit of service to the scientific and technological development of our fatherland (patria), to freely assist those who may need help in the most varied circumstances, … and … to carry out apostolic work among technicians and scientists, which they would not

16 17 18 19 20

On the concept of hegemony in the thought of Gramsci and some interpretations of it, see for instance Bates 1975, Cospito 2004, Jackson Lears 1985, and Williams 1960. Cospito 2004, p. 75. Gramsci 1949, pp. 3–10. Gramsci 1966b, p. 71. English translation in Bates 1975, p. 353. Gramsci 1966a, p. 158. English translation in Bates 1975, p. 363.

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easily accept from others … [W]hat I know is that … if the exponential evolution of science and technology does not have, at least at times, a moral and Christian soul, this will cause us to make the greatest blunders …21 The commitment to creating a widespread Catholic dimension to science does indeed represent the linking thread between what can be metaphorically seen as the temporal dimension, i.e. the strategy, and the spatial dimension, namely the praxis, of Romañá’s agenda. That is, it represents the link between his ideas and aspirations, and his actions, reactions, and interactions within the evolving cultural environment of Franco’s Spain.

3

From Rodés to Romañá: The Ebro Observatory Under the Spanish National Research Council

After its creation in 1939, the CSIC was the institution that had the monopoly of reorganising Spanish scientific culture. This objective was pursued in line with National Catholicism, the ideological aspect of Franco’s regime that embraced the State and the Church in the organisation and control of social and cultural life. It was especially Opus Dei, the ‘lay arm of Catholic influence’ as it has been called by John Pollard,22 that acquired positions of power and controlled ministries and state institutions, among them the CSIC.23 The very structure of the CSIC, following the rhetoric of its first president José Ibáñez Martín (1896– 1969), derived from the intention to realise the unity of science for the glory of God: ‘[t]his commitment must be based, first of all, on the restoration of the 21

22 23

‘[D]ar testimonio de la presencia activa de la Iglesia en el campo de la Ciencia, contribuir con espíritu de servicio al desarollo científico y técnico de nuestra patria, ayudar gratuitamente a cuantos nos piden ayuda en las más variadas circumstancias … y … poder ejercer entre tecnicos y científicos una acción apostólica, que de otros difícilmente admitirían … [L]o que sí sé es que … si la evolución exponencial de la Ciencia y la Tecnología no tiene un alma, por lo menos a ratos, cristiana y moral, no dejará de llevarnos a los mayores desatinos …’. Letter from Romañá to Torelló, 29 May 1973. Source: Archivo Histórico de la Compañía de Jesús, Cataluña (hereinafter AHCJ), Fondo Romañá, Correspondencia con Jesuitas, 1935–81. Pollard 2014, p. 384. For the history of CSIC, see in particular Malet 2009a, and Romero de Pablos and Santesmases 2004. For some insights on civil society in National Catholic Spain, see Ginsborg 2014, pp. 279–311, and Cazorla 2010. For the history of Opus Dei in early Francoism, see Artigues 1971. Among the vast literature on Franco’s dictatorship, see for instance de Riquer 2010.

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classical and Christian unity of the sciences, destroyed in the eighteenth century’.24 The combination of modernity and Catholic tradition should result, in principle, in a balanced development of all scientific disciplines which, like the harmonious branches of a tree, deal with the three characteristic lines of ‘the supreme act of the Supreme Creator’, namely matter, life, and spirit. The most important institution representing astronomy in the CSIC’s ‘tree of science’ was the Ebro observatory, as the CSIC’s vice-secretary Alfredo Sánchez Bella (1916–99) put it to Romañá: Regarding the appointment of the Head of the Section [of astronomy], in view of the situation of the Madrid Observatory, the fact of the matter is that the observatory that the Council can consider its own is the Ebro one, since, although this is not legally the case, mutual understanding and cordiality will overcome a legal restriction. Conversely there is as yet no state Observatory in such a good condition. Of course, the ideal would be to coordinate all the existing [observatories].25 From these lines emerges the intention of the CSIC founders to centralise cultural institutions and control them from Madrid. Nevertheless, this aim could not be achieved in the case of astronomy, because of the devastating effects of the civil war on the staff and instruments of the Madrid observatory.26 Fur-

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‘Tal empeño ha de cimentarse, ante todo, en la restauración de la clásica y cristiana unidad de las ciencias, destruída en el siglo XVIII’, CSIC 1940, p. 9. ‘Respecto a la designación del Jefe de Sección, dada la situación del Observatorio de Madrid, lo cierto es que el Observatorio que el Consejo puede considerar como proprio es el del Ebro, pues aunque juridicamente no lo sea, la compenetración y cordialidad superan a una vinculación legal. En cambio no existe todavía ningún Observatorio del Estado en tales condiciones. Desde luego, el ideal sería la coordinación de todos los existentes’. Letter from Sánchez Bella to Romañá, 13 December 1940, emphasis added. Source: Archivo General de la Universidad de Navarra / Fondo José Maria Albareda / Caja 1 / Camisa 129–1 (hereinafter AGUN/6/1/129–1). In particular, part of the scientific staff of the Madrid observatory practically disappeared in the aftermath of the civil war. Pedro Carrasco Garrorena (1883–1966), director of the observatory, and Honorato de Castro Bonel (1881–1962), professor of astronomy, went into exile in Mexico. Furthermore, the astronomers José Tinoco y Acero (1882–1953) and Mariano Martín (1904–84) were purged, while Rafael Carrasco Garrorena (1902–81) was temporarily imprisoned and sanctioned by a Francoist law court because of his ‘collaboration with the red Army’ (Fernández Pérez 2009, p. 103). Additionally, during the siege of Madrid (1936–39) part of the observatory instruments had been moved to Valencia by scientists loyal to the Spanish Republic. On purges in universities during Franco’s dictatorship, see Claret Miranda 2006.

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thermore, the inclusion of the Ebro observatory into the CSIC could guarantee the necessary financial support to carry out its scientific activities. Actually, the delicate issue of the funds allocated to the Ebro observatory constantly appears in the letters exchanged between Romañá and José Maria Albareda (1902–66), the influential secretary general of the CSIC and one of the first members of Opus Dei. In this context, a certain sense of vulnerability on Romañá’s part can be perceived between the lines of their exchanges: I want to express particularly our gratitude [Romañá wrote to Albareda in 1942] for the increase of the [Ebro] subsidy … for which I do not doubt we have mainly to thank you, especially taking into account that the subvention has been entirely spontaneous and without us having to apply for such an amount.27 On the other hand, the keen interest expressed in Sánchez Bella’s letter suggests that the Ebro observatory was tactically important for the CSIC’s executive board. The Jesuit institution was internationally renowned thanks to the work of its directors, in particular the Jesuit father Lluís Rodés i Campderà (1881– 1939), Romañá’s predecessor. In this context, the troubles experienced by Rodés during the civil war deserve consideration; they are briefly mentioned later on. It is worth noting that in 1932 the Society of Jesus had been banned by the parliament of the Second Spanish Republic (1931–39), and that its property had been confiscated. Rodés, in charge since 1919, was nonetheless confirmed as Ebro director by the bishop of Tortosa, the local authority responsible for this institution after the ban.28 It was Franco himself who, in the midst of the civil war, rescinded the suppression and restored the ‘very Spanish’ (españolísima) Society of Jesus.29 The personal diary that Rodés kept during these years testifies to the ordeal that he experienced, and offers insights into his own worldview, and into the different approach of Romañá as well. They did not share the same opinion on Franco’s military coup, the levantamiento: Rodés criticised the military coup, which he regarded, ‘apart from the intention, … as veritable foolishness … [W]hile until now we were moving slowly towards com-

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‘De una manera especial quiero expresarle nuestra gratitud por el aumento de la subvención … que no dudo debemos agradecerle a Vd. sobre todo, máxima teniendo en cuenta que la concesión ha sido del todo espontánea y sin que nos hubiésemos atrevidos a solicitarla en tal cuantía’. Letter from Romañá to Albareda, 2 April 1942, AGUN/6/3/60. García Doncel and Roca Rosell 2007, pp. 107–8. O’Neill and Domínguez 2001, p. 1518.

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munism, [the coup] makes us fall into it with one push’.30 In these troubled times, especially in the light of the executions of clergymen and the persecution of religious communities carried out in zones controlled by Republican forces, Rodés struggled for the safety of the observatory staff, something that – as he reported to the superior general of the Society of Jesus – ‘was not so easy to achieve’.31 The Ebro observatory was indeed frequently visited by anarchist and Republican groups. On these occasions, Rodés was bravely able to placate the more radical individuals, and he effectively safeguarded the autonomy of the observatory. Rodés expressed his feelings in his diary: Two hours of conversation with the Dr. [Romañá]; with the greatest goodwill on both sides, and of course with his goodwill, each time that we touch on fundamental points the disparity of our viewpoints which derive in part from [our] very different natures and education becomes more obvious … Impressions on [the act of] disobeying, not being subject [to an authority], suffering, help, praise, etc … What he told me the other day, that any other person would have saved the Observatory under these circumstances, he explains today in the sense that ‘assuming my previous intervention’, even if I had been out, for example, giving Exercises, here the same thing would have happened; I have to confess that I doubt that very much.32 Except for Rodés, the other staff members eventually had to leave the observatory. From October 1937 to March 1939 Romañá stayed at the Académia Llúria in Barcelona, where he clandestinely carried out apostolic activities.33 Once the zone of the river Ebro was occupied by Francoist troops, Romañá was able to return to Roquetes, and he officially replaced Rodés shortly after the end of 30

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‘Salvando la intención, considero un verdadero desatino este levantamiento que si, hasta ahora caminábamos hacia el comunismo, de un empujón nos hace caer en él’, Rodés 2015, p. 33. ‘[L]o cual no era tan fácil’, Rodés 2015, p. 228. On the persecution and murders of clergymen in Spain during the 1930s, see Egido 2004, pp. 348–64. ‘Conversación de dos horas con el Dr.; con la mejor voluntad por parte de ambos, y desde luego con la suya, cade vez que removemos fondos queda más patente la disparidad de criterio que en parte proviene de naturalezas y formaciones muy distintas … Impresiones sobre el desobedecer, no ser súbdito, sufrir, ayuda, alabanza, etc … Lo que me dijo el otro dia de que cualquier otro habría salvado el Observatorio en estas circumstancias, lo explica hoy en el sentido de que “supuesta mi actuación” anterior, aunque yo hubiese estado afuera, por ejemplo, dando Ejercicios, aquí habría pasado lo mismo; yo he de confesar que lo dudo mucho’, Rodés 2015, pp. 51–3, italics replace underlining in the original. Cardús 1995, pp. 1418–20.

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the civil war. Actually, this replacement was considered appropriate by some sectors of the Society of Jesus, because Rodés’s attitude during the conflict had become something of an embarrassment. Rodés could be suspected, if not accused, of not having supported Franco’s military coup, and of having got on too well with the Republican authorities.34 Moved away from Barcelona officially because he needed to recover after the war, Rodés died in Majorca in June 1939. In one of his last letters, he regretted that ‘I have not yet returned to the Observatory; I have not the physical nor the moral strength for that, at least now’.35 Under the auspices of the service for ‘Ravaged Regions’ (Regiones Devastadas), Romañá effectively resumed the activities of the observatory. Most of the scientific activities at the Ebro observatory had been interrupted during the civil war, as many of its instruments had been dismantled and moved by Republican forces when Rodés was absent. At the same time, the first public interventions by Romañá were aimed at saving the reputation of his predecessor. In some obituaries and public conferences, Romañá acclaimed Rodés’s struggle to save the observatory from the fury of the reds, and convinced his audience that his predecessor’s achievements had in fact greatly contributed to the progress of Spanish astronomy and geophysics, and to the fame of the observatory in the international context.36 These attempts at redeeming Rodés were eventually successful. That is, Romañá was able to reposition in the public sphere both Rodés as a genuine symbol of national prestige, and the Ebro observatory as an institution loyal to the Church and to Spain.

4

Astronomy, the Spirit of Service, and Spheres of Action

Romañá was directly involved in multiple scientific initiatives at the local, national, and international levels for almost three decades. From the mid1940s, he coordinated the activities of the ‘National Union of Astronomy and Related Sciences’ (Unión Nacional de Astronomía y Ciencias Afines, hereafter UNACA), a new network of Spanish observatories set up by himself under the 34 35

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See García Doncel and Roca Rosell 2007, pp. 111–19 and p. 139, Raguer 2007, pp. 161–2, and Mas i Solench 2002, pp. 105–41. Quotation from a letter that was sent by Rodés to Father Johan Stein (1871–1951) of the Specola Vaticana, the English translation of which was published in Popular Astronomy, 47, 404 (1939). ‘It is very evident [the editor of Popular Astronomy added as a comment on Rodés’s letter] that much is written between the lines’. Romañá 1940a. See also García Doncel and Roca Rosell 2007, pp. 119–20, E.A. 1942, p. 207, and Mas i Solench 2002, p. 143.

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umbrella of the CSIC. In collaboration with the directors of the Madrid and San Fernando observatories, Romañá organised the national expedition to Spanish Guinea, now known as Equatorial Guinea, to observe the total solar eclipse of 1952. Furthermore, he was able to resume a number of collaborative projects of Spain with foreign scientific institutions. For instance, in the aftermath of World War II, Romañá successfully intervened with representatives of the International Astronomical Union (IAU) in order to maintain the presence of Spain within this important international network. His diplomatic action resulted indeed in a project of reducing observations of the minor planets, which the IAU eventually commissioned to Spain. In his publications, Romañá rarely extols Spanish astronomy as a national endeavour. Romañá was certainly well aware of the backward state of Spanish astronomical facilities, something that could not be mentioned in the public sphere but that made it impossible to be too positive. The polemic in the newspaper ‘ABC Madrid’ that followed the observation of the planet Mars in opposition in September 1956 is illuminating in this regard. In the light of the lack of interest shown by pertinent official institutions in this astronomical event, the ABC director Luis Calvo (1898–1991) criticised in an editorial the unsatisfactory situation of national astronomy. Calvo pointed out that European scientists were carrying out research of great interest into planets, stars, and galaxies, and were able to deal with intriguing questions like the possibility of life on other planets. Spanish astronomers, on the other hand, could use only obsolete and inadequate instruments37 and were confined in observatories that, according to Calvo, were not very different from market tents. Because of the marginal attention it received, astronomy could be considered the ‘great Cinderella’38 (insigne Cenicienta) of Spanish science. Despite the explicit request received by Albareda, Romañá did not publicly intervene in defence of the CSIC in the controversy sparked by ABC.39 Conversely, he considered it appropriate to send

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For instance, in the same year the director of the Madrid observatory ironically asserted in an interview that the most modern instrument at their disposal was in fact the telephone. See López Arroyo 2005, p. 23. Calvo 1956, p. 54. ‘Do not think’, Romañá explained to Albareda, ‘that I have forgotten the [issue of the] articles for ABC … It occurs that I do not find it so easy to say what has to be said in a way that does not offend anyone’ (‘No crea que he olvidado lo de los articulos para ABC … Lo que ocurre es que no me resulta tan fácil decir lo que conviene y de manera que no se ofenda a nadie’). Letter from Romañá to Albareda, 16 October 1956, AGUN/6/37/332. Actually, a reply to Calvo’s editorial was published in ABC, which had been written by Vicente Puyal, the president of the Spanish National Commission of Astronomy (Comisión Nacional de Astronomía).

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a report to Albareda and Ibáñez Martín in which he described the state of astronomy in Spain in detail, frankly confirmed the unpleasant picture presented in ABC, and suggested actions that might be taken in order to overcome the problem, such as allocating more funds to the existing observatories and creating new observational infrastructures on high mountains.40 However, the CSIC’s executive board did not take the actions suggested by Romañá. Throughout the early Franco period, astronomy was relegated to a secondary position in the plans of the CSIC. Other disciplines such as physics, geophysics, meteorology, and engineering were considered a priority for civil and military applications, as well as for technological development. Issues of access, funding, and control of astronomical facilities became a government concern only during late Francoism, to some extent in reaction to the interest shown by scientists from several European countries in the excellent astronomical conditions of the ‘Spanish sky’. On these occasions, it was Romañá himself who frequently intervened behind the scenes in the long and complex negotiations between scientific institutions in Spain, the German Federal Republic, the UK, Sweden, and Denmark. The negotiations eventually resulted in new international astronomical and solar observatories being built in southern Spain and the Canary Islands.41 Romañá’s domains of action overlapped but he had somewhat different priorities in different areas. His activity within the CSIC was inspired by the ‘spirit of service’ referred to above. On the other hand, Romañá’s efforts were mainly directed at consolidating the position of the Ebro observatory, the Jesuit institution that – he would later acknowledge – represented ‘all my life’ (toda mi vida).42 Actually, the Ebro observatory played a leading role in the national activities carried out in the context of the International Geophysical Year (1957–58). This observatory was also one of the first scientific institutions in Spain to install a radio telescope and an ionospheric survey instrument. Furthermore, it was the Ebro observatory that became involved in the IAU project of minor planet observations. This project was developed in collaboration with the ‘Seminar of Astronomy and Geodesy’ of the University of Madrid, a new institution founded under the auspices of the CSIC. The chair of this seminar was the astronomer José Maria Torroja Menéndez (1916–94). During the early Franco dictatorship, Romañá and Torroja controlled in fact almost every astronomical activity implemented within the UNACA. 40 41 42

AGUN/6/37/333, and AGUN/6/41/77. On the inauguration of international observatories in Spain during late Francoism, see Quintana 1989, Realdi 2012, Sánchez Martínez 1985, Smith 1985, and Wilson 2010. Romañá 1966c, p. 236.

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Above all, Romañá’s leading motivation was the Christianisation of science, a motivation that he shared with Albareda and Ibáñez Martín: ‘I wish you’, Romañá wrote to Ibáñez Martín, the CSIC’s president and Minister of National Education, ‘every success … in carrying out with great zeal and skill the important function of spiritually building up our Fatherland entrusted to you by el Caudillo’.43 And again, Romañá wrote to Albareda, ‘may God allow that my limited strengths will not prevent me from achieving the scientific aim that I wish to achieve for the prestige of Religion and our Fatherland …’.44 Viewed through the Gramscian lens of the societal role of intellectuals, Romañá’s true zeal for a religious dimension of science is entirely in line with National Catholicism. Romañá’s active presence can be noticed especially within the complex social and cultural environment of Catalonia.45 One of his concerns as a priest-scientist was to find ways to improve the condition of the Catalan needy class, ‘and I say “needy” and not “working”’, Romañá commented later in 1975, ‘because in many places the true middle class is much more poor and helpless than the working class, which in many respects is a true “power” ’.46 One might therefore meet Romañá ‘preaching the Saint Mission at the University’47 of Barcelona, or participating in the ‘Campaign against materialism’ organised in Barcelona by members of the Society of Jesus. For this campaign, he gave public conferences on science and materialism, a topic that he was considered ‘the most appropriate person’48 to deal with. While Romañá’s views converged with those of the CSIC’s officials on establishing a Catholic dimension of science, his secondary position within the hier-

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‘[L]e deseo … toda clase de prosperidades … para seguir desempeñando con todo celo y acierto la importante función que para la construcción espiritual de nuestra Patria el Caudillo le ha confiado’. Letter from Romañá to Ibáñez Martín, 1 January 1941. Source: Archivo General de la Universidad de Navarra / Fondo José Ibáñez Martín / Caja 33 / Camisa 102 (hereinafter AGUN/139/33/102). ‘Dios quiera que mis limitadas fuerzas no me impidan llegar a la meta científica, a donde desearía llegar por el prestigio de la Religión y de nuestra Patria …’. Letter from Romañá to Albareda, 25 February 1943, AGUN/6/4/133–2. On Catalonia in post-civil war, see for instance Solé 2007. For historical analysis on Catalan scientific institutions under the reorganisation of CSIC, see Malet 1998, and 2009b. ‘[Y] digo “necesitadas” y no “obreras” porque en muchos sitios la verdadera clase media está mucho más necesitada y desamparada que la obrera, que en muchas partes es un verdadero “poder” ’. Letter from Romañá to Torres-Gasset, 4 December 1975, AHCJ, Fondo Romañá, Correspondencia con Jesuitas, 1935–81. ‘[P]redicando la Santa Misión en la Universidad’. Letter from Romañá to Albareda, 24 February 1951, AGUN/6/23/286. ‘[L]a persona más indicada’. Letter from Piulachs to Romañá, 25 January 1960, AHCJ, Fondo Romañá, Correspondencia con Jesuitas, 1935–81.

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archical structure of the CSIC was a matter of tension. This tension can be perceived between the lines of Romañá’s letters to Albareda. For instance, commenting on an official speech that Albareda delivered in 1942 to the Madrid Academy of Sciences, Romañá put the issue in terms of a sense of isolation: [W]hat I really liked is what you declare on the constancy or depth of research, on the generosity and complete dedication that [research] demands and on the risks of loneliness … Sadly I feel and experience this latter too much … On the other hand the solitude, in another sense, is also a great benefit, since, far from the noise of the city, it is easier to carry out the ‘very important task of avoiding the tasks’ that distract …49 Romañá was one of the representatives of the Jesuit Tarraconense Province who participated in 1965 in the election of the new superior general of the Society of Jesus. In a letter to Albareda, Romañá described his new superior general as follows: [An] extremely spiritual and dynamic person, very convinced of the importance of the scientific apostolate, and very keen on authentic collaboration, both with the secular clergy, and with all kinds of orders and Institutes. As you can see, one always looks ‘pro domo sua’ and for this [reason] I have mentioned the [matter of] the scientific apostolate, which is so important for the [Ebro] Observatory. Of course, the other apostolate fields are also of interest to him.50 The friction around spheres of action and competence that emerges from these lines was in a way a reflection of a broader competition between Opus Dei

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‘[L]o que más me ha gustado es lo que Vd. expone sobre la fijeza o profundidad de la investigación, sobre la generosidad y total entrega que exige y sobre los peligros de la soledad … Esto último por desgracia lo siento y palpo demasiado … En cambio la soledad, tomada en otro sentido, es una ventaja también muy grande, pues lejos del bullicio de la ciudad, es más fácil llevar a cabo aquella “importantísima tarea de evitar las tareas” que distraen …’. Letter from Romañá to Albareda, 28 September 1942, AGUN/6/3/143–2, italics replace underlining in the original. ‘[P]ersona sumamente espiritual y dinámica, muy convencida de la importancia del apostolado científico, y muy deseosa de auténtica colaboración, tanto con el clero secular, como con todas las ordenes e Institutos. Como Vd. ve, uno siempre mira “pro domo sua” y por esto he citado lo del apostolado científico que tanta importancia tiene para el Observatorio. Naturalmente, también los otros campos de apostolado le interesan’. Letter from Romañá to Albareda, 26 July 1965, AGUN/6/54/114.

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and the Society of Jesus. After the end of the Spanish Civil War, these rival groups struggled to gain positions of control in the new political regime, especially regarding the education system.51 Romañá placed the popularisation of astronomy high on his agenda so as to promote a hegemonic position of the Catholic Church, as well as to emphasise the importance of the Society of Jesus in the cultural environment of post-civil war Spain. This aspect of what might be called Romañá’s programme is described in the next section.

5

Narratives and Direction: The Turn of Cosmology Towards the Idea of Creation

The differences between Rodés’s and Romañá’s worldviews are reflected in their different accounts of modern cosmology and the corresponding scenarios of the origin and evolution of the universe. Actually, Romañá’s book Los Atrayentes Problemas de la Moderna Astronomía appeared shortly after the publication of another work on astronomy intended for a wider audience and written by Rodés. After a postponement because of the civil war, a revised edition of Rodés’s widely circulated book El Firmamento had eventually been published in 1939, the very year of Rodés’s death. In his book, Rodés only briefly considered the recent picture of the expanding universe that resulted from the application of general relativity to the universe at large. He was rather sceptical about the hypothesis of a natural beginning of the world proposed in 1931 by the Belgian priest Georges Lemaître (1894–1966).52 In line with the remark of the famous English astrophysicist Arthur Eddington (1882–1944) that ‘[t]he beginning seems to present insuperable difficulties unless we agree to look on it as frankly supernatural’,53 Rodés pointed out that ‘[a]stronomy will not be able

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On the rivalry between Opus Dei and the Society of Jesus, see Artigues 1971, pp. 126–31. Rodés had discussed the so-called primeval atom hypothesis with Lemaître himself, on the occasion of an international astronomical conference held in Oslo in 1938. Rodés reported in his diary that ‘[t]he Abbé Lemaître invites me to a soft drink and we talk a lot about his cosmological theories; it seems to me something rushed and little precise on his philosophical principles; the atom which has been continuously disintegrating and expanding; it seems to confer to matter and the Cosmos contradictory concepts; the length in time, the freedom with respect to future acts …’ (‘L’Abbé Lemaître me convida a un refresco y hablamos largo de sus teorías cosmológicas; me parece algo precipitado y poco preciso en sus principios filosóficos; el átomo que ha estado siempre desintegrándose y expandéndiose; parece atribuye a la materia y al Cosmos conceptos contradictorios; la duración, la libertad respecto de los actos futuros …’), Rodés 2015, p. 187. Eddington 1933, p. 125. On Eddington’s view on science and religion, see Stanley 2007.

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to explain this beginning in time without turning to the free act of Creation; a necessary cause cannot start doing what it has not done for an eternity’.54 More concerned about the place of human beings in the universe than about cosmic evolution, Rodés nevertheless considered it plausible that the Creator’s act had brought into being an infinite and stationary starry heaven, a picture that Rodés conveyed in the book’s title itself, the ‘firmament’. By contrast, Romañá presented his arguments in a more radical, or rather indisputable, way. In his popular articles on the science of the universe he insisted on two related narratives, namely the history of astronomy from Copernicus onwards, and the evolution of the universe as described in modern cosmology. The portrait that Romañá painted was a combination of scientific progress and history on the one hand, and the continuity, tradition, and constructive role of the Church on the other. A portrait in which religious authority was eventually superimposed on modernity.55 The first relevant work that Romañá wrote on cosmology appeared in 1936, with the title ‘Le Monde, son Origine et sa Structure aux Regards de la Science et de la Foi’ (‘The World, its Origin and Structure with Regard to Science and Faith’).56 This was in fact a chapter in the French book Essai d’une Somme Catholique contre les sans-Dieu (Essay of a Catholic Summa against the Atheists), a collective work edited by the Jesuit Ivan Kologrivof (1890–1955). The book was explicitly intended as the Catholic reaction to the 1933 edition of the Antireligious Manual published by the Soviet League of Militant Atheists, and was an exposition of Catholic doctrine on a wide range of topics from the social and natural sciences. In 1933, the Secretariat on Atheism had been founded by a group of Vatican officials, in line with the directives of the secretary of state, Eugenio Pacelli (1876–1958), the future Pope Pius XII. Its formal leadership was placed under the superior general of the Society of Jesus, Włodzimierz Ledóchowski (1866–1942). ‘The extensive involvement of the Jesuits’ in this secretariat, Giuliana Chamedes notes, speaks of ‘the high regard in which the order was held by Pope Pius XI and Eugenio Pacelli in the interwar years, and the close personal ties that connected these men to the staunchly anti-communist

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‘La Astronomía no podrá explicar ese comienzo en el tiempo sin acudir al acto libre de la Creación; una causa necesaria no puede comenzar a hacer lo que no ha hecho en una eternidad’, Rodés 1939, p. 643. See Romañá 1936, 1940b, 1941, 1942, 1946, 1954, 1966a, 1966b, and 1966c. Romañá 1936. Further French versions appeared in 1950, 1951, 1953, and 1957. English translations were published in 1937 and 1938, while the Spanish and Italian translations appeared in 1943 and 1953, respectively. See Romañá’s bibliography in Cardús 1995, pp. 1435–42.

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Superior-General’.57 The Essai was widely circulated. It was translated into English and Spanish, and re-issued in 1950 with the title Essai sur Dieu, l’ Homme, et l’Univers. The editor of this new edition was Father Jacques de Bivort de la Saudée, who aimed at strengthening, by quoting from Don O’Leary, ‘the West’s resistance to communism’.58 The new edition would later also be translated into English, as well as into Italian and Portuguese. In retrospect, Romañá’s first contribution to the Essai can be seen as a kind of manifesto of his own ideas, which Romañá persistently advanced in subsequent works. The adaptation of his rhetoric to the cultural environment of the Francoist regime was quite easy and successful: ‘I sincerely congratulate you’, an amateur astronomer wrote about Romañá’s 1940 book, ‘since [the book] reveals that you are an excellent communicator, explaining in few, very clear words the most transcendent problems of modern Cosmogony’.59 And again, a representative of the Spanish Ministry of National Education commented on Romañá’s treatise on cosmology published in 1966: ‘I have read your discourse entirely. It is impressive and excellent … I think that you are exactly the right person to write a treatise on Cosmology’.60 The Gramscian approach makes it possible to give a sound interpretation of the core arguments of Romañá’s programmatic position in terms of an effort to consolidate the hegemony of the Catholic Church. An initial argument for this position is the strong correlation between the religious views of important scientists and their contributions to science, a correlation that, according to Romañá, had always characterised the history of modern astronomy. This was the case with Copernicus, Newton, Herschel, Whittaker, Eddington, and others. Since these wise men did not lose their faith while investigating the heavens, this fact was a telling proof that there was no contradiction between religion and science. Another argument is that the Church never opposed science. Concerning the Galileo affair, Romañá acknowledged frankly that the condemnation was a mistake, since it complicated the position of the Catholic Church during later attacks by its enemies. Conversely, Romañá some-

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Chamedes 2015, p. 9. O’Leary 2006, p. 157. ‘[L]e felicito sinceramente pues en ella se revela Vd. como un excelente divulgador, esplicando en pocas y clarísimas palabras los mas trascendentales problemas de la moderna Cosmogonía’. Letter from Armenter to Romañá, 20 February 1941, AHCJ, Fondo Romañá, Correspondencia general, 1926–62. ‘Leí integramente tu discurso. Es impresionante y magnífico … Creo que eres la persona idónea para escribir un tratado de Cosmología’. Letter from Navarro Borrás to Romañá, 30 March 1966, AHCJ, Fondo Romañá, Correspondencia general, 1963–81.

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how admired Galileo’s acceptance of the events, wondering whether this great scientist-believer would have been able to acquire the attitude of obedience to the Pope characteristic of Jesuits, in accordance with Ignatius of Loyola’s formula ‘what seems to me white[,] I will believe to be black if the hierarchical Church so determines’.61 Again, the history of astronomy provided evidence of the harmonious relation between science and religion, for it was constantly characterised by important contributions of clergymen: ‘[i]t can be certainly affirmed’, Romañá stated, ‘that the history of the contribution of the Catholic Clergy to the progress of astronomy would fill a thick volume’.62 In particular, the members of the Society of Jesus had always contributed significantly to the understanding of the natural world through the exact sciences, by the research carried out over the centuries in its observatories all over the world. The exaggerated emphasis that Romañá put on the Jesuit contributions was in fact noticed by de Bivort himself. When he was preparing a new edition of the Essai sur Dieu, l’Homme, et l’Univers, de Bivort asked Romañá to underline in his chapter that ‘the advancements of modern physics and the theories of Einstein are each of them advancements of the sciences that can only reinforce faith and that in any case cannot move people away from faith’.63 On the other hand, de Bivort warned Romañá ‘not to give the impression that there are only Jesuit scientists in the domain that you are dealing with’.64 According to Romañá, astronomy was the science that offered the best evidence in favour of the existence of God and the creation of the universe. This evidence could be inferred from theories proposed in different epochs. For instance, the cosmic order demonstrated by Newton revealed God’s act of creation. Laplace also offered evidence of the existence of a supreme Intelligence (Intelligence sûpreme). The stability of the heavenly structures that resulted from Laplace’s investigation was indeed nothing but an additional ele-

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‘[L]o blanco que yo veo creer que es negro si la Iglesia hierárquica así lo determina’, Romañá 1966a, p. 30. ‘Bien puede afirmarse que la historia de la contribución del Clero católico a los avances de la astronomía ocuparía un grueso volumen’, Romañá 1942, p. 854. ‘[L]es progrès de la physique moderne et les théories d’Einstein sont autant de progrès dans les sciences qui ne peuvent que consolider la foi et qui en tout cas ne peuvent éloigner de la foi’. Letter from de Bivort to Romañá, 21 December 1951, AHCJ, Fondo Romañá, Correspondencia general, 1926–62. ‘[N]e pas donner l’ impression qu’ il n’y a que des jésuites savants dans le domain que vous traitez’. Letter from de Bivort to Romañá, 7 December 1951, AHCJ, Fondo Romañá, Correspondencia general, 1926–62.

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ment reinforcing the Newtonian cosmic order. ‘[I]t is known’, Romañá claimed, in order to emphasise that Laplace’s works supported the existence of God, ‘that Laplace died as a fervent Christian in the arms of two priests’.65 Romañá emphasised that in more recent times modern astrophysics had developed around the concept of divine creation in a remarkable way. This development was evident from the introduction of relativistic models that described an expanding universe of a finite age, the divine act taking the form of a creation ex nihilo. During the 1930s and 1940s, the backbone of Romañá’s attacks was the infinite and eternal universe of dialectical materialism. From the early 1950s on, this target was replaced by the steady-state theory of the universe, which predicted an expanding universe that was infinite in both space and time.66 A similar dichotomy between true and false scientific approaches in investigating the universe was supported in those years by a number of Jesuit scientists and philosophers. Positions such as the infinity of the cosmos, the universe of dialectical materialism, and the steady-state theory were indeed criticised in several articles, in a transnational convergence of views around the interpretation of a tight relationship between science and religion from a neo-Thomist perspective.67 A different approach was adopted by Lemaître, the father of the hypothesis of a primeval atom as the origin of the world. As a priest-scientist, Lemaître always held the view that two independent, separate roads should be followed simultaneously to reach the same truth: the scientific road and the religious road. According to him, a scientific beginning of the universe should be clearly distinguished from a supernatural creation. Lemaître’s address to the 1958 Solvay Conference exemplifies his liberal attitude. Talking about his primeval atom hypothesis, Lemaître clarified: As far as I can see, such a theory remains entirely outside any metaphysical or religious question. It leaves the materialist free to deny any transcendental Being … For the believer, it removes any attempt to familiarity

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‘[O]n sait que Laplace est mort en chrétien fervent entre les bras de deux prêtres’, Romañá 1936, pp. 77–8. An example is one of Romañá’s popular articles, significantly entitled ‘The Turn in Astrophysics to the Idea of Creation’ (‘La Vuelta en Astrofísica a la Idea de Creación’, Romañá 1954). See Kragh 1996 for a thorough historical reconstruction of the twentieth-century debates on the Big Bang and steady-state theories of the universe. See for instance Abelé 1949, Due Rojo 1955, and 1960, Ferrer Pi 1967, Muñoz 1955, O’Connell 1953, and 1954, Puigrefagut 1957, 1961, and 1964, Stein 1949, and 1951.

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with God … It is consonant with the wording of Isaias speaking of the ‘Hidden God’ hidden even in the beginning of creature.68 By contrast, a final argument that emerges from Romañá’s reflections on cosmology is the subordination of scientific knowledge to theological knowledge. His representation of a harmonious relationship between science and religion reflects indeed the steering of science towards religion. That is, Romañá depicted astronomy as a scientific activity that asymptotically approached the absolute truth, yet without ever being able to reach it. This picture was actually perfectly in line with the message of Pope Pius XII delivered at the IAU General Assembly that took place in Rome in 1952. According to Pius XII, there was ‘no chance that even the most brilliant scientist will ever be able to know and even less to solve all the enigmas contained within the physical universe’.69 Commenting on the papal speech, Romañá asserted that ‘[t]his is the pure truth’70 (pura verdad): the efforts of science to understand the cosmos would come to a standstill, which only a transcendent, metaphysical conception of nature would be able to overcome. Science could not be left alone: this was the essence of the comment that Romañá made to Catholic scientists, ‘subject without any doubt to the Church’s teachings, but no less aware of the “holy freedom of the sons of God”’.71

6

Conclusions

A first conclusion that can be drawn from this historical reconstruction concerns the issue of the mutual relation between science and power in Franco’s Spain. Romañá’s spirit of service was instrumental for the CSIC to bring professional astronomy in line with Francoism, as well as to promote international relations and thus to make Spain acceptable in the international community. In turn, Romañá took advantage of his institutional role to reinforce the research 68 69

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Lemaître 1958, p. 7. On Lemaître’s approach to science and religion, see Kragh 2004, pp. 124–60, Lambert 1999, and 2007. ‘[I]l n’y a toutefois aucune probabilité que même le plus génial chercheur puisse jamais arriver à connaître et encore moins à résoudre toutes les énigmes renfermées dans l’ univers physique’, from: ‘Discours du Pape Pie XII aux Participants au Congrés Mondial d’ Astronomie’, 7 September 1952, available at: https://w2.vatican.va/content/pius‑xii/fr/ speeches/1952/documents/hf_p‑xii_spe_19520907_la‑presence.html. Romañá 1966c, p. 192. ‘[S]umiso sin duda alguna a las enseñanzas de la Iglesia, pero consciente no menos de la “santa libertad de los hijos de Dios” ’, Romañá 1966c, p. 5.

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capacity of the Ebro observatory and thus to consolidate the position of this scientific institution. In a letter to Albareda concerning certain future visits to scientific institutions in France and Italy, Romañá wrote the following words, which are illuminating in this respect: I consider it indispensable to have these interviews, in particular the one with D’Azambuja, because of the position that he holds on the International Coordinating Committee of Studies in Heliophysics and Geophysics, in which I wish to ensure that they include Spain again, relying on the strong friendship that existed between this gentleman and F[ather] Rodés, on the friendliness that he has always shown me in his letters, and above all on the realisation of a properly functioning project for which I would like to know exactly what your plans are, in order to direct the reconstruction of our Heliophysics Section in a such way that we can satisfy all your aspirations.72 A final reflection concerns Romañá’s domains of action analysed through the perspective of (the struggle for) cultural hegemony. The spiritual dimension of science fostered by the CSIC was a suitable ideological framework to advocate a dominant role of the Church. The thorough treatise on modern cosmology written in 1966, Idea Sobre el Estado Actual de la Cosmología (A View of the Present State of Cosmology), represents in some ways Romañá’s swan song, whose ambition in this direction gradually decreased in the years that followed. Actually, he requested and was given leave to be replaced at the Ebro observatory, the directorship of which he surrendered in 1970 at the age of 70. However, this was probably not just a matter of age. In the aftermath of the Second Vatican Council (1962–65), the interests and priorities of the Jesuits shifted from the scientific to the social apostolate. Particularly from the 32nd Jesuit General Congregation (1975) onward, the Society of Jesus accorded priority to pastoral and social aims such as faith and justice, while the scientific apostolate lost its important role. This choice resulted in closing or selling some of the Jesuit scientific

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‘[C]onsidero indispensable tener las entrevistas dichas, sobre todo la de D’Azambuja, por el cargo que ocupa en el Comité Internacional de Coordinación de los Estudios Heliofísicos y Geofísicos, en el que quiero procurar incluyan de nuevo a España, apoyándome en la gran amistad que unía a dicho señor con el P. Rodés, en la simpatía que siempre me ha mostrado en sus cartas, y sobre todo en la realización de un trabajo eficiente, para lo que quiero conocer bién sus planes, a fin de orientar la reconstrucción de nuestra Sección Heliofísica de modo que podamos satisfacer todas sus aspiraciones’. Letter from Romañá to Albareda, 17 June 1947, AGUN/6/13/700.

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installations, a decision motivated also by the decline in vocations.73 Although Romañá accepted these changes in the Society’s direction, he could not help feeling a certain disappointment, as he regretted that the aims that had characterised his scientific apostolate were now considered ‘outdated’ (superados) among the priorities of the Jesuits.74 Again, the Gramscian concepts offer an appropriate theoretical background against which to trace the evolution of Romañá’s scientific apostolate in the context of Spanish National Catholicism. Dwelling on the interactions between popular and intellectual elements, Gramsci pointed out: The popular element ‘feels’ but does not always know or understand; the intellectual element ‘knows’ but does not always understand and in particular does not always feel. The two extremes are therefore pedantry and philistinism on the one hand and blind passion and sectarianism on the other … The intellectual’s error consists in believing that one can know without understanding and even more without feeling and being impassioned … in other words that the intellectual can be an intellectual (and not a pure pedant) if distinct and separate from the people-nation, that is, without feeling the elementary passions of the people, understanding them and therefore explaining and justifying them in the particular historical situation and connecting them dialectically to the laws of history and to a superior conception of the world, scientifically and coherently elaborated – i.e. knowledge.75 It is in the very terms of presence and awareness that Romañá perceived the scientific apostolate. Curiously, Romañá illustrated this attitude by adopting a phrasing that is reminiscent of Gramsci himself: [L]et me say to you that in the [Jesuit] enlarged council the ministries that we might call ‘scientific’ seem to me not to have been well represented (and of course even less in the true council …). For sure there is Father Thió, but he does not seem to me to be a person who ‘feels’ (siente) the scientific apostolate: certainly he has a brilliant university career and he works at the University; however, isn’t he basically a ‘pastoralist’ who practises his apostolate ‘among university people’ and uses his career for 73 74 75

See in particular Udías 2003, p. 14. Letter from Romañá to Torelló, 29 May 1973, AHCJ, Fondo Romañá, Correspondencia con Jesuitas, 1935–81. Gramsci 1966c, pp. 114–15. English translation in Hoare and Nowell Smith 1971, p. 418.

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this purpose? The scientific apostolate, in my humble opinion, is a very different thing, and one has to ‘feel’ it.76 The fecundity of the Gramscian lens in attempting to read the agenda of Romañá lies in its effectiveness in helping us understand to what extent Romañá, as Eugenio Garin put it regarding the role of Gramscian intellectuals, embodied ‘concretely, the theory, project, and consciousness’77 of a certain cultural hegemony, and to grasp how his constellation of values shaped public and institutional actions. ‘I trust’, Romañá stated, ‘that the Lord has to be bountiful and generous with those who work so much for his glory and for the Christianisation of scientific research’.78

Acknowledgements I am sincerely grateful to Massimiliano Badino and Pietro Daniel Omodeo for the invitation to contribute to this volume and their constant encouragement. I would like to thank the colleagues that commented on earlier drafts of this chapter. They are: Azadeh Achbari, Danny Beckers, Ab Flipse, Frans van Lunteren, Agustí Nieto Galan, Antoni Roca Rosell, Xavier Roqué, Ida Stamhuis, and Abel Streefland. I also benefited from the comments of the participants in the conference ‘As Ciências Matemáticas e as Ditaduras no Século XX’ (Lisbon, 10–12 December 2015), especially the suggestions of Moritz Epple, Antoni Malet, and Albert Presas i Puig. I am grateful to Bas Jongeling for comments and for helping to revise the text, and to Xavier Roqué and Antoni Roca Rosell for helping with the translation of the Spanish and Catalan texts. I would like to sincerely thank Maria Genescà for the collaboration during my research stays at the Ebro Observatory Library (Roquetes).

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‘[P]ermítame que le diga que en la consulta ampliada no me parecen bien representados los ministerios que podríamos llamar “científicos” (y menos naturalmente en la consulta verdadera …). Ciertamente está el Padre Thió, pero éste no me parece una persona que “siente” el apostolado científico: ciertamente tiene una carrera universitaria brillante y trabaja en la Universidad; pero ¿no es más un “pastoralista” que ejerce su apostolado “entre universitarios” y para esto utiliza la carrera que tiene? El apostolado científico, a mi pobre entender, es otra cosa muy distinta y hay que “sentirla”’. Letter from Romañá to TorresGasset, 4 December 1975, AHCJ, Fondo Romañá, Correspondencia con Jesuitas, 1935–81. Garin 1997, p. 65. ‘Confío que el Señor ha de ser pródigo y generoso con quien tanto trabaja por su gloria y por la Cristianización de la investigación científica’. Letter from Romañá to Albareda, 18 March 1953, AGUN/6/30/175.

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I am grateful to Francesc Casanovas for the collaboration in consulting archival material at the Archivo Histórico de la Compañía de Jesús (Barcelona), and for permission to quote from archival sources. I would also like to thank Inés Irurita, Carmen Jauregui Pérez, and Marian Zabala for helping in the research at the Archivo General de la Universidad de Navarra (Pamplona), and for permission to quote from archival sources. This research has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement n. 656139.

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part 4 Organic Intellectuals

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chapter 8

Using Gramsci’s Dialogical Approach: The Struggle for Meaning in Q&A Sections of the Spanish Press in the First Third of the Twentieth Century Isabel Jiménez-Lucena, Jorge Molero-Mesa and Carlos Tabernero-Holgado

Trovare la reale identità sotto l’apparente differenziazione e contraddizione, e trovare la sostanziale diversità sotto l’apparente identità è la più delicata, incompresa eppure essenziale dote del critico delle idee e dello storico dello sviluppo storico. Antonio Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere (Q24 §3)

… Ogni traccia di iniziativa autonoma da parte dei gruppi subalterni dovrebbe perciò essere di valore inestimabile per lo storico integrale. Antonio Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere (Q25 §2)

∵ 1

Dialogic Gramsci and Science Studies*

In the past few decades, the ambiguity that characterises the uses of Gramsci’s work has been increasingly exposed. Conservative uses emphasising dichotomous distinctions between hegemony and subalternity serve to consolidate states of dominance according to the motto ‘some rule and others obey’.1 However, it seems clear that Gramsci did not reduce his consideration of hegemony and subalternity to a linear and unidirectional rulers-ruled process.

* This research was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation Project HAR2014-58699-P. 1 On appropriation of Gramsci by conservative projects, see Giroux 1999.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004443778_010

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Gramsci’s perspective rejects any simplification or attempt to restrict the comprehension of social dynamics. This is why concepts such as ‘historic bloc’ or ‘consensus’ became crucial in his theorisation of such dynamics, as the notion of hegemony entails both consensus as well as social and cultural struggles.2 The mechanisms of negotiation, of the establishment of alliances (consensus), and of dissent and opposition, constitute relational processes where the changing nature of hegemony/subalternity becomes apparent. In such processes, hegemonic struggles, including the struggle for meaning,3 play a significant role. To tackle them, Gramsci urges us to approach those struggles from a dialogic perspective, through which, as historians, we consider the interrelationship and participation of a range of agents, media, and settings in those processes.4 This approach allows us to rule out conservative uses of Gramsci, for we do not think that some social groups merely impose meanings on other, supposedly submissive ones. In our analyses, we consider that groups situated in both hegemonic and subaltern roles take part in the struggle for meaning within a given historical context. The logic of domination may thus be dismantled in this struggle to yield situations of non-domination.5 We are speaking here of hegemonic struggles, that is, everyday processes of meaning construction that do not necessarily entail an aspiration for hegemony, rather than actual battles for hegemony, or concrete actions in the pursuit of (social, political, institutional, etc.) positions of power. In this sense, one of Gramsci’s most relevant contributions was the theorisation of cultural struggles within social dynamics. Gramsci considered that the ideological and cultural dimensions of social reproduction and change are crucial to understand socio-historical dynamics. He was also aware that cul-

2 The historic bloc refers to structures and superstructures and their relations and interactions, which include, equally, disagreement, coercion, and consensus, and where hegemony is configured: ‘Structures and super-structures make a “historic bloc” so that the complex, contradictory and clashing ensemble of super-structures comprises all social relations of production’ (Betancourt 1990, p. 122; from Gramsci, 1971, p. 46). 3 ‘Struggle for meaning’ refers to the constant processes of negotiation, disagreement, and consensus within and between social groups to translate their perceptions and takes on facts into discourses and practices of their everyday lives. 4 The Gramscian notions and categories we use are indebted to Giorgio Baratta’s readings and interpretations of Gramsci’s work; see in particular Baratta 2003. 5 While conservative uses of Gramsci’s work consolidate states of domination by maintaining the rulers-ruled dichotomy, the subversive use of Gramsci, as pointed out by Javier Biardeau, allows an imagining of practical ways of overcoming the hegemony-subordination division (he emphasises the pairing counter-hegemony–hegemony as a strategy to open up space to a multiplicity of transgressor meanings). See Biardeau 2008.

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ture and communication are inseparable.6 His work offers the possibility to explore processes of knowledge production, circulation, and management,7 as well as power relations considered as processes of socio-cultural construction where communication practices, including people’s everyday actions, discourses, objects, and spaces, are essential. From this perspective, knowledge management is also the management of experience, individually and collectively. Therefore, the social, political, and administrative attempts to rationalise, normalise, and regulate people’s experience, which are essential constituents of the dynamics of the construction of hegemonies and counter-hegemonies, are directly identifiable as behaviour modification practices, undoubtedly based upon the interests of the parties concerned. The struggle for meaning – of the world, of life, of knowledge, and of experience – takes place in the realm of culture and, hence, in the space of communication. These are struggles for both symbolic and material resources. And if we analyse them, we will be able to expose forms of oppression through a diversity of discourses, some of which, carrying an emancipatory aim, reveal the oppressive nature of others they oppose. The methodological approach that would better contribute to the understanding of such a reality belongs to the dialogic angle that Gramsci shared with some of his peers.8 He managed to theorise the interactions between hegemonic and subaltern groups, and then build an apt set of tools to interpret historical events, including those concerning the generation and management of knowledge. From this point of view, and regarding science studies, we do not think that strictly scientific content alone has been relevant in scientific epistemology. We understand science as a constituent of general knowledge and thus of historical dynamics of socio-cultural construction. We also consider it as an effort of individual and collective subjects producing epistemologies. Therefore, we look at the construction of subjectivities, that is, socio-political processes of production and management of knowledge directly related to everyday individual and shared experience. Through such an analysis, we will 6 Gramsci’s interest in media and his own editorial project confirms this particular. See Baratta 2003, pp. 80, 155 and 158. This connection has become so strong in the contemporary world that some research programmes have made it explicit through the category ‘communication/culture’, where the slash ‘states the impossibility to treat them separately’. See Universidad Nacional de La Plata 2008. 7 On some uses of Gramsci in the history of scientific knowledge, see Nieto-Galán 2011a. 8 The geopolitics of knowledge has made Gramsci the figurehead of this line of thought, yet he was not the only one in the interwar period putting forward such proposals, as we have shown in Jiménez-Lucena and Molero-Mesa 2014. In addition, it is important to stress Gramsci’s links to other dialogic trends, such as the libertarian ones; see, for instance, Urbinati 1998.

