It is one of the hardest tasks for historians of any period or field to “think away” what appears to be self-evident. Yet it is also this ability which differentiates very good scholarly work from the mere expression of personal opinion on the one hand and the simple reproduction of given facts and figures on the other. In other words, the epistemic ability to put yourself in any given position at any point in time and to think about our sources from this particular point of view, rather than retrojecting your own thoughts and ideas onto the given material, is a crucial factor in creating new knowledge about past circumstances.

But then, while this maxim is rather easy to understand and to follow in some areas, it is particularly hard in others.

Take, for example, any given battle that happened in the course of history. In comparison, it is a rather straightforward task to reconstruct the respective goals and possibilities of the opposing parties before, during, and after the event. This is because the event of the battle itself is so decisive that its influence on any given parameter of past reality can be witnessed with a certain directness. How many people died? Who died? Which areas were lost or won? What damage was caused? How many people had to flee? These and many similar questions are very straightforward and, in most cases, rather easy to answer.

We find ourselves in a completely different situation, however, if the course of knowledge and ideas itself becomes the matter of study. The reason for this is also quite easy to understand, but its implications are certainly much harder to comprehend.

In the history of knowledge and ideas, we are also confronted with battles, and these battles can be cataclysmic events in a very similar way to their real-life counterparts. But this is already where the comparability stops. It is neither very easy to reconstruct the goals and possibilities of the opposing parties nor the aftermath of the battle. Furthermore, whilst it is rather easy to understand the concrete territorial gains of a “real” battle, the gains of a battle in the field of knowledge and ideas often lead to a certain paradox: because one side won, the perspective of this side can become so dominant that its victory appears to be self-evident.

Or, in other words, the outcome of the battle might lead to a situation in which the battle itself is not only forgotten, but subsequent generations might have a very hard time understanding why it was fought in the first place.

On the other hand, it is the in-depth analysis of these kinds of battles that can lead to the most astonishing insights and sometimes call our whole idea of reality itself into question.

This is exactly where we come to the book this essay is all about. Leviathan and the Air-Pump by Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer was first published in 1985 by Princeton University Press, and 20 years later, in 2005, its authors were awarded the highly distinguished Erasmus Prize. Its main subject is such a battle in the field of knowledge and ideas. More precisely, the book focuses on the debate between Thomas Hobbes, the author of Leviathan, and Robert Boyle about the latter’s experiments with an air pump.

Just laying out this subject matter to a modern audience explains not only part of the fascination of the book itself, but also part of the problem it addresses. Why on earth could such a very specific scholarly debate that took place almost 400 years ago be of any interest to us today?

Well, the answer to this question is plain and simple: Although the book treats this discussion in great detail over the course of more than 300 pages, it is in fact not really about this debate at all, but about something way more profound. We will come back to this in a bit. First, we need to understand the positions of the two opponents in this battle, which may have been completely bloodless but was nevertheless fought in a very fierce manner.

Let us start with Boyle’s position. Although it appears self-evident from our modern perspective, the very fact that he had to defend it explains a lot about the fascination of Shapin and Schaffer’s work. Boyle was a so-called “experimentalist”. His main argument was that reliable knowledge about nature could be achieved via experiments whose outcomes could, in principle, be witnessed and reproduced by others. He called these experimentally established items of knowledge “matters of fact”.

One of Boyle’s favourite practical tools was his air pump, a device whose main feature was its ability to remove the air from a small glass container and thereby allow the experimenter to conduct experiments inside a vacuum. For its time, this device was absolute high tech, and as such, the device itself as well as basically almost all aspects of its construction and function were widely discussed among the scholarly community.

Up to this point, Boyle’s position as well as the situation he found himself in appear to be rather modern and straightforward. The problems begin at a different point. Because even though Boyle, from our perspective, appears to be largely correct, in his own time this was anything but self-evident.

In fact, back in the 1600s, Boyle could not just conduct an experiment and expect the scientific community to accept its outcomes as matters of fact. Because, as we will see, back in those days there still existed opposing views on how real knowledge was achieved. And because of this, Boyle could not just count on his peers to see things from his point of view, but first had to “invent” a set of “technologies” that helped him to get his ideas accepted.

