Leviathan and The Air-Pump - Chapter VIII: The Polity of Science: Conclusions

Chapter VIII: The Polity of Science: Conclusions

In the final chapter of Leviathan and the Air-Pump, Shapin and Schaffer condense their vastly complicated picture of Restoration society and how it interacted with the development of modern science to three points. "First, scientific practitioners have created, selected, and maintained a polity within which they operate and make intellectual product; second, the intellectual product made within that polity has become an element in political activity and in the state; third, there is a conditional relationship between the nature of the polity occupied by scientific intellectual and the nature of the wider polity." In proving those three points they say they had three things to connect: "(1) the polity of the intellectual community; (2) the solution to the practical problem of making and justifying knowledge; and (3) the polity of the wider society" and that they did so by connection three things: "(1) that the solution to the problem of knowledge is political...(2) that the knowledge thus produced and authenticated become an element in political action in the wider polity... (3) that the contest among alternative forms of life and their characteristic forms of intellectual product depend on the political success of the various candidates in insinuating themselves into the activities of other institutions and other interest groups. He who has the most, and the most powerful, allies wins." This is a departure from the "self-evident" scholars who attribute the victory of the empirical method to its inherent "goodness" (discussed in chapter 1).

They end by relating their examination of Restoration society to their current social climate in the late twentieth century: "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."