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be able to understand and explain scientific and technological developments linked to their socio-political and cultural contexts,9 where struggles for meaning take place as individuals and social groups accept, resist, and re-signify elements constituting their experience.10 Epistemological agencies of hegemony are constructed in the relational development of subjectivities conducive to the creation of agent and nonagent subjects. In this way, the latter are configured so that they cannot contribute to the generation and management of knowledge. The mechanisms set off in such a process are numerous11 and have led to the dominant position and affirmation of some subjects and the oppression and negation of others, individual or collective. Gramsci’s theoretical-practical work aimed mostly at the modification of such a hegemonic reality by giving a leading role to people’s experiences while indicating common sense as a crucial field of political struggle.12 We have elsewhere addressed the epistemological agency of people’s everyday experiences in the construction and management of knowledge through the interaction between so-called experts and non-experts in the ‘Questions and Answers’ section of the Spanish anarchist magazine Estudios (1930–37).13 Here, following Gramsci’s preoccupation with the relations between singularities and the general,14 we suggest that, in order to accurately grasp the interest and importance of what is said through a concrete medium, we must consider it as part of the ensemble of social dynamics that occur in a given historical context. To tackle such a complex reality requires a dialogic approach that considers the coexistence of opposing views. Therefore, we are going to analyse our sources as a multilayered dialogue where supportive as well as oppositional arguments regarding the social norms of the prevailing status of hegemony and subalternity are established, both between and within the sources.15 Addition9 10

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In this respect, see also Gramsci’s suggestion on the interdisciplinary or a-disciplinary understanding of the world, as pointed out by Baratta 2003, p. 129. What Baratta calls the Gramscian transformation of the notion of subjectivity from a relational perspective has been particularly fruitful. See, for instance, Judith Butler’s elaborations (add references to specific Butler texts?). In the past decades, a huge effort has been made to understand the construction of subjectivities in the subfields of feminism, the theory of modernity/coloniality, and the Foucauldian developments of the technologies of the self, among others. Baratta 2003, pp. 27, 59 and 212. Tabernero-Holgado, Jiménez-Lucena, and Molero-Mesa 2013. On the importance of the tension between the general and specificities in Gramsci’s work, see Baratta 2003, pp. 27, 59 and 212. Regarding dialogic approaches linked to these same sources, see also Tabernero-Holgado, Jiménez-Lucena, and Molero-Mesa 2012.

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ally, such a necessarily synchronic analysis of discourses from different sites of enunciation allows us to see the different strategies used in a particular set of communication practices, as well as their limitations.

2

Q&A Sections in the Spanish Press of the First Third of the Twentieth Century: Estudios, La Revista Blanca and Blanco y Negro

In order to appreciate the transformations that the libertarian magazine Estudios, and particularly its Q&A section, introduced in the first decades of the twentieth century, we must further contextualise it, as Gramsci insistently stressed.16 This entails, in this case, looking into a dialogue of opposition between matching communication practices taking place at the same time in the Spanish press, albeit linked to different social and ideological groups. In this way, we directly consider the interactions between the parties, as our empirical work is situated in what we deem a key historical context of crisis of hegemony, and so a privileged stage for such an analysis. By and large, 1930s Spain was a context of (re)configurations of meanings in a quite particular social dynamic concerning hegemony and subalternity which saw the fall of a dictatorship and the monarchy, the rise of a powerful, however fragmented, libertarian movement, the proclamation of a Republic, and the Civil War. The so-called agony columns or problem pages (Q&A sections) of the printed press feature a multiplicity of subjectivities, from experts to non-experts, where a wide range of everyday experiences and social conflicts interact. Discourses and practices develop from these interactions, legitimating, questioning, and re-signifying the range of legacies that constitute the dynamics between hegemony and subalternity. Besides, we know that everyday actions linked to the production of subjectivity (de)stabilise power systems. Asking a question about an everyday action – such as how to dress, to eat, to take care of the body, to love – in a Q&A section is also an everyday action, as is answering it. Taking this into account, we have already explored the connections between Q&A sections and the socio-historical context,17 where our main interest was the possibility that these sections offer to analyse the diversity of approaches serving quite divergent strategies. People’s everyday expectations and experiences that made it into these sections revealed social tensions and conflicts, 16

17

Jiménez-Lucena and Molero-Mesa 2011; Tabernero 2011; Tabernero-Holgado, JiménezLucena, and Molero-Mesa 2013; Banerjee and Jiménez-Lucena 2014; Banerjee and Jiménez-Lucena 2017. Tabernero-Holgado, Jiménez-Lucena, and Molero-Mesa 2013, pp. 44–6.

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and as such they may help us understand the changing character of the dynamics concerning hegemony and subalternity. We have analysed the Q&A sections of three Spanish publications with a cultural slant. Two of them are linked to the anarchist movement, albeit from different factions – the above-mentioned Estudios18 and La Revista Blanca19 (hereafter LRB) – allowing us to examine diversity within uniformity. We have also studied a magazine associated with liberal-conservative trends, Blanco y Negro20 (hereafter ByN), in order to examine uniformity within diversity.21 The Q&A section of Estudios, conducted by the naturist physician Roberto Remartínez Gallego (1895–1977), was the first of the three to be published, starting in December 1930. The grounds for its publication were stated by the editorial board: readers constantly wrote with all kinds of questions, and with the support of its contributors, this led to the creation of a section called ‘Questions 18

19

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21

Estudios enables a detailed account of anarchist thought, struggles, strategies, concerns, and expectations in 1930s Spain. Published from 1928 to 1937, and with a print run of 70,000 copies, it enjoyed wide prestige in libertarian circles. Its interests and editorial practice were eclectic, as stated by its subheading, Revista Ecléctica, and it therefore tackled an extensive range of subjects proposed by an equally wide range of contributors, regardless of their ideological inclinations, thus fostering the debate in its pages. It focused primarily, although not exclusively, on sexual education, art, science, and general knowledge, its premise being that education and culture were a necessary revolutionary basis. See Jiménez-Lucena and Molero-Mesa 2011; Tabernero-Holgado 2011; Tabernero-Holgado, Jiménez-Lucena, and Molero-Mesa 2013. La Revista Blanca was a biweekly libertarian publication owned by Joan Montseny (a.k.a. Federico Urales, 1864–1942) and Teresa Mañé (a.k.a. Soledad Gustavo, 1865–1939). It had two runs: from 1898 to 1905 (Madrid) and from 1923 to 1936 (Barcelona), reaching 6,000 copies. Its editorial line defended an individualist anarchism and aimed to intervene in anarcho-syndicalist strategic approaches concerning reservations about the integration of intellectuals in its ranks (Molero-Mesa and Jiménez-Lucena 2013). Its owners and their daughter, Federica Montseny (1905–94), who directed the publication in its last two years, opposed the neo-Malthusian discourse of other libertarian publications such as Estudios or its predecessor, Generación Consciente. See also Pradas Baena 2011 and Freixes and Garriga i Mas 2010. Blanco y Negro was an illustrated weekly owned by publisher Torcuato Luca de Tena and his family (the company Prensa Española). It was part of the news media enterprise that published the newspaper ABC. Established in 1891, this prestigious publication was a model for contemporary illustrated magazines and reached a run of 80,000 copies in the second decade of the twentieth century and 100,000 in the third. Its ideological and social range was liberal conservative, with readers mostly belonging to the middle and upper middle classes. As such, it was part of an ideological project that backed a social order based on tradition and authority. For further information about what the publications of this editorial group meant, see Desvois 1977, Iglesias 1980, and Seoane and Saiz 1998. See Gramsci’s quote at the beginning of this chapter.

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and Answers’ (Preguntas y Respuestas).22 Roughly one year later, in January 1932, the Q&A section in ByN, ‘Tell me your case’ (Cuénteme usted su caso), started under the direction of society columnist Juan Spottorno y Topete (1887– 1935). In this instance, the motivation to begin a ‘spiritual agony column’23 was not in response to the readers’ demands, but rather a necessity perceived and felt by the person in charge of the section. And nearly two years later, in November 1933, the ‘General Problem Page’ (Consultorio general) was announced in LRB, which was to be under the direction of different experts, although only the physician Javier Serrano Coello (1897–1974)24 identified himself as the person in charge of the answers to health and disease questions. As also happened in the ‘sister’ magazine Estudios, its readers’ demand for information was used as the reason for its publication.25 The explanation of their aims at the outset of these sections shows the different approaches to the Q&A format in the separate contexts pertaining to each publication. The magazines linked to the libertarian movement asserted an educational, pedagogical goal.26 In Estudios, this was made explicit in the very announcement of the section and even clearer, later on, in Remartínez’s words, for whom the aim was ‘to spread knowledge of general interest as well as useful for all readers of ESTUDIOS, as a means of contributing to popular culture certain essential teachings aimed at the mental and physical improvement of man, as stated in the principles of the magazine’.27 In LRB, the editorial board, in a note to introduce the section, stated that the reason to start it was ‘the aim for the readers of LA REVISTA BLANCA to be able to pose their moral as well as legal, scientific, medical and pedagogical doubts’.28 Even though the ultimate pedagogical and educational goal of both magazines coincided, it may be argued that Estudios tried more explicitly to elaborate a new form of expression: it emphasised an activist intention where the objective was ‘improvement’, which implied a conscious course of action for which the pedagogical aims of the magazine were necessary. For his section in ByN, Spottorno stated a completely different purpose from those of the libertarian magazines:

22 23 24 25 26 27 28

‘De gran interés para nuestros lectores …’ 1930, p. 18. Spottorno y Topete 1932, pp. 142–3. On this physician’s work in the National Confederation of Labour (Confederación Nacional del Trabajo, CNT), see Molero-Mesa 2014. LRB, 30 Nov 1933, p. 392. Concerning anarchist publications, see Girón-Sierra and Molero-Mesa 2016. Estudios, Jul 1931, p. 26. LRB, 30 Nov 1933, p. 392.

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‘Tell me your case’ is born with no specified aim. That is, perhaps, its only liking … To pass the time. There is no other purpose … The light comedy is about to start.29 Remarkably, while Estudios and LRB published the readers’ questions, even if edited by their conductors, ByN opted to not publish them. However, we must not forget that a space for informal learning is open in every communication process. People may thus develop and modify essential social and cultural skills, contributing to the legitimation, validation, questioning, and/or re-signification of the knowledge which determines the rules of behaviour30 and is also crucial for the shaping of subjectivities. Trivialisation constitutes here a rhetorical technique aimed at the uncontested acceptance of a given socio-cultural standpoint. A top-down dynamic of communication (in our case, media) practices is therefore presumed.31 Consequently, despite Spottorno’s explicit declaration of intentions and the deliberate trivialisation of people’s everyday experience through the editing and selection of questions and answers, an underlying intention can be expected, a leitmotiv that is wholly fulfilled in the reinforcement of the bourgeois view of the world. Spottorno’s recommendation of books clearly reflected this purpose, as he meant to establish reading as an escapist practice to help readers endure situations that, according to the bourgeois order, could only be faced through resignation. Yet, at the same time, an exchange process inevitably surfaced, for contributions from readers were expected, although the final edition was – most likely, as we do not have the necessary evidence – the ultimate censor aimed at conveying the construction of that concrete view of the world. Spottorno considered himself the author of the section, giving no credit to those who wrote to him: ‘“Tell me your case” will be a section admitting all the incoming mail. Its author, naturally, has the right to choose those worthy of a reply among the arriving letters’.32 However, he treated readers’ contributions as an opening to distribute accountability for a potential failure of his endeavours: ‘If the result is in the end awful, we will all have our share of blame’.33 Eventually, readers established themselves as editing players, as we shall see.

29 30 31 32 33

Spottorno y Topete 1932, pp. 142–3. Tabernero-Holgado, Jiménez-Lucena, and Molero-Mesa 2013, p. 45. Tabernero-Holgado, Jiménez-Lucena, and Molero-Mesa 2012; Tabernero-Holgado, Jiménez-Lucena, and Molero-Mesa 2017. Spottorno y Topete 1932, pp. 142–3. ByN, 3 Jan 1932, p. 142.

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In Estudios, Remartínez conceived the section as a pedagogical tool to address primarily hygiene and medicine issues, yet the success of the section soon exceeded Remartínez’s expectations and ability to respond.34 He repeatedly had to remind readers of the general (educational) rather than individualised character of the section: ‘Only those questions which are of general interest, and which are in keeping with the informative and cultural nature of the Section will be answered’.35 Nevertheless, even though final editing certainly has to be considered in the analysis, it seems it was devised, in the case of Estudios, more in pedagogical, and thus revolutionary, terms than as a tool to silence voices. In fact, debate, as a means to expose the bourgeois scheme, was the ultimate goal. In the process, however, Remartínez’s media profile – as an across-the-board expert (even though and because he was a physician) and ultimately the (intellectual) author of the section – was built by the spirit and scope of the questions. His consideration as ‘distinguished’ in his introduction to the readers, where he stated that ‘this Section was conceived and established by me’, already anticipated this.36 In the end, despite his power to select the questions and answers to be published, readers’ agency – and essential role – in the construction of knowledge was openly acknowledged, either explicitly or implicitly, by Remartínez’s replies and those of other contributors to Estudios.37 In LRB, Javier Serrano used the Q&A section to spread a scientifically grounded health culture and clarify the doubts that the working class might have concerning scientific problems of general interest. He stated his pedagogical aims in the pages of Solidaridad Obrera, the organ of the anarchist union National Confederation of Labour (Confederación Nacional del Trabajo, CNT): ‘physiology and hygiene are sciences that strengthen people’s revolutionary spirit, teaching what is needed to stay healthy’. According to him, if the working class knew the health consequences of misery and abusive work (unhealthy homes, scarce food, lack of rest, unhygienic clothes, lack of leisure), ‘all bayonets would be powerless to restrain the clamour of the people’. By contrast, hygienic unawareness makes the worker prefer ‘to sadly suffer on a mattress, prematurely and after a grey life’ rather than ‘dying machine-gunned in the struggle for a better life’.38 In the introduction to the section, the head writer, possibly Joan Montseny himself, asked readers to express their doubts or ques34 35 36 37 38

Tabernero-Holgado, Jiménez-Lucena, and Molero-Mesa 2013, pp. 54–6. Estudios, Oct 1933, p. 44. Remartínez 1932, p. 37. Tabernero-Holgado, Jiménez-Lucena, and Molero-Mesa 2013, pp. 65–7. Dr. Fantasma [Javier Serrano] 1932.

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tions concisely, with no further considerations, for, in any case, ‘those [considerations] would be provided by the collaborator who replies the question’. That was indeed an attempt to avoid controversy.39 What were readers, potential petitioners, asked to contribute? A certain degree of frustration was clear and shared by the managers of the three sections analysed here concerning their expectations, which reveals their difficulties in handling the readers’ undeniable and unquenchable will to contribute to the construction of knowledge. Readers of Estudios were constantly reminded of the wide-ranging pedagogical aims of the Q&A section (and the magazine), despite its origins in the medical questions sent to the magazine. Remartínez increasingly ended the section with warnings, in which he repeatedly apologised for delays in replying, citing in his own defence the huge number of enquiries received. On occasion, these warnings were explicitly severe, since the reply time could be reduced not only ‘if fewer questions were received’, but also if most of them were not as ‘inane and totally without interest [for] I cannot devote a whole issue … to answering nonsense … personal matters or dull questions’.40 The Q&A section of LRB was extremely successful. It is important to note that requests were always free and never required any kind of coupon. Consequently, one year after its launch, the magazine already had more than 2,000 unanswered questions. Readers were asked not to send more than one inquiry at a time. Serrano also requested readers not to repeat questions.41 Yet, previously, the editorial had complained about many questions being ‘too silly or not discreet enough’, warning that they would not be answered while urging readers to raise ‘the tone’ of the section.42 Upon petitioners’ protests concerning the lack of answers, Serrano replied, ‘some of the questions that are not addressed are so dim-witted that in order to answer them we would have to be completely nuts’. Yet, some that, according to him, deserved a reply might not get one immediately due to the high volume received, for ‘replies cannot be published all at the same time. A bit of patience, folks’.43 In any case, Serrano went from anger at ‘inappropriate’ questions to disbelief in the face of an enquiry that he described as ‘absolutely silly’ when he ended up publishing it in order to ask ‘How is it possible that, nowadays, a man asks if a woman can

39 40 41 42 43

LRB, 30 Nov 1933, p. 392. Estudios, Feb 1936, p. 22. Cf. Tabernero-Holgado, Jiménez-Lucena, and Molero-Mesa 2013, p. 56. LRB, 5 Oct 1934, pp. 772 and 774. LRB, 23 Mar 1934, p. 303. LRB, 25 Oct 1935, p. 1030.

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get pregnant by performing certain acts with another pregnant one? Are you kidding us or do you want to be kidded?’44 In this context, one way to decide on the questions was to exert an influence on the petitioner before the submission. That intent is clear in the following: We notify that questions whose only aim is to ask will not be answered. We notify that questions of little interest will be answered after the ones of real interest have been addressed. We ask readers to take note of answered questions so that they are not repeated. Those repeated will not be answered.45 In ByN, Spottorno, in the introduction of his section, plead[ed] for a bit of freshness and ask[ed] the girls, above all, not to concur in asking what to do to reclaim the boyfriend who left or what is, for instance, the best-known depilatory. ‘Tell me your case’ is not going to be in any case a marriage service that requires stamps to get replies, nor is it going to resemble one of those posting pages where perfumery products are advertised.46 Spottorno employed a scornful tone in discussing potential requesters’ interests, which could be interpreted as his way of distancing his section from what he considered the shallowness of other traditional Q&As of the bourgeois press.47 In any case, Spottorno acknowledged that he did not reply to most of the letters because he did not consider them interesting.48 In other instances, he replied, ‘Do you think your question can be taken seriously?’49 Yet, requesters challenged the dismissal of their inquiries as irrelevant, which 44 45 46 47

48 49

LRB, 21 Jun 1935, p. 596. LRB, 4 Jan 1935, p. 22. Spottorno y Topete 1932, pp. 142–3. Our italics. An example of the type of section he intended to distinguish his own from was ‘Floralia’s female correspondence’, sponsored by the Floralia perfumery, and which, through several changes of layout and adviser, was published in the newspaper ABC from 1915 to 1932. He sometimes replied in this sense: ‘I am sorry, but we do not make little requests to beauty institutes “here”. The quandaries we try to solve are purely spiritual. I am sorry, then, for you and for those freckles that seem to bother you so’. ByN, 30 Jul 1933, p. 14. He did not intend it to be a contact section either, even though he faced some demand to make it so, refusing to become the adviser of a ‘marriage bureau’. ByN, 2 Oct 1932, p. 190 and ByN, 20 May 1934, p. 240. ByN, 14 Aug 1932, p. 182. ByN, 15 Jan 1933, p. 12.

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led to confrontations between them and the adviser. This prompted Spottorno to clarify that ‘there is no animosity against anybody in this section’, while justifying his frustration as inquiries ‘had overfilled the spiritual recipient I could manage to be’.50 Spottorno explained the dissonant situation that arose to a male requester: I would like to see you, sir, however, in my back room. I get enquiries of all kinds: some earnestly written that reveal a soul full of doubts; some only ask for the sake of asking, and others try to be ironical, though they are mostly innocuous. And I set myself to match them, do you understand, sir …? It is because of this that you will spot inconsistencies in this section. Sometimes I say white in any given case only to say black a couple of lines below in another case I deem alike. It is not true: it looks similar but it is not. Because, for instance, there is a serious enquiry in the former, while you can guess the jest in the style of the enquiry of the latter even if it is almost the same. And I reply with a joke or seriously depending on the case. You can judge for yourself.51 This account shows that some readers’ expectations were not met, as they questioned Spottorno’s replies and assumed the censor’s role with their disapproving comments. Spottorno had to reply in order to justify his answers: I did advise, yes, a woman to get married to a divorced man as the lesser evil. But you did not know what that woman was telling me. No less than what had to happen had already happened and that she would never give up that man … I opted for the lesser evil: to legalise, in a certain way, an otherwise ambiguous situation. Should she have harboured any doubt, my advice would have been different.52 Thus, Spottorno acknowledged that his readers made him a supporter of actions he did not agree with, and also referred to disapproving requesters’ opinions about his work: ‘Indeed, I write banalities’.53 In another instance, Spottorno had a male requester scold him because of his unfavourable take on marriage: ‘the holy horror the word marriage brings

50 51 52 53

ByN, 17 Jul 1932, p. 162. ByN, 15 Jan 1933, p. 13. ByN, 10 Sep 1933, p. 14. Our italics. Ibid.

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on me’.54 This view was controversial and Spottorno had to reply to letters of protest: ‘I always tell the truth, or better, my truth, even if I thus disappoint the readers of this section’.55 Yet, he apologised for his ‘particularly bad opinion of marriage’, which was related to the fact that he did not consider himself a good husband (actually, he was a widower).56 He had to reiterate the apologies, in a lengthier manner, for another female reader: I accept your admonishment with my head hung … but, nonetheless, you did not understand me. I do not particularly hold a bad opinion of marriage itself, but of the lousy husband I would be. The bad opinion thus concerns me.57 Upon the reader’s disagreement with his answer, Spottorno explicitly exploited, once again,58 the setup of the section to counter readers’ questioning of his views, without disdaining, if it fitted, the belittling (sexist) remark: Besides: you read my replies, but not the questions. I always advise those who ask me something and are very much in love to get married. Go over this section and you will be persuaded. Now: to those in doubt, those who do not feel quite sure, I hate to push them towards the grand adventure, and then my advice becomes a bit of a light joke. If I told you that I was told yesterday that I am soon getting sweets from a wedding that if I did not make then I at least counselled, you would laugh … and I would let you laugh, because I know that when a woman laughs frankly, it is because she has beautiful teeth.59 Then, he sowed doubt about the authenticity of what he was saying by immediately replying to the petitioner who was sending the sweets, ‘you know it is true, even though that lady who scolds me in pressing and higher tones thinks my answer is a lie and a contrivance. But it does not matter at all’.60 54 55 56 57 58

59 60

ByN, 20 May 1934, p. 239. This kind of statement revealed the Don Juan-esque character that Spottorno often displayed. ByN, 15 Jul 1934, p. 221. ByN, 22 Jul 1934, p. 207. ByN, 29 Jul 1934, p. 214. Spottorno, in order to justify an opinion to which the reader did not subscribe, resorted to the argument of the reader’s unawareness of the letter he had received: ‘But you did not know what that woman was telling me …’ ByN, 10 Sep 1933, p. 14. ByN, 29 Jul 1934, p. 214. Ibid.

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Transgressions of the rules and prescriptions typical of the social stratum to which the section was addressed, and that contradicted some readers’ everyday experience, were re-signified under the cloak of banality and jokes. Spottorno maintained that he did not ‘care if “your case” is real or fabricated’.61 However, and despite the section’s original and deliberate spirit of frivolity, both the counsellor and the petitioners demanded a ‘serious’ treatment of certain questions. At the same time, some concerns about the veracity or falsity of contributions arose, above all in relation to Spottorno’s awkward management of diversity. As a result, an atmosphere of mistrust emerged between him and the petitioners, leading to a tone of accusation regarding questions and answers. Thus, the ‘author’ of the section asked one petitioner to write seriously and … by hand. To see someone’s handwriting is like seeing a bit the person who has written it, do you understand what I mean …? Because one can sign a typed letter as ‘María-Loreto’ and then MaríaLoreto sports the most conceited moustache as upright as those of CountDuke of Olivares.62 He also openly questioned the veracity of some petitioners’ accounts: ‘what you are telling me is sheer fabrication’.63 At the same time, some readers thought that Spottorno was occasionally being fooled, to which he replied that he was ‘a contributor that does not get angry even if he is tricked’,64 although some subsequent replies showed that this might not have been entirely true: ‘the terrible tale you are telling me … where did you read it? … In a serial? … Or, did you by any chance watch it develop on some movie theatre screen? … Do you think I am stupid?’65 ‘I do not believe anything of what you are telling me’;66 ‘I somehow doubt what you are telling me’.67 The readers doubted the veracity of the section as well: ‘this section of mine, which many think fake, and that I sometimes take as a joke myself’;68 ‘You

61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68

Spottorno y Topete 1932, pp. 142–3. ByN, 28 Feb 1932, p. 190. ByN, 13 Aug 1933, p. 14. ByN, 17 Sep 1933, p. 14. ByN, 22 Oct 1933, p. 14. ByN, 22 Jul 1934, p. 206. ByN, 22 Jul 1934, p. 207. ByN, 27 Mar 1932, p. 164. A bit light-heartedly and with an ironic and distrustful overtone, Spottorno sometimes produced replies such as ‘As you can see, in the face of a mocking lady I feel like a mocker and a half’, ByN, 24 Jul 1932, p. 7; or ‘I cannot believe that you seriously wrote that. It is because of this and nothing else that I use a humorous tone in my

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are wrong. This section is authentic and not fabricated’.69 Despite Spottorno’s insistence on the authenticity of the section, challenges kept coming: ‘You doubt this section. You think it is fabricated. I am flattered that you attribute me such excess of imagination. But you see I do not invent anything … I just reply’.70 Yet, notwithstanding all these complaints in both directions, the popularity of the section became clear just four months after its start when Spottorno stated that ‘the mail addressed to this section grows frighteningly day after day. It is therefore necessary to curb it as we do not know where it would head to otherwise’. The curbing mechanism was the commercialisation of the advice by asking for coupons in order to secure a reply.71 All this shows that, despite the intended frivolous character of the section, a struggle for meaning ensued, owing to the readers’ will to contribute, combined with Spottorno’s difficulty in handling it. As such, the dynamic here was the complete opposite of what was proposed and subsequently happened in the Q&A section of Estudios, where the struggle for meaning was the ultimate aim and, accordingly, a wide range of contributions and debate were welcomed. Remartínez’s complaints in the face of an ever-increasing number of enquiries also called for petitioners’ honesty and seriousness and always focused on the pedagogical spirit of the section.72 In LRB, despite all the warnings mentioned above, the editorial team did not succeed in getting readers to abide

69 70 71

72

reply’, ByN, 7 Aug 1932, p. 180; or ‘to write sentences that I – because I am tolerant – want to take as a joke’, ByN, 23 Oct 1932, p. 189. ByN, 29 May 1932, p. 170. ByN, 30 Apr 1933, p. 12. ByN, 1 May 1932, p. 171. The consideration of this sort of section as part of commercial campaigns of bourgeois publishing houses is possible upon Spottorno’s assertions: ‘You have seen, up until now, that I have been completely unselfish. Not anymore, however. Certainly not because of me, but because of you. I try to reply to all those who write to me, yet, due to the course this has taken, it would be nothing less than impossible, so I had to somehow reduce the mailing. How …? Demanding two BLANCO Y NEGRO coupons for each reply. You will understand that I do not get any benefit with these two little pieces of paper’. ByN, 1 May 1932, p. 171. Two coupons were required for the film and the needlework sections, four for the graphology and the bridge sections, ByN, 27 Mar 1932, p. 3, and 23 Jul 1933, p. 13. Following this trend to make a profit out of the Q&A sections, four coupons plus stamps (to the value of ten cents for each word of the reply) were required when a new section on interior decorating ideas was started. ByN, 27 Aug 1933, p. 5. The loss of the cost-free answers led to readers’ complaints, which Spottorno aired in his replies: ‘I am so sorry that the peseta Blanco y Negro costs you means such a huge expense for you’. ByN, 26 Jun 1932, p. 187. On the other hand, ads (hair dyes and removers, colognes, medicines) kept proliferating throughout the two pages of the section, undoubtedly because of its success. Thus, this kind of section contributed to the establishment of the consumer society. Tabernero-Holgado, Jiménez-Lucena, and Molero-Mesa 2013.

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by their requirements. When Federica Montseny assumed the direction of the publication at the beginning of 1935, she published an ‘Important notice’ in the Q&A section, similar to Remartínez’s in Estudios, to remind petitioners of the pedagogical character of the publication, although in different terms than those used in Estudios: Montseny stressed that the new direction had the intention of giving the section a cultural and educational tone, and enough ‘high-mindedness’, to make it useful to all LRB readers.73 In this sense, ByN’s section also reveals the importance of the device as a multilayered means of production, circulation, appropriation, assimilation and, with its particular attributes in this case, questioning of knowledge, and thus of the construction of subjectivities from people’s everyday experience. Indeed, the success of the section led to its continuation, notwithstanding the fact that some of Spottorno’s complaints about some enquiries seemed to point to expectations not being met, as we have seen. It seems that Spottorno aimed at a one-year run, yet he went on until his death in 1935: ‘I do not know what will happen to this section in the upcoming year, if it will continue or not, it depends …’;74 a few weeks later, he told his readers: ‘They have convinced me to go on with this section and, in addition, I have to be very grateful to my anonymous interlocutors’.75 Both Estudios and LRB visibly opted for a dialogue format: both magazines printed the readers’ questions, although these were also edited and sometimes condensed by those in charge of the sections, so that we cannot know all that was written in the letters; and the sections explicitly pointed out, through paralinguistic elements, such as dashes in Estudios and other more sophisticated elements in LRB, the readers’ leading role. By contrast, ByN opted for highlighting the consultant’s words, and did not publish the readers’ questions, thus formally mutilating the dialogue. This is a case where form and content blend through the significance of the former. The editorial approach of ByN presupposes the theoretical irrelevance of the readers’ contributions, while, at the same time, that same editing process, as well as Spottorno’s arguments with (and, as we have seen, recognition of) some of his readers, were implicitly acknowledging the epistemological value – however undesirable from the editors’ point of view – of those contributions. Instead, the consideration of readers’ contributions reached its height when in LRB they were given the chance to directly become epistemological agents by answering other readers’ questions: when the director of LRB’s Q&A section did not know an answer, the question 73 74 75

LRB, 15 Feb 1935, p. 150. ByN, 25 Dec 1932, p. 12. ByN, 15 Jan 1933, p. 12.

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was redirected to any reader who could answer it. This later brought about a new section in the magazine, printed right above the Q&A section, called ‘From some to others’ (De unos a otros),76 which featured the questions addressed to all parties, counsellors and readers alike.

3

Sexuality: Between Liberation and Taboo

Regarding content, it is important to call attention to the difference in the thematic diversity that characterised the libertarian sections as opposed to the conservative ones. Estudios and LRB granted room for many different topics. As we have mentioned above, the Q&A section of Estudios was started in response to a huge number of readers’ questions about health issues. Yet, it soon became much more than a doctor’s surgery, also in part owing to its conductor’s plea ‘to spread knowledge of general interest and usefulness to the readers … as a means of bringing to popular culture certain teachings vital to man’s mental and physical advancement’.77 Thus, although medical and health issues kept filling its pages, their social, political, and/or cultural implications kept growing and were increasingly highlighted together with other socio-cultural matters.78 Sexual education was a highly relevant topic in Estudios. Sexuality was often discussed from a medical-health perspective without precluding other, wider socio-cultural aspects. A biological and scientific ethics, which was subversive as it opposed the dominant morality based on ‘the good and the bad’,79 was upheld through the combined application of three lines of thought that were socially, politically, and culturally crucial in Europe at the turn of the twentieth century: neo-Malthusianism, understood as people’s right to manage their own sexuality as applied to family planning, and thus population control; environmental eugenics, in the sense that living conditions were at the core of healthdisease processes and the latter’s impact on people’s everyday undertakings; and naturism, which was in fact at the foundation of re-signification practices concerning health and disease as it allowed the definition of a different biopolitics ‘where each and every organism under natural hygiene conditions has the resources to fight and cure diseases’.80 Such an approach necessarily

76 77 78 79 80

LRB, 12 Apr 1935, p. 344. Estudios, Jul 1931, p. 26; Tabernero-Holgado, Jiménez-Lucena, and Molero-Mesa 2013, p. 55. Tabernero-Holgado, Jiménez-Lucena, and Molero-Mesa 2013, pp. 54–6. Jiménez-Lucena and Molero-Mesa 2011, Molero-Mesa and Jiménez-Lucena 2010, JiménezLucena and Molero-Mesa 2009. Un médico rural [Puente, Isaac] 1932, pp. 13–15.

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implied a dynamics of resistance against dominant, bourgeois medicine, even though, according to Remartínez, it ‘aimed at the improvement of individuals, the avoidance of diseases [or, in any case,] their natural healing, and the advance of humanity toward ideals of harmony, peace, health, spiritual upgrading and fraternal cooperation’.81 As a result, the Q&A section in Estudios featured people’s actual everyday concerns, worries, and expectations, most of them related to medical-health questions and linked to their social and cultural circumstances. As a clear example and directly associated with sexual behaviour, it is worth mentioning the long and wide-ranging discussion on the use of the calendar-based contraceptive practice known as the ‘Ogino method’: there were many questions about this issue; Remartínez gave long and detailed answers; the discussion spread to the magazine pages outside the Q&A section; and also, importantly, Isaac Puente, another physician and regular contributor to Estudios, designed and implemented a sociological study (unfortunately cut short by the Civil War and his early assassination) that explicitly illustrates how they used the exchange between readers and experts as a tool to construct and disseminate scientific-medical knowledge.82 The Ogino method debate was part of a clear trend in the section towards an open and serious discussion about sexuality. A quantitative analysis of the section along its entire run from 1930 to 1937 shows that 22.6% (472 of 2,082) of the published questions focused on sexual matters, with almost half of them (43.4%; 205 of 472) addressing women’s sexuality. This data, however, does not count 1,141 additional questions of a strictly medical-health nature that Remartínez deemed to be private consultations and did not publish because they did not abide by the ‘general interest’ rule he was at pains to establish.83 Yet, undoubtedly, many of these enquiries most likely featured sexual issues, for it was clear, as we are arguing, that there was room for these subjects. Unlike Estudios, LRB ended up separating medical questions from the rest, and making explicit that physician Javier Serrano (a.k.a. Dr. Klug) was the person in charge of those answers. There were problems in LRB with accepting sexuality as a space for social struggle and, therefore, for the public exposure of the debates that were developing about it. The editorial board complained about the high number of questions dealing with disturbing personal issues, written with a complete lack of modesty. This was the reason why they

81 82 83

Estudios, Jan 1932, pp. 28–31. Tabernero-Holgado, Jiménez-Lucena, and Molero-Mesa 2013. Tabernero 2011; Tabernero-Holgado, Jiménez-Lucena, and Molero-Mesa 2013, p. 55.

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aimed for the Q&A section to become ‘an interesting, noble, clean and serious thing’, thus putting an end to many petitioners’ ‘excesses’ that led to ‘dirty questions and absolutely filthy explanations’. In the eyes of the editorial board, the magazine was read by ‘a legion of sexual degenerates or people sick of all body and spirit diseases’.84 Thus, when asked about the reason why LRB did not publish any pieces on sexual education, the editorial board replied: sexual education is a private parental task and not a public physicians’ or journalists’ issue. This is a principle as respectable as any other, yet it better matches our understanding of the morals of propaganda.85 However, free love was another recurring theme in LRB’s Q&A section. Replying to the question ‘How could we avoid marriage and increase free link-ups?’ Serrano, as Dr. Klug, suggested that in the same way that bourgeois newspapers create mailing sections for young people encouraging marriage, could our magazines and weeklies not give a bit of help to male and female comrades to freely link up? [This] would be an important way to defend our ideals and prevent the Church and the State from being necessary intermediaries in our relationships.86 At the same time, he proposed that LRB organise a ‘free love festival’ once a year ‘where a great number of male and female comrades could go, and where conferences on sexual education and a number of recreations were provided’.87 Serrano’s idea was accepted by LRB, as transpires from the reply to another enquiry about free unions: our purpose is to turn May 1st, that is now known as labour day, into love day as used to be done in Great Greece times. The only problem is that those festivals could become bacchanals, which would be dangerous and inconvenient. While they organise it for next year, they have thought about publishing the addresses of young men willing to freely 84 85

86 87

LRB, 15 Feb 1935, p. 150. LRB [suplemento], 3 Aug 1934, p. VII. Nevertheless, between 1933 and 1936, the actual run of the Q&A section, out of the 2,947 questions that were answered, 1,731 (59%) dealt with health and disease issues; 350 of these (20 %) addressed sexuality, with almost half of them (149, 43 %) focusing on women’s sexuality, most of them asked by men. This is significantly similar to what was happening in Estudios. LRB [suplemento], 18 May 1934, p. VI. Ibid.

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marry but unable to do so due to the lack of available women. It is understood that the young men give the directions for women, if they want, to pick up.88 Although they were afraid that young women might not have ‘the mental balance and enough moral strength to beautifully and serenely enjoy sexual freedom’, they nevertheless authorised Serrano/Dr. Klug to promote free love with the publication of the male birdcalls.89 In July 1934, the first names and addresses were printed, belonging to some young men who were ‘willing to start corresponding with a young woman in order to freely link up, if they like each other’.90 ByN, on the other hand, limited the scope of the section to relationships, with a noticeable emphasis on gendered behaviour. While the success of the section in Estudios, as we have seen, was largely based upon its openness to questions about sexuality,91 this topic, although not absent in ByN, caused tensions as well as rejections on the part of Spottorno, who constantly used euphemisms in order to avoid naming anything related to sexuality, including pregnancy: ‘Get married, then, and when you get … well, you know what I mean’.92 Thus, his euphemisms for the unmentionable proliferated: ‘thorny subjects’,93 ‘excess of vitality’,94 ‘volcano’, ‘fire’,95 ‘action’,96 ‘something I cannot mention’,97 ‘certain things’,98 ‘what you know’,99 ‘man-eating ideas’,100 ‘food’, ‘after-dinner’,101 ‘sin’,102 ‘temptation’,103 ‘wrestle’.104 In this sense, ellipses served

88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104

LRB [suplemento], 22 Jun 1934, p. VII. Dr. Klug [Javier Serrano] 1934, pp. 572–3. Consultorio general. La Revista Blanca [suplemento], 20 Jul 1934, p. VI. Jiménez-Lucena and Molero-Mesa 2011; Tabernero-Holgado, Jiménez-Lucena, and Molero-Mesa 2013. ByN, 23 Apr 1933, p. 16. Spottorno used ‘… well, you know what I mean’ as an euphemism for ‘pregnant’. ByN, 29 Jul 1934, p. 214. ByN, 21 Jul 1935, p. 182. ByN, 3 Apr 1932, p. 163. ByN, 29 May 1932, p. 170. ByN, 14 Aug 1932, p. 181. ByN, 26 Feb 1933, p. 10; ByN, 2 Jun 1935, p. 180. ByN, 2 Jun 1935, p. 180. ByN, 23 Jul 1933, p. 14. ByN, 2 Jun 1935, p. 178. ByN, 9 Jul 1933, p. 14. ByN, 10 Sep 1933, p. 12; ByN, 13 Jan 1935, p. 172. ByN, 8 Jul 1934, p. 211.

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Spottorno well: ‘thirst of …’, ‘hunger of …’, ‘do … whatever you feel like’,105 ‘thinking about … what you are thinking’,106 ‘it serves … its purpose’,107 ‘you are liked for …’.108 In addition, sexual conduct considered as transgressive of gender roles was not only dismissed but also rejected altogether as untruthful, whereas in LRB, for instance, there were no restrictions, except for homosexuality. In response to a question on sexual relations with someone other than one’s partner, the LRB reply stated: We are not surprised or shocked by anything concerning love matters and relations between men and women. The only things we reject because it sickens us are sexual practices between two men or two women. About the rest, nothing scares us and we understand everything.109 Stronger censorship was established by ByN, based on the assumption that the experience being described was false. According to Spottorno, this section, which I always try to dress smart, sports very narrow margins to tackle such thorny subjects as the ones you are interested in. And yet, I do not much believe in this interest of yours. Because there are instances about which, by instinct, a woman does not inquire, not even hidden by anonymity. You will understand that I am saying this to you thinking of BLANCO Y NEGRO readers. Particularly, I am not one of those who shrink away from anything.110 Flat rejection was also featured: Come on! … I get cocky before I start because I do not believe ‘a bit’ of your query. If I did, I would have to shyly lower my eyes to the ground. And above all, if you have already consulted a physician and you have been given a solution to your problem, why are you asking me? … Your list of suitors, if it is not invented, is silly.111

105 106 107 108 109 110 111

ByN, 27 Mar 1932, p. 164. ByN, 9 Apr 1933, p. 16. ByN, 2 Jun 1935, p. 180. ByN, 3 Sep 1933, p. 13. LRB, 8 Feb 1935, p. 140. ByN, 29 Jul 1934, p. 214. ByN, 21 Jul 1935, p. 182.

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However, censorship and self-censorship about these subjects did not prevent controversial issues from being introduced, such as homosexuality, albeit without naming them: A bit … equivocal, what you tell me. That a man, as you say you are, would feel so attracted to another man, notwithstanding his being very spiritual, sounds strange to me. So strange that I choose not to take part, with my advice, in such a matter. Yet, I will give you, yes, a single piece of advice: Why don’t you seek a little woman’s friendship? … Open your eyes, because there are girls around that are able to work even miracles.112 In another instance, Spottorno wrote: Knowing you through your letter moves me to sympathy. But your disease has no cure. I do not feel able to comfort you. I admit, yes, that Nature makes mistakes when it brings to life certain sorts of creatures. But, even admitting so entirely, my advice would not work. Because my advice would be for you to go and live alone in the mountains as an anchorite. And you, it is clear, will prefer to go on combing ladies to fondly imagine you are combing yourself. Nevertheless, I understand your tragedy. To live in a village with those leanings must be even dangerous. Just thinking about the kids that dwell in those villages! And their penchant to throw stones!113 Even transsexuality found its way into the section: A creature that was born a male and signs with a female pseudonym [María] particularly disgusts me. Despite that double personality that dwells in you and that you explain so well as a medical case. If María lives inside Virgilio and he feels the temptation of committing suicide to kill her, he is about right. The only thing I am asking you is that you let me know if you reach such last moments. Not to impede the suicide, but to present you with the coup de grace.114 Spottorno denied the truthfulness of this case, and so he was in effect following the strategy of rejecting even the possibility for such gender transgressions to exist. 112 113 114

ByN, 4 Jun 1933, p. 14. ByN, 7 Jul 1935, p. 168. ByN, 17 Mar 1935, p. 176.

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Besides, the fact that as the editor of the section he chose to air these kinds of enquiries through his replies points to their use as a tool to weaken the readers’ position as producers and managers of knowledge. To this end, he tried to expose them as not truthful enough, which, in turn, strengthened his own authority. Yet, at the same time, it also reveals the readers’ relentless will to contribute their personal, everyday life experiences, with their concerns, doubts, and expectations. The sending of such requests strongly suggests not only a wish to get a reply, but also to see it in print. Ultimately, the publication of the replies (and this despite Spottorno’s dismissive language), amounted to a genuine struggle for meaning on the part of the consultants in relation to what was discussed and the actual construction of certain subjectivities, regardless of their conflicting view of people’s everyday experiences and behaviour, individually and socially.

4

Communicating Science: Need and Lack

Besides sexual matters, the nature of the topics discussed in LRB and Estudios was very similar, for the circulation of knowledge, scientific and medical in particular, was a staple in these publications. By contrast, neither Spottorno nor ByN considered science content, including those aspects related to everyday life, such as questions of health, disease, and the care of the body, as an essential part of the task of the media. They thought these issues belonged to the realm of an expert elite. This sort of knowledge was instead included in LRB and Estudios as part of, or inescapably related to, people’s everyday experience, as we have seen, quite explicitly, with the discussion about the Ogino method in Estudios. In LRB, the distinction between expert and non-expert knowledge was at times explicit: upon a reader’s objection to certain neo-Malthusian opinions held by Gaston Havard (a.k.a. Jean Marestan, 1874–1951), the reply maintained that Marestan was ‘an expert in that matter’, and thus his take on ‘sexual energies is worthier than whatever we may say about it’.115 However, it is notable that Joan Montseny, and later her daughter Federica, answered some questions about sexual health matters instead of the physician Serrano. For instance, when readers asked about male sterilisation through vasectomy, they were always against it, arguing that one of its consequences was to make ‘men meek.

115

LRB, 21 Sep 1934, p. 725.

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It is exactly what happens to bulls when they are castrated and become oxen’.116 They also expressed their doubts about it from the scientific-medical perspective. For example, they wondered if, in a healthy man, ‘such an operation castrates vital energies, reducing men to an intermediate state between a capable man and an eunuch’.117 Moreover, they considered vasectomy an operation that worked against the revolution as it reduced men’s ‘courage’ and prevented the production of new anarchists. Physician Isaac Puente (1896–1936), a regular collaborator of Estudios, ended up contributing a piece to LRB where he contended that ‘this operation does not have to be mistaken with castration, as Federica Montseny seems to uphold’, as it did not have anything to do with the virility of vasectomised men.118 As mentioned, ByN rejected the widespread circulation of plain scientificmedical knowledge on the basis of an intensely hierarchical view of social relations and communication. It is from this perspective that responses to health matters were given in ByN, sometimes reaching unexpected heights. For instance, Spottorno did not have a problem recommending marriage as a therapeutic solution while dismissing medical practices and discourses: ‘Do not pay attention to physicians and think of God. Without God’s permission, nobody dies, not even those sentenced to death … get married as soon as possible’.119 Likewise, Are you religious? … Yes, of course. There are things that a Spanish girl should not be asked. Thus, behave religiously, have true faith and do not pay attention to medical doctors. Nobody dies until God allows it … There is no deceit here as He knows your disease … Get married, woman, happiness does not hang around.120 Or, more explicitly: I guess, upon your account, that your disease is more spiritual than material. If I were you, I would send physicians to hell and resort to my own will as the only redeeming remedy. All that of ‘psycho-analysis’ and the ‘subconscious’ is technical talk more or less difficult to utter. I, who am fond of practice and not techniques, think that you, at your age, are very much in need of a boyfriend to become a husband in no time. And you will see, 116 117 118 119 120

LRB, 19 Apr 1935, p. 894. LRB, 16 Aug 1935, p. 788. Puente 1935, pp. 1199–200. ByN, 27 Mar 1932, p. 165. ByN, 20 May 1934, p. 239.

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whenever you get married and God provides you with a chubby baby, one that cries really loud at night, how all that about ‘obsessive neurosis’ is but a ‘sham’ to add up to the long theory of ‘shams’.121 This kind of statement did not necessarily mean denying the authority of physicians, however. They were indeed considered the necessary experts to handle certain areas of knowledge and experience, and any issue related to health brought up by readers had to be sanctioned by an expert, while any sort of people’s self-management was summarily disallowed: In point of fact: nearly all those books about hygiene are … one more sham. Trade, pure trade. It is like that gentleman’s ad promising to cure bald men and featuring on the side his own picture with exactly four hairs on his skull. Sham. Sham. In order not to give you one more sham, I am not recommending any book to you. What I advise you is to visit a good physician that sets up an eating and exercise routine to help you cope with your sedentary life. It may be somewhat expensive; but always cheaper than any hygienist’s books, which are usually numbered as they come in collections.122 The incongruity in some of Spottorno’s answers is due to the fact that he established a hierarchy concerning knowledge management where God was the highest authority in health matters, which plainly stressed the inaccessibility of such knowledge. God was duly followed by the experts (physicians). Placed last were the people in need of solving health problems, who had no role whatsoever beyond that of a passive patient. In addition, he established a hierarchy within the expert community, excluding those who were devoted to openly circulating health-related knowledge. Yet, notwithstanding Spottorno’s own opposition, his Q&A section ended up becoming a communication tool between defiant consultants, who insisted on disobeying the injunction against this kind of question, and physicians: Stop reading ads and go to the doctor. You are probably in need of a stomach specialist. Tell him your story as you would to a confessor. And believe his diagnosis and follow his prescription.123 121 122 123

ByN, 16 Jul 1933, p. 14. ByN, 7 May 193, p. 12. ByN, 9 Oct 1932, p. 190. The religious connotations of Spottorno’s line of thought were, as shown, implicit and explicit.

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It seems clear that one appealing trait of Q&A sections was indeed, and regardless of their foundational principles, the opportunity to ask questions about health problems. Interestingly, in the case of Spottorno, the contradictions suggest a power struggle related to wider spheres of socio-cultural management concerning the relative weight of science/medicine and morals/religion and, consequently, the hierarchies associated with these domains where private and public concerns merged or clashed. As we have seen, readers’ inputs, as well as their perseverance in raising health-medical issues, were conducive to the translation of such struggles from their everyday experience to the printed page. In this respect, we should not forget that, in libertarian circles and organisations, heated debates concerning the socio-political status of professionals and intellectuals, including physicians and scientists at large, were taking place at the time. These debates were openly featured in publications such as LRB and Estudios alongside and in the Q&A sections.124 Arguably, all these publications, taken together, show that this was a key period for the establishment of the socio-political roles of medical-health professionals. Their authority would in the end come to be defined as the product of a multidimensional discussion between the professionals themselves, the social, political, and economic centres of power (bourgeois, corporative, institutional), and people at large. The latter showed, in all instances, an unwavering will to contribute to this process, that is, to the actual construction of the society and the communities where they lived. In this context, physicians, as portrayed and discussed in Spottorno’s section, were, from a professional perspective, mere technicians at the service of the status quo within the highly hierarchical, hegemonic system. Meanwhile, despite their explicit dismissal, (non-expert, non-professional) people’s everyday life experience became reinforced, for the discussion itself, particularly as far as Spottorno’s outbursts are concerned, was but a way to highlight it. Indeed, Spottorno insistently complained about readers’ health-medical questions: ‘On and on …! You all want me to be a doctor. And I am not … In this section we try to address spiritual problems, not those of a physical order. For those, there are doctors of Medicine’.125 This disparity of aims persisted, however, as shown by his repeated complaints about enquiries concerning medical matters.126 It is clear that there was no intention to address this enduring demand in print – that is, aside from a strictly commercial standpoint: the publishing

124 125 126

Tabernero-Holgado, Jiménez-Lucena, and Molero-Mesa 2013. ByN, 6 Nov 1932, p. 179. ByN, 3 Apr 1932, p. 162; ByN, 2 Jul 1933, p. 16; ByN, 22 Apr 1934, p. 219.