Shapin and Schaffer describe these technologies as material, literary, and social. For this essay, it is not necessary to explain them in detail, because all three of them work towards a single goal: allowing as many people as possible to come to an agreement about these matters of fact. 

Or, to put it differently: Boyle first had to do something that today appears to be superfluous. He had to find a way through which the outcomes of his experiments could be accepted as knowledge – something we today take for granted. Why this was the case becomes easier to understand once we turn to Hobbes and his position.

Hobbes’s main point was that although the outcome of experiments might provide useful observations, they could not by themselves establish certain philosophical knowledge. To our minds, this approach appears to be rather counter-intuitive. If an experiment is conducted in a proper manner, of course it provides new knowledge, right?

But then, Hobbes’s point of view follows a very coherent logic. It had its foundation in the conviction that certain knowledge about nature could only be established through the rational demonstration of causal relationships.

In other words, for Hobbes it was a central part of knowledge that we should be able to explain exactly why and how something necessarily occurred. In fact, Hobbes even went so far as to deny the status of “philosophy” to the outcome of the experimental programme. For him, the creation of new knowledge was a fundamental political process. It was not enough just to point out that something happened in a certain way, as experimentalists like Boyle did. One also had to be able to explain why it did so and – way more importantly – to establish agreement on the explanation.

At first, Hobbes’s position feels inherently wrong to us. If we witness something happening, we can be certain about it even though we cannot explain every aspect of the occurrence. But, as explained above, this point of view might well be the result of the fact that Boyle not only won the battle, but won it so decisively that we might ask ourselves why the battle between the two positions was fought in the first place.

But then, when we do ask ourselves how and why Boyle won, the picture starts to change. Because even though this might feel wrong to us, Boyle did not win through the self-evident truth of his observations. He did not win for the reasons that we might assume.

Boyle won because of the way he produced, communicated, and socially established his observations as matters of fact. As explained above, he won because he invented a set of technologies and thereby established a certain form of scientific community and a certain way of approaching scientific dissent. It was only through this approach that he found a way in which the outcomes of his experiments could be accepted without being fully explained in the way Hobbes would have wanted.

But it is exactly here where things become seemingly paradoxical. Because in a way, Boyle only won because it was, after all, Hobbes who was right, as Shapin and Schaffer state prominently at the very end of their work:

As we come to recognize the conventional and artifactual status of our forms of knowing, we put ourselves in a position to realize that it is ourselves and not reality that is responsible for what we know. Knowledge, as much as the state, is the product of human actions. Hobbes was right.¹

What the authors intend to say with this is that all forms of knowledge, and with them our understanding of reality, are always human creations. Knowledge itself is always deeply political.

Finally, it is also this ultimate statement that allows us to grasp most clearly that, as stated above, it was never the debate between Boyle and Hobbes that stood at the centre of the work in the first place – it was the nature of knowledge and, through this, our understanding of “reality” itself.

It is precisely because of the wider implications of this that I decided to write this essay. Because if all production of knowledge is always political, and if this holds true even in those cases where we think that we are talking about self-evident facts, it is never actually guaranteed that what we would describe as facts will always be accepted as such by the communities that have the “authority to produce” knowledge.

What counts as certain knowledge in any given society always depends on social practices, institutional authority, and political power relations. When we look at the production of knowledge from this angle, the wider implications are absolutely stunning.

Because if we accept this statement as true, then we arrive at a point where we are provided with a very direct explanation of how, for example, social injustices directly influence our understanding of reality. Phrased differently, the implications of Shapin and Schaffer’s work mean nothing less than that all kinds of scholarship and scientific endeavours, their outcomes, and with them what we consider to be true, are never the purely epistemic endeavours they are usually presented as. They are always deeply political.

Things like discrimination or scientific gatekeeping are therefore not mere injustices, but ultimately have a profound and very direct influence on how we perceive reality. Our present knowledge, and with it our concept of truth about the world, is always a matter of political processes. Our understanding of reality is always shaped by who in any given society is able to “define” what is considered to be “real knowledge”.

This also implies a very important point about social mobility. Because if only certain groups are able to take part in the construction of “real” knowledge, then what we collectively accept as knowledge about reality will necessarily reflect the perspectives and practices of these groups.

1. S. Shapin, S. Schaffner, Leviathan and the Air-Pump. Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life, Princeton 1985, 344. ↩︎