Who owns Enlightenment science ?

Display the full size picture: Gravure ancienne montrant une scène médicale historique avec des médecins et un patient. — Frontispiece to the Essai sur l'électricité des corps by Abbé Nollet, 1746. - Public domain.

Presentation

In 1738, in his Eléments de la philosophie de Newton mis à la portée de tout le monde (Elements of Newton's philosophy made accessible to everyone), Voltaire justified his enterprise by saying: "The science of nature is a good that belongs to all men". This does not mean that everyone can contribute equally, but that everyone is entitled to know the results. The universality of science lies not only in its ability to enact laws that are valid everywhere and at all times; it also implies that the knowledge produced is universally shared, that it becomes a common good. The Newtonian, then Lavoisian and Linnaean paradigms, which have so often served as models for the definition of modern "science", have long been associated with the need to publicize scientific knowledge: it must be made available, both materially and intellectually, through intermediaries such as Voltaire, so that everyone, and especially those who have neither the possibility nor the time to enter into the details of calculations, can have "knowledge of their good".

This Enlightenment ideal of openness and publicity clashed with the supposedly closed, secretive culture of artisanal knowledge, and with the hierarchy and selectivity of learned institutions. But these cleavages have been profoundly debated. Although publicizing the sciences was at the heart of the Enlightenment project, from the XVIII^th century onwards, it posed as many problems as it solved. Who will be responsible for publishing scientific results? Can the public settle disputes between scientists? The public's entry onto the scholarly scene transforms the social perimeters of its analysis: what role do women, amateurs and craftsmen play in this scholarly world that is both specializing and open to the public? What was the place of lay knowledge in the scholarly world of the Enlightenment? Can the dissemination of science escape being made into a spectacle, simplified and abused by half-savants and charlatans? The social openness generated by the Enlightenment's new approaches also calls into question the very category of science itself. Today's issues are no longer those of the cultural turnaround of the 1990s, and this symposium will provide an opportunity to discuss the perspectives opened up, for example, by reflections on the scientific commons, the financing of science, the usefulness of science or intellectual property.

What's more, Voltaire's proposal is far from exhausting the universality of Enlightenment science, as the ambivalence of the "world" in its title shows. Maximum social extension, certainly, but what about geographical extension, the mondialité of science, its global dimension? In 1999, the collective work The Sciences in Enlightened Europe, edited by William Clark, Jan Golinski and Simon Schaffer already took the measure of these shifts by proposing to move away from legitimate places of knowledge. But in proposing a new topography of the sciences in the XVIII^th century, it remained confined to the limits of Europe, without always questioning the imperial dynamics that marked the production of science at the time. The global history of science has since completed the picture of the European production of Enlightenment science, noting the massive expansion of networks for the circulation of science and knowledge about nature, the importance of extra-European knowledge and players, and the links between European science and domination of the planet. We have also shown the extent to which slavery networks contributed to the constitution of knowledge and the supply of cabinets of curiosities and museums in European capitals. The most recent research sketches a world of Enlightenment extended to all continents; it emphasizes that power relations between powers activated scholarly research, between European empires but also between European metropolises and other imperial powers. These approaches call into question the narrative of specifically European progress - long dominant and intrinsically linked to the Enlightenment gesture of writing the history of science - to replace it with another history, that of a global factory of science, based on unequal exchanges, local intermediaries whose invisibility masked the mechanisms of co-production of knowledge, and an economy of predation based on extractivism. Finally, they emphasize that the sciences themselves have contributed to the production and naturalization of borders between disciplines, between humans and the rest of the living world, but also within humanity itself: borders of race and gender, in particular, as well as national borders. Geographical extension problematized the universality of science by attacking the diffusionist approach to European science, but without always proposing a precise analysis of its circulation in different contexts.

These two historiographical traditions (the cultural history of science and the global history of science) have succeeded one another without really being articulated. However, they shared a common concern for universality. Where the questionnaire of the 1990s had repopulated the universe of science with new actors (women, craftsmen, etc.), the global turn continued to extend the list by adding slaves or non-humans. Returning today to the question of the Enlightenment and science thus invites us to combine the question of social dissemination with that of scales, to better consider the universalist ambition of modern science and its limits.