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company of ABC and ByN (Prensa Española, S.A.) did not consider the possibility of launching a Q&A section for physical and mental health issues or the knowledge of the body like the ones in Estudios or LRB.127 However, the editors, as well as the backers of the publications, were most probably well aware of the public demand, for they inserted an advertising page featuring mostly ads for products related to the care of the body and health maintenance or recovery: cough syrups, prescription lenses, treatments for calluses and other feet conditions,128 pain ointments,129 remedies against dizziness and nausea, against excess of bile, and orthopaedic devices to treat hernias,130 products for the prevention and treatment of influenza, angina, bronchitis, constipation, migraine and ‘blood vices’;131 also, despite the section’s avoidance of the explicit mention of any term related to sexuality, as we have seen, remedies for ‘weak men’, where impotence and lack of vigour were mentioned, and where the ‘restoration of manhood to the exhausted man’ was promised;132 and, finally, hair removal techniques that in effect linked depilation to medical practices.133 In this way, Spottorno’s Q&A section in ByN contributed to configuring a consumption society where medical products were increasingly treated as commodities – that is, it contributed to the corporative and institutional, hegemonic-driven commodification of health-disease experiences. Furthermore, this arguably also constituted a compelling contribution to the abovementioned socio-political struggles concerning the status of the medical profession and its bearing on the hierarchical, hegemonic design and management of society. At the same time, all these strategies and interests led to the linking of some women’s health issues to fashion trends, above all concerning the correct, proper looks and manners required by the day’s gendered social norms. These 127

128 129 130 131 132 133

Other enquiries, about knitting for example, were actually addressed: ‘I cannot myself solve your other question. Among other reasons, because I do not understand anything about crochet. For that purpose, please go to the fashion section. We do not know about knitting in this section of mine’ (ByN, 20 Nov 1932, p. 8). For the knitting section, two coupons were needed (ByN, 27 Mar 1932, p. 3). A Q&A section related to human knowledge that did in fact have a space in the publication, and quite successfully (going from a 4-coupon to a 6-coupon requirement), was Matilde Ras’ graphology section, which addressed people’s ‘moral character and attributes’ through their handwriting (ByN, 27 Mar 1932, p. 3 and ByN, 23 Jul 1933, p. 13). ByN, 29 Jan 1933, p. 14. ByN, 26 Mar 1933, p. 13. ByN, 16 Apr 1933, p. 13. ByN, 30 Apr 1933, p. 13. ByN, 7 May 1933, p. 11. Ibid.

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were, conversely, very much on target in libertarian circles and publications, as we have already seen in connection with the treatment of sexuality, particularly female sexuality, which added one layer of complexity to the hegemonic and counter-hegemonic struggle.134 In this context, Spottorno even dared publish direct advice on these issues. For instance, in his critique of ‘the woman who smokes out of vice’, he contended that health ‘suffers with tobacco’, yet he was ‘in favour’ of women’s ‘flair and coquettish’ smoking, showing no concern for their health:135 You started smoking because it was fashionable, because it gave you a pretext to show your well-groomed nails. Today, you smoke out of necessity, like men. To the extreme that, once married, as you do not have much money, so to speak, you smoke your husband’s cigarettes … Such a way of smoking cannot be good for your health. You must gradually drop tobacco. Reduce, little by little, your daily intake. That way, you will achieve two things: not falling ill and pleasing that husband who, in the end, is the one that provides you with cigarettes.136 Another issue related to ‘modern’ gendered practices that was featured in the ByN section was cosmetic surgery: All torments a woman endures to preserve or enhance her beauty are acceptable to me. In the end [after describing hair care techniques as well as the use of powder and lipstick], if a woman is born with a purpose, this is to be or try to be pretty. But to a certain extent, and no more. Between this standpoint and resorting to surgery there is a rift I refuse to overcome. And, above all, the surgical operation you want to try seems atrocious to me. Bah! What do you care about a little ‘more’ or a little ‘less’? Yes, I know what you are going to reply: ‘figure’. Yet, if you achieved the figure you are after, you would not be a woman, but an ephebus.137 And Spottorno goes further, persistently: ‘Surgical operations of the Beauty Institute seem dreadful to me’.138 In fact, the link between health and beauty was relevant to quite a range of topics, such as the concern about the use of 134 135 136 137 138

Tabernero-Holgado, Jiménez-Lucena, and Molero-Mesa 2013. ByN, 24 Sep 1933, p. 14. ByN, 7 Jul 1935, p. 170. ByN, 24 Sep 1933, p. 14. ByN, 15 Apr 1934, p. 223.

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eyeglasses: ‘You should not worry [about it]. If you could only see the highly sentimental affair I had with a certain “Madame Lunettes”!’139 This subject was recurrent, and was treated in the most patriarchal terms: No; I do not deem it detrimental for a woman to wear eyeglasses. Above all when the woman is young. Because it seems a game more than necessity; a lively girl that has taken dad’s eyeglasses in a moment of joy.140 It is important to note that the direct relation between health and beauty was not explicitly featured in the questions, as printed, that were received by Estudios or LRB. In the Q&A sections of the libertarian publications, they focused on health aspects if they considered them of obvious general interest, although we must not forget the editing of what was published.141 Vanity, when introduced by any petitioner, was disregarded in the way questions were answered in general, whenever they dealt with women’s health, regardless of the consultant’s sex, and even if not related to the issues described above concerning ByN. Nevertheless, some contradictions occurred, further revealing the complexity of struggle for meaning construction processes. For instance, in connection with the problem of vasectomy mentioned earlier, Federica Montseny in LRB, while considering this procedure against the aims of the revolution, in puzzlingly gendered terms maintained that, in Spain, ‘where women are still very ignorant, very primitive, we like men as virile as possible. We are not at all amused by the perspective of a vasectomised man’.142 Overall, however, the aim and treatment of concerns in the Q&A sections of the libertarian magazines was clearly different, as explained, and worked as a whole precisely as a response to the mainstream gendered social norms that Spottorno so willingly fostered in ByN.

5

Questions of Eugenics

All Q&A sections considered in this essay featured questions highlighting the importance given to health in the establishment of a relationship. We have mentioned that in Estudios sexual education and sexuality were often discussed from a medical-health perspective that included wider socio-cultural

139 140 141 142

ByN, 13 Jan 1935, p. 172. ByN, 9 Jun 1935, p. 178. Tabernero-Holgado, Jiménez-Lucena, and Molero-Mesa 2013. Montseny 1935, p. 1121.

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aspects. The take on eugenics based on naturist and neo-Malthusian grounds focused on the recognition and vindication of people’s right to and capacity for self-management in scientific-medical, health/disease processes and beyond. Estudios’ commitment to re-signification through eclectic discussion that inclusively covered everyday practices was aimed at the construction of a different biopolitics, as explained above. This was central in the environmental eugenics they advocated, where people’s production, circulation and sharing of knowledge was a key element in achieving a better life.143 Regarding eugenic and neo-Malthusian measures, LRB, without falling into natalism, was always against any kind of birth control as a fighting strategy144 because, as they maintained, a drop in births in anarchist families reduced ‘the excess of population carrying in their blood the seed of social Revolution’. This would then prop up the bourgeoisie’s interests.145 Javier Serrano, who was in charge of the medical part of the Q&A section, as we have seen, agreed with this editorial line. Yet, beyond this, contradictions also occurred in this area, reflecting what we have already characterised as an exceedingly intricate range of processes concerning the construction and management of knowledge. Once again, the Montsenys’ take on vasectomy serves as an example: while they expressed doubts about it on purportedly scientific-medical grounds, they also stated, in peculiarly eugenic terms, ‘we only accept [vasectomy] as a way of sterilisation of the retarded, the incurable, the degenerates’.146 In ByN, Spottorno addressed health and heredity issues concerning relationships explicitly from a eugenics perspective. Sometimes he even did so jokingly, when referring to psychological concerns, or certain diseases and different kinds of defects. For instance, on the importance of health, he would say things such as, you adored a certain lad because of everything: his looks, his spiritual side, his intelligence. Because of everything, I repeat; but, above all, because of his health. He was what is considered a strong man;147 or

143 144 145 146 147

Jiménez-Lucena and Molero-Mesa 2011; Tabernero-Holgado, Jiménez-Lucena, and Molero-Mesa 2013. In this respect, see a programmatical article where LRB anti-neo-Malthusian reasons are detailed: Urales 1925, pp. 9–13. LRB, 19 Apr 1935, p. 894. LRB, 16 Aug 1935, p. 788. ByN, 23 Oct 1932, p. 190.

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you must still be in love with that sick and incurable lad. Why not, while it does not go beyond elated correspondence? … I have always loathed the fiancé hunt. You have got a boyfriend that, owing to his poor health, cannot become anything else, but a boyfriend … you are doing an act of charity;148 or … future happiness must be based upon something solid and a sick man does not offer, in that sense, enough security.149 A eugenics perspective was implicit in such replies, and Spottorno did not consider that an expert was necessary to answer this kind of question. Physicians were considered mere technicians, as described above, while eugenics, in this context, was deemed a wider issue reaching far beyond the realm of medicine. From this perspective, he did not hesitate to assert that ‘owing to a merely physical law, cousins are not desirable. It is widely known that same-blood marriages yield degenerated progenies. Would you like, for instance, to some day have a mute child?’150 Some months later, he quite explicitly insisted: ‘Marriages between close relatives are not advisable as regards race improvement’.151 He became even more emphatic when pressed about this issue by his readers: I vote along with the family and against the cousin. I am thinking about race improvement and do not ever approve of such kinds of marriages between consanguineous relatives … To have sick children, almost knowingly, seems to me an enormous crime.152 It does not seem, though, once again, that such a categorical answer succeeded in putting an end to readers’ doubts, as he had to come back to the issue: The Church allows it with dispensation and I am not one to reject what it admits. Weddings between first cousins, however, use to be ill-fated for the perpetuation of the race. The same blood, when mixed, yields few healthy children. Think, thus, about it before making up your mind and 148 149 150 151 152

ByN, 15 Jul 1934, p. 221. ByN, 22 Jul 1934, p. 208. ByN, 13 Nov 1932, p. 194. ByN, 14 May 1933, p. 16. ByN, 28 May 1933, p. 14.

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do not go for such a marriage unless it is your last resort. This is my advice. According to my conscience that, later on, you would reproach me for it should your first child be deaf-mute and you could not enjoy being called ‘dad’.153 Indeed, a concern for hereditary questions was essential in this matter: You, thin-haired woman, dream of a curly son with his hair reaching his feet. In order to improve the species, it is natural that you think of a father sporting more hair than Samson before finding Delilah’s scissors. As a result, you rebuffed several suitors owing to their lack of hair … Yet one turned up … The man was bald: but you understand he is your man anyway. So marry the bald man. Why cannot a person with abundant hair be born from two people with little hair? … There is no reason for this not to happen. The first bald man of the world was born from two individuals of the human species that sported bountiful hair. The contrary is perfectly possible. Marry, then, and you get … well, you understand me, go to all lectures by Federico García Sanchia. And do not stop staring the lecturer’s hair.154 In addition, Spottorno used evolutionary and psychoanalytic concepts and terms quite randomly, even jokingly mixed in with religious references, yet implicitly providing a sort of scientific credibility to his eugenic arguments, which also conveyed, taken all together, a deliberate sense of inexorableness: What is happening is that Humankind is the victim of that great machinery through which the world works. One is not oneself, strictly speaking, but a little insignificant piece of the great universal machine. And, in this concert, the One in command takes care, naturally, of harmony. And the short man falls in love with the tall woman and vice versa. And it is not because of their will, but of the directive of their subconscious. And so the son of a short man and a tall woman is born as a normal child. Here lies the harmony: the improvement of the species. Do you realise it?155 The teasing tone disappeared when mental diseases instead of minor characteristics were considered in terms of heredity: 153 154 155

ByN, 8 Oct 1933, p. 14. ByN, 23 Apr 1933, p. 16. ByN, 17 Sep 1933, p. 14.

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If your suspicion is right, you should not marry. Not because of you, who, in love, are surely capable of sacrifice; but thinking of … whatever may come from that marriage. One may accept anything in one’s own name, good and bad. That is for each one’s tastes and conscience. What cannot be done, however, is to contribute to the delivery of an individual with a high prospect of a wretched life. That, never. You seem composed and sensible. Study that man, and if you get to understand that his reason fails and he is not normal, make the sacrifice of renouncing him. Humankind, at least, will be grateful to you.156 On another occasion, he asks: ‘What would your marriage with a man you consider sick become? … I think about … what may come and I am horrified … The little current tragedy would be nothing as compared with the huge tragedy of a mother that is like her unavoidably sick child’.157 These examples illustrate that eugenics was treated as a popular – indeed, common – theme, where there supposedly was no need of expert knowledge to set out views on complex and uncomfortable issues regarding heredity. However, the complexity of these questions gave Spottorno trouble to the point of being forced to rectify upon receiving additional information from a petitioner. This was the case of a man’s enquiry about the woman he wanted to marry and who apparently suffered from some kind of disease. Spottorno advised him to ‘renounce … think of what your life would become with such a person’.158 Then, upon more details being provided by the petitioner, Spottorno modified his advice: ‘The woman you refer to is almost normal. It is not necessary to be a physician in order to realize that. So marry her … and do not even consider what you know’.159 This advice triggered the intervention of the woman’s mother, who was also the groom’s aunt and a former petitioner, to whom Spottorno replied: Yes, in fact I encouraged your nephew because I thought I had to upon the case he referred to me. I am not an expert regarding diseases and acted according to my reason, if not my science. In your case, I would take my daughter to the physician. Regarding diseases, a woman’s embarrassment does not count. Just imagine if her life would be at stake. Would you let

156 157 158 159

ByN, 5 Feb 1933, p. 12. ByN, 21 May 1933, p. 14. ByN, 28 May 1933, p. 12. ByN, 16 Jul 1933, p. 14.

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her die on account of a misguided modesty? … Have a physician examine your daughter and he, better than I, will be able to tell you if she is fit for the marriage.160 Routinely, Spottorno did not recommend relationships if there was any disease: ‘Concerning what you ask me as a “case”, you have all my sympathy. But my advice – with all the ache in my heart – will not be favourable again: you should never get married’;161 or, in more pleasant terms, ‘Get healthy as soon as possible and find in your work a worthy rehabilitation to your own eyes’.162 Significant, in this last case, is the way Spottorno linked the eugenic argument with the healing virtues of work, that is, explicitly giving eugenics a sociopolitical dimension beyond its strictly biomedical claims. As opposed to the libertarian environmental eugenics sported in Estudios, healthy living conditions were articulated here in terms of (the duty of) work itself, regardless of its particular practical circumstances. In any case, the focus on physical ‘perfection’ made him carefully qualify his replies sometimes, which also points to the importance as well as the routine character of this kind of concern and argument: ‘The man’s leg defect and linked slight limp is not enough reason to reject his love, despite other things your lady friends might tell you’.163 Alcoholics, however, were systematically stigmatised as their condition was considered a vice as opposed to an illness: ‘An alcoholic is not a man … Keep away from the drunk, I repeat’.164 Overall, yet again, these innumerable requests and (published) replies reveal a highly dynamic and multilayered process of construction and management of knowledge that, in many different ways, was essential to people’s ways of perceiving and running their everyday lives.

6

Conclusion

In his theorisation of cultural struggles within social dynamics, Antonio Gramsci pointed out the need for a dialogical approach to their analysis that would consider the multidimensional relationship between a range of individual and collective (social, corporative, institutional) epistemological agents. This would be essential in order to understand socio-historical developments where 160 161 162 163 164

ByN, 1 Oct 1933, p. 12. ByN, 10 Feb 1935, p. 176. ByN, 11 Dec 1932, p. 10. ByN, 30 Jul 1933, p. 14. ByN, 3 Mar 1935, p. 151.

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individuals and/or groups situated on different socio-economic sides would take an active part in hegemonic struggles,165 including struggles for meaning. These, in turn, are directly linked to logics of domination and non-domination where hegemonies and counter-hegemonies are cooperatively and successively established and dismantled. Such analysis entails the exploration of processes of knowledge production, circulation and management, as well as the related power relations within dynamics of socio-cultural construction. Communication practices, including people’s related everyday actions and interactions, discourses, objects and spaces, are necessary constituents of such processes. Meaning construction is directly linked to the management of experience, and social, political and institutional attempts at rationalisation and regulation are necessarily included as behaviour modification practices. And in this dynamics, media constitute fundamental spaces for relational developments of subjectivities and, thus, multilayered grounds for dispute and construction of epistemological agencies, which, in turn, may lead to uncharted forms of hegemony and/or the removal of subalternities. With all these considerations in mind, we have focused on carrying out a relational, dialogical analysis of these Q&A sections in order to tackle complex, public communication practices related to the management of the symbolic and material resources of power relations and socio-cultural construction. The editorial architecture of agony columns or problem pages (i.e. Q&A sections) of the printed press leads to the combination of a multiplicity of subjectivities, everyday experiences and social conflicts. All these shared experiences, actions and interactions contribute to the construction and negotiation of subjectivities (individual and/or collective), as well as to the routine legitimating, questioning and/or re-signifying of the meanings that constitute the fabric of hegemonic and subaltern relations. We have seen that even though that same editorial architecture establishes a priori the Q&A counsellors’ authority, readers’ resistance, together with counsellors’ hesitations and difficulties to acknowledge the multidimensional nature of the processes of meaning construction, directly challenge that authority. We have elsewhere analysed what could be considered unconventional processes of construction and management of knowledge in the Q&A section of the anarchist magazine Estudios, ‘Questions and answers’ (Preguntas y respuestas), which was widely influential in libertarian circles in the 1920s and 1930s.166 With Gramsci’s dialogical approach in mind, we explored this section as part 165 166

See note 2. Jiménez-Lucena and Molero-Mesa 2011; Tabernero 2011; Tabernero-Holgado, JiménezLucena, and Molero-Mesa 2012 and 2013.

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of a whole social dynamics where opposing views coexist and interact. Within the libertarian context, we have also taken into account the ‘General Problem Page’ (Consultorio general) of the anarchist publication La Revista Blanca.167 However, we realised that it is essential to expand the analysis of the dialogue beyond these sections to other enunciation spaces. Therefore here, we have focused on the concurrent Q&A section of the liberal-conservative magazine Blanco y Negro, ‘Tell me your case’ (Cuénteme usted su caso), managed by society columnist Juan Spottorno y Topete. This section allows us to look at a space where bourgeois deliberately hegemonic, unidirectional discourses and practices were insistently (re)produced. The analysis of this section, and its matching up to our findings concerning the libertarian magazines, allows us to identify additional and crucial multidimensional traits of struggle-for-meaning processes. The libertarian magazines serve as contrast but also as necessary references for contextualisation and analysis of the dynamics relating to support and opposition arguments and practices. While the libertarian magazines’ knowledge management, despite varying degrees of difficulty and disagreement, tended to allow multiple epistemological agents, we have found that people’s desire to contribute gave Spottorno serious trouble regarding the conscious construction and assertion of his readers and petitioners as non-agent subjects. In fact, such processes became quite complicated and confusing, even contradictory, when questions and replies dealt with social norms susceptible of being produced and legitimised in the scientific-medical sphere. In this regard, we have particularly explored, in Spottorno’s Q&A section, the consideration of science and medicine in society as well as their application to specific questions dealing with sex, gender, and eugenics, for these are all key socio-political pieces in the production of epistemologies in relation to behaviour control, social norms and people’s everyday life. The clear differences in the management of these Q&A sections, by physicians in Estudios and LRB (Roberto Remartínez and Javier Serrano, respectively), as opposed to a society columnist in ByN (Spottorno, as pointed out), and also in their aims, deliberately pedagogical in the former and entertainmentdriven in the latter, offer an inescapable contrast regarding the consideration and treatment of readers’ inputs. It is important to point out, however, one trend that was present in the three Q&A sections, albeit quite differently, which was the persistent recommendation of reading materials. This characterised the three sections as essentially pedagogical, whether with the emancipatory

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Molero-Mesa and Jiménez-Lucena 2013.

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disposition of the libertarian magazines, or with the aim of providing escapist and acquiescence-inducing arguments of the conservative publication.168 Furthermore, Spottorno’s trivialisation of petitioners’ experiences and approaches, which is nowhere to be found in the libertarian magazines, worked as an explicit underlining of a top-down process of knowledge management. To end this chapter, let us look at some questions around gender. These were one of the main features of these sections in this historical period, above all regarding women’s lives.169 Spottorno’s confusion about who in fact were the addressees of the section reveals a time of change as to the notion of what was masculine and feminine: ‘I will confess that I am more particularly interested in female complications. Yet, I aspire to be impartial this once, and also want to deal with the man-complication. All this in a frivolously spiritual manner, it is understood …’; although a few lines below, he would say: ‘Female reader, take your pen to tell me “your case” with it’.170 That same ambivalence recurred at other times, such as when Spottorno said that the section was addressed to ‘all BLANCO Y NEGRO regulars’, and yet, although he did not seem to speak to any sex in particular, and confessed himself pleased because his first reply had been sent to a male consultant,171 he admitted, a few months later, that ‘if I thought of anyone when I started this section, it was the unhappy woman and the solace I could give her with my humble effort’.172 In addition, there was also confusion concerning Spottorno’s sex. In this regard, his signature, with the initial of this first name and the whole of both surnames, J. Spottorno y Topete, probably contributed to the misunderstandings. Nevertheless, he had to repeatedly clarify this: ‘Although at the beginning of your letter you doubt my sex’,173 ‘I am not a woman, but a man’;174 and he sometimes, as the confusion persisted, replied a bit angrily: ‘Not again! I am not a woman; I am a man, I do not know if fortunately or unfortunately’.175 This 168 169 170 171

172

173 174 175

See Tabernero-Holgado, Jiménez-Lucena, and Molero-Mesa 2012, regarding the use of entertainment and trivialisation as indoctrination tools. Jiménez-Lucena and Molero-Mesa 2011; Tabernero-Holgado, Jiménez-Lucena, and Molero-Mesa 2013. Spottorno y Topete 1932, pp. 142–3. ‘I am very happy that the first “case” I have been submitted in these brand-new pages comes from a man’s hand. As a result, I will not be branded as partial’. ByN, 10 Jan 1932, p. 79. ByN, 11 Sep 1932, p. 186. The play on meanings, which was a trait of this section, was clear since the inception statement, where the oxymoron ‘frivolously spiritual’ was used, as we have pointed out, ByN, 3 Jan 1932, p. 142. ByN, 27 May 1934, p. 207. ByN, 25 May 1932, p. 169. ByN, 12 Jun 1932, p. 172.

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could very well happen because of the spirit of these sections, their focus on love affairs, and the counsellors that directed them. And yet, this was at odds with the interest in identifying the consultants’ sex, as can be seen in Spottorno’s section. Indeed, it is not difficult to identify the consultants’ sex (75% male, 25% female) through the pseudonyms they used or through Spottorno’s replies. This was different in the libertarian magazines, where pseudonyms and replies were not so explicitly gendered, and relationships were not the primary concern.176 The underpinning of gender and class stereotypes was part of a knowledge management strategy aimed at the reinforcement of a particular female model: ‘I do not believe it. Neither that you are a plain and simple dressmaker nor that you are ugly. To be such a meek dressmaker, you handle the pen too well’.177 In this sense, transgression of gender roles was severely censored, sometimes even violently, such as when Spottorno reproached the boldness of some young girls who, according to him, ‘deserved some spanking, instead of advice, for asking certain things’.178 And moreover, this was not the only time Spottorno referred to the justified use of violence as an answer to certain behaviours on the part of women: I am very sorry to tell you, but you have got the bold as brass soul of the working-class districts. If pushed a little, I think that you would like your boyfriend to raise his hand to you sometimes. You will end up doing as much as possible for this to happen, you will see.179 Such a remark, even if the last sentence may sound like a warning to the consultant to avoid a situation like that, implies the assumption of a submissive role for women in their relationships with men. The repetition of these ideas along with other gender and class stereotypes, sometimes uttered in an apparently light-hearted manner, yet with a clear repressive intent, worked as an affirmation of such roles, and thus, of a given dominating, hegemonic sociocultural order. This, as can be easily inferred, was diametrically opposed to the persistent call for self-management in the pages of the Q&A sections of the libertarian magazines, both in terms of class and gender.180

176 177 178 179 180

See Tabernero-Holgado, Jiménez-Lucena, and Molero-Mesa 2013, pp. 44–6, on the historical evolution of these sections and their characteristics regarding themes and audiences. ByN, 7 May 1933, p. 10. ByN, 11 Jun 1933, p. 14. ByN, 2 Jul 1933, p. 14. Tabernero-Holgado, Jiménez-Lucena, and Molero-Mesa 2013.

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Moreover, Spottorno was doubtless prey to the frivolity he advocated, which led him to discredit women as a whole, while praising those who, for him, were an exception: ‘The world, including this section, is so full of coarse women, that one that is not like that must necessarily stand out …!’181 This kind of discrediting, paradoxically, served to praise an elite of ‘cultured’ women (in the quoted case, a law student) who secured their social distinction, although they had to keep being, or at least seeming, weak, as he advised her to pretend to be ‘sick’ to attain a man’s interest.182 And yet, as in other cases mentioned, Spottorno also went back on it and assumed an utterly contrary stance, giving the section the quality of a frivolous game, so full was it of direct contradictions: ‘But do not resort to illnesses as a way out. You would be, in the end, the loser. The worst could be that you end up completely liberated, but at the expense of your own life’.183 As we have seen, the frivolity was also a function of a sort of pragmatic ambivalence, which was not at all an attribute of the conductors of the libertarian Q&A sections, where there was more consistency in the replies. Perhaps, Roberto Remartínez and Javier Serrano had a clearer view of the aims of their respective sections in Estudios and LRB than did Spottorno in ByN. Or it may be, in addition, that readers took them more seriously, because of the publications’ (and the sections’) spirit, context, and ultimate goals. Beyond trivialisation, the scolding of contributors was not unusual for Spottorno, who interacted with them in a plainly paternalistic manner. This is significant, for some scolding was also featured in the libertarian sections, yet, and notwithstanding some unavoidable conflicts, mainly to stress the need to keep in mind the pedagogical aims of the sections and not to reinforce any kind of differential status between the counsellors and the petitioners. People’s unyielding will to contribute ended up defining quite complex and multilayered processes of meaning construction, which became particularly explicit in the bourgeois publication. Indeed, the resulting insistent reproduction of arguments and counter-arguments turned the section, by virtue of sheer accumulation, into a rather ambiguous tool for knowledge validation. This applies to its intent, which was constantly challenged; its content, as not even the implicit editorial censorship prevented the printing of certain subjects; and its form, for the concealing of questions did not preclude an active contribution to meaning construction on the part of petitioners. In all, Gramsci’s dialogical approach has allowed us to delve into the complexity of processes of construction of subjectivities and epistemologies, and 181 182 183

ByN, 12 Feb 1933, p. 12. Ibid. ByN, 27 Jan 1935, p. 180.

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hence, of hegemonies and counter-hegemonies. The multidimensional nature of hegemonic struggles and the processes of struggle for meaning found in these sections and described in the chapter reveal the difficulties in accurately defining hegemony, counter-hegemony and subalternities, as well as the contradictions in their construction and relations, as they turn out to be deeply intertwined communication processes.

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chapter 9

The Scientific Intellectual, a Hostile Milieu, or a Cultural Dispositif? Revisiting the Historiography of Interwar German Physics and How It Explains Scientific Culture Arne Schirrmacher

Scientific intellectuals as perceived by Antonio Gramsci are scientists and researchers who create and are created by (and within) a social sphere, which in this volume is called ‘scientific culture’. In order to help elucidate a little further how this scientific culture may be construed, an episode from the history of physics is evoked – the reception of quantum theory in Weimar Germany – and three different framings are discussed that may serve to delineate the notion of scientific culture from various directions. The first is a (socio-cultural) milieu, which suggests a social force field acting on scientific intellectuals; the second is the concept of rival ideological groups, which represent various hegemonies and counter-hegemonic forces; and the last is a cultural dispositif, which hints at the workings of a well-oiled machinery setting in (cognitive) motion and interaction both scientists and society. Thus, in this essay, I seek to approach the wide field of hegemony in the natural sciences from a historiographical point of view by revisiting and recontextualising one of the more prominent examples of cultural hegemony acting on hard science: the so-called capitulation of German physicists to a hostile environment in the 1920s. This thesis, which became prominent – but also excessively generalised and misinterpreted – as the ‘Forman thesis’, has produced some heated discussion involving generations of historians of science, as well as a great number of publications.1 For my purposes, a minimal sketch of the historiographical discussion of physics, seen as the model for the hard sciences more generally, may suffice before expanding on the benefits that a Gramscian approach to its problems may provide. 1 For a reprint of Forman’s articles and a broad recent assessment see Carson, Kojevnikov, and Trischler 2011, particularly the contributions of John Heilbron, David Cassidy, and M. Norton Wise. An earlier critical examination can be found in Meyenn 1994, which includes German translations of Forman’s articles as well as of Hendry 1980, which is one of the key critiques.

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Writing the History of Science and Scientific Culture

In the early 1960s – at the apex of the Cold War and the Cuban missile crisis – Thomas Kuhn wrote on the development of science as being governed by dogmas, paradigms, and social groups, without, however, touching upon questions of power or hegemony. His book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which deeply influenced sociological studies of science, had no sociology in it, as the author rather avoided this field; and while it marked a deliberate attempt to create a positive historiography of the physical sciences that were so deeply embedded in post-war academic sensitivities, it flatly ignored contemporary physics and the threat it posed, which was then omnipresent in the minds of his contemporaries.2 While the ‘quantum revolution’ of the twentieth century did not take a prominent place in Kuhn’s seminal work, it was nevertheless subsumed under the same historiographical structure by many readers, although some kept wondering why Kuhn did not include the apparently most fitting case of quantum theory in his list of larger and smaller revolutions (and why he did not use its ramifications to explain incommensurability).3 A decade later, a rebellious student of Kuhn, with whom he was conducting a major interviewing project precisely on the quantum revolution,4 took a radically different stand. Paul Forman argued that the very society in which quantum physicists were immersed made them radically reinterpret their findings. Key to Forman’s argument was that the German physicists adapted ‘the content of their science to the values of their intellectual environment’, first and foremost by dispensing with the principle of causality when dealing with problems of the new quantum physics, thus jettisoning one of the firmest pillars of traditional physics.5 In this capitulation model he found three stages: first, one of hostility of the intellectual culture, which then prompted the second stage of ideological accommodation, which finally resulted in the restructuring of physical concepts in culturally more acceptable ways. 2 Hacking 2012, p. xxxvi. 3 Kuhn 1962, p. 66. Some 20 years later, Kuhn commented in a paper titled ‘Revisiting Planck’ (Kuhn 1984), which then became an afterword to his study of the quantum discontinuity (Kuhn 1987, pp. 349–70), on the interrelations between his work on scientific revolutions and his later historiography of quantum theory, basically claiming that he did not ignore things, but rather that they had been implicit in his arguments. 4 On Kuhn’s troublesome attempt to make quantum physicists reflect on when they perceived a crisis, see Seth 2007, p. 46 f.; for a more comprehensive discussion of the interview project cf. te Heesen forthcoming. 5 Forman 1971, p. 7.

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A couple of years later, this study became a shining exemplar in David Bloor’s manifesto for formulating the strong programme. As one of four ‘typical problems’ it was said to suggest the fundamental tenets of the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK).6 In Bloor’s reading, the ‘fascinating and controversial study of the physicists of Weimar Germany … shows them taking up the dominant, anti-scientific “Lebensphilosophie” surrounding them’. A wider controversy developed, with many facets that are beyond the scope of this essay, but the precise nature of the original claim remained rather vague.7 In a reformulation, Forman tried to clarify things in 1984 in the following way: In an effort to realign their discipline with dominant cultural values, individual German physicists had been delivering manifestos against causality even before the discovery of quantum mechanics … Thus we should not be surprised that once a nondeterministic theory of atomic processes was at hand, German physicists were disposed to view it and represent it in public as providing that liberation from causality so generally desired.8 Two aspects of this revised wording should be stressed. First, it concerns a matter of timing – a scientific interpretation is accepted ‘even before’ the underlying theory was fully established – rather than of causation. And second, what is called ‘liberation from causality’ is at least as much a discourse reaching out to the public as within the scientific community. Interestingly, the Forman thesis, so strongly debated by historians of science, was not further illuminated in the sociological analyses of Bloor and colleagues. Instead, Bloor staged Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn as two opposing theorists of history of science and both were accused of having constructed their models of knowledge according to their respective social ideologies – in Bloor’s terminology, of ‘Enlightenment’ and ‘Romanticism’, respectively.9 Popper, an émigré philosopher and strong proponent of an open society since the 1930s, argued for logic, individualistic researchers, falsificationism, and progress through the exclusion of wrong theory, which relates to prescriptive and moralising traits; Kuhn, who switched from physics to history and philosophy of science in order to counter the repercussions of the atomic bomb on the reputation of ‘almighty’ physicists, saw an abundance of revolution and great inspiration that quickly generated large groups of followers and marginalised 6 7 8 9

Bloor 1976, p. 7. Cf. Carson, Kojevnikov, and Trischler 2011. Forman 1984, quotes on pp. 337 and 338. Bloor 1976, ch. 4.

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older worldviews. However, he did not recognise any influence of money, power or ideology on theory choice, thus completely ignoring the academic-militaryindustrial complex looming large around him the whole time.10 That the public, understood as the society in a wider sense, may be seen as the co-producer of scientific knowledge that feeds its resonances and interpretations back into the thought collectives, thus allowing for thought styles and scientific language to stabilise, was an early insight of Ludwik Fleck.11 His ideas, however, were discussed only from the 1980s on, when his notion of collectivism no longer scared Western post-war readers and when it could be read as an early example of laboratory studies.12 Here we also find the point, prominently discussed later by Roger Cooter and Stephen Pumfrey, that public knowledge must not be misunderstood as knowledge deriving from popularisation – thus cutting the epistemological circuit – but rather that science has to be related to multiple publics in an interactive and dynamic fashion. And these kinds of popular or public science may entertain – and here I quote the authors’ use of a Gramscian term – ‘[a] variety of hegemonic alliances’ with politics, religion, etc.13 In the following I will use some new insights from the history of popular science in the twentieth century which have emerged in recent years14 to discuss three key aspects of the controversy sparked by Paul Forman: (1) To what extent is the story of Weimar physics one of scientific intellectuals? (2) What ‘milieus’ – hostile or not – may have influenced modern quantum theory? And (3) What different models may be used to account for the interaction of science and society, and how would they relate to Gramscian concepts? While these considerations can only be exploratory at best, they nonetheless hint at a general task for the (political) historian of modern science: the necessary disentanglement of the various hegemonic discourses addressing science, its publics and politics.

10 11 12

13 14

Cf. Hacking 2012 and Fuller 2000b. Fleck 1979. This was facilitated by the ‘interpretative translation’ of his book, which still had qualms about using the term ‘thought collective’; see preface by Thaddeus Trenn in Fleck 1979, p. xv. Cooter and Pumfry 1994, p. 252. See, e.g., Bowler 2009, Papanelopoulou, Nieto-Galan, and Perdriguero 2009, Schirrmacher 2012 and 2013a.

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The Scientific Intellectual: Examples from Interwar German Physics

It is one of the basic Gramscian tenets that intellectuals should not be conceived of as comprising a distinct class (apart from society), but that any class or functional group (within the society) produces from its own ranks ‘organic intellectuals’. From this perspective the ‘scientific intellectual’ emerges naturally and, hence, I will start by asking to what extent the relation of German physicists to their societal environment, as well as their reaction to the real or proclaimed crisis in science during the Weimar period, is a story of scientific intellectuals and their consenting followers, in both scientific and larger public circles. When looking for a scientific intellectual in early twentieth-century Germany, scientific eminence and public impact are key. Among the many influential German physicists of this time, one stands out from the crowd and may qualify as a master intellectual. Max Planck, the founder of the quantum theory in 1900, quickly became the spiritus rector of a broad scientific community, particularly after the First World War, when the Nobel Prize for 1918 and his untiring efforts to restore German science made him a public figure.15 His philosophical writings reached wider audiences attentive to science, and in them he constantly tried to shape the understanding of science as the sincere quest for a ‘world picture’. In his influential and frequently reprinted talks on ‘The Unity of the Physical World Picture’ (Die Einheit des physikalischen Weltbildes) published in 1909, and in particular ‘World Picture of the New Physics’ (Das Weltbild der neuen Physik) of 1929, he provided an interpretation of science as a highly cultural asset, more or less untainted by earthly affairs. In particular, quantum mechanics had proven that the world picture had developed such that it ‘moved ever further away from the world of perception and, correspondingly, is approaching the real, in principle unrecognizable world’. It therefore had to be ‘purged of all anthropomorphic elements’, and one even had to eliminate any notion that ‘is related in any way to the human skills of measurement’.16 Clearly, we can read this as a strategy to make science unassailable through an emphasis on individual genius and philosophical depth, whereby common sense observation of nature or reference to the world as it shows itself cannot falsify science’s findings. At a crucial time for German political identity and 15 16

Cf. Heilbron 1986. My translation of Planck 1909 and 1929, which are contained in many editions of collections, e.g. Planck 1965, here pp. 28–51 and 206–27.

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scientific standing in the world, this message resonated very well with the convictions and expectations of an attentive public of considerable size. Planck’s 1929 talk saw four editions in the years 1929 and 1930 alone and was excerpted in many newspaper articles. It would, however, be wrong to suppose that his view reflected the general view on science of all German scientists or even of the society as a whole in the 1920s. As Forman demonstrated, crisis talk on the failures of physical theory to account for the phenomena of nature in a rational and causal way was widespread in academic circles, although it did not really reach much beyond them, into wider social strata of society, as he instead suggested.17 Within the scientific community there were many occasions on which scientists speculated about the connections between the riddles posed by their research and current philosophical and cultural narratives of acausality and cultural decline in line with Lebensphilosophie and Oswald Spengler’s historical prophecies, respectively. On the other hand, there were probably just as many physicists who did not engage in these discussions or rejected them outright.18 Looking at the debates about science conducted in the wider public arena, Planck’s view was not the only mode by which a quantum physicist could address the public during the late 1920s’ (economic) crisis years. Erwin Schrödinger was quite effective, too, in drawing followers to a very different though equally attractive picture of modern science. Like Planck, Schrödinger was one of the main protagonists of the history of quantum physics, in particular as one of the founders of quantum (or rather wave) mechanics. In the October 1929 edition of Koralle, a new and fashionable popular science magazine published by the immensely successful Ullstein publishing house, one of the main players in early mass media, Schrödinger’s account of quantum theory was presented on the occasion of his succession to Planck at the University of Berlin. He used a story about the riddle of light to tell his scientifically inclined female reader about spectroscopy (the ‘Lichtreklame’ which every atom makes), quanta (which were particularly small, like ‘Inflationsmark’) and confessed that he himself was not yet quite sure whether the quantum assumption was really the true expression for the phenomena. However, he concluded, as soon as scientists really know how to address the unfortunate but only temporary lack of Anschaulichkeit (visual intelligibility) of the theory, they will tell the reader. 17 18

On the lack of clarity about the relevant social groups with respect to crisis perception and hostile environment, see Schirrmacher 2011, p. 345f. For the case of Arnold Sommerfeld, Seth 2007 and 2010 show at length that he and his large research group on atomic physics did not register any sense of crisis.

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Not only did Schrödinger attempt to convince the ordinary man, and woman too, that science workers pursued a decent occupation just as everybody else did in their joint society; he also humanised their process of knowledge creation: Instead of apodictic truth, science strives for better theories, a process that takes time and many steps. It is a pursuit, however, very common to any human activity, as he explained in the same journal a year later, that basically unites science, art, and play (hence the title, Wissenschaft – Kunst – Spiel). The first publication of the article in English thus bore the title ‘Science as Culture’.19 With Planck and Schrödinger we have found two exemplars of scientific intellectuals, albeit of rather different kinds, both of which could, with some justification, be understood as organic intellectuals. But we have not yet analysed how they interacted with their social environments and culture in general. Can the claim of a ‘hostile intellectual milieu’, which was so central in Paul Forman’s early form of a sociology of scientific knowledge, hold water?

3

From Forman’s ‘Hostile Milieu’ to Three Hegemonic Forces

In order to work out what kinds of milieus were in play in Weimar science and which may have been hostile against whom, it seems helpful to bring on stage, besides the hegemony concept, what in Gramscian terms is known as ‘folklore’ and ‘subaltern’ social groups. Taking my cue from Forman, whose main sources for the recognition of a hostile intellectual milieu were academic speeches and articles mostly from within the university, I scrutinise the discourses that can be found in the more widespread popular science literature and try to link this discursive space to questions of hegemony. As for Gramsci hegemony comes with counter-hegemonic forces, I will submit my findings to a kind of Gramsci test: Did the cultural hegemony of an industrial bourgeois class provoke a counter-hegemonic reaction in the (popular) scientific discourse which, besides scientific intellectuals, also included new mass media? It did not escape Forman’s attention, as he recognised already in his 1967 dissertation that ‘despite […] inflation and the antagonism toward the physical sciences and mathematics – semi-professional journals of general scientific content prospered’ and that this ‘curious fact’ may be connected to Gramsci’s notion of ‘folklore’.20 Later, unfortunately, he did not elaborate on these findings. For this reason, I will try to address at least some aspects of the multi-

19 20

Schrödinger 1930. Forman 1967, p. 176.

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faceted popular discourse, and I suggest drawing a rough distinction between three struggling parties aiming at three different cultural hegemonies which one can aptly label as ‘folklore hegemony’, ‘consumer society hegemony’, and ‘counter-hegemony’. The most successful German popular science magazine not only drew its title, Kosmos, from older popularisation efforts; it also mainly followed a typical nineteenth-century approach that included much natural history, wonders of nature and travel writing, albeit mixed with modern science like atomic physics in the Weimar period. Taking folklore – to quote a couple of lines from Agustí Nieto-Galan’s reappraisal of the Gramscian legacy for the history of science – as an ‘inherited worldview, passively or unconsciously accepted, which often reinforced consent and subordination’, we can say that Kosmos carried one version of nineteenth-century bourgeois popularisation into the new era, when it still entertained the common people. And as a ‘sediment of earlier forms of domination’, it maintained a certain kind of hegemony, which I will call for the moment ‘folklore hegemony’.21 This ‘folklore hegemony’ nicely contrasts with what one may call ‘consumer society hegemony’, which in the interwar years was aggressively pursued by the large German publishers like Ullstein with various magazines in the fields of literary criticism, women’s interests, and also popular science. Koralle was a rather lavish competitor of the comparatively dusty Kosmos and it presented topical science reporting in the context of an emergent consumer society, as is apparent from the many advertisements for chocolate, cars, and cigarettes. Ullstein even told prospective advertisers that its magazines would offer through this project a particularly educated and well-off customer group.22 The same science that, according to Forman, prompted a hostile intellectual environment, can be found in Koralle aligning nicely with the other interests of its readers, understood as aspiring modern middle-class citizens (and consumers), including the modern women to which Schrödinger had addressed his account of atomic physics.23 Both folklore and consumer society hegemony invited a critical reaction, particularly by those elements of society without bourgeois or new middleclass backgrounds. And indeed, there was a strongly outspoken counterhegemony from the working classes, or rather from a group of Marxist scientific intellectuals around the Jena ‘red professor’ and biologist Julius Schaxel who were running an educational society and editing a popular science journal for 21 22 23

Nieto-Galan 2011a. Ullstein-Berichte, April 1927, p. 12. For details see Schirrmacher 2011.

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the working classes, which tried to disrupt the established consent of workers to popularisation as diffusion from above.24 In the first number of Urania, which appeared in 1924 as a kind of ‘proletarian Kosmos’ and which was distributed and advertised in meetings of leftist worker groups by a network of agents, the reader was told: […] without doubt it is in the best interest of the proletariat that its own popular science journal has a Marxist outlook and attempts to clearly exhibit the manifold relations particularly between applied science and social studies. Every bourgeois-capitalist project will and must be anxious to avoid this! Therefore all members of the working class are obliged to refuse all bourgeois ‘distracting science’ [Ablenkungswissenschaft] and to pledge allegiance to ‘Urania’.25 In this way Urania made clear from the beginning that they had understood the mechanisms of hegemony through folklore and the role of consenting, or rather ensnared masses in science popularisation. This field had become the arena for political struggle. Mastermind of this counter-hegemony was Karl August Wittfogel, who had published an analysis of ‘The Science of Bourgeois Society’ in 1922 and would later become a well-known sociologist in the United States.26 Writing in Urania, he explained that ‘education material’ coming from the ‘bourgeois-capitalist camp’ was mostly superfluous and that moreover it was the ‘duty of every proletarian to replace in his shelves the respective bourgeois-capitalist literature with his Urania’. Even more outspoken was Julius Schaxel’s account in one of the book supplements to the journal on the ‘Development of the Science of Life’ in which he proclaimed: Murky dirt of enlightenment, won from the waste of bourgeois teaching, is absorbed by education-hungry proletarians. Not only is this of no use for them in accomplishing their historic mission; they are distracted away from the battlefield of class warfare onto scant playgrounds, where the sweeping fog of bourgeois culture obstructs the view of the summits of freedom that should be climbed.27 24 25 26 27

Cf. Hopwood 1996. Anon. 1925, p. 385. Wittfogel 1922. Schaxel 1924, p. 8 f.

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These passages set forth rather drastically the argument that knowledge and understanding of science in the different ‘socio-moral milieus’ of Weimar society – to use a term from the sociologist and Weber scholar Rainer Lepsius28 – is linked with strong emotions, even hostility against certain bourgeois teachings and ‘distracting science’. Science and ideology (pace Planck) had become closely interlinked and the condition of German society after the devastating war was in many ways dependent on scientific, technological, and industrial renewal. Naturally, the popular science media became one of the arenas in which scenarios of progress and prosperity were presented, promoted, and contested. While all the particular circumstances of the interwar period and Weimar culture clearly play important roles for the scientific culture of that time, the general framework which becomes discernible has a much wider reach. In the same vein, for example, Kostas Gavroglu concluded from an analysis of popularisation and commercialisation of more recent science, as well as the role of utopias, that ‘science popularization … appears to be one of the fundamental means through which the dominant ideology is being (re)produced and assimilated’.29 Returning to the treatment of physics, without going into all the details, it is evident that the three differently defined popular spaces represented by three journals struggling over cultural hegemony, namely Kosmos, Koralle, and Urania – as hostile as the latter was to the others – exhibited no particular hostility towards modern science. The battle over the new physics was obviously a rather restricted inter-academic discourse mainly fought within the university and in highbrow literature, thus threatening the physicists in their professional environment, rather than in their public standing. Quantum theory was discussed in all three journals, and certainly in different ways, but generally these turned out to allow for flexible interpretations. Hard-to-understand quantum mechanics was diligently reported as a story of scientific progress in Kosmos with clever drawings depicting a middle ground between old and new quantum theory of the atom (Bohr’s orbits and wave mechanics); it was presented – as we have already seen – to the female reader in Koralle by Schrödinger as a project still in flux but on a good path; and it was also discussed at length in Urania. Here, however, the ideological moulding was strongest. Bourgeois physicists, who at times seemed perplexed by their findings of indeterminism and by a crisis of causality, were just learning a hard lesson, it was proclaimed. However, Engels, with his ‘dialectics of nature’ that applied Marxist ideas like dialectical

28 29

Lepsius 1986. Gavroglu 2012.

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materialism to science, as did Lenin, had already provided the right framework for this most advanced physical theory: With their metaphysical and idealistic ways of thinking they simply cannot grasp that the unity of the ‘irreconcilable’ contradictions within the theory is nothing else than the reflection of the dialectical connections of the objects of nature.30 Bourgeois scientists, so the conclusion went, were simply incapable of the kind of dialectical thinking which Marx and Engels had introduced. Did physicists in Weimar Germany capitulate to a ‘hostile intellectual environment’, and if so, in what way? Or was there a Zeitgeist incompatible with some direction in which scientific thinking seemed predestined to proceed? Or, perhaps, could Schrödinger’s own contemporary view provide a better description, when at a session of the Berlin Academy of Sciences he asked, ‘Is science milieu-determined?’31 Distancing himself from Planck’s de-anthropomorphising programme, while trying to humanise the scientists’ activity, Schrödinger affirmed the physicists’ immersion in general culture and their dependence on decisions about funds, effort, cooperation, etc. that were made in light of the current circumstances. He even preliminarily identified five ‘milieu-determined traits’ of the day in physics, which he characterised with some buzzwords as (1) the trend to ‘new objectivity’ (Neue Sachlichkeit) and dispensing with all unnecessary ornamentation, (2) revolutionary longings and the penchant for liberties, (3) the idea of relativity and theory of invariants, (4) methods of mass control (of physical objects), be it by rational organisation or by industrial reproduction, and (5) statistics. It is telling that in his closer descriptions of these five traits, Schrödinger, strictly speaking, never leaves the field of physics proper, for example when the methods of mass control simply relate to mathematical techniques to describe physical systems consisting of a great number of entities or particles. Reading between the lines, he clearly took some pleasure in evoking analogies to political developments of his time.32 And it was here that working-class and leftist ideas of non-bourgeois science could enter, at least in principle. Acknowledging that a certain revolutionary mood had become more and more prevalent among physicists, in particular when treating atoms and quanta, Schrödinger saw this as grounded in a common cultural milieu, but not 30 31 32

Chemicus 1932/33, p. 174. Schrödinger 1932. Cf. Meyenn 1994.

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in one associated with a particular hegemonic force. If a hostile surrounding was identified at all, it was, first of all, that of the broken international relations after the war, with its boycott of German science. This line of thought was prominently adopted by a state institution, the Notgemeinschaft, or Emergency Association of German Science, which proclaimed in one of its annual reports that only its support for Heisenberg’s work had guaranteed that quantum mechanics was founded in Germany; otherwise this prestigious feat would have been left to its foreign competitors, in this way exhibiting the claim of scientific hegemony through state funding.33

4

Conclusion: Scientific Culture, the Popular Press, and a Cultural Dispositif

If Paul Forman’s claim was right in the broader sense that the special cultural milieu to be found in Weimar Germany could explain large shifts in scientific research – particularly that towards modern quantum physics with its unintuitive description of the laws of nature – then a definition of the notion of scientific culture including historical agency would follow easily. Unfortunately, that is not the case, as many critics have demonstrated the limitations of such a wider claim.34 Moreover, John Heilbron has recently unveiled the extent to which Forman’s research itself may be understood, at least in part, as a projection, one which resulted from the experience of a hostile environment when his own engagement in political fights such as the Free Speech Movement and the political compromises made by academic colleagues for career reasons led him to compare the situation in Weimar Germany with that in Berkeley, California, around 1970, where he was writing his seminal paper.35 This particular context, however, in no way invalidates the wealth and depth of analysis Forman’s works provided for elucidating an important discursive arena of science, which was essentially that of interdisciplinary academic discourse within scientific institutions like universities and academies. But there are more places in society where science is discussed and which contribute to a scientific culture. As mentioned, Forman recognised early on that popular science had prospered even during economically difficult times like the Weimar

33 34 35

Notgemeinschaft 1926; cf. also Richter 1972, p. 37. See in particular Hendry 1980. Heilbron 2011.

