I. Bernard Cohen, Science and the Founding Fathers (Norton, New York, 1995). 368 pp. $25.00. ISBN 0-393-03501-8.
As the first American Ph.D. in the history of science, I. Bernard Cohen is virtually the father of his field. Long a student of Isaac Newton and Benjamin Franklin, he was led to write the present book, subtitled Science in the Political Thought of Jefferson, Franklin, Adams, and Madison, by focusing on the question of "whether an outsider who was not a specialist in American political thought, American intellectual history, or American diplomatic or social history could add anything of consequence to the monument of established scholarship and interpretation." (p.13)
The quartet of subjects Cohen has chosen are the key players in framing the documents on which the United States of America is based -- from the Declaration of Independence to the Constitution. All save Franklin were college graduates and became presidents of the United States, and two benefited from the finest science education available in America at the time (Jefferson from William Small at William and Mary, Adams from John Winthrop at Harvard). Self-educated, Franklin became a first-rate scientist in his own right (thus achieving fame that would serve his country well during the Revolution); he and Jefferson both went on to found universities, named for their respective states.
To what extent did each of these Founding Fathers use the science they learned in contributing to the founding of their country? More particularly, Cohen asks, how much were they influenced by the work of Isaac Newton, which is said to have influenced thought in the eighteenth century as that of Darwin did in the nineteenth. He cites three ways in which Clinton Rossiter -- a political scientist he greatly admired -- "believed that 'Newtonian science quickened the advance toward free government'" (p. 255):
1. "conquering of superstition and ignorance and the parallel exaltation of the power of human reason." Cohen responds that this is true of science in general, as much true of Franklin's explanation of lightning as of Newton's explanation of comets.
2. "scientific method had a 'kinship' with democratic procedure." Though science did decline in Nazi Germany and Communist Russia, Cohen counters that it thrived in Imperial Germany and ascended in France in the second half of the eighteenth century.
3. ". . . the new science had a direct influence on the development of American political and constitutional thought." Cohen regards the generalization from "natural law" to human-made law as "too facile," as he also discounts connections between separation of powers and the concept of equilibrium (which he emphasizes is not Newtonian) and between the operation of government and the running of a machine (which he emphasizes is not what Newton's Principia is all about).
The culprit in promoting the connection between the operation of government and a machine Cohen finds to be none other than a later president, Woodrow Wilson, who was given the notion by a Norman Kemp Smith that thinking falls under the dominant thought of the preceding age. (In fact, Wilson later went on the interpret the U.S. Constitution in terms of the dominant thought of his own age, that of Darwin -- although Cohen criticizes his evolution as being more Spencerian than Darwinian).
In challenging what he feels to be are spurious Newtonian influences in American political thought, Cohen enlists an ally in J. Robert Oppenheimer: "What there is in eighteenth-century political and economic theory that derives from Newtonian methodology is hard for even an earnest reader to find." (p. 257) What Cohen did find is that "The Founding Fathers used science as a source of metaphors because they believed science to be a supreme expression of human reason." ". . . the use of science was . . . invoking metaphor and analogy in the service of rhetoric." ". . . the sciences provide rhetorical authority to buttress a position or conclusion already adopted, just as a lawyer's argument is reinforced by citations of legal precedents or the names of great authorities" (although Cohen observes that Franklin, a scientist in his own right, apparently felt that he didn't need to do this). But "their insistence on checks and balances was not so much an expression of some abstract philosophical position about government being a machine rather than an organism as it was an expression of concern about limiting the power of the central government . . . and . . . balancing . . . the influence of the larger and more populous states at the expense of the smaller ones." (pp. 150-151, 261, 279-280).
The direct influence of Newton on Madison and Adams was quite minimal. Together "science" and "sciences" appear 15 times in The Federalist, but Madison's scientific metaphors are primarily from "the life sciences and particularly medicine." And Adams erred in invoking Newton's Laws of Motion to argue against Benjamin Franklin's preference for a unicameral legislature (see box). As a self-educated scientist, though, Franklin benefited greatly from Newton and learned the experimental method from Newton's Opticks. His observations and theory of electricity "enlarged the Newtonian natural philosophy" in the experimental tradition of the Opticks, and he carried this experimental approach over to his attitude toward the Constitution, relinquishing his preference for a unicameral legislature and proposing the "great Compromise." His famous "Final Speech" on 17 September 1787, which accepted the Constitution with all its imperfections, suggested that he looked upon the new American government as an experiment and held out the hope that it could be improved by further amendment.
But the only Founding Father examined by Cohen who seems to have been influenced by the mathematical tradition of Newton's Principia (written in Latin rather than in English) was Jefferson. Indeed, suggests Cohen, "Thomas Jefferson was surely the only president of the United States who ever read Newton's Principia," and both the Latin original and English translation were in his library. Cohen notes that Jefferson used Newton's "same effects, same causes" Rule for Reasoning in Natural Philosophy in his Notes on the State of Virginia to argue against Buffon's claimed inferiority of species in the New World and that "It is obvious that in the age of Jefferson the words 'self-evident' suggested axiom and made an association with science." (p. 123)
In fact, Jefferson's earlier reference to the "laws of nature" in the Declaration of Independence made it sure that that the truths he claimed to be "self-evident" connected to axioms in science rather than to those of geometry. "Even though Newton's axioms are not universally self-evident," Cohen writes, "they nevertheless could partake of the same degree of validity as the self-evident axioms of geometry, but only for those people who had learned to think about nature in the new manner." "This sense of 'axiom,' as a basic truth accepted by those who had been converted to a new and correct way of thinking, has an obvious transfer of meaning from the physical sciences to the realm of politics. . . . Aquinas . . . emphasized that a learned man can see as self-evident a truth which an ignorant . . . man cannot." (pp. 127-128)
Despite the thoroughness with which Cohen researched his book, I see nowhere any citation of the following follow-up from Arnold Arons ("Newton and the American political tradition," Amer. J. Phys., 43(3), 209-213 (Mar 75)):
Philosophers of the Enlightenment all too easily made a leap from the laws of gravity to laws of human interaction and at the same time ignored the forces of habit, tradition, and custom, neglecting the deep non-rational impulses and drives that are the sources of irrational human behavior.
". . . the expressed faiths of the Enlightenment are sometimes naive and never self-evident; . . . the dignity and the rights of man are not an inalienable birthright, but a hard-earned acquisition." (quoted from M. Curti, The Growth of American Thought (Harper and Row, New York, 1964).And, given the claimed lack of self-evidence to the uninitiated, is not the purpose of science education to develop in our students an ability to "think about nature in [a] new manner," so that Newton's axioms (i.e., laws of motion) -- and other scientific truths -- are viewed by our students as "self-evident"?
- John L. Roeder
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