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Abstract
This project investigates the historical relationship between modern science and politics, in order to reopen the question of science’s place in a democratic society. In contemporary political theory and practice, we tend to take for granted that science constitutively excludes political opinion or eschews involvement in political affairs. This familiar view of science’s opposition with politics encourages some to laud science as a corrective for political interest or ignorance. It encourages others (particularly within democratic theory) to raise concerns about science’s devaluation of the political faculties that democracies require. I recover a less familiar understanding of science’s relationship to politics from the work of several thinkers who are commonly remembered as architects of the science-politics opposition: René Descartes, Thomas Hobbes, and Giambattista Vico. My readings seek to show that common sense, political judgment, and the rhetorical imagination played an enabling role in the re-founding of science. I argue that these political faculties actually nourished the creative, revolutionary energies of modern science, even if many scientific innovators were tempted to sublimate these energies in the name of renewed authority.
Conventional views of Descartes and Hobbes as founders of absolutist views of science and politics are not wrong, but I argue that they are incomplete. Both Descartes and Hobbes elicited political judgment in order to nurture science’s critical, revolutionary spirit. Only then did they disavow the common people (and common sense itself) as an unruly threat to the “new science.” Vico, in contrast, refuses the opposition between politics and science that Descartes and Hobbes at once violate and install. His genealogies uncover science and politics’ shared root in rhetorical speech.
Extending Vico’s genealogical approach, this dissertation augments recent critiques of the scientific quest for the Archimedean “view-from-nowhere,” while resisting the tendency of post-positivist scholars to treat opinion – the view from somewhere – as a rut where scientific thinking gets stuck. Descartes, Hobbes and Vico each recognized the value to science of perspectival thinking and political opinion. Above all, this dissertation pursues new ways of understanding how scientific thinking and the practice of democracy may enrich, limit, and transform one another today.