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years, but only some fifty years later has the history of popular science come of age and looked more deeply into the various cross-influences between scholarly, academic, public and popular (or even populist) discussions of the aims, reach, and relevance of science.36 Scientific culture happens on many different levels of discourse and within various strata of society, which relate to diverse images of science as well as to material resources and (political) power. Linked to the concepts and frameworks of intellectuals, hegemonies, and milieu(s) we have found divergent claims and rationalities and it appears to me that none can alone grasp the entire workings in a satisfactory way. Clearly, it is necessary to look at the plurality and coexistence of many different understandings and materialisations of science in society and to consider the combination of a number of hegemonic forces at the same time, which may add up in various ways. Given this state of affairs, I would like to propose a shift of perspective towards a more infrastructural point of view. As I have already suggested, folklore, consumer society, and counter-hegemonies can be associated with – or rather embodied or ‘en-texted’ in – organs of popular science, exemplified above by Kosmos, Koralle, and Urania. The idea behind this move, hence, is to translate the analysis of scientific, cultural, and thus often hegemonic discourses, which can be hard to grasp in a longer-term perspective, into an investigation into the structures of communication, the circulation of ideas, knowledge, and interpretations. The claim is that, although this approach appears to be rather contrary, it still answers the very questions about scientific culture raised in the beginning. For a fuller picture, the system – or machinery – of the organs of semipopular and popular science need to be examined. These typically consisted of a dozen or so journals which addressed audiences for science on various levels and had varying circulations, ranging from organs of inter-specialist communication produced in hundreds of copies for attentive and interested readers, to publications intended for a broad general public and with a circulation in the tens and hundreds of thousands. Editors and publishers emerge as additional actors, who also influence the scientific culture and connect it to ideological and economic forces.37 (Clearly, film, radio, television, and

36 37

For a concise discussions see, e.g., Daum 2009, Topham 2009, Schirrmacher 2013b. For details see Schirrmacher 2011 and 2013b; for a graphical representation of the system of journals and serials of popular science in Germany 1870–1945, see Schirrmacher 2007, p. 48; and for a diagram of the various levels of the public, see Nikolow and Schirrmacher 2007, p. 30.

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the Internet also need to be considered, in addition to print, depending on the historical period studied.)38 Among the main lessons that can be learned from such an analysis is that of the strength, robustness, and longevity of scientific culture, for instance in Germany in the twentieth century. A rather well-oiled social machinery of mass media communicating science, technology, consumption, and utopias can be followed through the late Kaiserreich, two wars, as well as the interwar period (the topic of this essay), and even through both post-war Germanies. So, despite a great plurality of views on science, and the stark changes of German political regimes in the twentieth century, there is also surprising continuity in the treatment of science in public discourse and consumption. This is what I have described elsewhere as the ‘cultural dispositif’ that can be found at work during all the different stages of twentieth-century German science.39 This concept is meant to characterise a kind of machinery or ‘social apparatus’,40 which I believe explains, for example, why Planck’s programmatic 1929 speech on ‘The world picture of the new physics’ was not only cherished during the Weimar period but also reprinted five times during the Third Reich and four more times in the first decade after World War II. This is because it encoded a philosophical proposition, which may have been subjected to some reinterpretation with the further developments of science and ideological claims on it, yet in principle remained a key element of the Germans’ common understanding of science, or, if you like, constituted an element forming the very bedrock of German scientific culture.41 The cultural dispositif may also explain, given the strong differences of folklore, consumer, and counter-hegemonies among the various kinds of popular science journals, why they share many common qualities, ranging from format, use of illustrations, breadth of coverage, to the preference for distinguished academics over journalistic writers – even Urania failed to give a voice to the worker when it came to science and (dialectical) philosophy. And finally, without an underlying machinery such as a cultural dispositive, it would hardly be possible to account for the impressive stability of the main organs of popular science. Not only Kosmos but also the more highbrow journal Umschau had an almost constant readership through its approximately one hundred years of publication. After it was shut down by the Nazis in 1933, Urania immediately

38 39 40 41

On early science radio, see LaFollette 2008 and Schirrmacher 2012. Schirrmacher 2013b. Deleuze 1992. For the different French approach to scientific culture, cf. Pourrier 2015.

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reappeared in the Soviet Zone after the war and became the flagship popular science magazine of ‘real existing’ socialist Germany.42 As Roger Cooter and Stephen Pumfrey found some twenty years ago, what we actually have to consider is the ‘variety of hegemonic alliances’ of science with culture, politics, economy, religion, and the like, which may relate to a number of hegemonic discourses at various levels. These levels, I have suggested, can be exhibited most clearly from the perspective of a system of popular science publications, which is, in a more epistemological vein, the perspective of an infrastructure of popular knowledge. It is this infrastructure that should be taken to be at the heart of any notion of scientific culture that pays attention to the rich conceptual toolkit created by Antonio Gramsci and which can be brought to good use in addressing the relation between science and society. 42

Cf. Hopwood 1996, Schirrmacher 2013b.

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chapter 10

Engineering as Cultural Hegemony: What a Gramscian Interpretation of Francoism Tells Us about Gramsci Lino Camprubí

The capitalist entrepreneur creates alongside himself the industrial technician, the specialist in political economy, the organizers of a new culture, of a new legal system, etc. Antonio Gramsci, Q12, § 11

∵ 1

Introduction

Antonio Gramsci’s preferred unit of analysis for his historical and political accounts was undoubtedly the nation-state. He wrote the Quaderni del carcere partly as an attempt to make sense of the rise of fascism in Italy, which had put him in prison. This forced him to reconstruct the entire history of the relationships between rulers and the people-nation in Italy from ancient times to his present.2 For Gramsci, it was within the nation-state that class struggle took place. And it famously did so not only in the form of coercion and repression, but also as the construction of a cultural and political hegemony by which, following Marx, the dominant class was able to make its own ideology into the ideology shared by all (or most) strata of the political body.3 This (always unstable) integration of groups within a state constituted a historical bloc and it involved both productive structures and ideological superstructures, which now formed an organic whole of social relations. As such, a civil war is the catastrophic development of an ‘organic crisis’ within a historical bloc. This is not to say that influences from other states and 1 While some translations are mine, I have mostly relied on the translation of Hoare and Smith in Gramsci 1971. 2 Laso Prieto 1973; Fontana 2000. 3 Bates 1975.

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other factors do not play a central role; but all those factors crystallise in a rupture of the consensus. The hegemonic ideology is no longer strong enough to suppress the conflicting interests of the various groups coexisting in political society. In the words of historian Luciano Canfora, a civil war is when two opposing legitimacies face each other, and ‘the question of questions’ is ‘how is a political exit from a civil war to be found?’4 Once the outcome of the civil war is decided, the peace of the victorious cannot be built on violence alone. For it to attain stability, victory will need to be reinforced by the creation of consensus. The question that this essay addresses is: what kind of cultural hegemony enabled the Francoist regime to retain power for almost 40 years after the end of the Spanish Civil War (1936–39) and perpetuate itself even further through a peaceful transition to a democracy that allowed for many continuities? Here, following the theses already presented in my book Engineers and the Making of the Francoist Regime, I argue that engineers were key ‘intellectuals’ in developing the regime’s cultural hegemony.5 What allows me to present a Gramscian interpretation of Francoism is Gramsci’s rich notion of intellectuals. The concept had been introduced early in the twentieth century to describe Dreyfus’s supporters in the Dreyfus Affair, most prominently Émile Zola. Soon it referred to a new type of French philosophe who fought for Enlightened politics pen in hand.6 Gramsci extended this notion beyond the scribes and beyond Enlightened political ascriptions: ‘Every social group, coming into existence on the original terrain of an essential function in the world of economic production, creates together with itself, organically, one or more strata of intellectuals which give it homogeneity and an awareness of its own function not only in the economic but also in the social and political fields’. And, some pages below, ‘All men are intellectuals, one could therefore say: but not all men have in society the function of intellectuals’.7 As per the theory of the historical bloc outlined above, the intellectuals of the hegemonic group will be in charge of defending and organising not only the interests of the ruling class, but the functioning of the entire society (to the benefit of its ruling classes). These are the ‘organic intellectuals’ – and not all intellectuals perform this organic function. We are now in a position to understand the quotation with which I opened the chapter: ‘The capitalist entrepreneur creates alongside himself the indus4 Canfora 2007, pp. 150, 165. 5 Camprubí 2014. Most of the empirical details of the chapter are fleshed out there, which allows me to spare readers a wealth of references. 6 Baert and Booth 2012, pp. 111–26. 7 Gramsci 1971, Q12, § 1.

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trial technician, the specialist in political economy, the organizers of a new culture, of a new legal system, etc.’.8 In replacing aristocrats and their organic intellectuals (particularly clergymen), the new historical bloc brought about by the bourgeoisie developed its own class of ‘organic intellectuals’. Because they were ‘organic’ with respect to a particular political body, intellectuals of capitalist economies varied according to historical conditions – for instance, in Italy the bourgeoisie produced different intellectuals in rural and urban areas, in the South and in the North. But in all cases their organic function consisted in bridging the gap between the rulers and the ruled through the production of consensus and the organisation of coercion and production. Crucially, their hegemony was simultaneously cultural and economic. The Gramscian notion of intellectuals, as developed mainly in Q12, has additional subtleties and ambiguities, some of which I will return to below. In any case, Gramsci made it clear that only historical research could disclose what type of intellectual was essential to the social cohesion of specific countries and periods. Following his insight describing the production of cultural hegemony not as merely the construction of a verbal ideology but as the factual transformation of the political economy, I will try to show how engineers became organic intellectuals in Francoist Spain. I contend that engineers were active participants in building the consensus for the new regime through a programme of industrialisation of the Spanish economy which conveyed important transformations of the structures of production in terms of labour organisation, resource allocation, and territorial management. These transformations came to constitute a backbone of ‘National Catholicism’, as the regime’s official ideology came to be known (first, by its detractors). This essay mobilises the notion of ‘hegemony’ to illuminate new understandings of the history of Francoism. It does not argue, however, that engineers’ hegemony was the only reason behind the stability of Francoism nor the only driver of the regime’s historical development. The violence of repression, non-technical ideologies and political leadership, international relations, economic growth in capitalist countries, all came to support Franco’s power. However, the cultural hegemony developed by engineers was instrumental in unifying these various factors and in making them coherent with the interests and expectations of the very heterogeneous groups forming the ‘historical bloc’ of Francoist Spain. These various groups were equally diverse in both the topdown vectors of the Francoist state (the different ‘political families’ occupying its administration) and the bottom-up vectors that Gramsci would have called

8 Ibid.

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‘civil society’ (winners and losers of the Civil War, industrial and rural workers, technicians and entrepreneurs, financiers and priests, etc.).9 In what follows, I will focus on some significant landmarks for the establishment of engineers’ cultural and economic hegemony across a variety of political spaces. The first section discusses the notion of ‘redemption’ as a cultural and political tool for consensus and investigates the links between the regime’s official ideology (National Catholicism) and industrialisation. The second section delves into the role of applied research for the programme of industrialisation of the Spanish political economy. The third section considers the role of technical hegemony within the new corporate structure of the Spanish economy and its development over time. The fourth section turns towards the struggle within various competing groups of engineers to define economic policy, and thus investigates the heterogeneous nature of the new historical bloc and of the new hegemonic ideology. Finally, the conclusion reflects on what the history of Francoism can tell us about the notions of hegemony and intellectuals 80 years after Gramsci wrote about them. It tries to explain why Gramsci did not imagine that the new urban and industrial intellectuals could actually become the organic intellectuals through Caesarism. It does so, moreover, with reference to Gramsci’s reception in Francoist Spain.

2

The Engineers’ ‘Redemption of Spain’

As an actor’s category, the ‘redemption of Spain’ (la redención de España), a concept primarily associated with historical accounts of the medieval Reconquista, acquired a secular meaning in the nineteenth century. Spain had to be redeemed from poverty and economic stagnation. During the Civil War, the Spanish Catholic Church reappropriated the concept to refer to the battle against anticlericalism. Once the war came to an end, General Franco charged himself with the task of redeeming Spain’s major sin: ‘fratricidal war’. This became a justification for the repression that followed, but it was more than just a proxy for reaction. Redemption included post-war reconstruction, and thus the secular overtones of the concept were not lost. The official ideology of the regime has come to be referred to as ‘National Catholicism’, an expression not used by its main protagonists but which cap9 The way the distinction between state and civil society plays out in Gramsci has been discussed widely, for instance, Anderson 1976. To avoid the impression that civil society (or even the people-nation) forms a community of shared interests, I prefer to speak here of a plurality of bottom-to-top powers, see Bueno 2004.

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tures well the marriage between Franco’s military and political power with the Church’s social and doctrinal control of the people. Preoccupied mostly with moral and educational aspects of this marriage, only a handful of historians have reflected on National Catholicism’s economic programme or on its ties to forced modernisation.10 However, for the main ideologues behind the construction of National Catholicism, a Catholic Spain could only succeed through a programme that transformed both Catholicism and capitalism. Let me mention a few examples. The writer Ramiro de Maeztu had called in the 1920s and 1930s for a new ‘reverential aspect of money’ that would enable Catholicism to compete against Protestant economic prowess. Extending this line of thought, Escrivá de Balaguer, the founder of the Opus Dei, preached for worldly sanctity through the practice of liberal professions. Importantly, Opus Dei grew together, both ideologically and financially, with the High Council for Scientific Research (CSIC; see below). Father Joaquín Azpiazu was the main proponent of the adoption of the Church’s ‘social doctrine’ as the guide not only for the priesthood but also for the government’s action. If the state wanted to prevent further upheavals by impoverished masses, it would have to forcibly inject charity into capitalism. For another right-wing intellectual writing in the 1930s, José Pemartín, the ‘revolution from above’ would prevent workers from initiating their own – I will return later to this version of Caesarism. Paternalism and authority brought the Church and the government together. José María Pérez del Pulgar deserves a special place in this long list. A physicist and a Jesuit priest, he had been the director of one of the most important Catholic mechanical schools for workers before the Republican government banned the Jesuit order in 1932. There, industrial workers and technical experts were to acquire the tools to run the factory while remaining passive subjects in regard to its design and its politics.11 Pérez del Pulgar was also the architect of the regime’s programme of ‘penalty redemption through labour’. Political and war prisoners could reduce their penalties by working in the physical reconstruction of the country. Right after his death in 1939, a series of speeches he had given were published together in a book titled The Christian Concept of Autarky (El concepto cristiano de la autarquía). There, he argued that the political independence required to turn back the tide of Spain’s history and to effectively impose the Church’s social doctrine was only possible through economic independence. The latter, in turn, was only achievable through scientific and technical research. 10 11

Botti 2008. Agustí Nieto-Galán has used Gramsci’s concept of cultural hegemony to investigate the political import of similar schools in the nineteenth century in Nieto-Galán 2011b.

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Scientists and, particularly, engineers readily picked up the argument. As in the French tradition, Spanish engineers had enjoyed a high social, political, and scientific status from the nineteenth century onwards. After Francoism, however, they succeeded in situating scientific research at the centre of the reforging of an independent Spanish political economy able to produce its own synthetic raw materials and technology. The preferred examples for Spanish engineers were Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, although of course the United States and its New Deal, as well as the strong state of Soviet Russia, were often at the centre of their attention. The defence of an autarkic political economy allowed engineers to place themselves at the forefront of national production. It is no accident that economic historians have referred to the economic policy of Francoism up to 1959 as ‘ingenierismo’ – the ideology and practice of engineers. The redeeming historical role proclaimed for the new regime had to occur at the level of machines, technicians, workers, and irrigation infrastructures.

3

Laboratories for Industry

The new status of engineering within the regime’s research structures can be traced through the history of the CSIC’s Patronato Juan de la Cierva (PJC) – the CSIC was structured around ‘patronatos’, clusters of research institutes grouped by discipline under a patron saint. The CSIC was founded in 1939 to become Spain’s main centre for scientific research. Its structure had been partly designed by José María Albareda, one of the earliest members of Opus Dei and personal friend of Escrivá de Balaguer. The relationship between researchers and Opus Dei is central for the argument developed in this chapter. Because it is not that the Opus Dei shaped the ideology of Spanish scientists; rather, as I show in more detail in Engineers and the Making of the Francoist Regime, some of the central doctrines of Escrivá’s Camino were directly inspired by Albareda during the Civil War. The CSIC and the Opus Dei nourished each other through the years, producing a hegemonic ideology of scientific rationality and state politics that would culminate with the Opus Dei governments of the late 1950s. Another of the earliest members of Opus Dei, Miguel Fisac, designed the buildings that formed the CSIC’s main headquarters in Madrid. Among them were the Ramiro Maeztu School, an elite secondary school that would educate the youth in practical skills as well as theoretical and moral virtues. Religious education was a big part of the new scheme, and the School shared a chapel (The Church of the Holy Spirit) with the complex of laboratories. The new buildings of CSIC were erected over the ruins of the liberal Junta de Ampliación de Estudios (JAE). But now Albareda sought to transform the place

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into a ‘city of God’ devoted to scientific research for the fatherland. To this end, he and Fisac coordinated the construction of new laboratories with the building of new churches. Again the relationship was one of mutual nourishment: the architectural style of the new churches adapted many of the rational elements of laboratory building. Ideas of national productivity and the materials of industrialisation were transforming Spanish National Catholicism. The buildings thus embodied and promoted the new ideology of Catholic science at the service of a new national economy. To push the connection between research and nation further, Albareda emphasised applied science. The CSIC was divided into six Patronatos, each devoted to a cluster of disciplines. The PJC was reserved to applied sciences, considered by Albareda to be one of CSIC’s main novelties with respect to JAE. In 1945, military engineer Juan Antonio Suanzes was appointed the PJC director. Suanzes had been Franco’s first minister of industry and the founder and president of the Instituto Nacional de Industria (INI). A military engineer, Suanzes shaped the INI in accordance with a tradition of economic protectionism and autarky. As director of the PJC, he allocated resources for research in coordination with the INI. The CSIC’s institutes belonging to the PJC were mostly devoted to the pursuit of independence and efficiency in key economic sectors, such as coal and energy, lubricants, construction and cement, applied physics, organic chemistry, refrigeration and metallurgy, and rationalisation of labour (geophysics was grouped together with these ‘applied sciences’, which is telling in terms of what was expected from this science). Soon the PJC had more funds than the other five CSIC’s Patronatos combined. One of Suanzes’s obsessions was that each institute within the PJC have industrial-scale experimental factories to ensure that the work performed in these institutes was of immediate relevance to Spain’s economic life. The directors of the PJC institutes were often engineers who shared Suanzes’s urge to make their research relevant. For instance, engineer Eduardo Torroja (renowned around the world for his laminar structures) was the founder and director of the Technical Institute for Construction and Cement. The works he directed there combined calculus, elastic theory, mechanical essays, and testing of physical models. But they shared the common goal of producing objects that would transform the Spanish landscape, from dams to fuel factories to cheap houses to host factory workers. This was essential to make their work at the laboratory relevant to the Spanish political economy. Torroja presented himself not only as a designer, but as a ‘modern engineer’, which meant, explicitly, an ‘organiser’. Torroja, the designer, would sit at the top of a mechanism of rationally organised labour that, through standardised materials and precast pieces, would enable the industrialisation of the country’s construction industry. In

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this scheme, artisans were to be replaced by workers able to execute different parts of the creative design. Torroja, like some of his peers, thought of engineering as ‘political engineering’. The next section turns to some of the mechanisms engineers used to enable their products to effectively spread across the Spanish landscape.

4

Disseminating Laboratory Products

For the technical products they designed at their laboratories to circulate, engineers pursued three main strategies: utilising them in the public works that engineers planned and designed; spreading them vertically through the Francoist corporate structure of the economy; and creating design and performance standards with which private manufacturers would have to comply. All of them were central in establishing the political power and technical authority of Francoist engineers and all had different targets: public works enrolled public officials and users, ‘vertical unions’ comprised workers and industrialists, and regulation through standards affected factory owners and consumers. Although these strategies were not mutually exclusive, the shift from the second to the third marked the transition from the corporate to the regulatory state in the late 1950s. For instance, Torroja was a strong figure within the vertical union for cement as the government’s delegate. Torroja’s political power went so far as to allocate cement to different users organised within the union and setting prices. This allowed him to spread his ideas on reinforced and prestressed concrete and on the industrialisation of construction, particularly prefabrication and rationalisation of labour. Torroja subscribed to the technological optimism that considered that machines would soon do all physical labour and allow workers to realise their intellectual potentialities. This view had been widespread since the mid-nineteenth century, and it had its echoes in Marxism, technocracy, and Soviet ideology – I will return to it to discuss Gramsci’s notion of the industrial intellectual.12 But Torroja gave it a ‘Christian’ spin compatible with ‘ingenierismo’: engineers needed to guide technology towards the spiritual realisation of all; they were to bare the creative genius of the designs while workers would be passive and obedient operators in charge of installation and maintenance. He used his political leverage within the corporate structure to reinforce this industrialising programme. However, as the weight of the union diminished and private industrialists supplanted

12

Babbage 1832.

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state interventionism, Torroja turned towards the setting and enforcement of standards – an activity which took him to European organisations for standardisation, as discussed at length in my book. It was not only civil engineers who took on the task of reorganising the Spanish political economy. Agronomy engineers were often well placed within the regime’s new production structures. For instance, Álvaro de Ansorena was before the war director of the Sueca Experimental Rice Station, where he specialised in hybrid varieties. After 1939, de Ansorena put his genetics laboratory at the top of the new National Union for Rice, which distributed seeds among planters. Hybrid grains produced at Sueca were now able to travel to the Ebro Delta as well as to the Guadalquivir marshes. Like Torroja, de Ansorena could influence the setting of fixed prices and he was in direct contact with the office in charge of rationalising food production and distribution in times of scarcity. Both things gave his grains a good foothold to outcompete private planters and helped to promote seeds produced at his Station. Agronomy engineers had power not only to shape crops and varieties, but also to influence the way they were produced and by whom. Through the National Institute for Colonisation (INC), agronomy engineers designed and built over 2,000 ‘rural cities’ aimed at transforming the Spanish landscape into a productive factory. Unlike industrial workers, rural workers were expected to be active participants in managing their fields. But this could only be possible after they became ideal Catholic producers. What made these small urban clusters into cities was the insertion of a church and a school as tools for producing hegemony. They were accompanied by a process of selection and surveillance involving the careful design of living and working spaces and of allocated fields and the presence of the vertical unions. Rural cities were explicitly designed to create new moral landscapes informing the future population of Spain that would embody the values of the new state. Once again, the metaphor of ‘redemption’ was extended to encompass economic and moral dimensions, and reinforced through pamphlets, technical publications, and sermons. When discussing the role of engineers and their products to generate and implement a new cultural hegemony, it is useful to reflect on their own education. Before enrolling in their respective National Corps, students of both civil and agronomy engineering had to go through a strict curriculum that was not only heavily mathematical and scientific, but which also included courses in political economy and even moral values for engineering. Designed by engineers themselves to discipline future peers, technical education thus became a mechanism by which the new cultural hegemony reached distant parts of the territory.

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267

Competing Corps

Among the different political families within Francoism, historians often group all engineers under a single category and characterise them by their ‘productivism’. This should not obscure the incompatibilities between the various engineering corps with different traditions and visions for the state. In short, the issue was not just producing, but what to produce. Forest engineers often competed with agronomy engineers for the use of a given terrain. Industrial engineers were more likely to work for private companies than were civil engineers and the two groups did not always share the same views on government regulations. Lastly, civil and agronomy engineers had conflicting priorities for the use of water. These two last groups came face to face in the transformation of the Noguera Ribagorzana River through 12 dams built over the course of 15 years (1946– 61). The INI had planned the river’s total regulation bearing in mind the needs of industries around Barcelona and the coordination with Escatron’s thermal plant. The INC, on the other hand, was primarily worried about irrigating the plains of Lérida. The two systems collided around the last dam within the river’s system. The discussion was carried on in purely technical terms, but was political at heart. Should water be used to feed the Spanish people or to fuel a nascent industry that could provide for Spanish economic growth? The second path was finally chosen. The explicit goal became to solve rural misery by transforming the economy into an industrial one. The shift into an industrial economy was already happening in the 1940s and from the 1950s up to the 1970s economic growth turned Spain into an industrial power. While it had been excluded from the Marshall Plan, Spain did receive other forms of American help and extensive trade with Europe made it a (late) partner in the post-war ‘Golden Age’ of capitalism.13 According to some economic historians, this was possible thanks to government policies while according to others it occurred in spite of these policies. In any case, engineers were able to interpret and channel the transformation of the economy in their own terms. In 1957 a new government led by Opus Dei members shifted economic policy from autarkic ‘ingenierismo’ to ‘desarrollismo’ – the theory and practice of development. This new group of public officials, often referred to as ‘technocrats’, were much more continuous with early Francoist engineers than is usually acknowledged. To be sure, the old idea of an autarkic economy was abandoned. But the shift from productivism to consumerism maintained

13

Guirao 1998.

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the central characteristics of Francoist Caesarism: What was preserved was a core identification of technology and industrialisation as the solution to Spanish miseries, both economic and moral. From their new position of power after the Civil War, early Francoist engineers were able to conflate diverging interests into a historical bloc that was not self-destructive despite various levels of class struggle. This cohesiveness is precisely the kind of problem that Gramsci had set out to understand.

6

Conclusion: The Historical Determinacy of Intellectuals

In the 1920s and 1930s, Marxist theory faced two main problems: the failure of the Second International and the failure of revolution in Europe during World War I. In an effort to make sense of them, Gramsci rejected both the economic determinism of Nikolai Bukharin that declared the advent of revolution inevitable and the Leninist theory of a revolutionary avant-garde. For Gramsci, in European countries where the bottom-up vectors of society were extensively developed, the modern Prince – the Communist Party – necessitated the consensus of a highly organised people-nation. For this, industrial technicians and managers were the most promising option. Brought about by capitalist entrepreneurs, the reason why they could become the organic intellectuals of the proletariat is that they were already part of the people-nation. This hope made sense within the Marxist tradition and in relation to the historical developments of Gramsci’s time. For Hegel, intellectuals in charge of developing art, religion, and philosophy enabled the realisation of the absolute spirit. He did recognise the chronological precedence of the working classes devoted to material production (objective spirit), but the forgers of history’s path and (idealist) meaning were the intellectuals, they were the universal class. Marx turned this scheme upside down: the objective spirit had ontological precedence over the absolute spirit. Traditional intellectuals were then a partial class, in that they represented only the rulers. Thus, their consciousness was not absolute, but false (and the Soviet and Chinese leadership directed their respective cultural revolutions towards the elimination of intellectuals’ false consciousness). For classical Marxism, the true universal class was the proletariat, because it announced a society in which classes would cease to exist and humanity would come together as one. There was an internal link between socialism and the history of technology: production was essential to human nature, but the separation between producers and owners had alienated that essence. The reunification of the productive forces together with the collectivisation of the

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means of production would put an end to this alienation. It would, moreover, make ‘the springs of collective wealth flow more abundantly’.14 Trust in the spiritual transformative powers of technology was widespread in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – recall that Torroja had followed Babbage and other industrial theorists on this. The tangible effects of modern science and technology on industry and war seemed to announce a new era, and one in which new types of knowledge were called to replace the traditional ones. In this context, some argued that engineers were the true universal class in charge of leading humanity to a better future, often through their mediation between capital and labour.15 Between 1919 and 1921, Thorstein Veblen prophesied that engineers would overthrow capitalism and design the future of revolutionary production.16 Years later, during the Cold War, theorists in the East (Radovan Richta) and the West (Daniel Bell) predicted a time after the division between communism and capitalism in which scientists and engineers would be in charge of running industrial economies that would put an end to class struggle through increased productivity.17 Gramsci’s high hopes for industrial intellectuals are part of this tradition. But, having rejected the mechanism of certain interpretations of Marxism, Gramsci did not accept that technological progress alone led to political revolution. The Party needed to bring the new class of intellectuals to the side of the people-nation. In this, he was certainly ambiguous. Because, again, this was only possible because intellectuals already belonged to the exploited classes: Technical development can be thought of as separate from the interests of the dominant class and, moreover, as united to the still subaltern class. That this separation and new synthesis is historically mature is demonstrated by the fact that a similar process is actually understood by the subaltern class, which thus stops being subaltern because it starts to move out of its subordinate condition.18 The ambiguity resides in the oscillation between the descriptive and the normative: industrial intellectuals could bring about a historical bloc integrated with labour only because they were already integrated with labour in a revolutionary historical bloc. That is, Gramsci’s notion of industrial intellectuals makes 14 15 16 17 18

Marx 1922, p. 31. Layton 1986, pp. 225–48; Meiksins and Smith 1996, pp. 256–85. Veblen 1921. Bell 1973; Richta 1969; Putnam 1977; Aronova 2014, pp. 393–430. Gramsci 1971, Q12, § 50 (my emphasis). See also Sassoon 1986, p. 148.

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full sense only when viewed from the vantage point of socialism. The organic intellectual presupposes the integrated organism that it is meant to produce and represent.19 Not all revolutionaries shared Gramsci’s optimism. Indeed, for both Russian Bolsheviks and (later) Chinese Maoists, recruiting experts and technicians to the ‘red’ cause had proved a more than challenging problem, given their bourgeois allegiances. The ‘new synthesis’ that Gramsci invoked achieved its historical maturity through state violence.20 Moreover, our vantage point more than 80 years after his death and nearly 30 years after the fall of the Soviet Union shows us that industrial experts and managers did not become a revolutionary force against capitalism. Gramsci’s concept was explicitly historical, and thus it is not surprising that certain events that he could not have predicted force us to rethink it. In particular, in the 1930s, communism, fascism and the New Deal seemed to have internalised the Marxist arguments that the extraction of surplus value and profits – and their colonial extensions – had reached their limit (and this was what Gramsci recognised in Giovanni Gentile). But they used this knowledge not to overthrow capitalism but to sustain it through the redistribution of the surplus by strong states. In this kind of political economy, industrial intellectuals became key in sustaining the capital economy.21 Gramsci accounted for the relatively ‘high salaries’ of Fordism in similar terms. But he strongly doubted that Fordism could be generalised beyond certain highly specialised industries and beyond the very specific American context.22 Gramsci acknowledged that Italian fascism and the taming of capitalism through the corporate state could in principle become a modernising force with the technocratic organisation of labour, and he recognised this as a central argument used by fascist ideologues.23 But he strongly doubted that a fascist regime would reinvest the surplus into industry, given its alliance with the ‘parasitic classes’ so strongly anchored in Europe.24 At the end of the day, fascism, as a form of ‘regressive Caesarism’, was a top-down movement that would fail to connect with the interests and expectations of the peoplenation.25

19 20 21 22 23 24 25

Bueno 1978. Andreas 2009. Piccone 1974. Gramsci 1971, Q22 § 13. Gramsci 1971, Q22 § 14. Gramsci 1971, Q22 § 6. Gramsci 1971, Q13 § 27.

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Coming back to our analysis of the Francoist regime, however, we can see that the allegiance with the ‘non-productive’ classes was soon made compatible with a productivist credo through which engineers put forward their own plans for the political economy, often in conflict with private capital. The ‘redemption of Spain’ and the ‘Christian concept of autarky’ made them into active participants in the creation and organisation of a new historical bloc. This was not only a matter of ideology, but also of political economy. As I have shown, technical products inscribed the state into the Spanish rivers, buildings and factories. When thinking about cultural hegemony and historical blocs, we cannot forget that they include not only people but also means of production – that is, economic hegemony. Engineers made artefacts, standards, and labour organisation into central pieces of the Francoist cultural hegemony. Francoist ‘organic intellectuals’ created consensus in the prosaic forms of building standards and rice seeds. But, to put it with Karl Marx, ‘unheroic though bourgeois society is, it nevertheless needed heroism, sacrifice, terror, civil war, and national wars to bring it into being’.26 Through the concept of the ‘aristocracy of labour’ – a Leninist expression – Gramsci linked Fordism to certain sectors of the productive economy rather than to the possibility of subsidising consumption in large parts of the world.27 Nevertheless, particularly after World War II, the new hegemony of consumerism extended the ideal of the aristocracy of labour to sectors of the peoplenation large enough to constitute a hegemonic historical bloc led by the ruling classes. From the 1960s onwards, the Francoist state moved from autarky to industrial exports. Capital accumulation and industrial investments were increasingly accompanied by redistribution among workers, so that in the 1970s Francoist officials could already deploy consumerism to gain the implicit consensus of large sectors of the middle classes. Engineers abandoned the earlier inflamed rhetoric and adapted to the Spanish context the talk about the end of ideologies in a post-industrial economy which was being developed on both sides of the iron curtain. But they also retained their predecessors’ ideas on Catholicism, territory and authority.28 This was precisely the context of Gramsci’s introduction into Spain. The first anthologies of translated texts appeared in the second half of the 1960s – the Quaderni were only fully translated in 1975, and in Mexico rather than in Spain.29 In 1973 communist leader José María Laso published the first Spanish 26 27 28 29

Marx 1973. Gramsci 1971, Q22 § 13. The most representative figure might be Gonzalo Fernández de la Mora 1977. Martínez 2014.

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general introduction to Gramsci, revolving in particular around the question of the role of the Modern Prince in creating a historical bloc. In the prologue to that comprehensive study, philosopher Gustavo Bueno located Gramsci’s significance in the identification of the objective spirit with the history of a people-nation (and let us recall that Marx had given preference to the objective spirit over the absolute spirit). This would become a central part of Bueno’s own project of turning Marx upside down by establishing empires and states as objective contexts for the history of class struggles. The consequences for the place of science and philosophy with respect to the economy were clear: the relationship between base and superstructure within a political society was not that of the foundations to the building, but that between the skeleton and the organs and tissue, i.e. the shape and strength of the vertebrae come from the body that they support.30 A direct inspiration for my own thesis here, the main problem that Bueno posed to Gramsci’s theory related to the definition of the organic intellectuals. Specifically, given the plurality of interests within a people-nation, it is exceedingly challenging to assess the level of ‘integration’ of intellectuals into a historical bloc and, most importantly, to gauge their role in the production of a hegemonic bloc.31 After de-Stalinisation and the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, European communist parties found a new reference point in Gramsci. The leader of the Spanish Communist Party in exile, Santiago Carrillo, teamed up with members of the Italian and French parties to develop the doctrine of Eurocommunism. In 1977, Carrillo particularly embraced Gramsci’s concept of hegemony in a reflection on how to connect with the Spanish people: ‘the mission of the [Communist] Party is to contribute for the forces of labour and the forces of culture to achieve social hegemony’.32 However, new political formations displaced the Party’s dominance on the left and only a handful of academics remained interested in Gramsci. Among those few academics, some have been instrumental in bringing the political party Podemos to the centre of the political stage. With it, Gramsci has made a comeback to Spain. It has done so, as elsewhere, through the lenses of Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau.33 The Gramsci of these post-Marxist 30

31 32 33

Bueno 1973. Gramsci himself also preferred the organic metaphor over the architectural one throughout the Quaderni: ‘… there is a necessary and vital connection between structure and superstructures, just as there is between the skin and the skeleton in the human body.’ Gramsci 1971, Q4 § 15. Bueno 1973; see also Bueno’s above-quoted paper published five years later in critical dialogue with Eurocommunism: Bueno 1978. Carrillo 1977; see also Laso Prieto 1979. Mouffe and Laclau 2001.

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readings is generally devoid of Marxism-Leninism and tends to decentre the discussion from the nation-state and from political economy.34 Most importantly for this chapter, the historical conditions of current readings of Gramsci are not the same as those of the first reception of Gramsci during late Francoism. The Spanish economy no longer revolves primarily around industry; it has become service-oriented. It is thus not surprising that technical experts and industrial organisers scarcely feature in current discussions about intellectuals and their role in producing hegemony. And yet we would do little justice to Gramsci by downplaying the connections between cultural and economic hegemony.

Acknowledgements I would like to thank Giulia Rispoli, Massimiliano Badino and, particularly, Pietro Omodeo, for their comments on earlier drafts. Also, an anonymous reviewer helped to improve the current version. 34

Losurdo 1997.

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chapter 11

Political Entanglements and Scientific Hegemony: Rector-Scientists at the University of Lisbon Under the First Republic and the Dictatorship (1911–74) Ana Simões, Maria Paula Diogo and Ana Carneiro

1

Introduction: Rector-Scientists as Organic Intellectuals

In this chapter we argue that a new perspective on the agenda of rectorscientists from the University of Lisbon, both during the First Republic (1910– 26) and the Estado Novo dictatorship (1933–74), can be revealed by summoning two of Antonio Gramsci’s central concepts: cultural hegemony and organic intellectuals. Although intellectuals and particularly engineers, physicians, and scientists are often analysed as Gramscian traditional intellectuals, insofar as they represent intellectual lineages and disinterested voices of reason far from the mechanisms of power, we reclaim Gramsci’s concept of organic intellectuals1 to highlight the role of techno-scientific-minded intellectuals in the creation of cultural hegemony in Portuguese society from the middle of the nineteenth century to the end of the dictatorship. The rector-scientists under consideration were scholars and ‘organisers of culture’ and their position as rectors entailed directive, administrative, and bureaucratic functions. Like the traditional intellectuals, they had no direct links to the economic structure, but they had been scientifically and technically educated, belonged to the ascending bourgeoisie, and adhered to the discourse of the political regimes in which they operated. To this extent, they were organic intellectuals as they represented the interests of the classes and political regimes aspiring to become hegemonic, and actively engaged in the construction and spread of an ideology based on technology and science. They took upon themselves and the University the mission of educating not only the bourgeoisie, but also citizens at large and in the First Republic they included specifically the working class. Their aim was to make them capable of approaching rationally, that is, scientifically, the

1 See the selection of Gramsci’s writings while in prison (Gramsci 1971).

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different dimensions of life, a precondition for creating social and political consensus, and in their view economic prosperity. In 1820, the Portuguese bourgeoisie came to power and began building and later refining its own cultural hegemony against the traditional landed aristocracy. Although under the rule of the same social group, different political and ideological strata became hegemonic during the 150 years under analysis: first the Liberal monarchy, then the First Republic, and finally the dictatorship. The banners under which they sought to create cultural hegemony were different: technical progress during the nineteenth century, the secular scientific driven man of the First Republic and the orderly multi-continental nation of the Estado Novo. In this context, the microcosm of the rector-scientists of the University of Lisbon offers a privileged vantage point, as they were intellectual leaders, fully engaged in political life and policymaking in the realms of science and education. The dialogic process between the various parts involved in creating cultural hegemony can be approached through these men as agents of transformation and as organic intellectuals of the Republican regime and of the dictatorship. All three rector-scientists of the First Republic – Augusto José da Cunha (1834–1919), João Maria de Almeida Lima (1859–1930), and Pedro José da Cunha (1867–1945) – had a military training (like the vast majority of men of science and technology at the time), educated according to Liberal values during the monarchy, who adjusted to or supported the Republic.2 The rise of the First Republic (1910) assigned them the new role of University leaders, with the mission of creating a new breed of intellectuals who would form the core of the Republican cultural hegemony based on reason and science. Although this intellectual elite belonged to the Portuguese bourgeoisie, it aimed at building a larger consensus with the working classes, thus helping to create the Republican citizen. To this end, both the University and its graduates were to directly engage in educating society at large, given not only the moral dimension they ascribed to science (as discussed below), but its role in creating wealth. Among the rector-scientists of the Estado Novo dictatorship, the first, Victor Hugo Duarte de Lemos (1894–1959), was, like his predecessors of the First Republic, a military officer who became a mathematician; the second, José Sarmento de Vasconcelos e Castro (1899–1986), a civil engineer who became a physicist; and only the last one, Fernando Carvalho Barreira (1928–73), was originally trained as a scientist. He had first-hand experience of international-

2 Simões et al. 2013. The subsequent sections on the rector-scientists are based on chapter 4 of this book, pp. 41–68.

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isation by having carried out research abroad, which shows that the process of training scientists able to pursue full-time teaching and scientific research on a regular basis in universities, and accede to high positions in academia such as the rectorate, was only fully completed in the 1960s. Although some of their commitments have similarities to those of their Republican fellow rectors, the rectors of the dictatorship had to respond to additional challenges: a significantly greater intrusion of the State in university life, as academia was perceived by the dictatorship as a cradle for both its supporters and its opponents; and the colonial question, exacerbated by the war against liberation movements. The analysis of the rector-scientists’ discourse and action during the First Republic and the Estado Novo dictatorship unveils the tensions, the successes and the failures to create specific cultural hegemonies and the role played by Portuguese intellectuals in mobilising and instrumentalising science and technology in the service of two very different political regimes.

2

Engineers as Artisans of Liberal Hegemony: The Nineteenth-Century Rhetoric of Progress

From the 1830s onwards, Liberalism had articulated a discourse that became hegemonic, that of technology-driven progress. The emphasis on technical education as a means of creating new elites, concretised in the establishment of the Polytechnics of Lisbon and Oporto, together with the rise of civil (as opposed to military) engineering as a specific field of expertise, were considered indispensable tools for the development of Portuguese infrastructure, industry and capitalism, and a means of making the country meet European standards of economic and social progress. Conscious of their role as builders of Liberal cultural hegemony, the professional group of engineers designed an agenda in which their own beliefs, perceptions, and values were turned into a normative discourse, in which they played the role of artisans of progress and makers of modern society. In this context, it is only natural that engineers prevailed throughout the second half of the nineteenth century as leading policy-makers ‘colonising’ the administrative sphere,3 in particular the Ministry of Public Works, Trade and Industry, created in 1852 as part of the Liberal reform of the State apparatus, and serving as Cabinet and Parliament members.

3 Carolino, Mota, and Figueiredo 2013, pp. 52–66; Matos and Diogo 2009, pp. 351–65; Diogo 1996, pp. 123–37; Diogo and Saraiva, 2020.

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Engineers and the policies they launched while in power played a key role in endowing the country with communications infrastructure – the core of the Liberal political agenda for industrialisation – as well as in the Portuguese African policy in the aftermath of the Berlin Conference, which established the rules for the division of Africa among European powers. Despite the shortcomings of Portuguese Liberalism and of its leading actors, particularly in the context of the rearrangement of European leadership in the age of new imperialism, engineers successfully managed to impose a techno-political worldview that permeated both ‘civil’ and ‘political’ society. By successfully identifying themselves with the country’s destiny, Portuguese engineers clearly embodied the role of organic intellectuals who were able to express a technology-driven epistemology, which was willingly shared by the common man.4 Their powerful and well-structured technocratic discourse prevailed over that of other intellectuals and science-based professionals, who, after the Generation of 1870 (Geração de 70), sought an alternative avenue for social progress.5 Although the 1911 Republican educational reform clearly focused on science rather than on technology, the Republican government continued to favour technical education and nourished an industrialist agenda. Persistent political and economic instability, both national and international, however, did not allow for a policy of investment either in infrastructure and public works or in industry; unlike in the Liberal monarchy, during the Republic, in a strongly politicised atmosphere, Portuguese engineers lost their power as policy-makers and gave way to other hegemonic blocs. However, engineers would come back to recover their lost agency in the 1930s, designing a meticulous and consistent strategy to regain power that was launched in the 1st National Engineering Meeting (1931), a powerful exercise of propaganda.

4 Hoare and Nowell Smith 1971, pp. 9–10; Sassoon 1986, pp. 139–61; Robinson 2005, p. 475. 5 The Generation of 1870 (Geração de 70) was an intellectual movement aiming at renewing Portuguese political and cultural life by bringing in new European ideas. In 1871, the group organised a conference series – the Casino Conferences – to discuss literature, education, religion, and politics. These gatherings were eventually banned by the government. After its initial vibrancy, the movement realised its inability to revolutionise the country, and its members decided to call themselves those ‘defeated by life’ (vencidos da vida). Fernandes 1999, pp. 335–40; Martins 1999, pp. 39–45; Quental 1871; Diogo and Matos 2012, pp. 185–204.

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Physicians and Scientists: The Republican Hegemonic Bloc

In 1911, the Republican regime, which had overthrown the Portuguese Monarchy in 1910, launched a reform of higher education in order to build its own hegemony, thus illustrating Gramsci’s idea that education, persuasion and repetition were instrumental in creating hegemony6 – ‘every relationship of hegemony is necessarily an educational relationship’.7 Two new universities were created, in Lisbon and Oporto, thus challenging the hegemony of the University of Coimbra, until then the only one in the country, which was reformed and lost its prerogative to be the sole educator of Portuguese intellectuals and the ruling elites. Two twin institutions of the University of Lisbon and of the University of Oporto were also created to strengthen technical education: the Lisbon Technical Institute and the Oporto Faculty of Engineering. In this new educational framework, new protagonists approached the stage, namely physicians, followed by a few scientists. From the 1880s onwards, Portuguese medical doctors sought to legitimise their occupation by resorting to the laboratory; for that purpose, they mobilised the sciences, notably biology and chemistry, which provided them with the techniques and methods they needed for the practice of what they termed ‘learned medicine’.8 Underpaid and with a low social status in most European countries, doctors in this period were broadly engaged in a struggle for employment, proper wages, and social respectability, as their profession was increasingly legitimised by science and the laboratory.9 In Portugal, the situation did not differ much. The low salaries paid in universities and hospitals led the Lisbon elite of physicians to take all possible measures to avoid their ‘intellectual and material proletarisation’, as the physician Ferreira de Mira (1875–1953) would later put it. Since the 1880s, physicians had engaged in ‘scientific propaganda’ and in creating scientific societies, such as the Portuguese Society of Natural Sciences, and journals devoted to popularisation, as they were aware of their importance in creating hegemony by fostering a scientific attitude to society’s problems, and life in general, among citizens.10 They presented themselves as the most capable of tackling the ills of Portuguese society, which had long been undergoing a process of degeneration, 6 7 8 9 10

Hoare and Nowell Smith 1971, p. 340. Hoare and Nowell Smith 1971, p. 350. ‘Learned medicine’ meant medicine based on the laboratory. Carneiro and Amaral 2015, pp. 138–66. Porter 1999, pp. 562–70. Gavroglu 2012, pp. 85–99, Carneiro, Amaral, Mota, 2019, pp. 23–50 and Mergoupi-Savaidou, Papanelopoulou and Carneiro, 2016, pp. 966–77.

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as had been diagnosed a decade earlier by the Generation of the 70s. Doctors assumed the role of intellectuals, not merely by applying thought in order to understand reality, but, in terms of an ‘organizational and connective’ function,11 becoming ‘organic intellectuals’ – in the sense of proselytising and acting in the people’s interest.12 Portuguese society had, in this way, become the object of medical analysis, and their problems called for doctors’ urgent intervention, as they presented themselves as key players in building up the State’s ‘biopower’, notably in defining ‘biopolicies’ – practices of medical teaching, public health and hereditary regulation – and in implementing them in the construction of institutions such as hospitals and biomedical laboratories.13 Medical in essence, their discourse sought legitimation in scientific research; clearly they aimed at being at the core of the new Republican hegemony by creating a new breed of intellectual aristocrats.14 The noblesse d’ État15 represented by the engineers of Liberalism gave way to the noblesse de la République, the physicians. The First Portuguese Republic offered them an opportunity not to be missed.16 The main actors in this process came to be known as the Generation of 1911 (Geração de 1911), a group mainly composed of physicians, many carrying out laboratory-based research, and their allies, the scientists. As an emerging professional group devoted to fundamental research and not merely the teaching of scientific subjects, scientists were a subaltern social group with limited influence, but indispensable as they represented the very foundations of doctors’ claims to the scientific character of their practice. Thus, by forging reciprocal cultural ties, doctors and scientists came to constitute a ‘hegemonic historical bloc’.17 In this dialogic process towards hegemony, physicians claimed their share of power and influence, and their alliance with science and the few Portuguese scientists whose numbers would hopefully increase, had the promise of changing the status quo. For the anti-clerical, positivist Republic and its physicians, science fulfilled their mutual needs for legitimacy. Fundamental scientific research, rather than applied research, became the banner of the Republicans and doctors alike, who 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

Hoare and Nowell Smith 1971, p. 12; Sassoon 1986, p. 140. Carneiro and Amaral 2015. Foucault 1963, 1976–84, and 2004. On labour aristocracies, see Bates 1975, pp. 351–66. Bourdieu 1989b. Carneiro and Amaral 2015. According to Jackson Lears, Gramsci’s notion of hegemonic historical bloc suggests that its leaders forged alliances on economic as well as cultural grounds. Jackson Lears 1985, p. 580. See also Lipsitz 1988, pp. 146–50.

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regarded science as an antidote to religion – seen as an obstacle to the progress of the country, both culturally and economically. Consequently, the minds of the Republican citizens had to be scientifically framed in schools, universities and by means of university outreach programmes. From the late nineteenth century, physicians had increasingly become a powerful science-based social group, and medicine’s inherently greater and more direct impact on society meant that their commitment to reaching and winning over the populace was facilitated. Unlike that of doctors, the position of Portuguese scientists however was still that of a powerless social minority by 1911, despite the role played by science at a symbolic level. The Republic created the Faculties of Sciences, not only as instruments to educate and train scientists, but also to inculcate a scientific spirit in those who attended them and by extension in the whole of society. From the 1911 educational reform, the mission of the Faculties of Sciences was no longer to provide future engineers and physicians with a scientific background, but to promote science, and fundamental scientific research, thus laying down the foundations of a scientific community with social significance. Their mission was, however, easy to decree but hard to implement. Although science and scientific research had become intrinsic to Republican ideology and discourse, the Republican regime was unable to effectively oppose the strong religious tradition of Portugal’s extensive rural areas. The Republican educational and epistemological agenda needed time to build on and time was exactly what the regime did not have. The outbreak of World War I created the ideal conditions for the resurgence of extreme forms of piety (for instance the famous Fatima miracles in 1917) and at the same time deepened the economic and political fragility of the First Republic, thus blocking the strategy for creating the new Republican hegemony. On 28 May 1926, a military coup put an abrupt end to the First Republic, on the grounds of the permanent and deep instability which had marked not only the 16 years of the Republican regime, but also the last decade of the monarchy. A long authoritarian cycle of almost half a century began in 1926, first with the military dictatorship – the Ditadura Nacional (National Dictatorship) – and later, in 1933, with the Estado Novo (New State), under the rule of Oliveira Salazar. The Estado Novo was an authoritarian regime of fascist inspiration with a right-wing platform, however heterogeneous and often contradictory, that gathered together vaguely disillusioned intellectuals, anti-liberals, anticommunists and the elites associated with agriculture, industry, and finance, all willing to establish ‘order’. To a capacity for building its own cultural hegemony based on mythical and religious traditional values, Salazar’s authoritarian regime added the regular

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use of conventional coercive state tools. The traditional elitist character of culture in Portugal became accentuated as Salazar’s regime managed to keep the masses deprived of basic education until the 1960s, thereby cutting short the Republican plans to drastically reduce the scandalous rates of illiteracy, and to create a society of scientifically-minded citizens. It was during the dictatorship, however, that the profession of scientist and scientific research became recognised as a result of the belief in university education that both the Republicans and important figures of the dictatorial regime cherished and shared. In the end, and in an international framework in which science and technology had become increasingly important, the seeds planted in the last two decades of the nineteenth century by the physicians, together with their persuasion and alliance with the few practising scientists during the First Republic, blossomed and scientific research and professions in Portugal found their way. This fact is paradoxical only at first sight as, after all, many of the dictatorship leaders and intellectuals had been educated in the universities created or reformed by the Republicans.

