Historians of science and technology once worried about the anachronism that suffused their discipline. Today there is less patience for such critical self-reflection. There are however still certain ...types of anachronism that historians of science have reason to worry about. My essay interrogates the abiding allure of what I call Disney history. Narratives that link the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment, and the Industrial Revolution together in an imagined causal series are prone to Disneyish anachronism, especially when they employ bundles of robustly anachronistic terms - economist, expert, scientist - to denote their imagined protagonists. Eighteenth-century oeconomies, which constitute the focus of this volume, have been especially susceptible to this kind of analysis, as indicated by the invention of concepts such as the 'economic Enlightenment' and the 'Industrial Enlightenment'. Such concepts, I argue, are tailored to serve the needs of Disney history.
Protogaea Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm; Cohen, Claudine; Wakefield, Andre
2008., 2008
eBook
Protogaea, an ambitious account of terrestrial history, was central to the development of the earth sciences in the eighteenth century and provides key philosophical insights into the unity of ...Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s thought and writings. In the book, Leibniz offers observations about the formation of the earth, the actions of fire and water, the genesis of rocks and minerals, the origins of salts and springs, the formation of fossils, and their identification as the remains of living organisms. Protogaea also includes a series of engraved plates depicting the remains of animals—in particular the famous reconstruction of a “fossil unicorn”—together with a cross section of the cave in which some fossil objects were discovered. Though the works of Leibniz have been widely translated, Protogaea has languished in its original Latin for centuries. Now Claudine Cohen and Andre Wakefield offer the first English translation of this central text in natural philosophy and natural history. Written between 1691 and 1693, and first published after Leibniz’s death in 1749, Protogaea reemerges in this bilingual edition with an introduction that carefully situates the work within its historical context.
Adam Smith caricatured mercantilists in his Wealth of Nations. “A rich country, in the same manner as a rich man,” he argued, “is supposed to be a country abounding in money; and to heap up gold and ...silver in any country is supposed to be the readiest way to enrich it.” Genghis Khan’s Tatars, Smith quipped, asked whether there were many sheep and cattle in France, because they wanted to know whether it was worth conquering. They believed that wealth consisted in goats, sheep, and oxen; mercantilists and Spaniards, on the contrary, held that gold and silver were the foundation
