Content area
Full Text
The Scientific Revolution, by Steven Shapin.
University of Chicago Press, 1996. xiv, 218
pp. Illus., index. Softcover. ISBN 0-22675021-3. $12.00. Hardcover. ISBN 0-22675020-5. $19.95.
There is no such thing as the Scientific Revolution, and this is a book about it.
Steven Shapin
Once again science is in revolt and scientific revolutions are big business, even when they never happened. At least that is Steven Shapin's contention in this brief study, which has garnered praise and press including a substantial essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education (December 6, 1996: pp. A17-A18). In that overview, Peter Monaghan implies that Shapin's historical and sociological perspective on the development of science tends toward the iconoclastic position associated with some postmodern cultural historians.
Shapin begins with a discussion of the concept itself: this revolution has been taken as the most important event, or change in attitude, since the beginning of Christianity, and perceived as the origin of the modern mentality, although the early practitioners never...