4

Wearing the Scientist’s Gown: The Republican Rector-Scientists and the Process of Carving a Place for Science and Scientists

The first three rectors of the University of Lisbon were scientists: two mathematicians and a physicist; that is, experts in the top scientific disciplines of Comte’s hierarchy of the sciences, which is not surprising as the ideas of Comte and Littré were widespread among Portuguese intellectuals, especially since the last decades of the Liberal monarchy.18 They were in charge of the University of Lisbon during a turbulent period in Portuguese politics, in which the new universities were themselves struggling to build a place of their own, not only in people’s minds, but also among other institutions. The three rector-scientists were all military men and had been professors at the Lisbon Polytechnic School, an institution that had been one of the bastions of Liberalism. The first, Augusto José da Cunha, was a former military engineer turned mathematician, who directed the University for two years, from 1911 to 1913. He is undoubtedly a transitional figure as he epitomises on the one hand the links – characteristic of the Liberal constitutional monarchy – that engineers established with the economic and political spheres and which

18

On the influence of Comte and Littré on Portuguese leading figures of the First Republic, see Luz 2004, pp. 239–61.

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made them influential actors, and on the other the change of allegiances of various elements of the Portuguese intelligentsia who had turned Republican. Augusto Cunha was followed from 1913 to 1916 by the physicist, later general, João Almeida Lima, the first elected rector, who then also took on the functions of Development Minister. The third was the mathematician (also a military engineer) Pedro José da Cunha, whose mandate lasted 12 years, from 1916 to 1928.19 Both Augusto José da Cunha and Pedro José da Cunha were former students of the Lisbon Polytechnic School; all three graduated from the Army School and held teaching positions at the Lisbon Polytechnic. Almeida Lima and Pedro José da Cunha alternated functions as director of the Faculty of Sciences and Rector of the University, between 1913 and 1924. Through their practice as academic leaders, and their reflections on the role of the university, teaching and research, they played a major part in the joint architecture of both institutions during their crucial first years. Bearing in mind the difficulties of making space for the newly created Lisbon Faculty of Sciences, notably vis-à-vis the training institutions dominated by the two powerful professional groups of physicians and engineers, it comes as no surprise that the first three rectors had advocated the integration of the Technical Institute with the University of Lisbon. They all shared an inclusive idea of the university that accommodated a technical dimension. They were, however, to fail in their ambition, and this completely undermined the creation of a ‘hegemonic historical bloc’ composed of scientists, physicians, and engineers.20 All three rectors agreed that, in addition to offering a general scientific background prior to admission to other faculties and professional or technical schools for higher education, the Faculty of Sciences should provide bachelor degrees in science and not merely in its applications, and be distinguished by the fundamental role it ascribed to scientific research. Thus, in order to become a constituent part of the new hegemony, the Faculties of Sciences, and in particular Almeida Lima and Pedro José da Cunha, together with young staff members of the Lisbon Faculty of Sciences, built up a discourse around the role of scientific research and sought to find the means of creating appropriate internal structures to this end. In particular, the Lisbon Faculty wished to demarcate itself through the practice of research not only from the former

19

20

Carolino 2011, pp. 102–3; Simões 2013, pp. 15–21. See also Leal 2003, pp. 454–57; Gonçalves 1966, pp. 93–111; Lemos 1946, pp. 409–13. As a historian of mathematics the work of Cunha was analysed by Saraiva 2002, pp. 325–37. It is not yet clear whether the first and third rectors entertained any kinship relation. In any case, the former was nominated and the latter elected. Simões et al. 2013, pp. 35–8.

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Lisbon Polytechnic – from which it had inherited buildings, teaching staff and students – but also from the other schools for higher education nationwide. The question was very much to determine the strength of the University of Lisbon in the construction of Republican hegemony, and in the concretisation of its scientific agenda. The appointment of the second rector-scientist, Almeida Lima, to the University rectorate was symbolic as it did not reflect the weight of physics in the university structure, but was meant to highlight the relevance of ‘fundamental science’ by rescuing physics from utilitarianism and engineering. A member of the Academy of Sciences of Lisbon, he published in its Jornal de Sciencias Matemáticas, Físicas e Naturais, in 1921, a paper in which he suggested the creation of a nationwide superstructure for scientific research, which would thus materialise the leading role of scientific research in ‘political society’,21 an endeavour that was, however, only realised in the creation of an institution, in 1929, during the military dictatorship – the National Education Board ( Junta de Educação Nacional). Almeida Lima’s proposal was part of a reflection about Europe triggered by the allies following World War I, when the possibility of a ‘German retaliation’ was perceived as a menace, as its scientific potential could easily reinstate its economic supremacy on the European scene. Lima argued that all nations were under threat and should be prepared to face an ‘economic war’ that could only be successful if based on an efficient organisation of the sciences, ‘the supreme inspirer of economic development’.22 The issue of scientific hegemony was no longer merely local, but part of the wider fight for hegemony of the allies, the argument being that only in this way it was possible to be on the same footing as Germany. Pedro José da Cunha, the last rector of the University of Lisbon during the First Republic, embodied the ideal of Gramsci’s organic intellectual by adding to his academic post the position of leader of the Free University (1912), a new institution that was part of a wider dissemination agenda and was designed to bring science and culture to a largely illiterate population by ‘breeding fair and free spirits’.23 Underlying his commitment to social movements was a political dimension derived from Republican ideology. As a rector, he tried to bridge the

21 22 23

Lima 1921, pp. 191–2. Lima 1921, p. 192. Carvalho 1985; Fernandes 1993; Bandeira 1996, vol. 2, pp. 996–7. The relationships, at first sight surprising, between popular universities and the University of Lisbon still require a detailed investigation. Many professors of the University of Lisbon taught in these institutions. See Simõ es, Diogo, 2019.

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gap between these two newly created Republican institutions, the Free University and the University of Lisbon, by promoting activities linking the latter to society. Pedro José da Cunha ascribed to universities the mission of consolidating Republican hegemony by ‘promoting the methodical analysis of national problems and the diffusion of high culture in the masses through the methods of university outreach’.24 Like no one else, he viewed university outreach at the centre of the ‘social mission’ of the University, which in addition to educating the nation’s elite, had the obligation of propagating ‘high culture’, the cornerstone of the new Republican man, free from religion and sharing the scientific worldview and the benefits of a new economic and political order: The mission of the University is not merely to train people for the various professions in their infinite complexity, nor is it the education of a presumptuous and irritating government minority; rather, it is an educational work open to all horizons of the spirit. Through erudite lectures and university outreach, summer schools, scientific excursions, journals and books, the University should offer an ideal of nobility, art and pleasure to all social classes, which by making their lives more beautiful and fruitful concur to strengthen and keep the national soul united.25 Cunha’s integrated intellectual vision extended to the relationship between the University and the country’s economic life. Newly appointed rector, Cunha gave a speech on 15 October 1916, on the occasion of the second solemn celebration of the beginning of the academic year, about the ‘social mission’ of the University of Lisbon, in the context of a general reflection on the role of universities in post-war societies. Invoking the example of universities in the Unites States of America, he stressed the importance of combining the technical and humanistic dimensions of higher education, once again illustrating Gramscian ideas on education and hegemony. In his view, this association was the only one able to transform universities into agents of economic and social development. In his words, If this moral federation ever came to full fruition, the University of Lisbon could act as a mediator between the interests of tradesmen, industrialists and agriculturalists representing regional interests, whenever they 24 25

Decree, 19 de Abril de 1911, Diário do Governo, nº 93, 22 de Abril de 1911. Archive of the Rectory of the University of Lisbon (hereafter ARUL), Actas das Sessões do Senado, 10 January 1917, p. 24, our italics.

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require the help of science and of the professors of all specialties of the capital’s institutions for higher education, who could provide it, whether serving in Faculties and Schools or not. This common enterprise should be initiated immediately, because if there is in our collective life a moment in which a truly close cooperation of all active forces in the country is undoubtedly mandatory, it is this one.26 In view of the need to create ‘moral solidarity’, or ‘a true university spirit’, the rector contacted various institutions, insisting on joining forces even prior to the institutional merging of all Lisbon-based schools for higher education, and creating a higher education federation in the capital, ultimately leading to a ‘hegemonic historical bloc’ by transcending institutional and professional confines: Once this moral federation is established, the University can serve as mediator between administrative corporations and the living forces of its region that might require the help of science. And if there is a time in which this collaboration is crucial, it is the time we are living in now, because even nations at war prepare themselves by all means at their disposal for the economic struggle following the fight in the battlefields.27 There is a utopian element in Cunha’s vision for the University of Lisbon, because expecting the productive sphere to require the services of science was wishful thinking, given the characteristics of the Portuguese economic situation. In effect, the association with both the State and the private productive sphere and economy was a prerogative that engineers and the technical and commercial institutes did not want to lose. In this context, scientists and the Faculties of Sciences were perceived as potential competitors, and the emphasis on research was possibly felt like a nuisance that would not pay off. Ultimately, in 1930, the Technical University of Lisbon was created by joining all the schools for higher education devoted to technical and economic training, thus reinforcing their exclusive links to the economic and productive structures, without the interference of the University of Lisbon. The division of higher education into two institutions, the University of Lisbon and the Technical University of Lisbon, each with its educational structures and cultures, was now formalised.

26 27

Cunha 1917, pp. 1–11, our italics. See also 1916, pp. 1–18. ARUL, Actas das Sessões do Senado, 10 Janeiro 1917, pp. 24–5, our italics.

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The Rector-Scientists of the Estado Novo Dictatorship and the Extension of the University to the African Colonies

During the 48 years of the dictatorship (National Dictatorship and Estado Novo), only three rectors came from the Faculty of Sciences. The first was the former military officer turned mathematician Victor Hugo Duarte de Lemos, who had graduated in Mathematics from the Faculty of Sciences in 1918, and completed his PhD in 1925. He began teaching in the Higher Institute of Agronomy, but his academic career developed in the Faculty of Sciences. For only a single month, he held the position of Minister of Instruction in 1929, in one of the many consecutive governments of the post-military coup years of the First Republic, characterised by intense political instability. Director of the Faculty of Sciences from 1932 to 1944, he became rector of the University of Lisbon from 1956 until his death in 1959. During his mandate, he advocated the unification of the two universities of Lisbon, an aspiration inherited from the Republican period, and was committed to the establishment of higher education in the African colonies.28 The second rector-scientist was the civil engineer turned physicist José Sarmento de Vasconcelos e Castro. He had graduated in civil engineering from the University of Porto, in 1922, and subsequently in physical chemistry. Between 1943 and 1944, he was trained in the Physics Laboratory of the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Lisbon as a scholarship holder from the Institute for High Culture, the institution which succeeded the former National Education Board designed to fund and define research policies nationwide. In 1957, he moved to the Faculty of Sciences, in Lisbon, and in 1965 was appointed rector of the University of Lisbon, a position he held until 1969. A member of the only legal political party, the National Union (União Nacional), he was engaged with the dictatorship. Due to his scientific background and training, he shared the view that scientific research and knowledge production should be at the core of university life and, like Lemos, favoured the establishment of higher education in the African colonies.29 Finally, the chemist Fernando Carvalho Barreira30 graduated in 1949, and completed a PhD, in 1957, in Physical Chemistry at the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Lisbon, becoming full professor in 1966. He epitomises a new generation of scientists bred in Faculty of Sciences who completed 28 29 30

Ferrão 2012, p. 34. Ferrão 2012, p. 40. In the period of democracy, which is outside the scope of this chapter, the chemist Virgílio Meira Soares held the position of rector between 1986 and 1998.

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or furthered their training in prestigious foreign scientific institutions, inaugurating a period of more regular internationalisation of Portuguese science. Between 1960 and 1962, he was granted a scholarship from the Institute for High Culture and went to London’s Imperial College as a research fellow. More distant from the regime, he became rector in 1969, at the peak of the students’ protests against the dictatorship. An advocate of university autonomy, throughout his mandate lasting until 1973, the year of his premature death, he was keen to reinforce the links between teaching and research, notably by being member of State laboratories associated with the nuclear program, personally cherished and closely monitored by Salazar, and held posts in institutions such as the Institute for High Culture, as well as being Portuguese representative in international organisations such as the Working Group on Public Health of the Committee of OECD Directorate for Nuclear Energy. As to higher education in the African colonies, he personally oversaw the establishment of scientific teaching in the newly created University of Luanda, Angola, in 1968, upon the invitation of its rector. The period of the Estado Novo was marked by a stronger intrusion of the government in higher education and in the University of Lisbon, manifested in the choice of rectors, drawn mainly from the Law Faculty and whose public allegiance to the regime was unquestioned.31 While in the First Republic, the lines of thought and action followed by the three rectors are identifiable and may be understood within a more global framework of building a Republican cultural hegemony, all converging in the question of university outreach and scientific propaganda, the same does not apply to the rector-scientists of the Estado Novo. Despite their more or less loose allegiance to the regime, they all addressed the question of university autonomy in relation to political power, although their discourse was not highly politicised. If they shared a similar perspective, the emphasis on scientific research, notably the need to increase its funding, and the University’s social services, emerge as common traits, all far from being key elements in the construction and legitimation of the regime’s hegemony. The old unsuccessful ambition of merging all of Lisbon’s higher education institutions continued to

31

Besides the rector-scientists, during the Estado Novo the long rectorates were held by figures of the regime teaching at the Law Faculty. Such were the cases of José Caeiro da Mata (1929–46), José Gabriel Pinto Coelho (1946–56), Marcelo Caetano (1956–62), and Paulo Arsénio Veríssimo da Cunha (1962–65). The remaining were the physician Augusto de Almeida Monjardino (1928) and the historian Joaquim Veríssimo Serrão (1973–74). Ferreira 2013, vol. 1, pp. 327–85.

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fail as the dictatorship considered it potentially dangerous to the regime, insofar as it facilitated the propagation of ‘subversive ideas’ within academia and from there to the city’s population, consequently risking mutual contamination. The importance of scientific research and of its funding continued to be a central and persistent theme in the debates in both the Faculty of Sciences and the University of Lisbon, in which distinct and sometimes even opposed perspectives were wielded, showing on the one hand that its place was still an unresolved issue, and on the other, that both the elite endorsing the regime and its opponents shared a largely similar position as to the role of science in achieving progress. The growing number of students in the late 1950s and during the 1960s forced the University to call for extra funding, both for teaching and research and to strengthen the University social services. The long-lasting tension between fundamental and applied science resurfaced under the new topic of interdisciplinary research. Barreira, despite his professional involvement in the applications of science, notably radioisotopes and their use in mining, and nuclear energy, often stressed the idea that scientific creativity should not be subordinated to the applications of science, as opposed to a past when Portuguese higher education institutions had been either driven by this single purpose, or were predominantly technical: Students have to be provided with a solid basic culture, which defines and identifies them in the different sectors, as highly educated technicians at a university level in the most correct and unvarying sense of the term. At the same time, the University has to project itself in society’s life, as a centre of cultural action and production of scientific knowledge, with the natural capacity of irradiating it to the outside world. These objectives can only be fulfilled if the university becomes a true research school and a centre of cultural promotion.32 Autonomy and obedience, alliances and opposition, the difficult balance between the universities and governments, always hard to strike, became even more difficult. Although academia continued to pursue the ideal of its Universalist mission, the repression policy of the Portuguese dictatorship curtailed any sustained action. From the 1950s onwards, however, a new mission emerged within the University: the extension of higher education to Angola and Mozambique. It is

32

Barreira 1970, pp. 9–16, 14, our italics.

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precisely the common African educational agenda of the three rector-scientists of the dictatorship that fulfils their role as co-makers of the Estado Novo’s cultural hegemony. The African colonial agenda became a relevant topic of Portuguese policy in the second half of the nineteenth century, in the context of the Scramble for Africa. From then on it remained a permanent subject for all governments, although for different reasons. Higher education in the African colonies became a major element in the political agenda only in the 1960s, but the discussion on this topic had been introduced by the scientist-rector Víctor Lemos in 1957.33 He launched the debate over the possible mutual benefits of creating one or two centres for higher education overseas, and chose the geographer Orlando Ribeiro (1911–97) to carry out a preliminary study on which to base the University Senate’s future decisions on this matter.34 Ribeiro regretted the almost complete absence of scientific policies in the Portuguese African colonies and advocated the immediate creation of institutes for higher education in those territories through a partnership between the University of Lisbon and the Overseas Ministry.35 These institutes were deemed crucial not only because their absence was often invoked in the criticisms levelled by European powers, but also because by contributing ‘to the settlement of the civilized population’,36 they were decisive in securing and reinforcing Portuguese sovereignty, contested by the liberation movements. In this way, the University of Lisbon would definitely contribute to the dictatorship’s hegemony and would gain a prominent role in legitimising and sustaining the Portuguese presence in the African territories. The rectors of the University of Lisbon were prompted by the need to respond to the calls of the overseas white and ‘Europeanised’ elites for the expansion of the teaching system and the establishment of higher education, as well as to the potentially damaging effects of the independence movements in neighbouring African regions. The University of Lisbon clearly felt it had a role to play, science becoming a mediator between its own and the colonies’ needs, and the mainland responses. Following in Lemos’ footsteps, two years later, in 1959, Marcelo Caetano, then rector of the University of Lisbon (and future prime minister),37 suggested the

33 34

35 36 37

ARUL, Actas da Sessão do Senado, 9 April 1957, pp. 87v–89v. Between 1950 and 1965, Ribeiro carried out research in the Portuguese African colonies and the tropics (including Brazil), amounting to more than half of his vast scientific production. Garcia 1998, pp. 107–16. ARUL, Actas da Sessão do Senado, 9 April 1957, p. 88v. ARUL, Actas da Sessão do Senado, 9 April 1957, pp. 87v–89v. Marcelo Caetano, here presented in his role as university professor and leader (he was

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government set up an annual summer school on the most varied topics ranging from literature to geology and botany, to be organised by metropolitan universities in order to pave the way for the establishment of universities in the capitals of the two most important colonies of the Portuguese Empire in the near future. As he recognised at that point, the conditions were not ripe to take this matter further.38 In Caetano’s view, the summer schools would enable university teachers to have first-hand contact with these territories and to evaluate directly the pressing local issues whose solution required a deeper involvement of the University of Lisbon, in particular of its Faculties of Science and Medicine, and the Technical University. Not long afterwards, in 1960 – that is, one year prior to the long and harsh colonial war, which lasted from 1961 to 1974 – the University of Lisbon was entrusted with the organisation of the first summer school to be held in Luanda and Lourenço Marques (now Maputo). Widely publicised by the local and metropolitan press, the solemn opening ceremony in both cities took place on 16 August 1960, and was attended by high representatives of civil society, military authorities and dignitaries of the Roman Catholic Church, and ended on 9 September with equal solemnity. The organisation of the First Summer School had the support of the Overseas Ministry, the Ministry of Education and the respective governors of Angola and Mozambique. The courses aimed at forging contacts between the local ‘cultured public’ and the University, and providing those who were university educated with an opportunity to update their theoretical and practical knowledge. Lectures consequently had a dual character: some were on topics of general culture, both humanistic as well as scientific; others more closely resembled postgraduate teaching. As this was the first edition, no restrictions were imposed on the colonial urban bourgeoisie’s attendance of the lectures, which accentuated the propagandistic features underlying the organisation of the event and how it was assimilated as a constitutive part of the hegemonic discourse of the dictatorship that portrayed Portugal as a multi-continental and multi-racial country. It is worth noting that secondary education in Luanda and Lourenço Marques had been established in 1919, and the students proceeding to higher edu-

38

rector of the University of Lisbon from 1959 to 1962, when he resigned from his position due to the so-called academic crisis during which the protesting students were fiercely suppressed by the police), eventually became the last prime minister of the dictatorship, replacing Salazar. He was considered a right-wing moderate and advocated some changes in the dictatorship. ARUL, Actas da Sessão do Senado, 16 February 1959, p. 100.

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cation, chiefly white but also Europeanised Africans, usually enrolled in one of the three continental universities (Coimbra, Lisbon and Oporto). In the case of Mozambique, however, a considerable part of the white students attended universities in neighbouring South Africa. The First Summer School of the University of Lisbon, more than paving the way for the much sought-after higher education in the colonies, seems to have been a means to make room in the agenda of both Salazar and the regime’s ultra-right-wingers for the inevitability of creating universities in Luanda and Lourenço Marques and securing Portuguese rule over Angola and Mozambique. Simultaneously, it was a delaying tactic meant to appease and impress the local white and Europeanised African elites calling for local higher education institutions. However, their establishment overseas had to confront various practical problems and involved serious risks from a political standpoint: on the one hand, the lack of qualified personnel to be in charge of teaching and research, given its scarcity in continental universities, which were expanding since the 1920s;39 on the other, for the generations of Europeans born in Africa and the Europeanised African population, the African universities to be created had the potential of undermining their need to come to the continent for a university degree. By weakening cultural ties with mainland Portugal, they could unwittingly favour growing demands for autonomy and ultimately independence led by the white and Europeanised African elites. Among the courses delivered during the First Summer School those with greater enrolment both in Luanda and Lourenço Marques were on Portuguese language and literature, followed by political economy, pedagogy, geography, and law. As to the sciences, mineralogy awoke much interest certainly because of the important mineral resources in both colonies, followed by botany, relevant to agriculture. In addition, engineering and medicine had also great impact, notably medical specialties such as ophthalmology and neurology involved in various tropical diseases. Adherence from the University’s staff to this initiative was considerable and restrictions had to be imposed in as much as the Technical University had been invited to participate, even if symbolically, and many of its staff members had expressed the wish to teach in Africa during this event. Only 12 full professors, chiefly from the University of Lisbon, were invited by the rector to lecture in the summer school.40

39 40

Ramos do Ó, 2013. Caetano 1961, p. 22.

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In this ‘pedagogical expedition’, whose arguments echoed those of the heroic geographic and public works expeditions of the nineteenth century, and thus favoured the dictatorship’s cultural hegemony by reinforcing the notion of the fatherland, participants held different and even opposing views on Salazar’s dictatorship: some were engaged and compromised with it; others were indifferent, at least publicly; and finally there were opponents whose international scientific prestige made them somehow ‘untouchable’ by both the regime and academia – their fields of expertise, notably geography, geology, and disciplines addressing natural resources, being of the greatest relevance to the economic and political colonial agenda. The latter’s adherence to this event is explained by the idea common among the regime’s opposition that the Portuguese African colonies were never properly valued and developed, an argument dating back to the nineteenth century, which had made its way among the Republicans and the dictatorship’s opponents. The annual summer schools in Africa were a way to renew the Portuguese presence in Africa, as railways had done a century earlier. Both Lisbon universities, through their rectors, were in this way mobilised to contribute to the reinforcement of the regime’s challenged control and legitimacy in Africa, since Portuguese sovereignty was then being questioned both by the African independence movements in Angola and Mozambique and their powerful allies – the USSR, China, and Cuba – in the international community. By designing and fully supporting the university extension to Africa, the rector-scientists of the dictatorship became actors in the reinforcement of the regime’s cultural hegemony in Portugal and the colonies.

6

Conclusion

Building cultural hegemony is a highly complex process essential to make room for transformation, as the present study shows. The rector-scientists of the University of Lisbon both during the First Republic and the Estado Novo dictatorship were instrumental in leading the process of using science as a component of cultural hegemony in both regimes. In this process, they empowered science as a profession and scientific education as independent from immediate applications, bringing original research to centre stage in academic life. During the First Republic, rector-scientists were committed to the education of scientifically-minded citizens through university outreach. They aimed at turning former university students into agents capable of spreading a scientific spirit in society at large, and ultimately neutralising what was perceived

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as the negative influence of the Roman Catholic clergy, at the same time winning the populace to the cause of science seen as a source of moral, social and economic development. In this context, the rector-scientists engaged in making the University of Lisbon an indispensable element in the construction of Republican hegemony. The Estado Novo dictatorship preferred lawyers to scientists as far as the rule of universities was concerned. The positivist Republican ethos that mirrored scientific discourse itself was no longer dominant and it was hard to perpetuate the previous short-lived hegemony of science within culture. Although the three rector-scientists picked up the Republican banner in what concerned university life, they were not able to recover their former agency in terms of the regime’s cultural hegemony. However, when leading the call for the establishment of higher education in the Portuguese African colonies, the rectorscientists managed to carve a place for scientific discourse in the dictatorship’s hegemonic rhetoric. Although all six rector-scientists shared the common desideratum of including scientific epistemology in the hegemonic cultural framework of political regimes, Cunha, the last of the Republican rectors, shows a particular feature as a Gramscian organic intellectual, when compared with his fellow-rectors. He actually contributed to a leftist hegemonic culture, by advocating that science – as a worldview – was the basis for the ‘new man’, the Republican citizen emerging from the working classes. In this sense, his active participation in the Free University is a perfect example of Gramsci’s concept of education as a tool to develop working-class intellectuals; both Cunha and Gramsci see popular education as an ontological device, which is at the core of the very definition of the human condition. Cunha was a doer, a ‘modern intellectual’ who produced counter-hegemony through education. By looking at the discourses and practices of six scientists that served as rectors in the University of Lisbon through the lens of Gramsci’s concepts of ‘cultural hegemony’ and ‘organic intellectual’, it is possible to bring into focus and analyse the entanglement, often forgotten, between science and politics. However different might have been the political scenarios of the First Republic and the dictatorship, the praxis of the rector-scientists illustrates how technocratic values, despite their nuances, found their way into the twentieth-century Portuguese political and ideological agenda.

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part 5 Towards Cold War Science

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chapter 12

Philanthropy, Mass Media, and Cultural Hegemony: The Rockefeller Foundation and the Politics of Science Popularisation in the 1930s Jaume Sastre-Juan

It would be a great thing, wouldn’t it, if some way or other society was spontaneously blessed with a scientific equivalent of Walt Disney? Warren Weaver, 19381

∵ In 1938 and 1939, the Rockefeller Foundation organised two confidential conferences ‘On the Interpretation of Science for a General Public’, commissioned an exhaustive survey of contemporary science popularisation in the United States and actively participated in international efforts in this field under the auspices of the Paris-based International Institute for Intellectual Cooperation of the League of Nations. The two conferences gathered a significant part of the scientific, social-scientific and mass media elites of the United States at the Westchester Country Club in Rye, New York, and were conceived as an informal think tank in which the participants were asked to privately and frankly discuss the political goals, strategies and techniques of science popularisation. In the 1930s, the Depression’s deep social and political unrest made the Rockefeller Foundation reorient its policy towards what Lily Kay has called ‘a science of social control’.2 Human behaviour became the object of a new psychobiological ‘Science of Man’ that was to replace the increasingly disreputable eugenic approach in advancing towards a programme of social engineering. In

1 ‘Conference on the Interpretation of the Natural Sciences for a General Public, 15–16 June 1938, Memorandum of the Discussion for the Private Use of Participants’, folder 121, box 15, Record Group 1, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, Rockefeller Archive Center, p. 191 (henceforth ‘1938 Conference’). For an excellent Gramscian approach to Walt Disney – and Mickey Mouse – as public historian, see Wallace 1996. 2 Kay 1993, chapter 1.

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the natural sciences this meant a shift from physical to biological sciences, including genetics and molecular biology. In the humanities, it meant a shift from the ‘cloistered kind of research’ of scholarly archaeology and philology to studies of mass communications and ‘the ways in which the American public now gains its culture’.3 The two main characters behind the Rockefeller Foundation’s interest in science popularisation were Warren Weaver, the Director of its Natural Sciences Division, and John Marshall, the Associate Director of its Humanities Division. They were also the key actors in the design and implementation of the Foundation’s new biopolitical programme in the 1930s. Weaver, a mathematician turned science administrator, was a crucial figure in the rise of molecular biology as a discipline.4 Marshall was instrumental in shaping the emerging field of mass communications research and in redefining propaganda as an acceptable and ‘democratic’ psychological warfare tool for engineering mass consensus during – and after – World War II.5 I will argue that a Gramscian approach, which understands science popularisation as a tool in the struggle for cultural hegemony, allows us to make sense of the Rockefeller Foundation’s interest in science popularisation in the late 1930s.6 The biblical motto that presides over the main entrance of the Rockefeller Center in New York, ‘Knowledge Shall Be the Stability of Thy Times’ (Isaiah 33:6), expresses very nicely how philanthropy’s business is the construction of knowledge in order to secure cultural consensus and political stability. In fact, both Gramscian and non-Gramscian concepts of hegemony – such as ‘soft power’ – have been widely used in dealing with philanthropic institutions.7 And the (bio)political role played by the Rockefeller Foundation in defining scientific research agendas in the United States and abroad has already been studied.8 However, scholars have not focused yet on its interest in shaping science popularisation, thus overlooking an important actor in the history of science popularisation in the United States.

3 Stevens, David, ‘New Program in the Humanities’, 10 April 1935, folder 10, box 2, Record Group 3.1, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, Rockefeller Archive Center. 4 Kohler 1976; Kay 1993. 5 Gary 1996. 6 Nieto-Galan 2011a. For an overview of the literature on science popularisation, see NietoGalan 2016. 7 The literature on American philanthropy is huge. For a recent overview, see Krige 2012. For an example of a Gramscian approach, see Fisher 1983 and Arnove 1982. 8 See, for example, Kay 1993, Kohler 1991 and Cueto 1993. Kay 1997 is explicitly grounded on the Gramscian concept of cultural hegemony and the Foucauldian concept of biopower.

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I will place the interest of the Rockefeller Foundation in science popularisation at the intersection of two of its main concerns in the late 1930s, which were at the same time two key elements in the struggle for cultural hegemony in the United States: science and mass communications. The first section will put the 1938 Rye conference in the context of the debates of the ‘science and society’ movement. The second section will put the 1939 Rye conference in the context of the politics of mass communication research, and will analyse the Rockefeller Foundation’s efforts towards the redefinition of scientific popularisers in the rapidly changing context of the 1930s cultural industry.

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Scientific Method and Democracy: The Rockefeller Foundation Joins the Battle Over the Popularisation of Science

Science was a key element in the ideological struggle for cultural hegemony in the United States in the 1930s. After the crash of 1929, more and more voices were challenging capitalism and the 1920s ideology that linked applied science and the free enterprise system as the key to abundance and progress.9 Science and technology were both blamed and invoked as either the Depression’s cause or remedy, and issues such as technological unemployment, industrial planning or technocracy became politically central.10 In this context, science popularisation came to be seen as an increasingly important cultural battlefield by many actors with different political agendas. One of these actors were big science-based corporations, which reacted to the threat posed by the Depression with huge public relations campaigns based on science. In countless advertisements, films, broadcasts and spectacular displays in World’s Fairs pavilions and other itinerant exhibitions, the corporations spread the message that science created jobs and that their industrial laboratories were the cradle in which the world of tomorrow was being nurtured.11 Another actor was the scientific community. Although a good part of it remained as conservative and corporate-oriented as in the 1920s, Peter Kuznick 9

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On the co-construction of capitalism and technoscience in the United States, see Noble 1977. On the 1920s ideological alliance between the scientific and corporate elites, see McGrath 2002. On the Depression’s rumble of discontent, see Kennedy 1999. On technological unemployment, see Bix 2000. On the Technocracy Movement, see Akin 1977. On the proposals for a science holiday, see Pursell 1974. See, among others, Nye 1992, Rydell 1993 and Marchand 1998. On the long tradition of popular scientific showmanship in the context of which these corporate shows must be placed, see Nadis 2005.

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has shown how in the late 1930s there was a significant process of leftist political radicalisation of an influential part of the academic scientific community, which went hand in hand with a stronger commitment to science popularisation. The years 1937–39 saw the emergence of a ‘science and society’ movement and the creation of such institutions as the American Committee for Democracy and Intellectual Freedom (ACDIF) and the American Association of Scientific Workers (AASW). Influenced by the lively debates aroused within the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS) by the agitation of the ‘visible college’ of Marxist British scientists, left-leaning and liberal American scientists shaped the policies of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in the direction of devoting more energies to a general discussion of the social consequences of science and to science popularisation as a rational antidote to racism and Fascism.12 The officers of the Rockefeller Foundation were keenly aware of the shifting political mood in the scientific community. When Henry Fairfield Osborn, the Director of the New York Zoological Society, approached the Foundation to get its financial endorsement for promoting the use of educational movies in natural history, Warren Weaver and John Marshall decided to explore the broader issue of the social function of science popularisation.13 They called for a twoday confidential conference to discuss the following question: ‘to serve what basic purposes, with what emphases, in what ways, where, when, and by whom can portions (and incidentally what portions) of this knowledge [natural science] be effectively and usefully transmitted and interpreted to the public’.14 Organising the conference was their way of joining the debate on popularisation as a civic duty started within the scientific community – and their way of shaping it. On 15 June 1938, a distinguished audience of first-rank scientists and officers from several divisions of the Rockefeller Foundation gathered at the Westchester Country Club in Rye, New York.15 Warren Weaver struck the political key from the very beginning: 12 13 14

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Kuznick 1987. On the ‘visible college’, see Werskey 1978. On the ‘social relations of science’ movement, see also McGucken 1984. Warren Weaver to John Marshall, 3 March 1938, folder 118, box 14, Record Group 1, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, Rockefeller Archive Center. ‘1938 Conference’, pp. 5–6. The conference was confidential because the officers wanted a free and frank discussion of controversial issues and because they did not want to raise expectations of Foundation money flowing into the field. The participants at the conference were: Karl Compton (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Watson Davis (Science Service), William Ogburn (Chicago University), Clarence Little (Roscoe B. Jackson Memorial Laboratory), William Beebe (New York Zoolog-

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I don’t think that any of you, gentlemen, will be shocked if, for the first setting of the topic that we have before us, I quote a toast which was recently given by Stalin. … From some points of view one might say that our topic would be the exploration of what we would like to mean by this toast as compared possibly with what Stalin meant by it …: ‘To the flourishing of science, that science which does not segregate itself from the people, but is ready to serve the people and transmit to the people all the conquests of science’.16 The participants were surely not surprised by his calling attention to the hot issue of the social responsibility of science, nor by his pointing to the Marxist origins of the debate. The waves produced in the lake of the scientific community by the stone thrown at the 1931 Second International Congress for the History of Science in London had arrived to the United States.17 In December 1937, the AAAS had passed a resolution on Democracy and Intellectual Freedom, and the Spring of 1938 was the peak of the ‘science and society’ movement. The political effervescence of the scientific community is a subtext that was constantly alluded to between the lines at a conference that was meant to tackle an issue which should not be left only in the hands of leftist intellectuals. The lively and rich transcripts preserved in the Rockefeller Archive Center offer an insider’s insight into the contemporary debates on science popularisation. While it is not possible to fully reflect the nuance and diversity of the transcripts here, two main issues kept appearing again and again, and ended up being the core debates: whether it was the method or the results and applications of science that had to be popularised on the one hand, and

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ical Society), Eric Temple Bell (California Institute of Technology), Charles Cadwalader (Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences), Henry Fairfield Osborn (New York Zoological Society), Ivor Richards (Magdalene College, Cambridge), Oscar Riddle (Department of Genetics, Carnegie Institution), Paul Sears (Oberlin College), Harlow Shapley (Harvard College Observatory), Alan Gregg (Director of The Division of Medical Sciences of the Rockefeller Foundation), Robert Havighurst (Director for General Education of the Rockefeller-funded General Education Board), John Marshall (Associate Director of the Humanities Division of the Rockefeller Foundation), David Stevens (Director of the Division of Humanities of the Rockefeller Foundation), Warren Weaver (Director of The Division of Natural Sciences of the Rockefeller Foundation). Many of the participants were already active popularisers of science. Note that the conference did not include the voice of engineers and industrial scientists. ‘1938 Conference’, p. 5. For a detailed description and analysis of this famous and influential congress, see Werskey 1978, pp. 138–49.

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what were the relationships between science and democracy on the other. I will deal with them in turn. In the 1930s, the belief in the scientific method as a touchstone for political rationality was pervasive, and fierce ideological battles took place around the meaning of this elusive concept, which was politically mobilised both from the left and from the right.18 In his introductory remarks, Warren Weaver distinguished between the Janus-faced ‘practical accomplishments’ of science and its ‘less tangible values’.19 He was inclined to think that popularisation would be socially useful provided that it focused on values and method. According to him, the materials to be presented to the public would inevitably be the practical accomplishments, since values could not be communicated in an abstract way, but these materials should be presented ‘in a way which would as continuously and as effectively as possible stress the underlying values that we all feel are the really vital things in science’.20 Weaver set for popularisation the missionary task of spreading among the masses the scientific ethos based on the scientific method, understood as a habit of thought which entailed virtues such as suspended judgement, intellectual honesty, open-mindedness and self-criticism. However, sociologist William Ogburn heavily objected to what he perceived as an ‘attempt to propagandise the good way of life as it seems to the scientist’.21 He claimed that it very well might be the case that the folkways of the scientist were not socially good for all members of society, and that it would be better to popularise the practical achievements of science. According to his influential theory of the cultural lag, science and technology were provoking disruptive social change at a pace which was too quick for people to adapt to. Social science had to identify the revolutionary inventions from their very inception, predict their social consequences and bring about the necessary adjustments that would help in the process of social adaptation. This is why the popularisation of the practical applications of science was politically important for him: to spread technological literacy would diminish the cultural lag and therefore reduce social unrest.22 18 19 20 21 22

Kuznick 1987, pp. 51–64. ‘1938 Conference’, p. 9. ‘1938 Conference’, pp. 19–20. ‘1938 Conference’, p. 27. On the transformations of the moral qualities of the ‘scientific life’ in this period, which Ogburn’s intervention reflects, see Shapin 2008. Ogburn 1923. Karl Compton added to this debate an interesting nuance, which was the need for training the people to expect this change, that is, to give them not only technological literacy, but also sociological literacy, so that they could adapt to it in a better way (‘1938 Conference’, p. 126).

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But Ogburn was an exception. Most participants saw scientists as paternalistic helpers of minds committed to spreading the gospel of the scientific method. Watson Davis, the Director of the syndicated news agency Science Service, referred to ‘a new religion’ called ‘experimentalism’ that had to start recruiting ‘converts’ in the ‘nursery school’.23 Mathematician Eric Temple Bell suggested that it would be better to find out first what people wanted, but geneticist Clarence Little insisted that scientists had ‘to be popes’ with a ‘militant idea to enforce that attitude on others’.24 The main problem, according to Weaver, was that the ‘overemphasis on the spectacular aspects of science’ could lead to ‘the substitution of an old magic for a new one’.25 Weaver thought that if the interpretation of science to the public was focused on its practical results, it could ‘easily degenerate and will almost inescapably degenerate’ into the commercial values of ‘mere gadgetry’.26 The corporate crusade which was popularising science mainly as the force behind the newest streamlined domestic appliance would not contribute to the urgent task of rationalising men and stabilising society. At the root of this way of thinking was the belief that the human element was the weak link in the chain of social control. Humanity had mastered the natural world through technology, but the bewildered and irrational ‘old savage in the new civilisation’, culturally unprepared for harnessing the colossal forces he had inadvertently unchained, needed techniques for putting social and personal behaviour under ‘rational’ guidance.27 If focused on spreading the scientific spirit among the masses, science popularisation might help in this regard. A population imbued with the scientific spirit as understood by the Rockefeller Foundation would more easily accept the application of the biopolitical programme behind the new ‘Science of Man’, which was aimed at achieving a more stable social order. Weaver also feared that the prevailing commercialised popularisation of science would ultimately result in more wood to the fire of the growing critique of science. Weaver pointed to some of the ‘practical achievements’ as having sparked a set of charges against science ‘which we must admit aren’t all entirely hypothetical, and which have been made from time to time by serious and thoughtful people’.28 It was not only that the Marxist group of British scient-

23 24 25 26 27 28

‘1938 Conference’, p. 83. ‘1938 Conference’, pp. 38–9. ‘1938 Conference’, p. 21. ‘1938 Conference’, p. 64. Fosdick 1928. ‘1938 Conference’, p. 11.

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ists were organising exhibitions such as one ‘with a rather horrible title, The Frustration of Science’, in which the argument famously brought forward by the socialist crystallographer John Desmond Bernal that capitalism was restraining the positive potential of science was visually defended using panels and statistical charts. Even respectable journals such as Nature were acknowledging the dark side of the scientific enterprise – technological unemployment, alienation, pollution, etc. – and urging scientists to be aware of their social mission.29 Under the threat of an imminent war and a growing fear for the fate of science, the British Marxist scientists had succeeded in establishing an alliance with liberal reformists from the scientific establishment in what Gary Werskey called a scientific ‘Popular Front’. It took institutional form in July 1938 with the creation of the Division for the Social and International Relations of Science of the BAAS. Even though the liberals outnumbered the socialists, the Bernalist discourse was hegemonic, in part due to the active popularisation efforts by the prolific members of the ‘visible college’, who saw their role as public intellectuals as one of their main political duties.30 Upon returning from the 1938 meeting of the BAAS, Watson Davis dutifully reported to Warren Weaver the behind-the-scenes movements regarding the creation of the new division, always with an eye kept on their own side of the Atlantic: The English interest in the social implications of science is being actively sponsored chiefly by a young and rather radical group. The older, more conservative English scientists are somewhat disturbed and are entering into the plans for the new division of the British Association largely to keep the young, radical group from running away with the ball. Davis’s estimates are skeptical, so far, that any definite possibilities will evolve from the cooperative interest in this field as it is being developed between the British group and the AAAS.31 Indeed, in the United States the scientific community was politically more moderate than in the UK. The stress was on the ‘social consequences’ rather than on the ‘social relations’ of science – which went both ways – and capitalism was in general taken for granted. In response to the enthusiasm with 29 30 31

Ibid. An example of the British discourse on the frustration of science is Hall 1935. Werskey 1978. ‘Interview of Warren Weaver with Watson Davis’, 7 October 1938, folder 127, box 15, Record Group 1, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, Rockefeller Archive Center.

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which the 1937 resolution on Democracy and Intellectual Freedom had been received by the more radical fraction of the British scientific community, the president of the AAAS, Forest Moulton, published a letter in Nature on 19 March 1938 assuring that it contained ‘absolutely no note of criticism of governments or of social orders’.32 Nonetheless, under the British influence, part of the American scientific community was moving to the left, as the creation of the ACDIF and the AASW some months later would show. The officers of the Rockefeller Foundation kept track of the development of this left turn in order not to leave the debate to the more radical element and to be able to contain it if it ever got to the improbable point of going beyond proper liberal limits. A red line was the talk about the frustration of science. Both socialists and liberals shared the technocratic belief in the application of the scientific method to social problems, and the stress on the latent potentialities of science, but when it came to popularisation there was a significant nuance: the socialists put the emphasis on how the inherently liberating force of science was frustrated by the capitalist social order. On the contrary, the liberal part of this scientific ‘Popular Front’ saw the talk about the frustration of science as something to be avoided. Julian Huxley expressed this point explicitly at a conference on the popularisation of science organised in Paris in February 1939 by the International Institute for Intellectual Cooperation of the League of Nations with support from the Rockefeller Foundation: In England recently there has been a good deal of discussion on the so called frustration of science which is supposed to be used mainly for destructive purposes, etc. As a result, in a great many of the more popular newspapers it has become practically impossible to get science news published … We must fight this idea. I think that the way to try to propagate the knowledge of scientific method would not be to lay stress on the frustration of science, in the purely negative way, but to stress what it might eventually do if proper methods were introduced.33

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Quoted in Kuznick 1987, p. 88. ‘Institut International de Cooperation Intellectuelle. Comité d’experts pour la diffusion de la science par la radiophonie, la presse et les publications. Compte rendu des travaux du Comité’, folder 116, box 14, Record Group 1.1, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, Rockefeller Archive Center, p. 8. The transcripts of the conference and substantial information both on the plans for creating an international organisation devoted to science popularisation and the reactions of the Rockefeller Foundation to it can be found in folders 112–17. For an account of Huxley’s ideological evolution from social imperialism to liberal positions in the scientific ‘Popular Front’, see Werskey 1978, pp. 240–3.

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In the context of the 1930s’ battle over the popularisation of science, the Rockefeller Foundation officers saw the emphasis on method and values as a safe haven that stood on a middle ground between the politically radicalised fraction of the scientific community and the big corporations that used science popularisation to restore their damaged image. The focus on method could correct the counter-productive biases of gadget-centred corporate popularisation, while at the same time avoid the undue emphasis on frustration and its dangerous implicit Bernalist conclusion: ‘if science is to help humanity, it must find a new master’.34 Let us move now to the second big debate at the conference, which was whether science popularisation should emphasise the ‘relationships between scientific freedom, intellectual freedom, and the principles of a free democracy’.35 In the late 1930s, there was a growing feeling that science was in danger. The Nazi and Soviet attacks on scientists and the widespread belief of being at a historical crossroads increasingly linked, in the minds of many liberal scientists, the fear for the fate of capitalist democracies with the fear for the fate of science.36 Weaver shared the Deweyan democratic rhetoric of the ‘science and society’ movement. On the one hand, he argued that democracies could only survive through ‘the development of a citizenry thinking continuously and effectively according to a pattern which is fundamental in science’.37 On the other hand, he echoed Robert Merton’s contemporary claims that science could only be successful under democratic conditions.38 However, both assumptions were challenged during the confidential debates, which reflected the interwar crisis of liberal political thought and the redefinition of its notion of democracy along increasingly technocratic lines.39 Unlike the case of the politically trans-

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Quoted in Kuznick 1987, p. 68. ‘1938 Conference’, p. 20. Eric Temple Bell’s answer to Weaver’s invitation to the conference reflects very well the contemporary atmosphere: ‘We pure mathematicians and less pure physicists who write on God-awful subjects stand a pretty fair chance of being stood up and shot as useless appendages of society if and when the revolution comes. We really must do something to convince the public that science is on its side’ (Eric Temple Bell to Warren Weaver, 9 May 1938, folder 118, box 14, Record Group 1, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, Rockefeller Archive Center). ‘1938 Conference’, p. 20. Merton 1938 and 1942. On Merton’s discourse on the relationships between science and democracy, and its influence after World War II, see Hollinger 1983 and Wang 1999. Purcell 1973; Jordan 1994.

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versal faith in the virtues of the scientific method, considerable disagreement occurred regarding what democracy was and what relation science had – or ought to have – with it. For William Ogburn, the claim that science was necessary and desirable for democracy was in itself unscientific, not stemming from a careful and accurate study of facts. According to his Lippmanian interventions at the conference, the scientific spirit might turn out to be a shaky foundation for democracy, since suspended judgement endangered efficiency in moments of crisis.40 Moreover, he went on, what did ‘intellectual freedom’ mean in a world of increasing regimentation in industrial laboratories and state planning? Ogburn argued that ‘the democratic form of government might very well be a fashion at the moment’ and that science should avoid forging too close a link with it.41 In fact, his working hypothesis was that the United States was ‘departing further and further away from a democracy’ and that the country would ‘get closer toward what is called a totalitarian state’.42 He saw a potential danger for science in totalitarianism, as the degradation of science in German universities showed, but he underscored the need for science to find the best way to survive in such an environment. Watson Davis drew the conclusion as far as popularisation was concerned: ‘you have to educate either the dictators or the people’.43 Ogburn was not alone in casting a shadow on the equation between science and democracy. Geneticist Clarence Little went much further along eugenic and philo-fascist lines. He did not agree with ‘the contrast between the Fascist as non-scientific and democracy as scientific’.44 For Little, the scientific spirit had basically to do with ‘the introduction of a biological philosophy at the basis of our particular branch of civilization’ even if that would probably entail ‘a period of very unhappy restriction’ in which ‘a degree of control not yet met with may have to be experienced in order that out beyond that may come a freer, happier type of humanity’.45 Literary critic Ivor Richards suggested a dialectical way out of the dilemma, which consisted not in popularising any fixed recipe of what the relationships between science and democracy were, but rather in presenting alternative possibilities so that ‘the general public could take part with the specialized sci-

40 41 42 43 44 45

For Walter Lippmann’s influential critique of the idea of participatory democracy and his model of technocratic governance, see Lippmann 1922 and 1925. ‘1938 Conference’, p. 138. ‘1938 Conference’, p. 143. Ibid. ‘1938 Conference’, p. 35. ‘1938 Conference’, p. 76.

