The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints used to have a tradition of building cities.
Under the leadership of Joseph Smith, we built the cities of Kirtland, Far West, and Nauvoo. Brigham Young oversaw the building of almost 300 cities across the Intermountain West. City building slowed dramatically after his death. We haven’t built any new cities in the last hundred years.
Why?
The debates between Thomas Hobbes, author of Leviathan, and Robert Boyle, inventor of the air pump, were some of the first challenges of institutionalized science (called ‘natural philosophy’ at the time). Boyle and the Royal Society won one of the most decisive victories in the history of philosophy. Hobbes is still remembered as a political and moral philosopher, but his natural philosophy was completely rejected and forgotten. Hobbes’s arguments had not even been translated out of Latin before 1985.
Shapin & Schaffer decided to take Hobbes’s side of the debate. They pretend impartially in the introduction, but consistently favor Hobbes in the text, and the last sentence of the conclusion is “Hobbes was right.”
Why should we care about the losing side of an old debate about natural philosophy?
It is interesting to see what challenges science faced in its early days and what it defined itself in opposition to. We can use these debates to help understand science and its role in society today.
Why shouldn’t we just read Hobbes directly then?
When you read only a few great authors of the past, you get a distorted view of intellectual history. It looks like there were only a few sides of the debates. Modern scholars have read much more than you could in their eras of expertise. I might have read Hobbes and Boyle, but not Torricelli or Linus or More. By reading modern scholarship, you can see how much more complex and sophisticated the debates were.
Puritan vs. Prussian vs. Parochial. Prussian wins. Also, high schools weren’t really a thing before 1900.
The criteria people typically use to distinguish the more reliable ‘hard sciences’ from the less reliable ‘soft sciences’ do not match our understanding of which is which. Instead, I think that the difference lies in the history of the fields. For hard sciences, the science precedes the community. For soft sciences, the community precedes the science. Hard sciences have norms of empiricism. Soft sciences try to import rules of empiricism. If you want to harden a science, it is more important to grow the norms than to establish the rules. One way to accomplish this is to require early career scientists replicate at least one major result in their field as part of their education.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is a large, centralized institution. Since large, centralized institutions tend to be biased towards legibility, it is worth asking if this exists in Mormonism. I try to avoid value judgements here and allow you to decide if less legible institutions are better or worse for the Church.
Grains – wheat, barley, millet, rice, and corn – are the dominant food in all of the earliest states because they are the easiest to collect taxes on, not because they are the best for the people who farmed them.
Scott’s expertise is the history of the people living in the hills of Southeast Asia. This people have been in contact with the largest state-building project in history (China) for thousands of years. They have arranged their societies to be anti-legible: to make it as hard as possible for the state or any large institution to establish itself.
Seeing Like A State is the best political book I have ever read. I have long had tendencies along these lines, but could never put them into words. Scott expresses himself beautifully and cites numerous examples.
Spruyt’s previous book detailed the development of the sovereign state system in medieval Europe. In The World Imagined, Spruyt looks at how the sovereign state system spread across the world during the Early Modern Era. He contrasts it with other international systems: the Chinese tributary system, the Islamic Cultural Community, and the Galactic Empires of Southeast Asia.
We currently understand international relations in terms of states, which claim sovereignty within their borders and recognize other states as equal outside of their borders. During the High Middle Ages (~1000-1350), multiple different international systems developed. One of them, the sovereign territorial state, became dominant, first in Europe, then throughout the world.
