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De Achttiende Eeuw. Jaargang 1999 (1999)

De Achttiende Eeuw. Jaargang 1999

(1999)– [tijdschrift] Documentatieblad werkgroep Achttiende eeuw–rechtenstatus Auteursrechtelijk beschermd

Vorige Volgende

Gerard Schulte Nordholt
Are all men created to be universal?
Dutch culturaland scientific societies in the decades around 1800*

Historical research often tries to find lost facts and hidden patterns of the past. Today I will attempt a somewhat different approach and draw attention to one of the more obvious facts of the past. In my opinion no one can seriously doubt the gargantuan rise of information and knowledge1. during the last couple of centuries. It seems so obvious that we tend to forget about it.2. Beside the accumulation of scientific knowledge, the canon of famous scientists and their works, there was a much larger and broader field of growth of practical and everyday information. With that growth came the need for communication, because information has an inclination to flow. Some western European societies tended, in the course of a few hundred years, to develop from a situation where most of the people live at an informational subsistence level, to a society where most of the people need information almost all the time and for most activities of life. So the way a society reacts to this increase in knowledge and need for information, is an interesting field of research, to say nothing about possible explanations. The underlying question here is: How much knowledge, information and communication does a society need in its different stages of development?3. Of course we all know that the process of growth did not stop in the eighteenth century. On the contrary: it accelerated.4. Closely connected to this process are Enlightenment universalism, and two intriguing paradoxes as well.

The hypothesis I want to discuss, is that the accumulation of knowledge, the growth of information and the need for communication in the eighteenth century, was an important factor in the emergence of cultural and scientific societies, and in their ideologies.5. Not the only one, of course, but one that has seldom been thoroughly looked into. It was not the sole reason for the emergence of these societies, nor was their emergence the sole effect of that growth.6. The accumulation of knowledge was, among other factors, fuelled by the universalistic and encyclopedic sides of the Enlightenment and by the switch to empirical research caused by the so called Scientific Revolution.7. It has been said that the Enlightenment shows a tendency to strive for universal knowledge. And it was felt that the human mind was quite capable of achieving that. An optimistic thought, charged with the idea of progress. Therefore it is a little ironic that this tendency towards universal knowledge ultimately led to the exact opposite of universal knowledge: specialist knowledge, and that the final result was, that learned men did not became universalists but specialists. Now for a Homo Universalis there is no need to socialize; at least in theory he knows all there is to know. Specialists, however, need each other, they cannot exist alone and will therefore tend to develop a desire to communicate with each other. Specialists depend on each other, so the growth of knowledge is accompanied by an increase of the information flow, of communication. Both phenomena are closely related. That is one reason for the rise of learned societies.

 

But before we go too fast too soon I would like to illustrate this hypothesis concerning the growing knowledge and communication with the example of the Dutch Republic and its societies around 1800, and with some of the characteristics of the Dutch reading public. Although the accumulation of

knowledge in the eighteenth century is, as far as I know, not a particulary disputed fact, still a few remarks might be made to underline this growth.

Firstly, the encyclopedic projects of the Enlightenment reveal a wish felt by many to describe the increased knowledge. Secondly, the scientific revolution went hand in hand with a change in the nature of knowledge. Knowledge was no longer centred around mostly ancient authorities and a defined corpus of texts but became more and more empirical in character, based as it was on experiments put into a mathematical framework. That was one of the reasons why it became increasingly hard to know all there was to know. Acquiring universal knowledge was possible as long as a defined corpus of knowledge existed; with such a corpus one could become an Homo Universalis. After the turn to empiricism this was no longer possible. Because empirical knowledge is in fact infinite. Empirical research therefore can result in a growth of knowledge, and science becomes dynamic.

Another hint for this growth of knowledge can be found in the increasing number of book titles during the eighteenth century. The amount of titles grew dramatically and doubled or even tripled in some countries.8. Often this growth has been used as an argument to postulate a reading revolution. The growth of book titles was connected with the supposed increase of the reading public in the second half of the eighteenth century. Recent empirical research, though, has cast many doubts on this reading revolution.9. Therefore I am inclined to ascribe the rise in the number of titles to the growth of knowledge. Where there is more to know, there is more to print.

 

But other than the growth of knowledge within the framework of the new sciences and discoveries, the rise of practical and everyday information is rather hard to test empirically.