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entific publics in considering freely what those relations ideally should be’.46 But this, he argued, would entail a serious danger: if ignorance were eventually overcome, it would be possible for the general public ‘to take a hand in saying, through its various political agencies, what science should do and who should do it’.47 He thought that this political interference was typical of autocracies and warned against ‘the effects of making the general public feel that it is competent to have a view … either on the organization and administration of science or upon the specific objectives of research’.48 According to Richards, then, ignorance was safer for democracy than general enlightenment. ‘Is this conference committed to the espousal of a free democracy?’, asked astronomer Harlow Shapley, to which Warren Weaver emphatically replied: ‘Not in the least!’ ‘We are not committed to anything’, added the chairman of the session, biologist Oscar Riddle.49 But there was something to which all the participants were committed: the preservation of social stability. Beyond the differences in opinion, they all shared the hope that science popularisation could act as a social balsam. Physicist Karl Compton argued that ‘one of the greatest things that science can teach people’ was that it had grown ‘by a process of evolution, not by a process of revolution’.50 Clarence Little was even more explicit when he told the participants at the 1939 Paris conference that the Rye conference had been aimed at ‘trying to stabilize people that are now bewildered’ and at ‘trying to give them a feeling of security when now that feeling does not exist’.51 The officers of the Rockefeller Foundation thought that this could be achieved if popularisation focused on method and stressed the links between science and democracy. Despite all the disagreements, Weaver’s initial outline was ratified with minor changes as the conclusions of the conference. The final summary report stated that ‘the interests of science and of democracy are in many respects identical’ and stressed that spreading the scientific method would bring beneficial consequences to the general public.52 On the one hand, we have already seen how the focus on method was perceived as a subtler and 46 47 48 49 50 51

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‘1938 Conference’, p. 141. ‘1938 Conference’, p. 142. Ibid. ‘1938 Conference’, p. 140. ‘1938 Conference’, p. 82. ‘Institut International de Cooperation Intellectuelle. Comité d’experts pour la diffusion de la science par la radiophonie, la presse et les publications. Compte rendu des travaux du Comité’, folder 116, box 14, Record Group 1.1, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, Rockefeller Archive Center, p. 38. ‘Summary Report of the First Conference on the Interpretation of the Natural Sciences

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wiser way of waging the battle over the popularisation of science and thus helping maintain social stability. On the other hand, from the officers’ liberal point of view, strengthening the equation between science and democracy was a way to fight the threat of Fascism in the United States, but also to prevent the equation between science and communism – with which Bernal would famously close his 1939 book The Social Function of Science – from crossing the Atlantic.53 Now the question was how to actually achieve these socially beneficial effects, which was something that had consciously been left aside at the first conference, basically devoted to discussing the goals – not the techniques – of popularisation. The answer would have to do with mass communications, a field in which the Rockefeller Foundation already had a vital interest.

2

Mass Media and Social Control: ‘Middlemen of Science’ as New Intellectuals for a New Cultural Industry

Right after the first conference, planning began for a second one that would gather both policymaking executives and practitioners of the mass media. The goal was to explore ‘to what extent it is practicable to attempt to do for the interpretation of science what the first conference believed should be attempted’, and what kind of eventual interventions by the Rockefeller Foundation might be useful and feasible.54 In preparation for the conference, the Rockefeller Foundation commissioned Watson Davis to conduct a confidential survey on ‘current efforts to interpret the natural sciences to the general public’, which was probably the first of its kind ever made. Newspapers, magazines, books, radio broadcasts, motion pictures and exhibits covering the first nine months of 1938 were carefully and exhaustively surveyed during the last three months of that year. The main result of the quantitative analysis of these several media was that science was interpreted to the public mainly in an indirect way, through advertising and non-scientific programmes. The conclusion was that the advertisement selling vitamins and the movie fictionalising a doctor were the main sources of science education for the masses.55

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for a General Public’, folder 118, box 14, Record Group 1, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, Rockefeller Archive Center. Bernal 1939. ‘Allocation RF39014’, 17 May 1939, folder 118, box 14, Record Group 1, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, Rockefeller Archive Center. Davis, Watson 1939, ‘A Survey of Interpretation of Science to the Public’, folder 22, box 381,

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The survey was an important working document for the follow-up conference, which took place on 16 and 17 June 1939, also at the Westchester Country Club. Again, it was small, informal and confidential. This time, the participants were big names of the social sciences and the mass media and it was chaired by the president of the Rockefeller Foundation, Raymond Fosdick.56 The officers’ strategy for the conference was to portray the scientific community as more willing to overcome its distrust of the mass media in order to obtain from the participants a statement with concrete recommendations for action. But, above all, it was again conceived as a ‘ceremony of getting attention for the subject and recognition of its importance from influential people who ought to feel some concern about it’.57 The emergence of mass media during the interwar years went hand in hand with anxieties about their destabilising potential that ended up redefining liberal notions of democracy and public opinion along the tension lines of the Lippman-Dewey debate over the manufacturing of consent and the role experts and citizens should play in decision-making.58 In response to these anxieties and debates, efforts to understand and control the mass media proliferated, with the Rockefeller Foundation at the vanguard of them.59 An

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Record Unit 7091, Science Service Records, Smithsonian Institution Archives. For a historical assessment of interwar public images of science in the United States as portrayed in magazines and radio, see Lafollette 1990 and 2008. On science fiction, see Cheng 2012. In addition to Warren Weaver, John Marshall, David Stevens, Alan Gregg, Robert Havighurst, Clarence Little, Harlow Shapley and Watson Davis, who were present at the two conferences, the following is the list of participants to the second conference. Representing the scientific community: Forest Moulton (President of the AAAS). Representing the social sciences: Hadley Cantril (Princeton University) and Harold Lasswell (William A. White Foundation). Representing radio executives and practitioners: James Angell and Lenox Lohr (National Broadcasting Company), and Sterling Fisher and Gilbert Seldes (Columbia Broadcasting System). Representing the film industry: Carl Milliken (Motion Picture Distributors and Producers of America, NYC), Thomas Baird (Film Center, London) and Donald Slesinger (American Film Center, NYC). Representing the press: William Chenery (Colliers Magazine) and David Dietz (Scripps-Howard Newspapers). Representing museums: Robert Shaw (New York Museum of Science and Industry). Representing the International Institute for Intellectual Cooperation: Arnold Raestad (former minister of Norway). Representing the Rockefeller Foundation, in addition to the already mentioned officers: Raymond Fosdick (President) and Sydnor Walker (Associate Director of the Social Sciences Division). ‘General Strategy for the Conference on the Interpretation of the Natural Sciences at Rye, June 16 and 17’, attached to John Marshall to Alan Gregg, 8 June 1939, folder 119, box 14, Record Group 1, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, Rockefeller Archive Center. Gary 1993. Gary 1992.

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emblematic example is the Princeton Radio Project, led by sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld. The results of this research project into the social effects of radio – in which Theodor Adorno participated until serious methodological disagreements with Lazarsfeld made him abandon the project – ranged from soap opera audience research to studies of new phenomena in mass psychology such as the panic after Orson Welles’ famous broadcast The War of the Worlds.60 Worried by the use of the mass media in Nazi Germany, where Goebbels was achieving spectacular results in relation to political control, the Rockefeller Foundation’s interest in mass communications was reoriented as World War II approached. Under John Marshall’s coordination, the newly formed Communications Seminar ended up acting as an unofficial arm of the State for devising the psychological warfare policies that were meant to keep at bay domestic ‘unAmerican’ propaganda and to shift American public opinion from isolationism to interventionism.61 The Soviets and the Nazis were showing signs of greater efficiency and ability to mobilise their populations for total war through propaganda. Could a democracy resort to it without losing its essence? How to preserve both control and liberty in times of emergency? How to create propaganda that was both efficient and democratic? These were some of the questions that were debated at the influential Communications Seminar by the same people (Lasswell, Marshall, Cantril, Richards, Slesinger) who had met just some months before to discuss science popularisation. The Rockefeller Foundation’s approach to science popularisation was shaped by all these efforts at systematically studying the mechanisms of mass media and was informed by similar concerns with social stability. Therefore, it comes as no surprise that the officers of the Rockefeller Foundation were actively interested in framing the intellectual debate at the second conference in general political terms. Did science popularisation promote social stability? Sociologist and political scientist Harold Lasswell posed this question in terms of ‘anxiety reactions’ and ‘attitudes towards authority’. According to Lasswell, anxiety reactions indicated ‘whether you are in for quite a rapid increase of hostile remarks and hostile activities against the established order in society or not’.62 Were anxiety reactions fostered or mitigated

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Cantril and Alport 1935; Cantril 1940. On Adorno’s American experience in mass communications research, see Jenemann 2007. Gary 1996. ‘Proceedings of the Rockefeller Foundation Conference on the Interpretation of Science for a General Public, 16–17 June, 1939, Westchester Country Club, Rye, New York’, folder 123, box 15, Record Group 1, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, Rockefeller Archive Center,

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by science popularisation? To what extent could an improved science popularisation act as a social balm?63 Lasswell did not provide a clear-cut answer, but it was generally assumed by the participants that more science popularisation would have positive consequences. James Angell hoped that radio would contribute to ‘the stabilizing of the democracy which badly needs it in this day and generation’,64 and Warren Weaver was convinced that the answer to Lasswell’s questions was that ‘science, if properly interpreted to the public, can make depositive [sic] and beneficient contribution to exactly the kind of points he raises’.65 The topics discussed at the conference ranged from the relationship between education and entertainment to the techniques of science reporting in the press, or science in documentary films. But the central issues ended up being audience research and the training of able ‘middlemen’ for ‘interpreting’ science to the public. There was a general agreement that more audience research was needed both to appraise what was the public’s knowledge and image of science, and to find out how it reacted to the messages conveyed by the mass media. In his intervention, psychologist Hadley Cantril used some preliminary results of the Princeton Radio Project to assess the interest of the potential audience for science in radio. He presented a socio-economical characterisation of the radio audience and posed the paradox that while the lower-class audience was the one in most need of ‘this cultural interest and appreciation of scientific values that apparently concern you’, it was also the one less likely to be interested in serious subject matters.66

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p. 110 (henceforth ‘1939 Conference’). Lasswell developed this conceptual framework right after the crash of 1929, with the goal of handling psychological frustration in order to avoid political unrest (Lasswell 1930). On Lasswell’s relationship with the Rockefeller Foundation and his key role in the creation of a ‘science of propaganda’, see Gary 1992, chapter 2. It was John Marshall who explicitly suggested the content and terminology of Lasswell’s intervention some days before the conference: ‘What we particularly hope from you is a statement which, though necessarily brief, will give those present some awareness of the broader social implications of the subject. For example (though without in any way intending to indicate or to set limitations for your remarks), you might well deal with the subject in terms of authority and anxiety. If science were more adequately and more authoritatively interpreted, what changes would result? To what extent would such better interpretation be “good”?’ (John Marshall to Harold Lasswell, 8 June 1939, folder 119, box 14, Record Group 1, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, Rockefeller Archive Center). ‘1939 Conference’, p. 144. ‘1939 Conference’, p. 283. ‘1939 Conference’, p. 98.

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Cantril suggested that the best way to proceed would therefore be to use and raise the standards of the successful existing methods in mass communication, such as quiz programmes, so that ‘the publicity could be more intelligently directed on fertile soil that might conceivably absorb it’.67 Watson Davis agreed with this point of view: In injecting science into the thought-stream of the public, it will be more effective to adapt science interpretation to the methods of the medium rather than to attempt to revolutionize the medium selected. The scientific revolution for which we hope will come through infiltration rather than by didactic upheaval.68 The idea that prevailed at the conference, and to which the Rockefeller Foundation was committed, was that the ability of the public to absorb science had mainly to do with its presentation. James Angell, Sterling Fisher, William Chenery, Gilbert Seldes and Carl Milliken insisted upon the fact that ‘almost anything can be conveyed to a very large public if it is done well’ and ‘offered within the proper limits of entertainment’.69 Form was what needed to be improved in science communication. Therefore, any eventual practical efforts should be directed towards achieving a more skilled presentation of science. The importance of the training of journalists, museum curators and radio scriptwriters who dealt with science contents was unanimously acknowledged at the conference, and the participants discussed whether it was better to improve the scientific training of journalists or to establish a training programme in science script writing aimed at young scientists at college level.70 In a context of mass communications, in which promoting a positive image of science linked to the democratic free enterprise system was politically crucial, scientists were not fulfilling their expected function as public intellectuals. A new kind of intellectual was needed, someone who could speak the language of the masses: new ‘middlemen of science’. The officers of the Rockefeller Foundation conceived these ‘middlemen’ as mediators between the scientists and the public, someone who could ‘inter-

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‘1939 Conference’, p. 103. Davis, Watson 1939, ‘Summary of Survey of Interpretation of Science to the General Public’, folder 23, box 381, Record Unit 7091, Science Service Records, Smithsonian Institution Archives, pp. 6–7. ‘1939 Conference’, pp. 137 and 176. ‘1939 Conference’, pp. 337–44.

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pret’ or ‘translate’ the technical language of science into the ordinary language of the masses so that it still transmitted information both on the contents and – tacitly but most importantly – the method and values of science. Warren Weaver, who had a sustained interest in translation throughout his career – ranging from his bibliophilic interest in translations of Alice in Wonderland in other languages to his important seminal contribution to information theory and machine translation71 – clearly understood the ‘interpretation’ of science basically as a problem of translation within the top-down diffusionist model of popularisation.72 Who would be the translators in charge of this process of interpretation was politically important. When Harlow Shapley mentioned the American Association of Scientific Workers as a potential middleman organisation because of its active commitment to popularisation, Forest Moulton quickly said that its English counterpart was ‘in the hands of the radical element’ and disregarded it for such a task.73 The National Association of Science Writers and Science Service were discussed as more suitable models.74 The rhetorically Deweyan goal of spreading the scientific method among the masses to strengthen the links between science and democracy went thus hand in hand with the Lippmanian belief in the need for management of public opinion by intellectual elites and the delegation of the top-down process of ‘interpretation of science’ in the hands of reliable experts. The ‘middlemen of science’ were conceived by Clarence Little, in almost cybernetic terms, as ‘a group of traffic experts to keep the flow of information from the scientist to the press and from the public to the scientist running smoothly in civilization’,75 and he insisted that ‘only by a large number of such individuals can we control and direct wisely the course of future progress in the whole relationship between science and the public’.76 Little was among the participants who called for the creation of a new organisation devoted to science popularisation, a documentation and authentication centre that would ‘do for us today what the elder Huxley so brilliantly did for Darwin’.77 But the officers were inclined to think that if the Rockefeller Foundation eventually decided to get involved in the field of science popular-

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Weaver and Shannon 1949; Weaver 1955; Weaver 1964. Hilgartner 1990. ‘1939 Conference’, p. 251. On Science Service, see Rhees 1979 and LaFollette 2006. ‘1939 Conference’, p. 253. ‘1938 Conference’, p. 205. ‘1939 Conference’, p. 289.

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isation in any significant way, the most useful thing to do would be to keep acting as a think tank and to fund training programmes for scientific popularisers. Actually, the Rockefeller Foundation’s Humanities Division already had experience in training mass communications professionals. In the museum field, it had been instrumental in what has been called the ‘communicative turn’.78 Since 1935, the Division had been funding surveys of the most successful techniques of display and training personnel in these techniques through grant-in-aid programmes.79 Dozens of interns were trained in places such as the Buffalo Museum of Science or the New York Museum of Science and Industry.80 The Division had also funded internship programmes at the CBS and NBC radio networks, with the goal of training young scholars and educators in the latest techniques in broadcasting.81 For John Marshall, however, the proficiency in performance was not enough. In his final remarks at the conference, he insisted that more thought on the broader social issues involved in popularisation was needed, and that it was necessary for the ‘middlemen of science’ to develop ‘a total conception of what their job was’:82 It seems to me only as the whole business of communications in modern society is taken very much more seriously and all these factors brought into account and into the awareness of the younger people particularly who are coming into communications industries and the other agencies that are in the field that probably we shall need to have if we don’t want to create some of the anxieties and some of the lack or destructive lacks of control that Dr. Lasswell has alluded to [sic].83 Far from just seeking ornamental changes in style, the training programmes of the Humanities Division were a conscious attempt at social control. In the context of a changing mass communications industry, the officers of the Rockefeller Foundation thought that the best course of action for orienting science 78 79

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Niquette and Buxton 2009. ‘New Ideas in Museum Techniques and Training’, Confidential Monthly Report, November 1, 1938, pp. 12–15, box 213, Record Group 1.1., Rockefeller Foundation Archives, Rockefeller Archive Center. On the politics of display at the New York Museum of Science and Industry, see SastreJuan 2018. ‘1939 Conference’, p. 368. Ibid. ‘1939 Conference’, p. 369.

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popularisation in the desired direction would be to shape the training of the key element in the codification and transmission of the messages, the ‘middlemen of science’.

3

Conclusion: Science Popularisation as Cultural Hegemony

In September 1939, John Marshall and Warren Weaver were supposed to attend the second conference on science popularisation organised by the International Institute for Intellectual Cooperation of the League of Nations in Paris, but the war broke out and thwarted their travel plans. The war also put an end to the Rockefeller Foundation’s interest in science popularisation. More urgent things were ahead. John Marshall focused his efforts on the Communications Seminar, and Warren Weaver devoted himself to many wartime projects, including the development of improved electrical fire control devices.84 Despite having a strategic interest in science popularisation, the Rockefeller Foundation never did include it as an official – that is, fundable – part of its programme. But the officers achieved their main goal, which was to put the topic on the intellectual agenda of key influential scientists and mass media professionals.85 As Warren Weaver put it, they were convinced that ‘a very considerable amount of pervasive but intangible good comes from talking about an important problem of this sort together’ and that ‘ideas continue to be very much more powerful than money’.86 It is difficult to evaluate what effects the conferences did have. During the second Rye conference, Weaver claimed that ‘the thinking of the people who attended that conference [the 1938 Rye conference] was very definitely reoriented’, and he quoted a letter by Gerald Wendt, responsible for science and education contents at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, stating that they had used the transcript of the first conference as their code.87 However, the most lasting influences might have been Weaver himself and Watson Davis. Weaver was a key figure in promoting and shaping the ‘public understanding of science’ after 84 85

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Gary 1996; Rees 1987. Apart from the participants, copies of the transcripts were sent to, among others, such influential people as Vannevar Bush (then Director of the Carnegie Institution of Washington), Frederick Keppel (President of the Carnegie Corporation) and Paul Lazarsfeld. ‘1939 Conference’, p. 52. ‘1939 Conference’, pp. 52–3. On the battle over the presentation of science at the New York World’s Fair, see Kuznick 1994. Wendt’s liberal approach, focused on the scientific method, was clearly defeated by the popularity of the conservative and gadget-centred corporate showmanship.

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World War II through his work at the AAAS, the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing and the National Science Foundation.88 And Watson Davis’ Science Service was not only a key player in the United States, where it was involved in the organization of science clubs, among other initiatives, but also internationally, becoming one of the main partners for UNESCO’s science popularization programmes in the 1950s. The continuities and changes between pre-war concerns about ‘interpretation of science’ and post-war efforts in ‘public understanding of science’ deserve further study.89 In any case, the Rockefeller Foundation must be included in the historical picture of the politics of science popularisation in the United States. In this chapter, I have argued that its interest in popularisation must be placed at the crossroads of two different but interrelated key elements in the struggle for cultural hegemony in the late 1930s: science and the mass media. An intelligent management of mass communications was perceived as crucial for social stability. And science popularisation was not only a very sensitive political issue, but also an area which offered the Rockefeller Foundation an ideal case study for strategic thinking in mass communications, since it allowed cooperation between all its divisions in a field the officers knew very well from first-hand experience. Facing both the political radicalisation toward the left of the scientific community and the rise of a new cultural industry, the officers of the Rockefeller Foundation pointed to the need for training a new kind of self-conscious intellectuals adapted to the language of mass communications, to which John Marshall referred, ‘for lack of a better name’, as ‘the natural carriers’.90 Antonio Gramsci, who died in Rome three years before John Marshall wrote these words, might have suggested a better name – ‘organic intellectual’ – to account for the Rockefeller Foundation’s interest in redefining the scientific populariser as a new kind of ‘natural carrier’ adapted to the new cultural industry, and thus better equipped to seduce and achieve consensus around certain ways of seeing science and the world. The goal was to reorient science popularisation along moderate liberal lines, avoiding both the potentially seditious talk on the frustration of science of the radicalised leftist scientists and the triumphalist and counter-productive gadget-centred propaganda promoted by large science-based corporations. Sci88 89

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Lewenstein 1992. I am currently working with Andrée Bergeron on science popularization as cultural diplomacy at the League of Nations and the early years of UNESCO. As for the United States, Lewenstein 1992 and Wang 2002 make only passing reference to the 1930s as a precedent for the post-war concerns about the ‘public understanding of science’. John Marshall to JHW, Comments, inter-office correspondence, 3 May 1940, folder 113, box 13, Record Group 1, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, Rockefeller Archive Center. - 978-90-04-44377-8

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ence popularisation should be neither a tool for undermining capitalism nor a crude defence of the status quo, but an instrument for achieving consensus around the need for making governance more efficient and scientific through controlled social reform. The Rockefeller Foundation’s interest in science popularisation can thus be seen as an attempt at social control in relation to the contemporary construction of a new ‘Science of Man’. If the unruly masses could get to see science through the lens of the new middlemen’s subtler and more balanced popularisation of its values and method, the application of the Foundation’s biopolitical programme might find fewer obstacles in its advance towards achieving social stability. Even if they sharply differed in terminology and political goals, both Gramsci and the officers of the Rockefeller Foundation were acutely aware of the crucial political role of culture and intellectuals in maintaining, subverting or reforming the dominant social order. It is not only the historian looking retrospectively through Gramscian lenses, but also the historical actors themselves, who conceived of science popularisation in explicitly political terms as cultural hegemony.

Acknowledgements I am very grateful to Tom Rosenbaum for his help, kindness and very insightful comments, and to Peter Kuznick for his support and substantial feedback on an earlier version of this chapter (presented at the History Forum Seminar of the American University’s Department of History in October 2010). I am also grateful to Antonio Sánchez, Isabel Zilhão and the editors of this volume for their very useful comments and suggestions. This research received a grant-inaid from the Rockefeller Archive Center, whose staff I warmly thank, as well as funding from the Programa de Formación del Profesorado Universitario (FPU) of the Spanish Ministry of Education (AP2007-01538), the Portuguese Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (UID/HIS/00286/2013), the AGAUR of the Generalitat de Catalunya (2017 SGR 1138) and the Serra Húnter Programme.

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chapter 13

Why Hegemony Was Not Born in the Factory: Twentieth-Century Sciences of Labour from a Gramscian Angle Alina-Sandra Cucu

1

Hegemony Against the ‘Dictatorship of the Proletariat’

My contribution to this volume employs a Gramscian perspective to discuss the emergence of a scientific field around labour in the twentieth century, with a further focus on its role in the project of socialist industrialisation in East-Central Europe. The starting point of this chapter is the obsessive drive for rationality and efficiency in production that has connected industrial sociologists, experimental psychologists, time and motion analysts, nutritionists, physiotherapists and educational experts across historical configurations since the end of the nineteenth century. I follow the threads that unite an otherwise fragmented story of several scientific fields in their fundamental entanglement with a form of industrial modernity centred around mass production, wage labour and capital accumulation. This story cannot be understood without a closer look at the broader processes underpinning shifting ideas about the valuation of labour, both economically, and in a moral sense of ‘establishing worth’.1 A history of labour as a scientific object is at the same time a history of the transformation of work – understood as human mastery of nature, self-perfection or craft – into labour – taken as a category of political economy that both allows for and requires politics of quantification. It was in this latter sense that it captured Gramsci’s imagination. The scientific field articulated around labour in Europe and in the United States throughout the twentieth century had a profoundly contradictory character. On the one hand, sciences of labour were predicated explicitly upon the necessity to depoliticise the shopfloor and economic life as a whole. They were supposed to function as anti-politics machines, to extinguish working-

1 Boltanski and Thévenot 2006.

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class radicalism, and to respond to trade unions’ discontent by replacing the language of class with a seemingly neutral scientific language of ‘efficiency’. On the other hand, their field of action has always been deeply political and highly contested. Against the naïve narrative of a linear rationalisation of the production process, the making of labour into a scientific object has rather been the favourite battlefield for competing logics of capital accumulation, working-class interests, nation-building, bureaucratisation, gender emancipation, and racial and genetic improvement. All these logics shaped the ways in which the worker became an object of the scientific gaze and had a longlasting impact on the two central traditions of thought that are the focus of this chapter: scientific management and the European science of work.2 From this perspective, making people work more, faster and better without risking the political organisation of their disquiet was at the core of hegemonic struggles, both in capitalism and in state socialism. When Gramsci wrote ‘Americanism and Fordism’, the profound transformations of the factory system in the United States were central to leftist debates after World War I. In the Quaderni, Gramsci addressed two interrelated problems: first, the way in which new methods of organising the production process were structuring the social as a whole, including regulation of alcohol consumption, gender norms and sexuality; second, the way in which the restructuring of productive forces and relations could constitute necessary and sufficient historical conditions for revolutionary action. Gramsci saw clearly that with the economic crises of the interwar period, the bourgeoisie recognised the potential that Taylorism and Fordism held for a ‘passive revolution’.3 Gramsci’s widely used concept is taken here as a reference to those concrete historical configurations in which social relations that make the accumulation of capital possible are constituted, reproduced, and sometimes expanded within a dialectic of ‘revolution/restoration’ in which the very possibility of revolution is simultaneously enacted and dispelled.4 Gramsci explicitly linked the advent of fascism to this acute awareness by the capitalist class that capitalism must be rearticulated from within. The question was whether these transformations in the realm of production could be instrumentalised for a different kind of revolutionary change. Following Marx, Gramsci envisioned the end point of communist revolutionary change as the his-

2 Science du travail in France and in Belgium, Arbeitwissenschaft in Germany, scienze del lavoro in Italy, or ciencia de trabajo in Spain. 3 Gramsci 1992 [1971]. 4 See also Morton 2007.

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torical possibility of an unmediated world, a world liberated from the tyranny of commodities, a world in which politics was rooted directly in production. He understood Fordism as a possible first step towards that world and saw American industrialism as the first historical embodiment of the possibility that hegemony would be rooted in the factory. This was precisely the possibility that Soviet economic planning and its scientific underpinning were going to bring to scale. In socialist East-Central Europe, the adoption of the Soviet version of Taylorist methods for a hyper-rationalisation of the production process, the reliance of central planning on the Fordist model of social reproduction, and the constellation of scientific inquiries opened by their embrace were going to produce a specific science/politics nexus. These transformations would connect productive practices to patterns of redistribution and consumption, and would integrate them into specific processes of subjectification of a new type of worker. In Gramscian terms, they were essential for the emergence of a new historic bloc, as they produced not only ways of making the workers perform more, faster and better, but also a practical concern with the instruments required for manufacturing their consent and a shifting interplay of social alliances. Within this broader frame, my contribution to this volume focuses on the fate of labour as a scientific object in socialist Romania. While the exploration expands inward and outward both spatially and temporally in order to capture a broader historical process playing out in the twentieth century in Western Europe and in the Soviet Union, a more in-depth analysis is dedicated to the participation of the Romanian factories, technical offices and universities in the implementation of the first five-year plan (1951–55). The transfer of the Stalinist rearticulation of production relations to post-war East-Central Europe was a moment of intense and violent transformation, which makes this snapshot in history particularly revealing for the relationship between science, production and politics. Moreover, it is a period in which the contradictions of the new societal project were laid bare, witnesses to the hegemonic crisis in which state socialism was born and in which it was going to function for decades to come. In this chapter, I argue that socialist hegemony was constantly threatened by a crisis of authority that was rooted directly in production. Since socialist factories represented the productive core of the state, from being a problem of specific factory regimes, the impossibility of controlling labour became a directly political issue, one that reveals not only the factory managers’ lack of authority, but also the fragility of the state itself. I further argue that this crisis of authority was central to additional developments in the field of sci-

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entific knowledge around work and productivity, which reverberated throughout the socialist period.5 It is telling that Gramsci starts his discussion about ‘State and Civil Society’ in the Prison Notebooks precisely with ‘the crisis of the ruling class’s hegemony’.6 It reflects his awareness that hegemony, as a process of routinising and institutionalising a set of mechanisms, tools and alliances for manufacturing consent in order to dominate a class society, is always a struggle. It is always fragile and problematic, pertaining to the practical realm as much as to the mechanisms through which dominant meanings are being established. The basic assumption here is that the Soviet Union and the post-war socialist countries in East-Central Europe were class societies.7 The underlying class foundation of state socialism is often obscured in the literature by the fact that the nationalisation of the means of production and the collectivisation of land produced a radical change in property relations. One term of the capitalist political economy was eliminated, leaving the state to assume the role of creator and manager of social production processes, with the explicit aim of ‘socialist accumulation’. While constituting new bonds between people and between people and things, the same historical shift shaped the relationship between labour and the state, which was going to include the field of forces emerging directly around mechanisms of surplus extraction.8 Thus, in this chapter, I am talking about socialist societies as class societies neither because inequalities persisted, nor because working-class ‘interests’ and ‘consciousness’ can be analytically isolated and empirically traced. They were class societies simply because the social continued to be structured by processes of capital accumulation in which the state apparatuses replaced the role held by the bourgeoisie in Western industrialisation. Understanding the notion of history upon which the Bolshevik project and its post-war Eastern European transpositions were founded is crucial here. As earlier Marxist debates convincingly showed, the Bolshevik endeavour was centred around an ‘economistic view of production and a voluntaristic view of politics’9 and it represented the living embodiment of the theory of productive forces that dominated leftist debates after the Second International. Drawing 5 6 7 8

For a historical perspective on authority in industry, see Jacoby 1991 and Cohen 2013. Gramsci 1992 [1971]. I developed this idea at length elsewhere. See Cucu 2019. My understanding of class is obviously rooted in a Thompsonian intellectual tradition, which has also infused the anthropology of labour and class during recent decades. Apart from E.P. Thompson’s still unmatched The Making of the English Working Class, see Kalb and Tak 2005, and the more recent Carrier and Kalb 2015. 9 Corrigan, Ramsey, and Sayer 1978, p. 43.

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on arguments rooted in a pernicious reading of Marx’s original texts, this theory connected the very possibility of revolutionary transformation to capitalist industrial modernisation, and produced a reductionist political imaginary, which was built around the artificial fracture between base and superstructure. Theoretically, this meant consigning the political to the activity of the state’s institutions and reducing production to planning and technological progress. In a mechanical manner, higher productivity was supposed to lead both to a visible improvement in workers’ living standards and to a profound transformation of their historical consciousness. The most important consequence for our discussion here was a revolutionary imaginary that professed a narrow understanding of ‘politics’ that implied an apolitical (or pre-political) shopfloor on which the Party could act. The logical consequence was that the discursive field of post-war East-Central Europe was dominated by a rather feeble understanding of what class was, and of what it was supposed to do in a particular historical configuration. On the ground, though, this vision of history and its associated notion of ‘science’ conflicted with the ways in which people integrated the new constraints and opportunities of industrial employment in the everyday logic of their social reproduction.10 I am following here Raymond Williams’s reading of ‘hegemony’ as ‘practical consciousness’, ‘a saturation of the whole process of living – not only of political and economic activity, but of the whole substance of lived identities and relationships, to such a depth that the pressures and limits of what can ultimately be seen as a specific economic, political, and cultural system seem to most of us the pressures and limits of simple experiences and common sense’.11 It is fundamentally a classed experience, which produces a system of practices and expectations and obscures the visibility of both political and biographical alternatives. As this chapter will show, against what a ‘scientific organization of the production process’ or a scientific understanding of the worker’s body entailed, the obstacle to rooting socialist hegemony directly in production was precisely the intersection between the reproduction of workers’ livelihood and socialist accumulation. By no means exhaustive, the following sections of this chapter represent an attempt to synthetically portray how these transformations were played out in

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This reading of the socialist regimes goes first of all against an emic understanding of class in terms of an abstract struggle with a ‘class enemy’, which was fundamentally imagined as an empty signifier that could then refer to various social categories according to the momentary practicalities of the raison d’état or to the more fragmented interests of specific actors. Williams 1977, p. 110.

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the scientific realm, both in the capitalist world and in the Soviet context. The third section investigates the specific Weltanschauung underpinning the implementation of central economic planning in socialist Romania, focusing on the centrality of the factory in the scientific and explicitly political imaginary of the 1950s. The chapter concludes with an open-ended question related to the nature of labour as a scientific object and to the nature of socialist factories as scientific institutions.

2

Sciences of Labour between Expenditure of Energy and Industrial Peace

The transformation of labour into a scientific object in the first part of the twentieth century was a complex process, which constantly tested the boundaries of scientific discourse. The gradual adoption of scientific management from the US factories or the acceptance of the laboratory-centred European science of work prescriptions were shaped by the major ideologies of the twentieth century, be they modernist-technocratic, liberal-humanist or religiousredemptive,12 while the experimental conditions of the laboratory met dreams for human betterment, gender emancipation, social equality, nation-building and genetic purity. Both scientific management and the European science of work were key in the emergence of a productive-political-cultural bloc. First, under the broad umbrella of ‘efficiency’ and ‘rationality’, the drive for capital accumulation was increasingly linked to the necessity of reorganising production at larger scales and at higher levels of complexity. This reorganisation further required reliable means of calculating and anticipating the productive outcomes. Second, science was called to offer solutions to the crisis of industrial peace that became generalised after the First World War. As such, scientific management and the science of work were born in the midst of the debates around labour rights and were supposed to offer support against working-class radicalism. Although networks of knowledge, practices and scientists belonging to these two schools of thought often engaged in a productive dialogue, the two strands in the study of labour had different aims, operated with different models of personhood, used different methods and instruments, unfolded their inquiries in different environments, and carried very different political implications. Nevertheless, accompanying the transformation of work as a moral issue into

12

See Guillén 1994.

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labour as a category of political economy, both scientific management and the European science of work came with the promise of finding a purely technical solution to what Michelle Perrot has called the ‘crisis of factory discipline’ around the First World War.13 In Europe, the very possibility of thinking about labour from a scientific perspective goes back to the nineteenth century and to the ways in which the working body came to be understood as a union of matter and motion, a human motor, a creator of energy. Work itself came to be conceptualised as the transformation of this energy into matter.14 By 1900, laboratories devoted to experimental sciences focusing on the study of the ‘human motor’ had been established in Paris, Brussels, Turin, Berlin, Leipzig, all over the United States and in Japan. Since the transformation of energy into work was the core of this new scientific field, its topics of interest included bodily functions, corporal dynamics, and the speed and accuracy of muscle movements.15 Specialists in prosthetics massively joined the science of labour after the First World War, when wounded men returning from the front needed to be reintegrated into the labour market. Drawing on the idea of the efficient expenditure of energy, scientists provided biological considerations in the public debates around the work of women and children, professional illnesses, or risks and hazards on the shopfloor, all of them central to the emergence of insurance systems in Europe. In these debates, the medicalised perspective on workers’ bodies encountered a complex discursive field, where moralising sermons about work as a Christian virtue met inspiring public speeches about work as a form of citizenship and as a national duty. Physics and biology were brought forward as better instruments to understand the new reality behind wages, working hours, work norms and productivity figures. Studies of fatigue slowly replaced the religious pamphlets about workers’ ‘idleness’ and ‘resistance to work’. A new discipline – psycho-

13 14

15

Perrot 1979. For an in-depth exploration of the relationship between the European science of work, scientific management, and the evolution of labour relations in Europe, the reader can consult the wonderful books by Rabinbach 1992, and Kaplan and Koepp 1986. As a quick survey of two major journals, Journal of Labor Research (Japan) and Labor Studies Journal (United States) shows, the topics most covered in the interwar period and in the immediate postwar years were: nutrition and food consumption habits; work performance in relation to bodily functions, fatigue, night vision, aging or shift work; personality profiles of sailors, pilots or farmers; biological considerations on the legislation regarding the work of women and children; professional illnesses; risks and hazards on the shopfloor; the relationship between object design and work performance; time budgets; and workers’ living conditions.

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technics – tried to offer a scientific solution both to the issue of personnel selection and to various inefficiencies of the labour process through the generalised application of psychological testing in industry and trade. Notions like ‘attention span’, ‘focus’, ‘intelligence’, ‘reaction speed’, ‘memory’ or ‘personality’ became pervasive in the vocabulary of industrial relations. The other major strand in the study of labour was scientific management. Initiated by Frederick Taylor in the United States, scientific management represented a family of organisational ideologies and techniques of analysing the labour process for maximising efficiency and productivity directly on the shopfloor.16 Taylorism involved a wide range of scientific disciplines, including engineering, industrial psychology, ergonomics and physiology. Its varieties – like the Bedaux System in Britain, Fayol’s system in France or German industrial rationalisation – penetrated the walls of the American, French, Soviet or Japanese factories.17 The aim of scientific management was straightforward: the elimination of workers’ wasteful movements and soldiering. It relied on the fragmentation of the labour process into discrete tasks, which could be timed in order to identify the inefficient uses of a worker’s body. By strictly separating conception from execution and by transferring authority from foremen to managers and engineers, scientific management was disruptive for the old shopfloor hierarchies. Nevertheless, in the eyes of many capitalists and policymakers, the disruption was worth the risks. In Taylor’s vision, the transition to the piece-rate system and the increase in wages that would follow the increase in productivity were seen as sufficient foundation for a generalised behavioural transformation of the working class. The model of personhood with which Taylorism and its subsequent historical variations operated was a worker who was completely disembedded from his or her environment – in his famous terms, a ‘gorilla’ that the managers could train to always work more, faster and better. There was an assumption of flat, ahistorical rationality of all actors involved in the production process. It was the vision of a historic bloc in which social harmony would be the result of a willing cooperation between workers, managers and capitalists. It produced an understanding of shopfloor relations that to this day has rendered any questioning of capitalism problematic.

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17

For a detailed account of the emergence of Taylorism as a dominant management ideology and as a system of producing knowledge about the labour process, see Kanigel 1997 and Nelson 1992. See Nelson 1991.

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In its aims and intentions, Taylorism represented a tactic to push industrial modernisation forward but erase its class struggle component. Fordism functioned not as a simple extension of Taylorism to the level of everyday life but as a clear recognition of the fact that nothing happens solely on the shopfloor. The innovation of Fordism was to explicitly link the rationalisation of production to a model of social reproduction that involved cheaper products and higher wages, which would allow workers to achieve a rising level of consumption. An increasingly dominant model of corporate paternalism integrated visions about housing, education, regulation of sexuality, religion, and closely knit working-class communities, whose morality could be supervised and policed by the company’s men. As Gramsci acutely observed, by intentionally creating a historic bloc around the idea of a capitalist rational social order, Fordism attempted neither more nor less than a ‘passive revolution’, which was supposed to produce not only cheaper goods but also a specific kind of subject. Scientific management was subjected to harsh criticism by the unions and in Western European leftist circles for its tendency towards de-skilling, for the over-empowerment of management at the expense of the labourers, and most importantly for the fact that an increasing productivity would not be used to improve workers’ living standards but the share of capital.18 Its ‘scientific’ character was also challenged either at the level of management ideology, or at the level of concrete industrial practices and relations. At the beginning of the twentieth century, resistance against Taylorism was widespread. In the United States – Gramsci’s case study – all major trade unions staunchly contested the introduction of Taylorism in the factories. In the United Kingdom, Charles Bedaux, an eccentric entrepreneur who was a member of the Taylor Society, founded one of the first consultancies for efficiency in industry and administration.19 Nevertheless, scientific management was strongly opposed by traditional-humanist elites on intellectual grounds as diverse as those of Christian ethics or Fabian socialism. State-led rationalisation of production, with the unions’ reluctant consent, led to the adoption of scientific management in interwar France. However, massive strikes against 18

19

The classic overview of the concrete consequences of scientific management upon factory organisation in the twentieth century is Braverman 1998 [1974]. Braverman’s book became the standard reference for a whole generation of historians and sociologists who focused on how science and technology as ideological forces become at once part and parcel of capitalist hierarchies and their driving engines. This strand of scholarship convincingly showed how the reification of people that necessarily accompanies commodity production is practically realised within the work process itself. Bedaux Britain would constitute the foundation of ‘the big four’ consultancy firms that dominated the European market until the late 1960s.

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its implementation hit Renault in 1912–13. Moreover, although it was strongly advocated by the French engineers, who adhered almost without reservations to its scientific ethos, it was rejected by many employers, who felt they would lose control in the workplace to the managers. In Spain, the adoption of scientific management was not only delayed by backwardness, anti-modernist stances and a lack of trained specialists, but also opposed by the unions and Catholic involvement in social reform. After the end of the Civil War, Taylorist ideas were pushed ahead by a top-down industrialisation policy and by the advancement of engineering as a fundamental pillar of Francoist corporatist vision.20 Vertically integrated unions and specific regulations kept labour unrest at bay during the 1940s, but scientific management was coming under attack again in the 1950s and 1960s, when human relations organisational ideology emerged as a solution to the crisis of industrial relations. In Italy, Giovanni Agnelli, the head of FIAT, tried to use the idea of rationalisation as a foundation for a new social contract with the workers. His move was directed against the increasing militancy of Italian labour, which culminated in the occupation of the factories by the workers’ councils in 1920.21 The necessity of co-opting subaltern classes in the politics of the ruling classes, which stands at the foundation of Gramsci’s notion of ‘hegemony’, as well as at its limits, could hardly become more explicit than in Agnelli’s attempt to introduce a co-operative system of management and in its immediate rejection by the workers. In Germany, Taylorism had been initially criticised as ‘non-scientific’, ‘uncritical’ or ‘socialist’, especially when it came with Fordist-inspired extensions in the realm of social reproduction. However, after the First World War, scientific management techniques came to be adopted by virtually all major German industrial conglomerates – Bosch, AEG, Siemens, Auer Electric Company and Krupp. In several economic branches like the chemical, electromechanical, machine-building, automotive, and iron and steel industries, scientific management rapidly became the dominant ideology and brought in its trail a new scientific vocabulary and measurement techniques. The consent of the unions to the sweeping German rationalisation movement was ensured only by shel-

20

21

For a detailed account of the competition and mutual nourishing of the two management traditions – scientific management and human relations – in most of Europe and in the United States, the reader can consult Guillén’s 1994 synthetic book. For an analysis of the relationship between the idea of ‘national redemption’ and engineering in the Francoist societal project, see Camprubí 2014. See Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith’s General Introduction to Gramsci’s 1971 edition of the Prison Notebooks.

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tering them within a corporatist organisation of labour that was still centred on a hierarchical tradition of Handwerk and guaranteed the stability of industrial employment for most skilled workers.22 In ‘Americanism and Fordism’, Gramsci revealed his own fascination with the potential of American industrialism but questioned the very possibility of resolving labour conflicts within capitalist productive relations. Consequently, what Gramsci was really interested in was the progressive revolutionary potential of the rationalisation of production. His analysis was not singular, but emerged as part of an intense contemporary debate on the left in the context of the Second International, a period when the October Revolution and the economic and social fractures following World War I were perceived as certain signs of the imminent collapse of the capitalist mode of production. With the concept of ‘hegemony’, Gramsci attempted to grasp the relationship between the shopfloor and the social fabric in which it was embedded, the possibility of making this relationship part of the revolutionary tactics and strategy, and what role it played in the classical Marxist conundrum of the suitability of revolutionary action in societies where capitalism had not sufficiently matured.23 Most importantly for our discussion, the Soviet Union itself became a laboratory for experimenting with the historical possibility of state-directed capitalist development aimed at socialist construction and communism in the aftermath of the October Revolution. An analysis of 1920s’ Soviet industry reveals it as the field of struggle between different visions of what labour should achieve, and how, in the context of socialist construction. The planned harmonisation between the scientific organisation of production, productivity and labour discipline was at the core of these struggles.24 In the Soviet Union, the technical intelligentsia emerging through one of the most radical processes of social mobility in history was fundamentally linked to utopian visions of progress through technological advancement and hyperrationalisation. The revolutionary process provided this technical intelligentsia 22

23

24

See Guillén 1994, p. 121. According to him, ‘the proportion of skilled workers in total industrial employment remained roughly unaltered between 1900 and 1930 at 49 percent, in spite of the extensive implementation of scientific management and Fordism’. The concept of ‘hegemony’ was first used in relation to the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ by Lenin and Plekhanov, long before Gramsci made it into an analytical concept for deciphering the specificity of bourgeois power. As part of the Bolshevik debates, it refers to the problematic alliance between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat against Tsarist absolutism and to the necessity that the proletariat become the hegemonic force in that particular struggle. Lenin 1977 [1966]; see also Anderson 1976. Shearer 1991.

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with a ‘generational location’ in Mannheim’s sense, which further produced a collective ‘mode of thought and experience, and a characteristic type of historically relevant action’.25 Starting with Taylor himself, scientific management practitioners everywhere were positioned in a particular way in the technoscientific hierarchy. While the scientific field constituted around the European science of work brought together laboratory scientists – from nutritionists to physicists or psychologists – Taylorism promoted a different type of intellectual, whose practices and knowledge production instruments were embedded in factory life. More often than not, they were ‘self-made mechanical engineers impregnated by the so-called shopfloor culture’.26 To this, Soviet engineering would add the experience of the war economy and planning, militarised factories and scarcity of resources. The generational dimension should not be underestimated when analysing the relationship between the adoption of scientific management and the emergent dominance of engineering. The Bolshevik project was founded on the assumption that rationalisation of production could be extracted from its close relation with capitalism and placed in the hands of the state, ideally as the leader of a movement initiated by workers themselves. Once production is absorbed at the core of the state, the need to enforce factory discipline coincides with the need to ensure workers’ consent to the Bolshevik rule. In other words, production becomes the site of struggle for hegemony par excellence. The debates between different factions of the Bolshevik Party crystallised into three broad intellectual positions. The most famous line of thinking has been associated with Aleksei Gastev and the founding of the Central Institute of Labour in Moscow (Tsentralnyi Institut Truda), which came to be known as the ‘citadel of socialist Taylorism’. Gastev was the promoter of an extreme form of scientific management, which combined a religious admiration for Marx with an equal veneration of Henry Ford’s practical ideas. Based on his cult of the machine age (to which he composed poems in his youth), Gastev advocated the setting of all work norms on the basis of chronometry and the complete standardisation of workers’ movements. Economic centralisation was going to bring to scale Taylorist basic principles: the standardisation of both products and labour process, the fragmented analysis of job requirements, task simplification, speed-ups and various piecework schemes, including the differential pay rate that was central to European capitalist and socialist industrial development alike.

25 26

Mannheim 1952 [1923]. Guillén 1994, p. 15.

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The ethos of scientific discovery dominated the systematic observation activities on the shopfloor. Time-and-motion studies became part of the normal life of major industrial units, with managers, engineers and scientists moving around the workers and equipment. The sight of their stopwatches, motionpicture cameras and slide rules pushed enthusiastic communists and experienced skilled workers to work faster and pay more attention to the use of their bodies, while at the same time, it made others slow down in order to keep work norms more manageable. As a leftist reaction to Gastev’s work, Platon Kerzhentsev founded the ‘Time League’, an organisation based on the idea of spontaneous self-discipline and on workers’ enthusiasm for rationalising the production process by themselves. Placing the leadership of these initiatives under Komsomol, the Communist Party Youth,27 Kerzhentsev’s intent was to undercut the emerging power of the new techno-scientific elite and open a space for the direct control of the shopfloor by the workers. In the wake of the ‘Time League’, countless teams of young labourers engaged in a systematic attempt to attain the impossible: an endless process of eliminating any wasteful movement or deficient use of raw materials. But it was Stanislav Strumilin’s line of thinking that would be embraced by Stalin in the implementation of the first Five-Year Plan. Strumilin was both against the ‘enthusiasm’ of the ‘Time League’ and against Gastev’s Taylorism because they did not take into account the biological limitations of the ‘human machine’, its need for rest, leisure and replenishment. He argued that the ‘rationalisation of leisure’ was as important for productivity as the ‘scientific organisation of labour’. His vision relied both on the European science of work and its emphasis on successful energy transformation, and on a more sociological line of thinking that paid equal attention to the reproduction of labour and can be traced back to Marx’s concept of ‘living labour’. What was really important in Strumilin’s understanding of the labour process was the fact that workers’ ‘speed’, ‘accuracy’ or ‘force’ were not taken for granted as natural characteristics. Rather, they possessed a certain elasticity, so they could be learned, improved and expanded. On the basis of Strumilin’s ideas, planning could be oriented towards future levels of productivity, without simply taking the present possibilities as a fixed reference point. Thus, the foundation of socialist planning became the institutionalisation of what Stephen Hanson calls ‘planned heroism’, the idea that rational linear 27

Psychotechnics, through its chief proponent, Isaak Spielrein, had a problematic relation with both of them. It would be banned in the mid-1930s, during the period of the Stalinist Great Purges.

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time can ultimately be transcended altogether through the same practices that Taylorism entailed, only elevated to a new level by the workers themselves.28 The five-year plan achieved in four years or the one-year plan achieved in 11 months became expressions of compressing time through a combination of draconian time discipline and workers’ desire to subject themselves to this discipline, under the ontological assumption that the ‘normal’ standard of human capabilities is historically set and can be infinitely expanded towards the future. Since, through redistribution, an increase in productivity would ultimately benefit society as a whole, the rationalisation of production could be understood as a neutral historical force, which could be harnessed for revolutionary aims. This was made clear by Lenin as early as 1919, when he showed his support for the adoption of an individual remuneration system, and strongly argued that it could be disconnected from capitalist rationales and used for revolutionary advancement. Nevertheless, there was a clear tension between the individual labourer, who was ultimately the final unit of planning, and the ‘collective worker’ as the bearer of a new historical possibility. Planning was seen as the solution for this contradiction. It was going to bring the scientific organisation of work promoted by Gastev and Strumilin to scale, transforming the whole economy into the equivalent of a Fordist factory, with tasks clearly segmented between enterprises and industrial branches. The next section will focus on the Romanian sciences of labour and on how they were impacted by the implementation of planning after the Second World War.

3

From Nation-Building to Hidden Reserves of Productivity

The rationalisation movement that swept the world of labour in the first part of the twentieth century was echoed by parallel developments in interwar Romania. Like elsewhere, the sciences of labour were shaped by the same need to safeguard a fragile industrial peace by depoliticising the shopfloor, and by a similar tension concerning the location of this type of science: the laboratory or the shopfloor. They were pushed forward by two contradictory forces: on the one hand, a top-down industrialisation dominated by an ethos of ‘Romanianisation’; on the other hand, the increasing domination of foreign capital over the Romanian economy, channelled through the presence of multinational corporations on the Romanian territory.

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Hanson 1997.

