Leviathan and the Air-Pump
by Simon Schaffer & Steven Shapin
Leviathan and the Air Pump is a history of science book. It's a brilliant title that perhaps doesn't perhaps draw you into reading the book, but to me, this is perhaps the single best history of science book that's ever been written. It's a fantastic book, though again it's gone a little out of fashion. But at the time it fundamentally changed the way that people saw the history of science.
The claims that the authors are making in the book are essentially that the political philosophy of Hobbes and other contemporaries, including Locke, and the scientific breakthroughs of Boyle who did the first set of experiments using an air pump – that these two bodies of thought weren't developing human understanding in parallel. They were part of a cultural shift that was interlinked and that was going to produce a new account of what it meant to be a human being. So in other words what this book really did was to show that changes taking place in apparently different areas of human understanding were actually linked to one another and that the Enlightenment, while dependent on immensely talented individuals and specialists, was a kind of collective commitment – a commitment which paradoxically transcended the individual.
Sophie Gee, Literary Scholar
"This is an incredibly influential book, really, really brilliant… This is written by a historian of science and a sociologist of science together. What they're doing is trying to look at how social identity and political issues play a role in the types of arguments that people make, and in the way they approach science and, in particular, whether they embrace experimentalism or not." Read more...
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Vera Keller, Historian
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by Steven Shapin
by Plato