For many years now, a research project in the Netherlands called: Reading culture in the Netherlands around 1800, has been going on. From surviving booksellers' ledgers the reading habits of Dutch book buyers on the Zeeland Isle of Walcheren could be reconstructed. This project generated a mountain of data, and one of the more astounding conclusions was, that along with a great hunger for scientific knowledge, there was an even bigger appetite for practical information: e.g. schoolbooks, local directories, tide-tables, small dictionaries and so on.10. There also was a considerable demand for non-books: e.g. writing material, paper, pens, ink and other stationery. As was convincingly shown in a similar project in another Dutch town, Zwolle,11. reading culture was to a great

extent the culture of practical reading and writing, the daily use of reading and writing for professional and social purposes. So alongside literary reading we find a larger landscape of practical, everyday reading culture.

 

Similarly, besides the Everest of scientific and technical knowledge there was a growing landscape of foothills and lowlands of practical everyday knowledge, technical and professional knowledge, social andmoral knowledge, legal knowledge, pedagogical knowledge and so on. People felt a need to know about such things. Letme givejust two examples. When the new, Frenchinspiredlegislation was introduced in Holland after 1805, everyone needed to get acquainted with it, as it covered almost all aspects of society. And for some years law texts became the biggest bestsellers of all, as was shown by the earlier mentioned project.12. And secondly, books and brochures of local interest, name-lists, almanacs, lists of mortalities in Middelburg and so on were widely sold.13.

It is in this area of practical information that people felt a greater need to socialize in order to become good and useful citizens. Cultural and scientific societies were an important way to satisfy that need, though not the only one. They provided the means to spread knowledge and propagated the idea that acquiring knowledge was morally correct. And finally they helped to solve a problem that confronted more and more people: how to acquire the ability to select from all this information.

In recent publications about reading culture one of the points of discussion has been the way people chose their literature.14. How did they acquire the ability to select from a wide range of available titles. It is argued that the act of buying books presupposes a learning process.15. Of course the buyer must be able to read, but that alone is far from sufficient to make a choice between a large number of titles. He must obtain the necessary information about those titles first, he must acquire the ability to select. This process of literary socialisation is by no means limited to the field of literature. It does not only apply to the selection of literary texts, the selection of books. In my opinion it is just a part, a small detail of a much larger movement towards the need for selection in a more complex and increasingly multi-optional society. A modern citizen of the eighteenth century needed to undergo a process of socialisation in many aspects of life. And so, before he could choose, before he could make selections, he had to become an educated citizen, he had to acquire a certain

‘Bildung’, he had to acquire a little universal knowledge.16. In a way this is a paradoxical situation: before making a selection and becoming a specialist of some sort, he must become a mini-Homo Universalis. This is the first paradox that follows from the rise of information. Before going to the second paradox I will take a closer look at the Dutch situation.

 

One of the main characteristics of the Dutch Republic in the late eighteenth century is the widespread feeling of decline. Many felt that compared to the golden age of the seventeenth century the Republic was but a shadow of its former greatness. Contemporaries saw political decline, economical decline, cultural decline and ... they saw moral decline. Modern historians do not paint that black a picture and point to the inevitable position of a relative small nation between larger ones. Not so the men of the Dutch Republic in the later decades of the eighteenth century. They felt something could and should be done about it. Some tried it along political lines and formed the party of the Patriots, some tried it along cultural and scientific lines and formed all kinds of societies, some tried it along economical lines and founded societies for economic reform. Everyone tried it along moral lines and wanted to return to the idealized values and virtues of the giants of the previous century. But all thought a solution must apply to the whole nation. The idea was that you could stop the decline by high moral standards and by applying useful knowledge. The idea was that knowledge was morally correct and a good thing for the entire population to acquire. A good citizen was useful for his country, virtuous and beneficial to the community. So this idea of decline provided moral and nationalistic arguments for the spreading and growth of knowledge, and for the founding of dilettante and reformists societies. The idea of knowledge and its importance influenced almost all societies. Even in the many different literary and poetic societies it was thought you would become a better poet by knowing and exchanging rules of poetry, that is, by applying knowledge.17.

After 1750 a sudden growth in the number of societies occurred.18. No longer only learned ones for the academic and social elites, but all kinds of societies for

popular science, and later outright reformist societies, sprang to life. One of the most important of these was the Society for Public Welfare19. founded in 1784. It soon had dozens of local branches all over the country and membership stood at about 2700 in 1796.20. Its goal was to reform Dutch society by spreading knowledge and morality amongst much larger parts of the population than the more traditional societies had done. The founders reproached the traditional learned societies for doing too little to educate the public at large. Nevertheless, the Society for Public Welfare was deeply influenced by the Enlightenment ideals of sociability as expressed by the older societies: together is better. It was a reformist society, but not a political one; in the Dutch republic politics were always strongly associated with party politics, the fighting factions. In the past, those fighting factions had threatened to split the nation, instead of making it one. So the ideal of addressing the whole nation and the sociability ideals were contrary to party politics.