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The Romanian interbellum period was marked by the fragility of the new state and by its inability to articulate a coherent political project out of the fundamentally different trajectories of its main provinces.29 In the 1920s, Greater Romania had to integrate several unevenly developed territories, industries and bureaucracies, and a population with an alarming proportion of ethnic minorities, who were more educated, more skilled and more ‘modern’ than the Romanian majority. This is why the labour question in Romania could never be separated from processes of nation-building and state formation. Thus, the idea of rationalising economic life in its entirety was a direct response to three entangled issues: the problematic incorporation of markets, industries and ethnic minorities that came with the territorial gains of the country in the aftermath of the First World War; the social and economic consequences of the Great Depression; and the increasing politicisation of the shopfloor as a reverberation of the October Revolution. Before World War I, the Old Kingdom was a high immigration country where representatives of the Ministry of Labour complained that ‘things went so far with using foreign labourers that the popular language was changed and people used to say “German” instead of “mechanic”, “German woman” instead of “governess”, “Serbian” or “Bulgarian” instead of gardener, and “Hungarian” instead of “servant”’.30 To prevent unemployment and to solve the problem of the allocation of labour in a more efficient manner, a law for the organisation of labour placement was issued in 1921, followed by the founding of the ‘Placement Offices’ in 1922. Again, the measure had to do as much with industrial employment as with the national problem and with the effort to form a Romanian workforce in the cities. Besides the heated debates around the ‘Jewish problem’ – a broad field of debates concerning the Jewish population’s access to Romanian citizenship, the struggles of creating a Romanian industry were doubled by the dominance of the trades engaged in by the newly added Hungarian and German minorities in Transylvania and Bukovina. Although ethnic quotas for factory personnel and apprenticeships were slowly generalised in the provinces, factory owners managed to go around these legal provisions by employing many unskilled Romanian workers and keeping the skilled and better-paid positions for the Hungarians, Germans and Jewish ones. This solution only reinforced historically produced hierarchies and sharpened ethnic conflict by extending it into the industrial realm.31 Vocational education was also a rather limited success 29 30 31

Livezeanu 1995; Case 2009. Ministry of Labour 1940, p. 197. In 1934, the state officials tried to counteract the managers’ actions, by imposing a new

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of the Romanianisation of the labour market. For a while, ethnic quotas did indeed encourage the Romanian peasants to send their children to town to learn a craft and kept state officials’ hopes for a ‘truly’ Romanian workforce alive. Nevertheless, before the Second World War, the figures for apprenticeship were still looking grim for the Romanian nationalists. This wave of policies promoting the ‘Romanianness’ of the labour force accompanied the national liberal ideas of fiscal protectionism and ‘nostrification’ – the encouragement of industry founded by Romanian citizens – that constituted the backbone of the interwar top-down industrialisation project.32 However, the politics of nostrification were weak in the face of the crippling consequences of the First World War and the hunger for foreign capital produced by the reconstruction effort and by the fluctuations of the national currency. American, British and French corporations penetrated and ended up dominating various economic sectors, from oil production to communication networks, railways and banking. Part of an export-oriented, peripheral economy, many emerging industrial branches came to rely on Western expertise. This expertise included the ethos of scientific management, as well as a strong preference for employing the US-led statistical advancements of the time. Scientific management made its way into the Romanian factories just before the First World War,33 when courses in industrial organisation were also introduced for the first time at the higher education level. After the war, it received a new impetus through the founding of the Romanian Institute for the Scientific Organisation of Labour by an interdisciplinary team of scientists – economists, sociologists and psychiatrists. The Institute published its own Bulletin and provided a space for systematic collaboration between scientists and transnational capital through the largest manufacturing and mining companies. The members of the Romanian Institute for the Scientific Organisation of Labour were part of a national intellectual elite whose generational scientific ethos was to be fundamentally linked to the post-unification processes of nation-building and state formation. The aspirations of the cultured bourgeoisie were moulded within the crucible of a particular historical mission, the mission of realising the vision of Greater Romania as an organic harmonisation of market interests, central and local bureaucracies, and social well-being. Under the motto ‘national development without social conflicts’, the Romanian

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quota of 80 percent Romanians in every category of industrial and commercial employment, Tașcă 1940. Turnock 1986. According to some sources, in a cotton weaving factory in Pitești, in the southern part of Romania.

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elites were in search of a scientific vision that could link nation-building to the labour question and match the necessities of the state administration to the educational system. Applied psychology – or psychotechnics – was the main answer to this search. The principal aim of Romanian psychotechnics was a rational allocation of manpower and an effective solution to the issue of personnel selection. Several books focusing on the analysis of technical aptitudes and their relationship to personnel selection appeared in that period, among them Florian ȘtefănescuGoangă’s Selecțiunea capacităților și orientarea profesională (The selection of capacities and professional orientation) (1929), Liviu Rusu’s Aptitudinea tehnică și inteligența practică (Technical aptitudes and practical intelligence) (1931), and Nicolae Mărgineanu’s Psihotehnica (Psychotechnics) (1943). The end of the 1930s also saw the publication of several journals dedicated to applied psychology: Jurnal de psihotehnică (The psychotechnics journal) (1937) and Revista de psihologie teoretică si aplicată (The journal of theoretical and applied psychology) (1938). The field of Romanian applied psychology was heavily influenced by the German rationalisation experience, which was seen as the most efficient way to fight backwardness and chronic underdevelopment. The founder of the first psychotechnical institutes in Cluj and in Bucharest – Florian ȘtefănescuGoangă – was educated in Leipzig under the guidance of Wilhelm Wundt, one of the founding fathers of psychology as a discipline, who also had a deep interest in physics, physiology and philosophy. Moreover, Ștefănescu-Goangă was a state secretary in the Ministry of Public Education, a status that allowed him to introduce the psychological charts in schools, to promote psychological testing in public administration, and to organise the first industrial psychological office at the Railways Company.34 Personnel selection, training and testing were intrinsically linked to the idea of a general economic plan, with specifications regarding the regional division of labour and the needs of the bureaucracy. With the advent of fascistic movements and ideologies, this programmewould find its extreme expression in the emergence of a corporatist vision of the Romanian future, subjected to the rule of a single party that would engineer a way out of the backwardness assumed to be inherent to the structure of the interwar capitalist world economy. The aim of this form of social engineering was an extreme efficiency, a total elimination of waste, and a complete domination of the country’s resources by bureaucratic rationality.35 34 35

Cîrjan 2014. The top-down, technocratic approach to industrial development and education culmin-

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For the state bureaucracy as well as for the emerging industry, a scientific understanding of the ‘best way’ to develop and to function on a daily basis became an important dimension of the Romanian version of a ‘passive revolution’. The explicit need for the sciences of labour to function as a guarantor of industrial and social peace was met by a line of thinking associated with a particular type of intellectual biography, one that directly connected the Romanian laboratories and shopfloors to American universities through the Rockefeller Foundation fellowships. Consequently, a second generation of Romanian experimental psychologists would develop a harsh critique of Florian Ștefănescu-Goangă’s school, attacking the possibility of translating the laboratory results of its studies into coherent shopfloor politics. They appealed to the American quantitative tradition, centred at the time on the statistical analyses of individual psychological aptitudes through the administration of paperbased tests.36 For the state, paper-based tests were a cheap, easy-to-standardise material infrastructure that allowed better coordination between the educational system and the economy by ‘providing a common system of reference’ for every individual’s educational and professional trajectory. They were explicitly seen as the expression of a ‘natural’ meritocratic order, and as an instrument for enabling social mobility as an alternative to radical political change, especially for the ethnic Romanians. Statistical techniques like correlation models and factor analysis carried with them the promise of easy generalisation, of independence from context, and of the discovery of those latent aptitude and personality traits that could account for complex psychological configurations and for a holistic understanding of ‘the worker’ as a scientific object.37 Moreover, they could be associated with analyses of political attitudes in order to predict and prevent workers’ radicalism.38 The Romanian rationalisation debate conveyed a sense of historical urgency coupled with a clear Gerschenkronian awareness that in a backward coun-

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ated at the end of the 1930s with the proposal – never followed through – of a Romanian ‘University of Labour’, imagined as ‘the brain’ of a fully planned system of allocating labour to industry and offices according to measurable and quantifiable necessities of both the state and the market. Georgescu, quoted in Cîrjan 2014. Cîrjan 2014. The history of statistical techniques like correlation and regression notes their rootedness in genetic research associated with racial purity and biological improvement. Although correlation is often seen as preceding regression in a logical order of learning statistics, Karl Pearson developed his correlation coefficient by finding a mathematical expression for Francis Galton’s general regression idea as it appears in his research on heredity. See Stanton 2001. Cîrjan 2014.

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try, both industrial development and a general efficientisation of economic life must come from above.39 The obsession with the West was indissolubly linked to any notion of ‘independence’ the Romanian elites produced in the twentieth century, as gaining independence meant ‘making itself intelligible and recognisable to the West’40 and, of course, opening the gates to Western capital. This obsession further shaped the debate around the very nature of Romanian capitalism. The most important questions were: Who (read what class) was going to be the agent of change in Romania? and, Where was this change going to come from – from the West or from the Romanian elites themselves? But in the aftermath of the Second World War, change came from the East. Under the supervision of Soviet counsellors and Red Army officers, the Romanian Workers’ Party41 embarked on a convoluted effort to take over the economic and political life of the country.42 In 1947, the first exclusively communist government was installed. Its crucial tasks were the nationalisation of the means of production and of the financial system, the implementation of central economic planning, and the start of an intensive and rapid programme of industrialisation. With the implementation of the first five-year plan in 1951, the Stalinist ‘revolution’ in the organisation of production was going to take over the shopfloor and the technical universities of Eastern and Central Europe. The intensification of work was seen as the only possible response to a systemic shortage of capital and raw materials, as well as to the backward technology of Romanian industry. Consequently, the vision of socialism as a scientific endeavour was linked to politics of productivity very similar to the capitalist ones, both in form and in content. The scientific perspective on labour, production and productivity that shaped the beginnings of Romania’s socialist industrialisation can be linked to the twentieth-century trajectories of Taylorism and of the European science of labour, both through their German and American interwar intellectual connections, and through the sudden transfer of the Soviet interpretation of Taylorism into the Romanian factories. Time and motion studies became central to factory life. They were conducted by teams led by members of the technical club of the factory, economists, engineers and university professors, who were segmenting the production process into discrete tasks, registering the time cost

39 40 41 42

Gerschenkron 1962. Jowitt 1971, p. 21. The name assumed by the Romanian Communist Party between 1948 and 1965. The Red Army remained on the Romanian territory until 1958.

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per operation, and constructing detailed diagrams of workers’ bodily movements. Technical offices were organised in every factory while quality, speed of production and economy of raw materials became the focus of many production meetings. Unlike in the Soviet Union, during the first years of planning, scientific management was not part of the public discourse in Romania. Instead, the factories became acquainted with the ‘Soviet methods of organising production’ and the conference halls of the main industrial units often witnessed members of ARLUS43 – The Romanian Association for the Strengthening of the Relationship with the Soviet Union – lecturing the Romanian workers, engineers and managers about the best way of conducting the labour process, from the layout of the workplace to detailed bodily movements. Socialist competitions, factory newspapers, and the anecdotes, caricatures and moralising stories strategically placed at the ‘red corner’ of the factory propagated a cult of labour heroism and a bashing of slackers as workers who lacked ‘the advanced consciousness of the socialist proletariat’. The combination of Taylor-inspired models of efficiency and labour heroism – that we can trace to Strumilin’s ideas in the Soviet Union – was articulated through the fascinating notion of ‘hidden reserves of productivity’. ‘Hidden reserves of productivity’ was an expression of the state officials’ belief in the potentially infinite productive capacity of the factories. It directly connected workers’ performance to factory productivity and to economic growth. While, in theory, the possibility of a planned economy required that all three of these be anticipated, this anticipation was based on the explicit assumption that the productive capacity of a factory was unknown at the time of planning. At the beginning of every five-year plan, every worker, every factory, and the economy as a whole held reserves of productivity that were hidden not only from the planners, but also from the workers and managers. Although by and large the parameters of production were set in advance, they were the direct result of the idea that the shopfloor bore a yet-undiscovered potential for increasing quantity, speed, quality or efficiency through a better organisation of the production process. When trying to find practical solutions to the problems raised by the execution of the plan, managers, engineers and workers alike were embarking on a process of discovering the real capacity of their factories, of their own bodies and of their own creativity. Thus, the increase in the plan figures was dependent on an endless expansion and improvement of workers’ current practices.

43

Asociația Română pentru Strângerea Legăturilor cu Uniunea Sovietică.

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The ‘hidden reserves’ of the industrial units represented precisely this possibility of infinite growth of human capabilities. The process of their discovery was central for the implementation of planning.44 Ideally, it was supposed to function according to scientific methods and to produce scientifically sound results. Following in the footsteps of the Soviet experience, the model of personhood on which the science of labour was predicated and the disciplines that came to be able to claim ‘scientificity’ in the new context fundamentally shaped the language, the practices and the political imaginary around production. The way in which the worker was constructed as a research object was different in socialism. Taylor’s ‘trained gorilla’, for whom increased earnings would represent a sufficient incentive to work more, better and faster, was far from the ideal subject of socialist construction: a worker endowed with historical consciousness and political aspirations, willing to sacrifice his present well-being for a collective better future. At least, this was how the Party officials justified keeping workers’ real wages low and continuously increasing their workload. The ideal socialist worker was an innovator, a dynamic participant in the rationalisation of the production process. He was the embodiment of a historical figure that was actively undercutting factory hierarchies, the distance between conception and execution that Taylorism entailed, and the difference between workers’ embodied knowledge and scientific pursuits. Thus, the socialist workers were not simply going to be observed and analysed by teams of scientists. They were to become increasingly self-reflexive, to investigate their workplace with an eye to standards, models and best practices, and to subject their own bodies to systematic scrutiny. With techniques of Soviet inspiration like ‘self-photographing’, timing of their own movements and critical analysis of their own routines, they were to appropriate the scientific gaze of the Taylorist managers for their self-exploitation. The consequence of this model of personhood was that psychotechnics and applied psychology were immediately banned at the implementation stage under the assumption that individual psychological traits would simply become irrelevant with the building of a new society. All those qualities that interwar psychologists had been seeking in order to create an ideal Romanian workforce – attention, focus, capacity to solve problems – were no longer considered natural characteristics of the individual, but rather the outcomes of workers’ and managers’ efforts to rationalise the production process, and the results of their advanced political consciousness.

44

See also Cucu 2014.

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The employment biography replaced psychological testing everywhere. It accompanied the unprecedented wave of social mobility that followed the change of the regime and the first wave of socialist industrialisation and recorded individuals’ education, professional trajectory, army service during the war, previous and current political affiliations, any suspicious activity, marital status, date and place of birth, parents’ social class with details about their economic situation, and the properties held in the city and in the countryside by the workers themselves. The employment biographies also contained contacts for references at every step of the employee’s trajectory – the village, the school, the army and the previous addresses – and were accompanied by characterisations, both from the previous employer and from someone from the factory where the worker wanted to get employed. Unlike the tests used by psychotechnics up until nationalisation, employment biographies dealt not with individuals but with a dynamic, embedded, witness-based model of personhood, which needed a different process of discovering the best fitted man for the job. Most importantly, it was a model that directly connected workers’ biographies and professional trajectories with Romania’s convoluted history around the Second World War. All these trends lead to the observation that the 1950s’ notion of ‘hidden reserves of productivity’ was articulated as a political concept, coined around the workers’ willingness to always work more, faster and better. However, the politicisation of productivity and the expectation that the workers not only would consent to their exploitation but would also initiate it, intensify it and expand it through selfless acts of innovation, rationalisation and intensification of work was short-lived. As the second section of this chapter showed, the evolution of labour sciences in the twentieth century was a direct response to a generalised lack of factory discipline that accompanied industrialisation processes everywhere.45 Romania was no exception. Socialist industrialisation would proceed with a severe lack of capital and labour, with an out-of-control instability of the local workforce, and with an extremely poor control of workers’ unpunctuality and absenteeism. As in the Soviet Union, labour shortages, especially of skilled labour, were endemic in the new socialist economy, and the factories needed to constantly appeal to a labour force commuting daily or seasonally from neighbouring villages. Taming the rowdiness of this rural labour force and making

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The classic reference for the use of working time within the broader discussion about factory discipline in the Soviet Union is Filtzer 1996. See also Siegelbaum and Suny 1994.

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these workers more and more productive became the most important issue on the agenda of the new economic executives.46 And they failed. In shortage economies like the ones of East-Central Europe,47 factory indiscipline led to systematic breaks in production, which had broader implications than in capitalism. These implications were directly political. First, the impossibility of ensuring a continuous productive flow meant that authority over the workers was also fragmented and sporadic. Second, workers’ bodies could be employed in different activities and participate in different spaces which escaped state control. Third, in a society dominated by a simplistic adoption of the base/superstructure understanding of the world, the forces of production were unable to sustain the social edifice. And fourth, making workers not only consent but actively take part in their exploitation on the shopfloor proved to be an impossible challenge. In its relationship with Romanian labour, the socialist state itself emerged as a fragile state, a relation of production that incorporated the contradictions of functioning simultaneously as a creator and manager of social production processes and as a ‘workers’ state’. In Yves Cohen’s words, ‘the regime of industrial efficiency was a part of the political regime of state efficiency. In particular, managing industry meant managing the public sphere, as well as manufacturing goods’.48 Consequently, after the end of the first five-year plan, the discovery of the ‘hidden reserves’ of the industrial units would return to its status as a highly scientific enterprise, taken out of the realm of workers’ ‘advanced consciousness’ and firmly placed in the hands of managers and university professors. It would become an essential pillar in the rise of a Romanian ‘rule of experts’ and, once again, would entail a systematic depoliticisation of the shopfloor. Time and motion studies came to be conducted only by engineers and other members of the technical staff, while the distance between conception and execution was officially reinstated in Romanian factories. Self-photographing virtually vanished from the shopfloor. By the late 1950s, employment biographies had already disappeared from the factories, being replaced by simple mentions of workers’ education and skills. Aptitude testing made a spectacular return in the socialist planning of the labour force, together with the notion of ‘human capital’. It became central for the Romanian educational system at all levels, especially for technical education, state bureaucracy and the army.49 46 47 48 49

Cucu 2019. Kornai 2007 [1992]. Cohen 2004. Applied psychology would be banned only until 1952, when the central laboratory of the Railways Company opened again, followed by six other regional laboratories, as part of the

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Psychotechnics became again central to the state logic. The same promise of harmony between the allocation of employment and the educational system on the basis of meritocracy dominated the 1960s as it did the interbellum years. But the object of this scientific endeavour was different both from the statistical individual of the interwar period, and from the post-war worker, with his ‘suspect’ biography and politicised network. Numerous studies of the workplace and professional monographs were the outcome of a new methodological approach: one that regarded the individual as embedded in her socio-professional context. Complex observations of individuals in their workplaces were conducted, including the investigation of the ways in which workers responded to various requests, to the intensification of work speed, or to specific changes in the layout of the shopfloor. Industrial sociology offices also emerged in the factories, focusing on the endemic fluctuation of the labour force and on the everyday life of the commuter, the central figure of Romania’s socialist industrialisation. Many of the interwar specialists were ‘recovered’ by the regime and became central to the implementation of testing in schools and universities. They would join efforts for the holistic study of the ‘industrial man’, both at his workplace and at home. Under their leadership, in 1974, the Romanian Academy advanced a proposal for the founding of ten interdisciplinary laboratories, with specialists in anthropometry, personnel psychology, engineering psychology, sociology, pedagogy and ethnopsychology. ‘Ștefan Gheorghiu’ Academy, an institute for the political training of the Party elite founded in the 1950s, was also deeply transformed by this technocratic movement. In 1972, the first generation of ‘leaders in production, trade and agriculture’ graduated from this institution. The graduates were factory directors, engineers and accountants working in the socialist factories, whose dissertations tackled concrete problems in production in their own industrial branches. The ‘Soviet methods of production’ were no longer part of the training of this new generation of economic executives. Instead, Western managers, engineers, psychologists and economists were called to share their theoretical and practical experience with the organisation of production in capitalist factories in France, Germany or the United States. The Romanian 1950s could be read as a particular form of industrialism, which promoted the plan as a synthesis of hyper-rationality with ‘fantastic’ elements50 that made little sense from a narrow market-oriented rationality

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Company policlinics in the main cities of the country. By 1956, all prospective employees of the Railways Company were subjected to a psychological exam. Nove 1989 [1969].

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perspective. The technocratic movement that marked the 1960s would be the dying breath of the combination of labour heroism with Taylorist principles that was specific to the transposition of the Bolshevik project in East-Central Europe. It would also end the hope of rooting socialist hegemony in production through manufacturing consent directly on the shopfloor. This historical failure opens the space for an assessment of the location of science in the struggle for socialist hegemony, which I will turn to in the concluding remarks of this chapter.

4

Concluding Remarks: Hegemony and the Location of Science

The twentieth-century biography of labour as a scientific object reveals the problematic character of each of the three terms. Neither ‘labour’, nor ‘object’, nor ‘science’ had the same meaning across time and space. The emergence of a scientific perspective around labour has not been a linear story of ‘rationalisation’ but rather a narrative of competing logics that marked industrialisation processes and shaped the institutionalisation of particular fields of knowledge and action across the globe. In this context, factories themselves can be understood as scientific institutions of a particular kind.51 They have no clear boundaries: the relationship between production and life, as well as the relationship between production and politics have always been crucial in defining what a science of labour is, what it should do, what language it should use, what object it should focus upon, and how much of a ‘science’ it is after all. Fields of knowledge and action have crystallised around the shopfloor only to see their core logics, assumptions and methods come under attack by complex shopfloor politics and by workers’ attempts to integrate the labour process in their own lives. The factory represented the contested terrain of various scientific imaginaries, which went from despising the messiness of the shopfloor to imbuing it with an exceptional transformative power, one that would simultaneously swallow productive time and historical time. And finally, as a unit of socialist planning, the factory was ultimately regarded as a perpetual mystery, a box of wonders with unseen and unforeseeable capacities for growth and improvement. Ideally, it participated in the estab51

I am using ‘institution’ here in the sense of a relational space within which fields of ideas and practices go through a process of ‘institutionalisation’, which involves the routinisation of certain ways of doing, as well as forms of appropriation (sometimes monopolisation) of knowledge and resources.

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lishment of an uninterrupted flow of goods, persons, materials and knowledge, with the plan for the national economy functioning as a scaled analogy of the Fordist enterprise, one that is able to bring together the realms of production and consumption in a coherent whole. The argument of my contribution to this volume was that in state socialism, the field of scientific knowledge around work and productivity was primarily structured by a systematic crisis of authority in industry, which was the direct result of being unable to exercise continuous control over workers’ bodies. As stated in the introduction, the role of labour sciences in the socialist hegemonic struggles can hardly be understood without unpacking their relationship with the workers’ own ways of integrating industrial employment in particular logics of social reproduction and without understanding the fragility of the socialist hegemony as a class issue. The success of the plan to bring factories together and subject them to a rational sequence of decisions and actions depended first of all on the creation of a new type of worker, socialised in a certain way, who was able to form a deep relationship with the machine and could become almost an extension of a technical function. From this angle, the worker ceased to be a datum and what was left was the process of her perpetual becoming. Building proletarians would have proceeded in a dialectical way, with Taylor’s ‘trained gorilla’ as a first dialectical moment, the embodiment of the Hegelian freedom of the void upon which the triumphant New Man would have been built as the negation of the negation. The next step, placed into the abstract temporal horizon of communism, would have entailed removing the mediation of all the intermediaries – class, the state, ideologies – and would have allowed hegemony to be born in the factory, where the social character of production would have finally come to be seen as it was: direct and immediate. However, this sketch of the evolution of labour as a scientific object illuminates from below the fact that Gramsci’s ‘hegemony’ is not simply a ‘worldview’ that is imposed in a top-down manner onto the subaltern classes, with the help of institutions and manipulative discursive fields. It is, rather, a fragile recognition of the moral leadership of a certain category in a given social order, the kind of leadership that is in turn required for maintaining a system of economic dominance.52 It is a practical and transformative force that rearticulates existing cultural tropes of the dominant as well as of the subaltern classes and holds the social together in such a way that at the limit, this economic dominance goes unquestioned. Thus, this chapter can also be read as an attempt to show

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See also Ramos 1982.

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how early socialist factories were not only the wombs of a new hegemony but also the sites of its daily contestation and sometimes even its clear negation. And the reason is indeed what Gramsci would have taught us: founding politics on the recognition of the immediately social character of production was an impossible target in a class society.

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part 6 Past and Future

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chapter 14

The Importance of Gramsci Today: The ‘New Lorians’ and the Biological Reduction of History Roger Cooter

Agustí Nieto-Galan’s invitation to revisit Antonio Gramsci presents me with an unusual challenge.1 I was, as Nieto-Galan notes, one of the few historians of science to ‘systematically deploy’ the ideas of Gramsci.2 That was in the 1970s, when the post-Althusserian ‘Gramscian moment’ was at its height,3 and when the study of modernity was almost universally within a sociological paradigm. In today’s post-social ‘age of fracture’ with the politics of ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ rendered anachronistic,4 Gramscianism seems like a fish out of water. What now can be the relevance of his critique of vulgar Marxism as a ‘form of arid mysticism’?5 In the ‘new left’ of the 1970s we saw it as applicable to an ossified and mystified historiography of science, and we readily teamed up Gramsci’s critical analysis of culture and society with that of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, which he appeared almost to have anticipated. Gramsci’s passion for the transformation of consciousness in the ‘creation of a new civilization’ was inspiring.6 For what then seemed spanking new – famously charted in E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (1963) – was the idea that people could be the makers of their own history, rather than remain puppets in a ‘mechanistic drama that unfolds according to unalterable natural laws’, as Gramsci had argued against Bukharin’s Historical Materialism

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Nieto-Galan 2011a. Cooter 1984, the book was the publication of my PhD thesis completed in 1978. Thomas 2013. Rodgers 2011. Quoted in Boggs 1976, p. 25. See also Gramsci 2011, in the ‘Introduction’ by Buttigieg, pp. 53–64. Cited in Merrington 1978, p. 163. According to Boggs (1976, p. 31), Gramsci was the first Marxist to insist upon the role of consciousness in shaping revolutionary change. However, Gramsci never really defined ‘consciousness’. He used it as a synonym for ‘mind’, as in his statement that ‘Man is above all else mind, consciousness – that is, he is a product of history, not nature’ (quoted in Boggs 1976, p. 59). His ‘problematic of consciousness’ was not about consciousness per se, but what he saw as the missing subjective element in/for socialist revolution. As with Marx’s ‘false consciousness’ or Lukács’s ‘class consciousness’ the adjective had priority over the noun.

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(1925) some forty years earlier.7 As ‘the working class made itself as much as it was made’, according to Thompson,8 so with Gramsci’s help should we. But now? After more than a generation of historical constructivism and literary deconstructivism it is hard not to feel that a revisit to Gramsci is a giant step backwards intellectually. Among other things, Gramsci’s understanding of power has not been just ‘diluted’,9 as Nieto-Galan insists; it has been transformed. For Gramscian scholars in the 1970s, if not exactly for Gramsci himself, power was construed around the trinity of exploitation, domination, and oppression. The Enlightenment ideal of change through human agency and free will was to be realised by the critical demystification of those features of power that blocked or concealed its reproduction. Rooted, ultimately, in economic organisation, power was largely perceived as external to the self: in structures, cultural systems, and historical knowledge.10 Gramsci’s ‘hopefulness’ and our own in the 1970s rested on these Enlightenment assumptions and understandings. But that hope evaporated with Foucault and the ascendance of poststructuralists or postmodernists.11 They insisted on tracking power not in structures, but in discourse, particularly around the self and the body. Power, Foucault showed, did not derive simply from social and political institutions, nor was it ‘always in a subordinate position relative to the economy’.12 Rather (in the course of the eighteenth century), power, Foucault argued, came to be located within the self through the innumerable systems that came into place to encourage people to self-regulate in the interest of preserving and extend7 8 9 10

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Gramsci 2011, ‘Introduction’ by Buttigieg, p. 57. Thompson 1991, p. 213, which was the book’s central message. Nieto-Galan 2011a, p. 455. This is not to say that Gramsci excluded the self in his analysis, only that, by comparison with later postmodernist thinking, it was not central to his thinking. Indeed, Gramsci believed that one needs history as a form of self-analysis. His treatment of common sense, for example, was at once a form of self-analysis and social criticism. His interiorisation of power challenged crude externalist notions of the ideology’s operation; violence, for Gramsci, is the external side of power, whereas persuasion is the internal. The main difference between Gramsci and Foucault may be said to be that Gramsci focused on the mental dimension to the neglect of the bodily or embodied. (My thanks to Pietro Omodeo for this qualification.) Throughout this chapter, I use ‘postmodern’ and ‘postmodernists’ as a shorthand for poststructuralist literary theorists, new historicists, and Foucauldians. Between the 1960s and 1990s, they effected the ‘literary’ and the ‘somatic’ turns, or the turn to ‘representations theory’, turns which are now under siege. I follow Forman (2010, p. 3) in distinguishing between ‘postmodernism’ as a poststructuralist hermeneutic movement among intellectuals, and ‘postmodernity’ as an epoch in which we all now live. Forman rightly points to the fallacy of thinking that the former is the cause of the latter. Foucault 1980, pp. 51, 57–8, 76, 89; Foucault 2008.

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ing their biological lives.13 In his later work on ‘biopower’, Foucault expanded on the differences between this specifically modern form of power, with all its complicated strategies, and an earlier ‘sovereign power’, which operated repressively over life.14 In the field of theoretics this was a major step forward, though hardly so from the perspective of the socialist rearguard who still anticipated fundamental social change through the demystification of power as they understood it. As interest in the nature of power shifted, largely through cultural studies of one literary sort or another, so too did all the concepts and categories for its understanding and analysis. Foundational categories, such as ‘nature’, ‘human nature’, ‘class’, ‘consciousness’, and ‘reason’ itself, were all shown to be historically contingent and subjective – ‘shaped not found’, neither timeless nor universal. Since among those made up essentialist categories was ‘the social’ that stood at the base of Gramsci’s notion of hegemony or ‘the organisation of consent’, it became hard to continue to share his appeal to it. His notion of ideological consent came to be viewed as sustained by underlying and inherently universalist assumptions about the nature of power and about what it was to be human. Also blighted, therefore, was Gramsci’s high held humanist faith in the capacity of humans to transform nature, society and themselves. By the late twentieth century, with the weight of the Holocaust made ever more burdensome,15 that Enlightenment faith in the capacity of humans became unsustainable.16 Postmodernists intellectualised its death (dismantling it as a constructed Enlightenment narrative) and inadvertently contributed to the degradation of humanness that Gramsci supported in his struggle against positivism and historical necessarianism. It is all the harder to feel the relevance of Gramsci today within a capitalism that has been transformed beyond all recognition, not only since Gramsci’s time, but in our own. In the West, Marx’s abstraction of ‘the capitalist mode of production’ is now more commonly built around commodity culture than the primacy of wage labour. Much non-wage labour is based on individual private ownership of, or stakeholding in, the means of production. Moreover, in a context in which, on the one hand, the economic rationality of capitalism has vastly expanded and, on the other, an unprecedented gulf has opened between

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Foucault 1980. For a lucid exposition of the transformation Foucault articulated, see During 1992, Chapter 2: ‘Medicine, Death, Realism’. See Cooter and Stein 2010. For a recent restatement of Foucault on biopower, see Cisney and Morar 2016. Novick 1999. Malik 2000, p. 7.

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the über-rich and the über-poor (between the Russian oligarchs and the tribal peasants of South Sudan, for instance), the proletariat is no longer the dominant ‘subaltern’ class, to use one of Gramsci’s most popularised key words. Trade unions have been forced out of business, privatisation is worshipped, and the manipulation of people to the purchase of goods, services, and ideas is perceived as ‘the very essence of the democratic process’ (to quote the protoneoliberal ‘father of spin’, the American nephew of Freud, Edward Bernays, in his 1947 essay entitled ‘The Engineering of Consent’).17 Many of the super-rich (celebrities, for example) gain their wealth from no labour at all, but by simply selling their fame to advertising companies.18 As capitalism has a new distinctiveness – across global economic states that have passed beyond all 1930s and 1970s recognition of themselves as civic – so, too, has science in relation to it, a subject that Gramsci analysed extensively. In some ways the succinct formulation by neo-Marxist historians of science in the 1970s, that ‘science is social relations’ (that is, that science mediates and mystifies the social relations of capitalism)19 now looks hugely oversophisticated because science has become so much more nakedly capitalistic as well as blatant in its political and economic service.20 Science still purports to be disinterested and value-free, but the context for the practice of this longexposed fiction is now on privatised university campuses and science parks that were barely imaginable in the 1970s.21 Research has been commercialised and corporatised with patents-for-profit ruling. Its funding now comes less from governments than private companies and charities with vested ideological interests in science-for-profit.22 Fierce is the competition for research funding, with the products of the research increasingly tailored solely to the generation of income. At the same time as the arts and humanities have been 17

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Bernays 1947. The article is a summary of his Crystallizing Public Opinion (1923) which, combining crowd psychology with psychoanalysis, was successfully targeted at governments and corporations. It was published a year after Walter Lippmann’s Public Opinion (1922) on which see Herman and Chomsky 1988. See Hammer and Champy 1993; and Liu 2004. Young 1977a. See Pestre 2003; Nowotny 2005; and Jasanoff 2004. The exposure of the fiction of objectivity is at least as old as Fleck 1935 (Fleck 1979). For the latest on ‘objectivity’ in scientific practice, see Daston and Galison 2007. In Britain, for instance, funding for biomedical research by the charity the Wellcome Trust has come to surpass that of the state and very much determines the latter’s agenda. It is thus entirely unsurprising that the last head of the Wellcome Trust, Mark Walport, should be elected the Government’s Chief Scientific Officer. It would be no less surprising if New Labour had appointed him to the post since, as Thatcher appreciated, New Labour was her greatest legacy.

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compelled to turn away from the production of knowledge to its pay-for circulation and consumption (the marketisation of public universities into profitmaking corporations, with the disparagement of academics along the way)23 science has become central to the commercialised commodification of knowledge (through techno-informatics on, for example, genes and brains).24 Thus, whereas in the 1970s we could speak of the organisation of consent to bourgeois ideology through the popularisation of science (which most scholars naively imagined as a passive process applied to a homogeneous audience)25 today, because scientific research is so expensive and differently constituted, public interest has first to be created in order to generate the massive venture capital necessary for its conduct. It is then sold back to publics26 – electronic and global – in terms of desirable products (most of which are utterly useless or, as knowledge products, soon out of date), with the forces of production being simply the exchange and laundering of money for the making more of it. Taking all this into account, it is not obvious why anyone should want to revisit Gramsci other than for reasons of nostalgia, or perhaps to fulfil a hankering after visionary life and living in our intellectually depoliticised and demoralised times. (Worse, it seems to me, is a revisit to Gramsci with a view only to a postmodern ‘multiplication of opinion’ on one or other textual ‘fragment’ of his Notebooks,27 or, alternatively, only to elaborate some post-Foucauldian scientistically conceived ‘complexity turn’).28 Everything has been radically transformed: the nature of what is to be analysed, its political formation, and the critical means to its analysis. So what now can be the relationship between Gramscian critical analysis (of scientised capitalist culture in particular) and socio-political action, or for exploring – more importantly enticing – the social and political efficacy of intellectuals in counter-hegemonic roles (whether or

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Nussbaum 2010. On the transformation of universities into centres of knowledge consumption, rather than knowledge production and, through that, the accumulation of capital, see also Cusset 2008, p. 41 ff.; Power 1997; and Cooter with Stein 2013, pp. 31–40. See Rose and Rose 2013, p. 11 ff. Cf. Cooter and Pumphrey 1994. For a self-critique of this position, see Cooter and Stein 2007. Warner 2005. E.g. Morton 2012. Cf. Thomas 2013 on the non-fragmentary nature of the Notebooks. Urry 2005, cited in Kreps (ed.) 2015, p. 5. The ‘complexity turn’ derives from recent developments within physics, biology, mathematics, ecology, chemistry, and economics, from the revival of neo-vitalism in social thought, and from the emergence of a more general ‘complex structure of feeling’ that challenges some everyday notions of social order. It further contributes, as I argue below, to the deliberate melting of the divide between the natural and social sciences, regarding both as characterised by ‘complexity’. Urry 2005, p. 1.

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not as Gramscian ‘purveyors of consciousness’)?29 There is, to say the least, considerable difficulty in endeavouring to act as Gramscian ‘scholars and citizens’, to take up Nieto-Galan’s suggestion. Yet, I wish to argue that the need to invoke Gramsci has never been greater and the time for it never more opportune. The urgency stems not from the unifying needs proposed by some Gramscian political theorists,30 nor from the interest of ‘neo-Gramscians’ in international relations.31 Rather, it emerges from what these and other scholars have yet to appreciate: the increasingly hegemonic role of evolutionary biology and psychology within critical thinking in the humanities – in art, literature, anthropology, human geography, cultural studies and, above all, in academic general history writing. The neo-Darwinist purveyors of this are today’s ‘organic intellectuals’ struggling like those in the past to conquer and assimilate ‘traditional intellectuals’. Although not aware of their ‘efficacious’ function, they are, for all intents and purposes, what Gramsci referred to as the dominant ideology’s ‘“deputies”, exercising the subaltern functions of social hegemony and political government’.32 Among historians, those inclined to the bio-evolutionary paradigm are growing in number and influence. Witness, for example, ‘History Meets Biology’, a recent roundtable discussion in the world’s most prestigious history journal, the American Historical Review.33 Other, mindlessly reliant on the paradigm (as, for instance, among many of those pursuing the fashionable ‘history of emotions’) have never been more prevalent.34 If only because academic history writing remains a powerful tool to explain and understand the culture in which it is produced, such undertakings need to be taken seriously – more seriously, indeed, than Gramsci

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Femia 1975, pp. 38–9. Gramsci himself never deployed the term ‘counter-hegemony’. In the manner of Laclau and Mouffe 1985. The followers of Robert W. Cox (1981; 1983). Gramsci 1971, p. 87. Smail et al. 2014. The history of emotions, when not explicitly drawing on neuroscience (e.g. Reddy 2001; and Konner 2010) and, therefore, in effect scientising phenomenology (the old study of the appearance of things in structures of experience and consciousness), frequently relies on ‘affect theory’, which, in turn, draws on the neurosciences to make claims about human cognition and identity. A major theoretician of affect theory, Nigel Thrift (Thrift 2008) defines affect theory as denoting an approach that attempts to capture the ‘onflow’ of everyday life ‘by attending to the biological and the precognitive rather than to consciousness’ (my italics), quoted, tellingly, by one of the leading British postmodern historians who promoted the death of social history, Patrick Joyce (Joyce 2010, p. 225). For critiques of affect theory from the perspective of its dependence on (often out-of-date) neuroscience, see Leys 2011 (especially p. 440); Papoulias and Callard 2010; and Korf 2008. On the fashion for the ‘emotional turn’ (uncritically explored), see Plamper 2015.

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himself ever did in denouncing the would-be organic intellectuals of his time who indulged in biological determinism to construct a present and a future based, not on the role of historical consciousness, but on evolutionary biology. Gramsci referred to such persons as ‘Lorians’ (so called after the illustrious, but whacky, Italian professor of political economics, Achille Loria [1857–1943]) who contrived evolutionary models of social change).35 Gramsci castigated the Lorians for their opportunism, perverse thinking, intellectual irresponsibility, careless scholarship and, above all, for their putatively progressive but actually crude and politically regressive positivist use of science.36 The ‘New Lorians’ in the humanities and in history writing may be less shoddy in their scholarship, but they are no less relentless in their faith in ‘scientific progress’ and through that perform, ultimately, in the same politically irresponsible biological reductive ways as the original Lorians. Ignorant of, or wilfully overlooking, the enormous historiography and epistemology of the natural sciences written by sociologists, anthropologists, and historians of science since the 1970s, they appeal to natural knowledge positivistically, albeit always with an ‘openmindedness’ similar to that puffed by science popularisers.37 They seem not to have heard of the ‘science wars’ waged in the 1990s by the populist defenders of 35

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See Gramsci 2011, Buttigieg’s ‘Introduction’, vol. 1, pp. 43–5, 49–53. Gramsci, who devoted a whole section of his Notebooks to ‘Lorianismo’, regarded Loria as representative of ‘a general cultural reality that has acquired “swollen proportions” in a field of “sociology”’: Gramsci 2011, vol. 1, p. 119. References to Loria, the Lorians and ‘Lorianism’ are peppered throughout the Notebooks. In particular, Gramsci sought to expose and undo the link between positivism and allegedly progressive politics (which could include that of socialists). For example, he criticises the reductionist psychology of the arch ‘Lorian’ Cesare Lombroso and his followers for its lack of comprehension of a politics from below: ‘this was the custom of that time [Lombroso’s]: instead of studying the origins of a collective event, and the reasons of its dissemination, of its being collective, one isolated the protagonist and limited oneself to produce the pathological biography, too often referring to reasons that either are not ascertained or could be interpreted in a different manner: For a social elite, the elements of the subaltern groups always display something barbaric or pathologic’. Gramsci, Notebook 25, Gerratana edition, Chapter 1, p. 2279. My thanks to Pietro Omodeo for this reference. Lynn Hunt’s contribution to the AHR roundtable on ‘History Meets Biology’ (Hunt 2014, p. 1576) is typical in submitting at the outset that ‘[d]espite many reasons for caution, an ongoing dialogue with neuroscience offers the prospect of new approaches to such perennially vexed issues as agency, experience, action, and identity. Neuroscience does not provide a handy model that historians can simply apply to their research. It functions more like psychoanalysis once did (and still does for some); as a field, it poses important questions and opens up new approaches to the mind, the self, and human behavior’. Forgotten in this liberal aspiration for a ‘dialogue’ with neuroscientists is that the latter have already set the agenda – it is a ‘dialogue’ only on the terms of neurobiologists. On the rhetoric of science popularisers, see the example provided by Pinker quoted below.

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scientific realism (facticity) against the relativist (social constructivist) incursions of historians, sociologists, and philosophers38 – or having heard of them, choose to bury their heads in the sands of a science-like taken-for-granted and would-be value-free historical empiricism. In their efforts to use neuroscience and suchlike in order ‘to deepen their understanding of the history of emotions and of cultural practices’,39 they evince little understanding of scientific ‘facts’ as always a priori bleached by the ideologies and the normative and epistemic virtues of the scientists who produce them. Thus they only further popularise notions of scientific ‘objectivity’, unaware that among the practitioners of the natural sciences themselves this old-fashioned ideal has long been superseded.40 Nor do they demonstrate any understanding of the disputed and provisional nature of natural knowledge production. In their efforts to ‘deepen’ or ‘thicken’ history they simply transport glossed over (and often out-of-date) scientific knowledge back into the past. Although only a few of the New Lorians in history writing draw directly on evolutionary biology and cognitive science,41 all of them knowingly or unknowingly do so indirectly by taking their cue from the contemporary evolutionary modelled ‘life sciences’. It is into this that the social sciences have been incorporated (or co-opted) over the last few years.42 One of the effects of this has been a return to a more positivist regard of science even among those formerly involved in its critical analysis.43 In turn, critical analysis itself has moved into simply ethnographic description – albeit, with often telling insights on the way the world is now shaped (not least by bio-technology), justified (not least by bioethics) and understood (not least by neurobiology and ‘neuroeconomics’).44 To be properly critical of science nowadays – of neuroscience in particular – is to be branded simply its enemy and spurned in the same associative bad breath as the old ‘heresy’ of Marxism.45 Instead, one must now share the fulsome rhetoric of the apologists of neurobiology who typically seek rationalisations of

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On the science wars, see Parsons 2003; Sardar 2000; Jardine and Frasca-Spada 1997; Ross 1996; and Labinger and Collins 2001. Smail et al. 2014, p. 1493. Daston and Galison 2007. Most prominently, Hunt 2014; Monica Green 2010; Smail 2008 and 2010; and Stafford 2007. For a critique of the latter two, see Cooter 2014. Newton 2003. On the hegemony of ‘life’ in and of the life sciences today, see Cooter and Stein 2015. See, for example, the work of Fuller 1991, 2003, 2009, 2011; and Rose 2012. See, for example, Rose 2007; Clarke et al. 2010; Ong and Collier 2006; Loch and Nguyen 2010; and Bauer and Gaskell 2002. Compare Rose and Rose 2013 (S. Rose being himself a leftist neuroscientist).

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their subject through spurious historical perspective. For example, the populariser Steven Pinker (who is also a cognitive scientist) waxes eloquent on how ours is: an extraordinary time for the understanding of the human condition. Intellectual problems from antiquity are being illuminated by insights from the sciences of mind, brain, genes, and evolution. Powerful tools have been developed to explore them, from genetically engineered neurons that can be controlled with pinpoints of light to the mining of ‘big data’ as a means of understanding how ideas propagate.46 The New Lorians, for all their cautionary humming on any naïve acceptance of evolutionary biology and cognitive science, share this view and the associative slurs that go with it. Another effect of the incorporation of social scientists into the evolutionary life sciences has been that the boundaries and divisions between what used to be called the ‘two cultures’ (the humanities vs. the natural sciences) are now deemed to be ‘childish’ and ‘silly’,47 and/or regarded merely as specific to a particular historical moment which is now past and therefore can be blithely disregarded. Whereas in the 1970s that dualism (along with nature/culture, science/society, fact/value) was targeted by neo-Marxist historians of science as performing ideologically for positivist science,48 now its dissolution serves the same end. On the basis of neo-evolutionary thinking, many scholars now regard even the binary between humans and animals as passé; with regard to agency, in what is alleged to be a ‘posthuman’ world, humans are placed on a par with animals, plants, and other non-human material things.49 Such

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Pinker 2013, n.p. Quoted in Papoulias and Callard 2010, p. 39. See also Callard and Fitzgerald 2015. Thus the art historian, Barbara Stafford, having taken the ‘neural turn’, gushes on about how we can now ‘alter our humanistic understanding of culture, inflecting it with urgent discoveries in medicine, evolutionary and developmental biology, and the brain sciences’ and how ‘we are discovering at the most profound levels that our separate investigations belong to a joint project, at last’ (Stafford 2007, pp. 1–2, my italics). Among other scholars, equally prominent in anthropology, art history, and general history who have been keen to ‘sieve through the cognitive turn’, are the Renaissance art historian David Freedberg 2011 (who also sits on the editorial boards of Arts et Neurosciences, and the Journal of Neuroesthetics), the art historians Bryson 2003 and Onians 2007, and the anthropologist Konner 2010. On the contemporary folding of the humanities into the natural sciences, see Cooter 2012. Young 1973, 1977b. Such thinking was much encouraged by the influential French public intellectual, Bruno

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thinking, willingly adopted as politically correct, denies comprehension of our existence as social and political, that is, as creatures who, by virtue of being human, are emancipated from the here and now of their senses, their genes and their environment. Posthuman thinking forecloses on that. It blocks out that it is the appreciation of the transcendent character of human life that enables us humans to make our own history, ‘rather than, as all other animals, simply be a part of it’.50 Degraded therefore is the Enlightenment view that humans are ‘exceptional’ in their ability to use reason and act with it as agents for the transformation of nature, society, and the self. The New Lorians, for epistemological reasons I will come to, are blind to this and, unsurprisingly, enthusiastically herald the ‘cross-fertilising’ virtues of ‘inter-’, ‘multi-’ or ‘trans-’ disciplinarity. They have need to, for the utilitarian culture in which they operate (especially in the UK and USA) has penetrated deep into their own discipline, threatening its elimination. A ‘knowledge economy’ that prizes only science and wealth accumulation is no place for ‘purposeless’ history (outside of the entertainment industry). The New Lorians’ effort to recolonise the study of the past in light of the bio-scientific present is intended precisely as a means to make history ‘relevant’. Admittedly, this mission is wellintended, but the rapprochement or hoped-for ‘dialogue’ between human and natural history to which it aspires, does not give rise to epistemological or methodological equality.51 Rather, ultimately, it succumbs to the yardstick of the natural sciences as the measure of all things. (Hence, in what is now called ‘neurohistory’, representations of ourselves and our past are articulated only in terms of evolutionary neurobiology.)52 As the editor of History and Theory points out, the current infatuation with the ‘fantasy of science’ or what it could be for the practice of history serves mainly ‘to close off discussion and debate

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Latour, especially through his ‘Actor Network Theory’ (ANT) (Latour 2005; Law and Hassard 1999). ANT is in many ways an intellectualisation of neoliberal society (where people and corporations are distinguished not by any common consciousness, but by the extent of their networking on Facebook and the like). ANT thus disposes of ‘humanism’ – a concept that is, after all, of no value to the ‘the market’, except in the commercial promotion of goods and services as ‘good for you and your family’ or as ‘beneficial to humanity’. Malik 2000, p. 378. (In this connection it is interesting that Gramsci (2007, p. 1244) regarded the emancipation of the subaltern and the struggle toward self-determination as the leap from the realm of necessity into the realm of freedom.) Typically, the Introduction to the AHR roundtable on ‘History Meets Biology’ submits that ‘the contributors to this roundtable believe that the benefits of communication and collaboration will be considerable for both biologists and historians’ (Smail et al. 2014, p. 1493). See also note 38 above. Cooter 2014.

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between historians and scientists rather than promote it’.53 Like the original Lorians who Gramsci castigated along with the would-be ‘scientific’ or ‘objectivist’ Marxists who were locked into static categories that denied the role of people to make their own history through consciousness,54 the New Lorians’ take up of evolutionary biology posits the existence of a human nature beyond conscious human purpose. Thus, ultimately, they make ‘zombies’ of us all – the term by which contemporary philosophers refer to entities that behave like humans but possess no consciousness.55 Placed outside of human agency and consciousness, humans and humanness is put beyond historicist understanding. Indeed, in common with the interlocutors of the evolutionary life sciences in the social sciences, the New Lorians block historicist thinking tout court. The result is a ‘history’ that is epistemologically fashioned outside of history – ‘deepened’ and ‘thickened’ in an ahistorically conceived evolutionary and biological present without a past. It is for this reason – not merely their swelling numbers – that we must take their knowledge production seriously. They are wholly symptomatic of the direction not only of wider intellectual culture, but of culture generally in its twenty-first-century ‘new-found enthusiasm for the natural sciences’.56 Of course, like the new evolutionary life scientists, the work of the New Lorians obscures what it helps to mediate: consent to a political and ideological world in which people are comfortable in a non-society of individuals (a priori predisposed to be distrustful of each other) who are to be regarded as nothing more than their biology. This is the world in which biology, not history, determines who and what we are. Biological selfhood is now constructed ‘selfevidently’ through DNA, for example, or through understandings of personality, moods, and desires in purely neurobiological terms. (Indeed, so extensively is ‘neurological identity’ embraced today that virtually out of mind has become the twentieth-century construction of selfhood built around psychological interiorities.) Forgotten, or rather not forgotten but classified according to a past politics of racism that renders it unworthy of current debate, is the spectre of ‘socio-biology’ or ‘biology as destiny’ and the associate social Darwinist ‘selfish gene’ – all conceived and denounced in the 1970s. Thus, remarkably,

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Kleinberg 2016, p. 87. Gramsci thereby sought to dispose of one of the most fashionable tenants of traditional Marxism of his time, that ‘human behaviour can be understood as a direct response to external stimuli, determined by social and economic conditions’ (Boggs 1976, p. 31). The same critique he applied to the biological determinism of the Lorians. Malik 2000, p. 13. H. Rose 2004, p. 59.

