To whom does the science of the Enlightenment belong?

Display the full size picture: An old engraving depicting a historical medical scene featuring doctors and a patient. — Frontispiece to Abbé Nollet’s *Essai sur l’électricité des corps*, 1746. - In the public domain.

Introduction

In 1738, in his *Elements of Newton’s Philosophy Made Accessible to Everyone* , Voltaire justified his undertaking as follows: ‘The science of nature is a good that belongs to all mankind’. This does not mean that everyone can contribute to it equally, but that everyone has the right to know its findings. The universality of science does not lie solely in its ability to establish laws that are valid everywhere and at all times; it implies that the knowledge produced is universally shared, that it becomes a common good. The Newtonian, then Lavoisierian and Linnaean paradigms, which have so often served as models for the definition of modern ‘science’, have long been associated with the requirement for the public dissemination of scientific knowledge: this knowledge must be made available, both materially and intellectually, through intermediaries such as Voltaire, so as to enable everyone – and in particular those who have neither the means nor the time to delve into the details of the calculations – to have ‘knowledge of their common good’.

This Enlightenment ideal of openness and public access clashed with the supposed closed nature and culture of secrecy surrounding craft-based knowledge, as well as with the hierarchy and selectivity of scholarly institutions. Yet these divisions have been the subject of in-depth debate. Whilst the public accessibility of science lies at the heart of the Enlightenment project, from the 18^th century onwards it posed as many problems as it solved. Who sets out the findings? Who will be responsible for publishing scientific results? Can the public settle disputes between scholars? The public’s entry onto the scholarly stage transforms the social boundaries of its analysis: what role do women, amateurs and craftspeople play in this scholarly world, which is both becoming increasingly specialised and open to the public? What is the place of lay knowledge in the scholarly world of the Enlightenment? Can the dissemination of science avoid being turned into a spectacle, oversimplified, or exploited by pseudo-scholars and charlatans? This social openness, driven by the new approaches of the Enlightenment, thus leads us to question the very category of science itself. Today’s issues are no longer those of the cultural turning point of the 1990s, and this conference will provide an opportunity to discuss the perspectives opened up, for example, by reflections on scientific commons, the funding of science, the utility of science and intellectual property.

Moreover, Voltaire’s proposal is far from exhausting the universality of Enlightenment science, as demonstrated by the ambivalence of the ‘world’ featured in its title. Maximum social scope, certainly, but what of its geographical scope, the global nature of the sciences, their global dimension? As early as 1999, the collective work *The Sciences in Enlightened Europe*, edited by William Clark, Jan Golinski and Simon Schaffer, had already recognised these shifts by proposing a move away from the established centres of legitimate knowledge. Yet, whilst proposing a new topography of eighteenth-century science, it remained confined within the boundaries of Europe without always questioning the imperial dynamics that characterised scientific production at the time. Since then, the global history of science has filled in the gaps in the picture of the European production of Enlightenment science, acknowledging the massive expansion of networks for the circulation of science and knowledge about nature, the significance of non-European knowledge and actors, and the links between European science and global domination. It has also been demonstrated how much the slave trade networks contributed to the development of knowledge and to the stocking of cabinets of curiosities and museums in European capitals. The most recent research paints a picture of an Enlightenment world extending across all continents; it emphasises that the balance of power between great powers fuelled scholarly research, not only amongst European empires but also between European metropolises and other imperial powers. These approaches challenge the narrative of a specifically European progress – long dominant and intrinsically linked to the Enlightenment’s distinctive approach to writing the history of science – replacing it with another history: that of a global production of science, founded on unequal exchanges, local intermediaries whose invisibility has obscured the mechanisms of knowledge co-production, and a predatory economy based on extractivism. Finally, they emphasise that the sciences themselves have contributed to producing and normalising boundaries between disciplines, between humans and the rest of the living world, but also within humanity itself: boundaries of race and gender, in particular, as well as national boundaries. This geographical expansion called into question the universality of the sciences by challenging the diffusionist approach to European sciences, though without always offering a precise analysis of their circulation in different contexts.

These two historiographical traditions (the cultural history of science and the global history of science) succeeded one another without ever being truly integrated. Yet a shared inquiry into universality ran through both. Whilst the research framework of the 1990s had repopulated the world of science with new actors (women, artisans, etc.), the global turn continued to expand the list by adding slaves and non-humans. Returning today to the question of the Enlightenment and science thus invites us to combine the issue of social dissemination with that of scales in order to better understand the universalist ambition of modern science and its limitations.

Program