The Society for Public Welfare did not have great practical schemes for the technical or even industrial innovation of the Netherlands. Its main goal was teaching the public how a good, useful and virtuous citizen should behave, and they did set up grand educational projects. The society had a strong moralistic tendency and satisfied the need for better knowledge about morals among larger parts of the population.21.

It is assumed that the Society for Public Welfare and other societies were addressing a new public that expressed a need for social and intellectual communication, and was mostly identical with the reading public. It was widely thought that this public was growing. As has been stated earlier, doubts have risen about such a readers' revolution.

Some of the questions my own research was meant to answer were, how large that supposed new cultural public actually was, what its relation was with the older academical and social elites, and how deeply these new forms of organisations penetrated into society as a whole, this in combination with the above-mentioned thesis of the enlargement of the reading public. Was this really identical with the public of these new societies? Did these two segments more or less overlap? The concept of the cultural public and its supposed growth in the eighteenth century was the main focus of attention in my research project.

To try to answer those and other, similar questions, a database of members of all kinds of cultural, scientific and learned societies in the Netherlands was set up. Eventually the database consisted of roughly 7400 persons divided

among 50 societies.22. Those 7400 persons constitute a very small part of the population in general, but they cover roughly half of the total membership of all societies.23. Now I will not bother you with too much details of this project, but concentrate on some of the results and possible wider interpretations. The compiled data consists of material from four learned societies,24. from a larger number of literary societies25. and from the above-mentioned society for public welfare, which was the most numerous of all.26. Added to this database were all the local societies of the Zeeland isle of Walcheren.27. We may assume that we have a fairly correct picture of sociability in this region. These societies of course are very different in character and purpose, and further research surely must take that in account. However, the first question I asked was whether there was an overlap with the reading public. Thanks to the earlier mentioned research project on reading culture around 1800 we have a lot of data on book buyers in Middelburg, the most important town in the region. Reconstruction of the character and quantity of their book acquisitions was possible. After further analysis and some fine-tuning of the data the conclusion could be drawn that by and large the overlap between the reading public and the members of societies was limited. The Middelburg bookseller van Benthem served about 750 costumers during the years 1807-1809.28. Only 300 of them were members of a society. On the other hand Walcheren counted about 1200 society members during that period.

Though the overlap between those two segments of the public, (readers29. and society-members) was modest, the picture changes if we look to more frequent readers.30. Those who spent more than 25 guilders a year on books (not a small amount of money at the time) were very active in the societies. They were associated with 5 to 6 different societies, and sometimes even more. Most of them have an academic background. Those who are a member of only one

society seldom have an academic background and most of them are infrequent readers. So when taking a more detailed look we see a hard core within the cultural public, very limited in numbers, say about a hundred in Walcheren, but very active in reading and with an academic education. On the fringes of this core we find much larger numbers of both modest readers and members of only one or two societies. But even these larger numbers constitute only a small part of the total population, no more than a few percent.

 

We have seen that a major part of all reading was practical, everyday reading, motivatedby the need and wish to know about local affairs, new legislation, and so on. We have also observed that a large society such as the Society of Public Welfare stressed the general need of acquiring useful knowledge. Useful knowledge and the ability to select can be acquired by reading or by becoming a member of one of the many societies. Dividing the public along informational lines is therefore enlightening. For the hard core of active readers and society members, a few thousand persons nationwide, information had become a daily necessity. For the incidental readers or members of only one society, a larger group but still no more than 1 or 2 percent of the population, information was not yet that important, but they nevertheless felt a need to know. For the third and by all means largest group traditional forms of information were still sufficient. But this group, too, was included into the pretension that knowledge was useful and morally correct, though in practical terms it would still take a lot of time before that last group was actually reached. As knowledge and information seem important motives for the first two groups, perhaps we should better speak of an informational public instead of a cultural public.