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it is now entirely without debate that ‘biocitizenship’ comes to replace social citizenship.57 Simultaneously, and not incidentally, the reduction of all human life to its biology goes hand in glove with the vastly expanded bio-industry, now fully corporatised and geared entirely towards profits, and whose only beneficiaries (if they be) are consumers who can pay for its products and services. Homo economicus thus powerfully joins hands with homo biologicus. Spawned is a ‘bioeconomics’ exploiting the individual self-obsessed and self-consumed body (now with the brain collapsed into it). It is to this simultaneously-made biologised economics and biological identity that consent is now successfully organised. And it is into this world that the New Lorians invite us. I will say more on the nature of this invitation in a moment; here it is perhaps only necessary to add that neoliberalism, as articulated by Friedrich von Hayek and others in the Austrian School of Economics at the turn of the twentieth century, was always closely bound to a biologised view of individuals as ‘species’ rather than as humans.58 In the face of all this, Gramsci’s passionate commitment to the political exposure of biology-wielding intellectuals and his celebration of the historicist method of critical analysis have never been more germane. Two concomitant contextual factors render revisiting him all the more compelling: first, the enervation of institutionalised modes of postmodern thought; and second, the revitalisation of political bottom. In recent years the forced recognition of capitalism as nothing less than anarchy (the piling of ‘crisis’ upon ‘crisis’, or scam after scam with capitalists and their political tools taking no responsibility whatsoever), along with the spectacle of neoliberal politicians’ attacks on public welfare in the interest of private gain (made in the name of a beyondcriticism would-be autonomous ‘market’) has rendered the apolitical speak of postmodernists obsolete. The postmodern project in the English-speaking world involved the abandonment of hopes of social change, an insistence on freedom from political forms of life and, above all, a rejection of the former (especially Marxian) emphasis on economics. But by the first decade of the twenty-first century this inclination was increasingly untenable, both among leading intellectuals as well as sections of the general public.59 The elephant

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Rose and Novas 2006; Cooter 2008; Rose and Abi-Rached 2010. On Hayek’s application of evolutionary ideas from biology to social science, see Hodgson 1994. On Darwin’s role in reformulating ‘species’ versus ‘individual’, see Williams 1976, p. 135 on the key word ‘Individual’. One recent British example of public dismay was during the so-called ‘energy crisis’ when it became manifest that the shareholders looking for profits most definitely did not represent the interests of ‘the people’. It did not help that neoliberal ideologues in the Conser-

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in the room, ‘capitalism’ and its iniquitous and ubiquitous ideology (whether neoliberal, as in the West, or authoritarian, as in Russia and China) had to be acknowledged and confronted. Witness publications such as David Harvey’s Brief History of Neoliberalism unpacking the basis of the inequalities in the new global ‘class system’.60 Or Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello’s brilliant investigation into The New Spirit of Capitalism (‘brilliant’ because it does not just describe the new capitalism, but seeks politically to apply an informed critique of it and thereby generate a new spirit of hope).61 Albeit more trivial is Terry Eagleton’s Why Marx was Right.62 Among a plethora of other notable publications is that by Iain Boal and colleagues, Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War, which rescues Guy Debord’s 1960s critique of capitalism from the apolitical clutches of postmodernist media studies.63 Documentary film makers, such as Adam Curtis (‘HyperNormalization’, BBC 2016), and novelists, such as Arundhati Roy (Capitalism: A Ghost Story [of 2014]),64 have also made powerful popular contributions. Important, too, interestingly, is Foucault’s The Birth of Biopolitics, which was only translated into English in 2008, and provides startlingly prescient historical insights into neoliberalism and political economy.65 The Birth of Biopolitics (a work as yet unregistered among those now seeking a new rapport between Gramsci and Foucault),66

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vative government and in the New Labour one could only call for more free market competition as a solution to the crisis. It is also interesting to note that around this same time there appeared many radio programmes on ‘community’ and other such subjects the likes of which had not been heard since the 1970s. Today, however, the so-called ‘migrant issue’ has confused and supplanted this popular response providing a highly politically convenient distraction for the promotion of neoliberal monetarist interests and selfish (indeed, quasi-racist) social values – not least those directed against the union of European states in the interest of autonomous neo-nationalist individual states. For Harvey (2005), writing from a Marxist perspective, neoliberalism, through its creation of a tiny but extremely influential and obscenely rich elite, requires analysis in terms of a new class struggle. That in the UK, for instance, the top one per cent of income earners have doubled their share of the national income from 6.5 per cent to 13 per cent since 1985 is for Harvey a cause for urgent analytical intervention. Such intervention is all the more necessary because of the remarkably thorough and profound way in which consent to neoliberalism has been constructed. On the history of neoliberalism, see also Mirowski and Plehwe 2009; Stedman Jones 2012; and Biebricher 2012. Boltanski and Chiapello 2005. Eagelton 2011. Boal et al. 2005. See also her novel of 2017, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. Foucault 2008. Notably Kreps 2015, a book that appears mostly in tow of Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, rather than Foucault’s ‘biopower’. Compare also Laclau and Mouffe 1985.

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sits well next to Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation, published in 1944, the book that argued that the cataclysms of capitalism are lodged in the utopian endeavour of economic liberalism to set up a self-regulating market system.67 Polanyi’s book is now increasingly spoken of favourably by a new generation of liberal and leftist historians sensitive to how the notion of the ‘market economy’ in the late twentieth century emptied ‘democracy’ of social justice and reconfigured dominant ways of thinking.68 The postmodern dethronement of ‘capitalism’ – its being struck ‘from the vocabulary of politicians, trade unionists, writers and journalists’ and its consignment to ‘historical oblivion by social scientists’ (as Boltanski and Chiapello put it)69 – has now run its course. ‘Capitalism’ has once again become à la mode, with leading publishers cashing in.70 Courses on the history of capitalism appear now even on American Ivy League campuses, while whole sessions on, for example, ‘Where is the History of Science in the History of Capitalism?’ have been staged at high-flying historical congresses.71 It has to be said, however, that such efforts serve mostly only to re-legitimise capitalism within the economic and political project of neoliberalism. Far from encouraging historical critique and informed reflection in the manner of the authors mentioned above, their tendency is rather to neo-empiricist historical descriptions of ‘value’, ‘labour’, ‘production’, ‘regulation’, ‘philanthropy’, and suchlike within the political celebration of ‘markets’, commodification’, ‘the circulation of material goods’, etc.

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Polanyi 1944. See Bloch and Somers 2014; and Levitt 2013. Boltanski and Chiapello 2005, p. ix. The same fate befell the word ‘poverty’. For example, Cambridge University Press in two volumes: Neal and Williamson 2014; Columbia University Press has also recently introduced a new series, ‘Studies in the History of US Capitalism’. In particular, at the meeting in Boston in November 2014 of the American Association for the History of Science. For an example of courses on the history of capitalism, see the website for Brown University. A summer school there (‘In History Departments, It’s Up With Capitalism’) happily announces that ‘After decades of “history from below,” focusing on women, minorities and other marginalized people seizing their destiny, a new generation of scholars is increasingly turning to what, strangely, risked becoming the most marginalized group of all: the bosses, bankers and brokers who run the economy. Even before the financial crisis [2008], courses in “the history of capitalism” – as the new discipline bills itself – began proliferating on campuses, along with dissertations on once deeply unsexy topics like insurance, banking and regulation. The events of 2008 and their long aftermath have given urgency to the scholarly realization that it really is the economy, stupid’. Such speak signifies a further turning away from the Gramsci-inspired histories of the 1970s and ’80s. It is also noteworthy how such courses and workshops omit Das Kapital from their deliberations on capitalism.

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Reproduced through such exercises72 is only further commitment to neoliberalism – the beast succinctly defined by Harvey as the theory of economic practice that entails the ‘creative destruction’, not only of prior institutional frameworks and powers … but also of divisions of labour, social relations, welfare provisions, technological mixes, ways of life and thought, reproductive activities, attachments to the land and habits of the heart. In so far as neoliberalism values market exchanges as ‘an ethic in itself, capable of acting as a guide to all human action, and substituting for all previously held ethical beliefs’, it emphasizes the significance of contractual relations in the marketplace. It holds that the social good will be maximized by maximizing the reach and frequency of market transactions, and it seeks to bring all human action into the domain of the market.73 Such is the worldview that stymies all evidence to the contrary. As the historian of economics, Philip Mirowski, observed of the 2008 crisis of capitalism: it served not to weaken faith in the capitalist system but actually to strengthen it. ‘Once neoliberalism became a Theory of Everything, providing a revolutionary account of self, knowledge, information, markets, and government, it could no longer be falsified by anything as trifling as data from the “real” economy’!74 Nor, one might add, falsified by anything as trivial as academic history writing. But the salutary fact, as testified to through works such as Mirowski’s, is that neoliberal politics and economics have become open to informed historical discussion and debate in ways that were simply not possible under the reign of ‘French Theory’. Indeed, one of the achievements of recent scholarship has been the recognition that the intellectual phenomenon of poststructuralism and/or postmodernist literary theoretics in the Anglo-American world was constitutive of the installation of neoliberal politics and culture. As Fredric Jameson observed as early as 1991, postmodernists came to speak ‘the very language of late capitalism’.75 More recently, the intellectual historian, François Cusset, has shown in detail how the transformation of intellectual life in

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Among which should also be numbered sophisticated elaborations of the now fashionable ‘descriptive’ and ‘material’ turns. For a critique of these in history writing, see Cooter with Stein 2013, Chapter 10: ‘The New Poverty of Theory: Material Turns in a Latourian World’. Harvey 2005, p. 3. Mirowski 2013, from the dustjacket. Jameson 1991; see also Eagleton 1996.

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the United States through the likes of Foucault, Derrida, and Deleuze was at one with the politico-economic interests of the ascendant neoliberal, neoconservative governments of the 1970s and ’80s.76 In Britain, Thatcher’s famous statement of 1987, that ‘there is no such thing as society’ (only ‘free-choosing’ individual consumers and heterosexual families) was seeded by Friedrich von Hayek, not Jacques Derrida or Jean-François Lyotard. However, the effect was the same among intellectuals in the Anglo-American world: ‘a loss of political appetite for the old frameworks of social analysis’ and, in particular, for the validity and relevance of Marxism.77 While conservative neoliberal political elites effected their ideological cleansing in the name of a new ‘end of ideology’ that celebrated hedonistic utilitarian individualism in a Bernays-like PR marketing of the ‘free-market’, poststructuralists radically routed social determinism, cultivating instead the politics of individual identity.78 In the course of deconstructing modernity, the would-be autonomous self became the focus of attention, especially (à la Foucault) around the body as the discursive, flexible, and fragmented site of power and the privileged ‘site of experiments with the self’ (commercial as much as intellectual, as it turned out).79 The danger that now exists, however, is that of throwing out the baby with the bathwater or, as Cusset cautions, casting truly critical poststructuralist social critics as mere trendy conservatives.80 This persuasion is particularly rife among the New Lorians in history writing who pride themselves on their ‘transcendence’ of postmodern literary theory. In truth, most of the New Lorians were always resistant to poststructuralism.81 They fought the ‘culture wars’ (which they did not connect to the ‘science wars’) in the name of a ‘cultural history’ whose direction was the very opposite of that of Foucault who, in his grand project to problematise and historicise reason, seriously questioned

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Cusset 2008. See also Harvey 2005, pp. 42–3, 47, 198. Foucault’s own would-be ‘neoliberal moment’ has also come to be extensively analysed: see Behrent 2016. Beck 1992, p. 163. On Thatcher, who read Hayek as an undergraduate in Oxford and who was stimulated to monetarist thinking by her Cabinet colleague, the ideologue Keith Joseph, see H. Young 1991; Harvey 2005; and Stedman Jones 2012. The ‘new left’ in the 1960s and ’70s also contributed to this shift, if inadvertently, through its anti-vulgar Marxist historical contribution to the ideal of a freed-up ‘making’ of society and individuals (à la E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class). On the present condition of the autonomous self (disempowered and ‘exhausted’ and which must organise itself entirely on individual personal grounds, such as Facebook), see Biebricher 2012, p. 178. Rose 2007, p. 26; and see Cooter with Stein 2013, Chapter 4: ‘The Turn of the Body’. Cusset 2008, p. xvi. See, for example, Appleby et al. 1994; Hunt 1989 and 1998.

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historians’ objectivist methodology.82 They could not take up the point that Foucault made without actually saying it, namely that conventional history writing is itself an exercise of power through its empiricist means of exercise. In their modish defiance of what we are now told to perceive as the ‘darkness of deconstructivism’, or the ‘politically sterile semantic-cum-cultural turn’,83 the New Lorians align with older acts of resistance to postmodern theory, such as those once proposed by some neo-Marxists themselves.84 They particularly resent what the literary and somatic turns centrally stood for: the reduction of all reality to representations in language. It is this ‘prison house’ of language (that is, the linguistic turn), the New Lorians purport, that inhibits historians from taking an ethical stand. (At root, pragmatically, is their fear that historians themselves will be eclipsed if they are not seen to have a stand that merits general public attention or utilitarian relevance.) If everything is a construction in language and all truths are relative, what can be the raison d’être for authoritative history writing, they ask? Positivist science supplies the answer. The turn to evolutionary biology and neurobiology, they believe, can liberate history from the constraints of the linguistic turn and thereby produce a ‘better’ history – ‘deeper’ and ‘thicker’ (both of which qualities are regarded as inherently good).85 But in this the New Lorians are sadly mistaken in at least two respects. First, they overlook that biological knowledge is hardly neutral and that its espousal in the humanities can never be so. Exponents of evolutionary psychology and biology do what they have always done: justify politico-economic ideas and social norms and behaviour by locating them in ‘nature’ and then selling them back as value-neutral ‘science’. Famously, in the nineteenth century, this was the naturalising role that Darwin played for the political economy of Malthus. Darwin ‘discovered’ political economy in ‘nature’. As Engels put it in the Dialectics of Nature, The whole Darwinian theory of the struggle for existence is simply the transference from society to organic nature … When once this feat has been 82 83

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Particularly so through his ‘genealogical methodology’, on which see Foucault 1991; Dean 1994; and Smart 2002. See Joyce 2010; and Kemp 2006. Joyce, in the 1990s, was at the forefront of applying postmodernist thought to history writing; Kemp, an art historian who was never there, now delights in proclaiming postmodernism as a passing iconoclastic, anti-essentialism movement. For example, Callinicos 1989; and (less stridently) Samuel 1991, 1992. See Smail et al. 2014, and, in particular, Hunt’s contribution (Hunt 2014) to the Roundtable on ‘History Meets Biology’.

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accomplished, … it is very easy to transfer [this theory] back again from natural history to the history of society, and altogether too naïve to maintain that thereby these assertions have been proved as eternal natural laws of society.86 That Alfred Russell Wallace simultaneously and independently came up with exactly the same natural history only further testifies to the fact that scientific knowledge (as much as art or theoretics) is never outside of the political economics and culture in which it is produced; it is in it, reproducing it in various abstract guises. In the 1970s, exposing such acts of naturalisation was routine in relation to socio-biology, with major critiques mounted against the outspoken Harvard expert on ants, E.O. Wilson and his English side-kick Richard Dawkins.87 While postmodernists routed social determinism, historians and sociologists of science (especially those allied to the radical science movement) routed biological determinism. Among the New Lorians, however, these critiques of biological determinism are dismissed. E.O. Wilson, the ‘father’ of socio-biology in the 1960s and ’70s, is back in fashion, restored untarnished as the exponent of the ‘Great Synthesis’ or the so-called ‘conciliation of all knowledge’ – that is, the subordination and reduction of all existing academic knowledges to human evolutionary imperatives.88 The New Lorians cosy up to these ideas, albeit espousing dissent from the old socio-biology while at the same time denigrating the old ‘disciplinary misunderstanding and mistrust’ that have retarded ‘fruitful dialogue’.89 After all, they reason, has not ‘the biological study of human behavior moved far beyond where it was in the 1970s and 1980s’?90 Thus, far from ‘liberating’ history writing, the New Lorians merely entrap it in biology, fulfilling E.O. Wilson’s 1975 proposal that the humanities should be included in the ‘Modern [biological] Synthesis’ of knowledge.91 In turn, the New Lorians’ knowledge production serves only further to naturalise the individualist ideology and economics of neoliberalism – the bedding of homo biologicus with homo economicus. What we get is a human nature forged 86 87 88

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Engels 1987, p. 584, my emphasis. On the common context of Darwin and Malthus, see Young 1969 (Italic mine). Rose and Rose 2013, pp. 68, 80–1. After writing Sociobiology: The New Synthesis in 1975, Wilson produced On Human Nature (1978), on the role of biology in the evolution of human culture, which won him the Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction. It ought to have won him the prize for contemporary fiction. In 1998 he published Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. Smail et al. 2014, p. 1494. Ibid, p. 1495. Quoted in Rose and Rose 2013, p. 80.

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in contemporary capitalist economics and legitimised through biology being sold back through a history writing that hopes to regain authority. It is Darwin’s trick all over. The other major shortcoming of the New Lorians lies in their seemingly wilful misapprehension of postmodern theory as negating ethical choice and value judgements in history writing. This too is misguided. Postmodernists may have been apolitical from the perspective of the old left,92 but their analysis of the constitution of modernity was anything but unethical or ahistorical.93 Their central contribution to the understanding of knowledge production in modernity was their historicisation of it. All reality represented through language, they showed, was shaped historically and, that being so, there could be no deference to the authority of universal or timeless principles. Concepts as basic to modern science and thought as ‘objectivity’, ‘empiricism’, and ‘experiment’, they helped to expose as historical constructs, and they contested such wouldbe historically transcendent, essentialist categories as ‘biology’ and ‘the body’.94 They challenged the naïve acceptance of facts as nothing more than facts, and called into question and thereby de-privileged the exalted valuation of science as its method as the standard for all other social and cultural enterprises. Scientific progress along with socialism, the free market, Christianity, and the nuclear family, they exposed as but bedtime stories told to lull the child-like into sleep.95 But in demonstrating ‘the irreducible historicity of all things’,96 or that nothing could ever be outside of history, including history writing itself as a universalising and homogeneous meta-narrative,97 they were not operating 92

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Postmodernists were hardly apolitical, however, in challenging intellectual orthodoxy. Foucault, in particular, was proudly political in relation to political prisoners, mental patients, and religion in Iran. It is truer to say that the appeal of French ‘poststructuralists’ (especially in America) was to those who were not particularly politically radical, or had become not so partly out of intellectual defiance of the politicised previous generation in the first place, which went hand-in-hand with their adoption of consumerist lifestyle, and the conditions of neoliberalism. See Novick 1988, pp. 566–7. Indeed the new historicism in literary studies was quite close to Marx in his historicism, believing that a critical method and a language adequate to describe culture under capitalism cannot do so without participating in the economy it describes (Veeser 1989, p. xi). I say ‘helped’ because in the area of the history and sociology of science and medicine, social deconstructivism proceeded without assistance from poststructuralists, who were often disdained. The melding with postmodernism took place mostly in the history of the epistemology of science in the 1990s. Science and medicine were central subjects in postmodern thinking (especially with Foucault) and ‘postmodernists’ can be said to have honed to a fine point social constructivist thinking in science studies. Heartfield 2002, n.p. White 2007, pp. 224, 226. White 1972, a book that situated the writing of history in the heartland of the humanities,

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outside an ethical framework. They were contributing to the inherently moral humanist tradition of historical critique. This tradition, devoted to unveiling that which has become concealed, obscured, or enchanted, stems at least as far back as the writings of the young Marx in his critique of Hegel’s philosophy of right where he speaks of the need always to unmask unexamined presuppositions and a priori philosophical concepts – including, above all, those of the historian-self as critic.98 Foucault maintained the same, centralising the question of how different epochs posed problems and then sought the solutions to them as ‘inevitable and necessary.’ As Joan Scott recently recalled, the postmodernist tempering of the tradition of history as critique did not undermine either its ethical or the political purpose.99 All that was instanced by the move to postmodernist critical thinking was greater sensitivity to the nature of that which Nietzsche had long before announced: that none of us are ever truly the authors of our own thoughts.100 The abandonment of universal transcendent values, far from impeding the holding of values, on the contrary, encourages the self-examination of them. In truth, what impedes ethical self-examination is precisely the message that has been preached for the past decade or so by theorists of ‘affect’, ‘non-representationalism’, ‘complexity’ and other such babblists, which is now naively taken up by the New Lorians: the imperative of ‘attending to the biological and the precognitive rather than to consciousness’.101 Although poststructuralists did not share the Enlightenment faith in emancipatory progress and change held by pre-Frankfurt School Marxists (least of all their faith in science),102 they were nevertheless solidly within the humanist

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literary and cultural studies, and was in many ways foundational to postmodern cultural studies and representations theory. Marx 1970. The need, he made clear, is always to problematise and historicise the historian’s own reasoning and patterns of logic (a policy that Nietzsche implemented in his 1874 work on ‘history for life’ [Nietzsche 1980] and which Foucault extended [Foucault 1977]). Interestingly, the notion of history as critique was also foundational for Leopold von Ranke, the ‘father’ of the modern professional discipline of history. Scott 2007, p. 27. Nietzsche, cited in Safranski 2002, pp. 55–6. See above, my italics. The Frankfurt School, in the shadow of the Holocaust, could not wholly share this Enlightenment faith. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno in Dialectic of Enlightenment (first published in 1944 under the title Philosophische Fragmente) also saw repression, destruction, and despair resulting from the use of instrumental reason. Again, in the New Left’s take up of Frankfurt School critical theory there is some continuity with, and contribution to, later poststructuralist thinking. Among pre-Frankfurt School Marxists, Gramsci occupies an ambiguous place on change and progress. According to him, change for the better is never guaranteed; practical and theoretical mistakes can lead to a bitter defeat,

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tradition that believed in the possibilities for cultural transformation. Indeed, their healthy scepticism of biological concepts and categories was born out of a fear of falling into essentialisms that were deemed hostile to that prospect.103 To the extent that they were ‘posthuman’ or ‘anti-humanist’, this too was within a tradition of humanist critique – in particular, in theoretical reaction to existentialism and/or to a Marxist humanism held (à la Althusser) to embrace all humanity. Their posthumanism was never intended as a contribution to the denigration of human agency,104 although their hostility to subjectivity (the ‘death of the subject’) necessarily played it down. They devalued human agency and put it up for grabs, but they did not set out to negate it, and in fact did not. Gramsci, as a socialist humanist reacting against Soviet materialism, was well within this ethical tradition of historical critique and interpretation, and he was also sensitive to the role of language within it. Like Marx, he appreciated that ‘human nature’ and ‘biology’ were not timeless categories, nor were they synonymous.105 He recognised that they were made up differently over time,

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as was the case with the socialist movement in Italy and Germany. He is not necessarily an optimist and, in fact, is often referred to as a pessimist of thought and optimist of will. For this insight, my thanks to Pietro Omodeo. One of the pioneers of postmodern cultural theory, W.J.T. Mitchell, asserted that humanists are precisely those who cannot accept the obsolescence of the concept of wisdom that we humans alone possess (to the degree we possess it). The concept of wisdom, Mitchell insisted (2009, pp. 1026–7), ‘underlies all critical and theoretical investigation of the species being of humanity’. Hence our business in the humanities, he maintained, must continue to be that of ‘engag[ing] in ethical reflection, analyses of the grounds for the making of wise decisions, responsible interpretations, logical deductions, accurate estimations of aesthetic quality, the critique of religion, culture, politics, the arts, the media, languages, texts, and so on’. See also Smith 2007. On how the concept of ‘humanity’ was narrowed over time, see Southgate 2007. For a feisty critique of how anti-humanism is sustained by neo-Darwinism, see Tallis 2011. Compare Latour 2004, who, while denying postmodernism (arguing that it was but a continuation of modernity [Latour 1993]), posits that the ‘modernist’ invention of critique has ‘run out of steam’ (Latour 2004), a view that permits his Actor Network Theory and posthumanism in general to serve as theoretical mediations of neoliberalism. See Cooter and Stein 2013, Chapter 10: ‘The New Poverty of Theory: Material Turns in a Latourian World’; and Fuller 2000a. On ‘human nature’ for Marx, see Sayers 1998. ‘Marxism’, he says (p. 3), ‘involves a Hegelian historicist account of human nature. This abandons the enlightenment project of looking for foundations in universal human nature; but it is not simply a skeptical, negative “anti-humanism” which rejects the concept of human nature. Rather, Marxism involves a historical and social account of human needs and powers, and this leads to a historical form of humanism’.

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or at least were appropriated differently under specific historical conditions. But this was not a reason for him to abandon faith in the ability of humans to make ethical political decisions. Far from it. He morally castigated scientistic (objectivist/positivist) Marxism for exposing ‘the existence of [an invented] natural world beyond conscious human purpose’. ‘Human nature is history’, he went so far as to declare; it is a ‘complex of … social relations’.106 He laid into the Lorians for using biology and biologically determined ‘laws’ to construct a new ahistorical human nature outside of history.107 Appropriately, he referred to his historicist method as ‘philology’.108 Moreover, much like Gilles Deleuze and other postmodernist literary theorists some fifty years later, Gramsci appreciated that theory and practice could not be separated – one was always of the other.109 His anti-idealist philosophy of praxis conveyed a vision of theory that was not only philosophical and political, but ‘was absolute “historicism”, the absolute secularization and earthiness of thought, an absolute humanism of history’”.110 What Gramsci could not see, of course, was that his historicism was itself a historical construct (not unlike poststructuralism as a cultural movement);111 it was not for him the epistemological problem that postmodernists made it into. He simply believed that history shapes humans and shapes the present. He was a product of his Marxian moment in terms of the problems he could pose and the political solutions he could offer. But in all other respects he was, anachronistically speaking, in line with postmodernist understandings.

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Gramsci 2011, vol. 3, pp. 185–6, my emphasis. Gramsci 2011, Buttigieg’s ‘Introduction’, vol. 1, pp. 47–8. Gramsci 2011, Buttigieg’s ‘Introduction,’ vol. 1, pp. 58–9. Ironically, Gramsci’s belief in the inseparability of theory and practice (see Boggs 1976, p. 21 ff.) was levelled by Terry Eagleton (in postmodern mood) at the Gramscian scholar, Edward Said, when the latter professed that he was not much into ‘theory’. Eagleton interrupted to say (perfectly critically) that to claim that you are not ‘into theory’ belies that you are nevertheless holding to some theoretical position (Eagleton and Beaumont 2009, p. 149). Just as we give ‘meaning’ to the universe when we say it is ‘meaningless’ (Ballard 2003), so the denunciation of ‘theory’ occupies a theoretical space that must always do political work, as witnessed today among those historians (New Lorians among others) who disdain ‘theory’ in the interest of ‘objective’ empirical research’. Quoted in Boggs 1976, p. 29; on Gramsci’s philosophy of praxis see, Boggs 1976, Chapter 1: ‘Marxism as the “Philosophy of Praxis” ’. This is not to say that Gramsci did not see historical materialism as an ideology – the ideology of the subaltern class which, due to its position and interests, treats reality as the realm of change and political action (indeed, has to treat it as such in order to emancipate itself). As he observes in Notebook X, p. 1242 (Gerratana critical edition), the ‘philosophy of praxis itself is a superstructure’, that is, it is not revealing of a reality per se in a metaphysical sense. Again my thanks to Pietro Omodeo for this clarification.

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(It is perhaps for this reason that Foucault, shortly before his death, remarked that Gramsci should be better known.)112 And this is why Gramsci is relevant today, made urgent in light of the hegemony of evolutionary biology and psychology among intellectuals. The New Lorians in history writing, fearful that their discipline will be closed down if it does not reinstall the universal truths and values which they suppose science supplies, remaining blithely unaware that a history made in biology is a history that has already been closed down epistemologically through an ahistorically conceived biological present thrust back into it. As Gramsci understood, history thereby ceases to be a tool with which critically to understand the present and guide the future. By adopting the ‘truths’ of the new life sciences, the New Lorians act as witless fifth columnists instantiating exactly the project of which Gramsci accused the Lorians and ‘scientific Marxists’: of the creation of a world beyond human agency, ahistorical conceived and naturalised in biology. The New Lorians fail to acknowledge what has long been a commonplace understanding in the history of science, that evolutionary science is based on an anthropomorphism, a reading backwards from animals to humans (where human behaviours – notions of fear, jealousy, love, pain, and so on – are first read into animals and then read back into humans as scientific proof of it). The rightness of their case for re-adopting universal, transhistorical categories logically follows. Therewith biological human nature displaces human agency as it was understood by Gramsci and other thinkers in the Enlightenment tradition. It relocates it outside culture and history in the biological notion of ‘species’ rather than in conscious human decision-making. It is in this trick, not in postmodern theoretics, that lies the loss of the idea of human agency today (however much postmodern theoreticians may not have advanced it). Here lies the anti-historicist source of contemporary posthumanism as fostered by new Lorian historians anxious to re-colonise the past in terms of the biological present. Gramsci castigated Marxists who valued theory only for its own sake, or who had ‘no action frame of reference’.113 The same accusation can and has been levelled at postmodern theorists. Yet it is not difficult to turn the insights of postmodernism into political action. If taken seriously, they compel, above all, the abandonment of the pretence of academia as a neutral place in which to exercise value-free enquiry (something that Gramsci well understood through his encounters with Lorianism). Once this is appreciated, the next step is open:

112 113

Gramsci 2011, Buttigieg’s ‘Introduction’, vol. 1, p. xix. Quoted in Boggs 1976, p. 30.

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to Gramsci-like partisanship – personal, passionate, and rooted in emotional commitment to everyday political struggle. For Gramsci taking sides was fundamental to his Marxist concept of praxis: the uniting of theory and practice, thought and action, subject and object. Through it, he proclaimed, he was made alive: I am a partisan, I am alive, I feel the pulse of the activity of the future city that those on my side are building is alive in their conscience […] Alive, I am a partisan. That is why I hate the ones that don’t take sides, I hate the indifferent.114 It is precisely this partisanship that is suffocated today not by postmodernists, as I have said, but by those wittingly or unwittingly consenting to evolutionary biology and cognitive science. Therewith the space is closed off for the making of our own history. But if we recognise this and understand historically how historicism is foreclosed through the take up of evolutionary biology and cognitive science across the humanities, it is possible to politically reanimate. We, too, can be made alive in a world that is increasingly flattened intellectually by Lorian-like productions of knowledge, and darkened politically through the union of it with the homo economicus of neoliberalism. It is in the abide of this, I submit – in the hope of restoring our creative capacities in the face of neobiological reductions – that we may yet reverse the tide and become, indeed, truly counter-hegemonic Gramscian ‘scholars and citizens’. Viva Gramsci.

Acknowledgement Heartfelt thanks to Claudia Stein for inspiration and much of the material to grist, and to Pietro Daniel Omodeo for his insightful corrective reading. 114

This famous quotation by Grasmci is taken from his article “La Città Futura,” L’Ordine Nuovo (11 February 1917). Cf. Gramsci 2004, 135.

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Index of Places African territories (Portuguese) 289 Alcântara (outskirts of Lisbon) 162 Almada 168 Angola 287–288, 290–292 Aragon 161 Austria 360 Barcelona 2, 15–16, 20, 30n, 33, 35–36, 175, 178, 184–185, 188, 199, 208n, 267 Belgium 52n, 80n, 83n, 320n Berkeley, California 254 Berlin 16, 19, 28, 248, 253, 277, 325 Boston 122–125, 151, 362 California 254, 301n Canada 118 Castile 157, 161 Catalonia 35, 175, 188 China 118n, 119, 292, 361 Coimbra 158, 166, 170–171, 278, 291 Cuba 128, 292 Czechoslovakia 272 Dutch Republic 160, 172 Ebro Observatory 177–179, 181–185, 187, 189, 196, 198 El-Ksar-el-Kebir (Morocco) 161 England 126n, 135, 160, 165, 305 European Union 6–7 Évora 166, 171 France 13, 52n, 80, 82–83, 84n, 89n, 97, 101, 112, 132n, 147–148, 160, 172n, 196, 320n, 326–327, 342 Frankfurt a.M. 27, 160, 349, 368 Georgetown 123, 151 Germany 7–8, 22, 84, 86, 101, 122, 243, 245, 247, 253–257, 263, 283, 311, 320n, 328, 342, 369n Greece 4, 6, 221 Hudson River 151 Hungary 4, 21–22

Iraq 50n Ireland 161 Italy 6, 21, 23, 26, 30n, 37, 68–70, 83, 91, 128, 129, 131n, 133, 138, 140, 147, 159, 180, 196, 258, 260, 263, 320n, 328, 369n Japan 325–326 Jena 250 Jersey City 151 Kenya 70 Korea 118, 119n Latin America 4 León 161 Lisbon 15, 158, 162, 166, 168, 171–172, 198, 274–275, 278–279, 281–293 Lourenço Marques, see Maputo Low Countries, see The Netherlands Luanda 287, 290–291 Madrid 129, 148, 175n, 178, 182, 186–187, 189, 208n, 263 Maputo (Lourenço Marques) 290 Manhattan 151 Melanesia 70 Mexico 182n, 271 Morocco 101 Mozambique 288, 290–292 Navarre 161 New York 297–298, 300, 315–316 Nicaea 136 Padua 147–150 Paris 90, 99n, 106, 107, 147–150, 297, 305, 308, 316, 325 Pernambuco (Brazil) 172n Philippines 161 Poland 4, 128 Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth 160–161 Porto 286 Portugal 144, 156–158, 161, 162n, 164–174, 278, 280–281, 290–292 Princeton 310n, 311–312

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421

index of places Romagna (Italy) 69 Romania 15, 321, 324, 332–342 Rome 22, 37, 103n, 109, 129, 133, 136–138, 147–148, 195, 317 Salamanca 169 Scotland 161 Sicily 151, 161 South Africa 73, 291 Soviet Union 7, 19, 21–22, 257, 263, 265, 268, 270, 306, 320, 322, 324, 326, 329, 330, 337–340, 342 Spain 4, 14, 35, 144, 161–162, 164, 166–167, 172n, 175, 177–179, 181, 184n, 185–187, 190, 195–196, 207, 208n, 231, 260–262, 266–267, 271–272, 320n, 328 Sudan 352 Suez (Canal) 22 Switzerland 52n The Netherlands 80, 86, 118n, 161 Tibet 73 Trent 128, 137 Tübingen 136

Ukraine 5 United Kingdom (UK) [British] 20, 22, 27, 72, 154, 160, 300, 303–305, 327, 334, 358, 360n, 361n, 363–364 United States of America (USA) [incl. America and American as referred to the USA] 6, 28, 72–73, 117–118, 123, 141, 151, 153–155, 251, 263, 267, 270, 297–301, 304–305, 307, 309, 310n, 311, 314, 317, 319–321, 325–328, 334, 336–337, 342, 358, 362, 363–364 Valencia 178, 182n Vals-près-le-Puy (France) 178 Vatican 122, 128–129, 136, 191, 196 Venice 148–149 Vienna 149 Wales 161 Washington, DC Waterloo 144 Würzburg 149

123, 316n

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Index of Names Adinolfi, Giulia 35–36 Adorno, Theodor W. 22, 27, 35, 311, 368n Afonso VI (King of Portugal) 172 Albareda, José Maria 183, 187–190, 196, 198n, 261–262 Alfonso X (King of Spain) 135, 179 Althusser, Louis 20, 22, 24, 349, 369 Anderson, Perry 20, 22, 29–30 Andrada, Diogo de Paiva de 169 Andrews, Geoff 36, 41 Angenot, Marc 41n, 42, 51–55 António, Prior of Crato (claimant of the Portuguese throne) 162 Arconati-Visconti, Marquise 98 Aristotle 53, 127, 145 Asor Rosa, Alberto 69 Azpiazu, Joaquín 262 Babbage, Charles 269 Baker, Donald L. 118 Bakhtin, Mijail 47–48 Baldini, Ugo 119 Barreira, Fernando Carvalho 275, 286, 288 Barthes, Roland 54 Bartoli, Daniello 147, 150 Bauer, Martin 31 Bédier, Joseph 97, 103n, 106 Bell, Daniel 269 Bellarmine, Robert (Bellarmino, Roberto) 117, 128–134, 142, 146n Benedict XVI (pope), see Ratzinger, Joseph 135n Benigni, Umberto 91, 94–95 Benjamin, Walter 27 Bennett, Tony 23, 29, 32 Berger, John 24 Bergson, Henri 84n, 96n, 105 Berlusconi, Silvio 134 Berman, Morris 26 Bernays, Edward 352, 364 Biagioli, Mario 119, 143 Bismark, Otto von 122 Bloor, David 245 Bohr, Niels 252 Boltanski, Luc 361–362

Boothman, Derek 24 Bourdieu, Pierre 43, 48, 72–78 Boyle, Robert 125 Brahe, Tycho 136 Bruno, Giordano 127, 131, 132n, 142 Bucchi, Massimiano 32 Bueno, Gustavo 272 Bukharin, Nikolai 62, 63–64, 66, 268, 349 Buonaiuti, Ernesto 83, 91, 94–95 Burawoy, Michael 74 Bush, George W. 50 Buttigieg, Joseph A. 23 Caetano, Marcelo 287n, 289–290 Comaroff, Jane 73 Comaroff, John 73 Canfora, Luciano 259 Cantril, Hadley 310–313 Carrillo, Santiago 272 Casmach, Francisco Guilherme 169–171 Castro, José Sarmento de Vasconcelos 275, 286 Charles I (King of England) 157 Chartier, Roger 29 Châtel, Jean 148 Chiapello, Eve 361–362 Clavius, Christopher 117, 135, 136 Clemenceau, Georges 89–90, 105 Cohn, Norman 70–71 Combes, Émile 89, 96, 98–100, 102, 105 Comte, Auguste 9, 60, 104n, 281 Cooter, Roger 27–28, 30, 246, 257 Copernicus, Nicolaus 117, 127, 132–135, 137– 140, 142, 152, 191–192 Crehan, Kate 25, 73, 75 Cremonini, Cesare 148–149 Croce, Benedetto 8, 24, 65, 68, 92 Cumont, Franz 83n, 91n, 98n, 99–104, 107, 109n, 110 Cunha, Augusto José da 275, 281–282 Cunha, Pedro José da 275, 282–284, 293 Curtis, Adam 361 Cusset, François 363–364 D’ Alembert, Jean-Baptiste 141 Darnton, Robert 29

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index of names Darwin, Charles 135, 314, 354, 359, 360n, 365–367 Daston, Lorraine 12 Davis, Watson 300n, 303–304, 307, 309, 310n, 313 Dawkins, Richard 366 De Bivort de la Saudée, Jacques 192–193 de Guzmán, Gaspar (Count-Duke of Olivares) 162, 216 de la Cierva, Juan 263 De Man, Henri 65–66, 78 De Martino, Ernesto 68–71 De Sanctis, Francesco 117, 127 Deleuze, Gilles 364, 370 Derrida, Jacques 364 Descartes, René 137–138, 141, 144–145, 147, 152 Diderot, Denis 142, 144 Disney, Walt 297 Doumergue, Gaston 105 Dreyfus, Alfred 89, 100, 132n, 259 Duhem, Pierre 117, 131–132 Durkheim, Émile 60, 88, 108 Eagleton, Terry 370n Eddington, Arthur 190, 192 Engels, Friedrich 35, 175, 252–253, 365 Erdoğan, Recep Tayyip 4 Escrivá de Balaguer, Josemaría 262–263 Fairclough, Norman 41n, 42, 47–51, 55 Feingold, Mordechai 120–122 Felipe II (King of Spain and Portugal) 161– 162, 164 Felipe IV (King of Spain and Portugal) 162 Fernández Buey, Francisco 35–36 Ferreira de Mira, Matias Boleto 278 Ferry, Jules 80, 85–86, 96n, 100 Feuerbach, Ludwig 63 Feyerabend, Paul 145 Firpo, Luigi 133n Fisac, Miguel 263 Fleck, Ludwik 246, 352n Fontenelle, Bernard le Bovier de 147 Forgacs, David 24 Forman, Paul 14, 243–246, 248–250, 254, 350n Foucart, George 96–97

423 Foucault, Michel 23, 28, 36, 43, 48, 52, 54– 55, 350–351, 361, 364–365, 367–368, 371 Francis I (pope) 155 Franco, Francisco 14, 34, 175n, 176–179, 181– 185, 187, 192, 195, 258–265, 267–268, 271, 273, 328 Frederick II (Emperor) 149 Freedberg, David 357n Freud, Sigmund 352 Galilei, Galileo 117, 119, 127, 132–134, 137–142, 145–146n, 152, 177, 192–193 Galison, Peter 12 Gambetta, Léon 84, 98 García Sanchia, Federico 234 Garin, Eugenio 26, 198 Gastev, Aleksei 330–332 Gavroglu, Kostas 15, 252 Gentile, Giovanni 24, 92, 270 Giddens, Anthony 48 Ginzburg, Carlo 71, 145 Gluckman, Max 70 Golinski, Jan 28 González, Felipe 34 Gorz, André 24 Graney, Christopher M. 139–141 Gregory XIII (pope) 135–137 Grendler, Paul F. 118 Guericke, Otto von 138 Guha, Ranajit 6n, 25, 71–72 Habermas, Jürgen 13, 27, 43, 45, 48, 49, 54 Hall, Stuart 22–25, 29, 43 Halliday, Michael A.K. 50–51 Harris, David 19, 26 Harris, Sten J. 119–123, 125–126 Harvey, David 361n, 363 Havard, Gaston (a.k.a. Jean Marestan) 225 Havet, Louis 96n, 97, 105 Hayek, Friedrich von 360, 364 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 8, 104, 268, 344, 368–369n Heilbron, John L. 254 Heisenberg, Werner Karl 254 Henry IV (King of France) 148 Hitler, Adolf 131 Hoare, Quintin 21 Hobsbawm, Eric 3, 26, 70–71, 158

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424 Hoggart, Richard 23 Hollande, François 6 Horace 165 Horkheimer, Max 27, 368n Hubert, Henri 88, 103 Husserl, Edmund 10 Huxley, Julian 305, 314 Ibáñez Martín, José 181, 187–188 Ignatius of Loyola 124, 126n, 127 Ingrao, Pietro 24 Ives, Peter 45, 50n Jameson, Fredric 24, 363 Jaurès, Jean 89, 98–99, 101, 103n João IV (King of Portugal) 162–163, 165, 167, 172 João V (King of Portugal) 172 John Paul II (pope), see Wojtyła, Karol Joyce, Patrick 354n, 365n Kaczyński, Jarosław 4 Kant, Immanuel 10 Kepler, Johannes 137–138 Kerzhentsev, Platon 331 Kofsky, Frank 24 Koyré, Alexandre 133 Krige, John 28 Kuhn, Thomas S. 244–245 Laclau, Ernesto 3–4, 13, 24–25, 41n, 47–49, 51, 67, 272 Lansbergen, Philips 139 Lanternari, Vittorio 68, 70 Laplace, Pierre Simon 147, 193–194 Laso, José María 271 Lasswell, Harold 310–312, 315 Latour, Bruno 10, 358n, 369n Le Bachelet, Xavier-Marie 129 Lefranc, Abel 97 Lemaître, Georges 190, 194 Lemos, Victor Hugo Duarte de 275, 282, 286, 289 Lenin 24, 253, 268, 271, 273, 329n, 332 Lepsius, Rainer 252 Lester, Jeremy 24 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 9, 60n, 63 Lilly, William 157–158 Lima, João Maria de Almeida 275, 282–283

index of names Lippmann, Walter 307n, 352n Little, Clarence 300n, 303, 307, 308, 310, 314 Loisy, Alfred 82–83, 87, 90–92, 94–100, 102– 111 Lombroso, Cesare 60, 355n Loria, Achille 355, 357–360, 364–368, 370– 372 Louis XIII (King of France) 160 Lourosa, Manuel Gomes Galhano 14, 156– 158, 160–161, 163–174 Luca de Tena, Torcuato 208n Luísa de Gusmão (Queen of Portugal) 172 Luporini, Cesare 69 Lyotard, Jean-François 364 Maeztu, Ramiro de 262–263 Malinowski, Bronisław 63 Malthus, Thomas Robert 365 Mañé, Teresa 208 Manuel I (King of Portugal) 161 Mao Zedong 270 Marcuse, Herbert 27, 29, 35 Marshall, John 298, 300, 301n, 310n, 311, 312n, 315–317 Marx, Karl 24, 35, 253, 258, 268, 271–272, 320, 330, 361, 367n, 368–369 Maryks, Robert A. 118, 124 Mästlin, Michael 136 Mauss, Marcel 88–89, 96–97, 102–103, 105– 106, 108 Melo, Francisco Manuel de 167 Merchant, Carolyn 35n Merkel, Angela 6 Mersenne, Marin 157 Merton, Robert K. 125, 306n Mirowski, Philip 363 Mitchell, W.J.T. 369 Monod, Gabriel 96, 99, 101n, 103n, 105– 106 Montseny, Federica 208n, 218, 226, 231 Montseny, Joan 208n, 211, 225 Morel-Fatio, Alfred 97, 105–106 Morley, David 23 Morrell, Jack 27–28 Mouffe, Chantal 3, 24, 41n, 47, 272 Mussolini, Benito 21, 128, 131 Napoleon III (French emperor) 84, 131 Neresini, Federico 32

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index of names Newton, Isaac 125, 152, 192–193 Niceforo, Alfredo 61 Nieto-Galan, Agustí 250, 349–350, 354 Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm 368 Nobis, Herbert M. 137 Nordmann, Charlotte 77 Nowell Smith, Geoffrey 21 Nun, José 47n O’Malley, John W. 122–124, 151 Obama, Barack 155 Ogburn, William 300n, 302–303, 307 Omodeo, Adolfo 93 Orbán, Viktor 4 Ortner, Sherry 73 Osiander, Andreas 132 Pacelli, Eugenio, see Pius XII Pasolini, Pier Paolo 24, 37 Pasquier, Étienne 147–149 Pedro II (King of Portugal) 172–173 Pemartín, José 262 Pera, Marcello 134, 135 Pérez del Pulgar, José María 262 Pettazzoni, Raffaele 92–93, 94n Phillips, Louise 49 Piaget, Jean 10n Pinker, Steven 355n, 357 Pius X, Pope 90, 94 Pius XI (pope) 128 Pius XII (pope) 134, 191, 195 Planck, Max 244n, 247–249, 252–253, 256 Plato 132 Platone, Felice 21, 68 Poincaré, Henri 132 Polanyi, Karl 3, 362 Popper, Karl 245 Possevino, Antonio 136 Puente, Isaac 220, 226 Pumfrey, Stephen 246, 257 Rabin, Sheila J. 134–135 Raiter, Alejandro 44 Ras, Matilde 229n Ratzinger, Joseph 135n Reinach, Joseph 98–100, 102n Reinach, Salomon 97n, 106n Reinhold, Erasmus 136

425 Remartínez, Roberto 208–209, 211–212, 217– 218, 220, 238, 241 Renan, Ernest 84, 85n, 90 Réville, Albert 81, 85–86, 90 Réville, Jean 97 Rheinberger, Hans-Jörg 11 Ribeiro, Orlando 289 Riccioli, Giovanni Battista 138–140, 145 Richta, Radovan 269 Rodés i Campderà, Lluís 183 Romañá i Pujó, Antoni 14, 175–198 Rose, Hillary 8 Rose, Steven 8 Rossanda, Rossana 24 Sacristán, Manuel 35–36 Said, Edward 24, 28, 109n, 370n Salvatorelli, Luigi 93–94 Sánchez Bella, Alfredo 182–183 Saramago, José 24 Schaxel, Julius 250–252 Schrödinger, Erwin 248–250, 252–253 Schucht, Tatiana 21 Scott, James C. 71–72 Scott, Joan 368 Sebastião (King of Portugal) 161 Serrano Coello, Javier (a.k.a. Dr. Klug) 209 Shapley, Harlow 301, 308, 310n, 314 Solé Tura, Jordi 34, 36 Sommerfeld, Arnold 248n Sousa, Luís de Vasconcelos e (Count of Castelo Melhor) 172 Spencer, Herbert 60 Spengler, Oswald 248 Spottorno y Topete, Juan 209–210, 213–218, 222–236, 238–241 Stafford, Barbara 357n Stalin 22, 272, 301, 321, 331, 337 Stavrakakis, Yanis 47n Ștefănescu-Goangă, Florian 335–336 Strumilin, Stanislav 331–332, 338 Suanzes, Juan Antonio 264 Thatcher, Margaret 36, 352, 364 Taylor, Frederick 320–321, 326–328, 330– 332, 337–338, 339, 343–344 Termes, Josep 35 Thompson, Edward Palmer 22, 29–30, 35, 75, 322, 349–350, 364n

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426 Thrift, Nigel 354n Togliatti, Palmiro 21, 68 Topham, Jonathan 30 Torricelli, Evangelista 147 Torroja Menéndez, José Maria 187 Torroja, Eduardo 264–266, 269 Toutain, Jules 96–97 Trump, Donald 4 Turmel, Joseph 94 Udías Vallina, Augustín 126 Urban VIII (pope) 128, 132 Van Dijk, Teun 41n, 42–48, 51, 55 Vernes, Maurice 86n, 96–97, 105 Voloshinov, Valentin 47–48, 51, 53, 55 Volta, Alessandro 147 Voltaire 141, 144 Wallace, Alfred Russell 366 Wallace, William A. 134

index of names Walport, Mark 352n Weaver, Warren 15, 297–298, 300, 301n, 302–304, 306, 308, 310n, 312, 314, 316 Weber, Max 252 Whitehead, Alfred North 152 Williams, Raymond 22, 24–25, 73, 323 Willis, Paul 23 Wilson, E.O. 366 Wittfogel, Karl August 251 Wojtyła, Karol 133 Woolgar, Steve 10 Woollacott, Janet 23 Worsley, Peter 70–71 Wright, Jonathan 118 Wundt, Wilhelm 335 Young, Robert 28–29 Ziggelaar, August 136 Zola, Émile 259

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