 

A second problem now arises: how did a society react to the growth of information, and what was the ideology needed to convince the nation that the informational infra-structure needed maintenance? One answer is that it reacted with new ideologies stimulating the growth of knowledge, telling the public that knowledge was moral. We observed this in the ideology of the Society for Public Welfare, for example. However, Enlightenment ideals such as education for all, useful knowledge for all and universality for all were by no means an altruistic ideology. They became more and more a bare necessity for both the population and the nation as a whole. Doing things together is better than doing them alone, is another of the ideals of Enlightenment sociability, again: together is better. That, too, is a way of reacting to the accumulation of knowledge and the growth of information. A society needs cohesion, and a more complex society with a greater degree of professional specialization needs even more cohesion. Cultural societies did provide that cohesion. And in a later stage nationalism did the same.31. Nations became dependent of the

exchange of information; on all levels of social life information became more and more important. To inform and educate citizens is not just a noble ideal. Without such citizens, it is not even possible to be a modern nation in the nineteenth century sense, to play an important role amidst other developed nations. So the information must be developed and maintained.

In the later decades of the eighteenth century we can observe the beginning of these developments in the Dutch republic. The idea of decline did much to provide arguments for the development and maintenance of information in Holland. Society at large reacted with the emergence of cultural and scientific societies, with new means of communication, with ambitious educational schemes, and with all sorts of philosophies that told the educated public that knowledge was a good thing. In the Dutch Republic for example the so called physico-theological thinking was widely popular. The wonders of nature were explored in order to discover the greatness and goodness of God. Indeed they came a far way from the biblical view that eating from the fruits of the tree of knowledge was not the road to find God.

These tendencies are of an international nature, that is, they can be found in major parts of continental and insular western Europe and on the Atlantic shores of the infant United States of America. But they were expressed in a nationalistic way. In every nation sooner or later the focus became national, depending on the particular local circumstances. The larger picture, however, must not be blurred by these situational contingencies. The international phenomenon of the growth of information, as well as Enlightenment universalism triggered, among other factors of course, the need for cohesion on a national scale. And instead of an universal culture national cultures began to emerge. This is the second paradox. Together is better, but only on a national scale. It gave the Enlightenment its different faces in different nations.

 

My conclusion is that the rise of societies was not so much connected with a new, much larger public as with a more comprehensive knowledge. I present an alternative view: the rise of societies and the characteristics of the reading public were, among other factors, the results of an expanded knowledge. That is, the cultural or informational public remained small, but the need for information grew and hinted at things to come. Neither the public at large, nor the much smaller public of the societies, nor the reading public could ever become universalists in the true sense of an Homo Universalis. The public of the cultural and scientific societies did not need, nor wished, nor could they ever hope to know everything, they just needed a little universal knowledge, enough to know how to select, how to choose, how to behave in an emerging multi-

optional society. They became mini-Homines Universales32., educated to be able to select and to specialize. All men are equal, yes, but they became more and more separate in their nationalism, they became more and more different in the knowledge they acquired. Specialisation was not a phenomenon restricted to the sciences. In the coming nineteenth century the division of labour would become even more widespread. And like other giants of the past, the Homo Universalis would become an extinct species. A new species would arise, a species with deep instead of broad knowledge, not rationalistic but full of intuition and dark feelings, the nineteenth century romantic genius.

Are all Men Created to be Universal?
Dutch Cultural and Scientific Societies in the Decades around 1800.

In this lecture, given at the asecs Annual Meeting in 1996, I discuss the hypothesis that the accumulation of knowledge and information in the last couple of centuries and especially in the eighteenth century was an important factor in the rise and emergence of all sort of cultural and scientific societies. As universal knowledge was no longer possible for an individual, people became more and more dependent on each other and hence needed institutions to exchange their knowledge. Even more important was the extensive and ever expanding landscape of practical, technical and day-to-day information. Based on extensive research of the members of all sort of organisations (see: http://people.a2000.nl/nordholt/Socmainpage.htm) and some characteristics of the reading public in the Netherlands around 1800, my hypothesis is that the rise of societies was not so much connected with a new, larger public as with a more comprehensive knowledge. The cultural or informational public remained small, but the need for information grew. Without a certain exchange of information no nation could ever hope to become a modern nation in the 19th century sense. Ideologies were not only altruistic ideals, but did much to provide arguments for the development and maintenance of the informational infrastructure. (e.g. the sociability ideal: together is better). The public of the societies did not need, nor wished to know everything, they just needed a little universal knowledge (‘Bildung’), enough to know how to select, how to choose, how to behave in an emerging multioptional society. They became mini-Homines Universales.


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