Jürgen Renn, The Evolution of Knowledge: Rethinking Science for the Anthropocene. Princeton: University Press, 2020; 584pp; Hardcover £30; ISBN: 9780691171982.
By Alfred Freeborn
The year 2012 marked the 50th anniversary of Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, a book which profoundly shaped the historical study of science. The then director of Department II of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG) in Berlin, Lorraine Daston, reflected that one unintended result of the book’s influence was that ‘most historians of science no longer believe that any kind of structure could possibly do justice to their subject matter.’[i] Daston proposed that the path to a new intellectual structure, sight of which had been lost among the growing plethora of detailed micro-histories, lay in the turn from a cultural history of science to a historical theory of knowledge.[ii] Down the corridor from Daston’s office the director of Department I has been busy charting just such a path. Jürgen Renn’s The Evolution of Knowledge: Rethinking Science for the Anthropocene is a guidebook for a new historical theory of knowledge. It is not so much a contribution to the growing literature on how society might tackle global climate change, but uses this context to give urgency to the daunting task of synthesizing a common theoretical structure for a discipline that has lost its way.
As the title of the book suggests, the structure of knowledge is not revolutionary but evolutionary. Renn takes his theoretical model from the biological theory of evolution and its explanatory concepts from the cognitive sciences. An evolutionary theory of knowledge seeks to do for the human sciences what Darwin’s theory of evolution did for the biological sciences by conceptually linking the morphology of the organism with its environmental conditions. It hopes to conceptually link experimental studies of individual cognitive development with the historical study of socially shared knowledge. The binding thread is, like in Darwinian evolution, the survival of the species, with knowledge understood as a value that emerged within the ecology of human life but which now threatens to fatally disrupt that ecology. What matters for the history of science reframed within the global evolution of knowledge is not the emergence of a progresive form of rationality, but the long-term accumulation of ‘earth-changing knowledge’. There is no single structure to scientific development in Renn’s world. Scientific achievements stabilize within complex architectures of knowledge governed by historically specific knowledge economies, but importantly, they do so in a shared cognitive world.
The book is divided into five parts. The first two lay out the methodological and historiographical tools for Renn’s vision of the history of knowledge. In parts three and four, we see how these tools can be put to work in telling longue durée histories of knowledge across its intellectual, material and social evolution. In the final part, the author turns towards the present ecological crisis. The case studies that form the bulk of the book mainly cover episodes from the history of mechanics, the focus of Renn’s department, which he embeds within a global history of the natural sciences. Towards the end of the book, Renn describes the need for a future transdisciplinary venture which he calls ‘geoanthropology’. This research domain would synthesize insights from the evolutionary history of knowledge with large-scale data gathering and modelling of contemporary human-earth systems. For Renn, the ‘anthropocene’ offers a mantle for a renewed ‘unity of science’ movement and the framework within which the natural sciences and the human sciences can be more closely integrated. Among the few concrete proposals for the future, Renn restyles an argument first put forward by Vannevar Bush in the 1940s that the internet can be harnessed to support an interactive and public worldwide web of knowledge. This wikipedia-on-steroids will aid the decompartmentalization of scientific knowledge and its reorganization for facing new challenges.
Renn presents his theoretical framework as an alternative to Kuhn’s Structure. Unlike Kuhn’s book-length essay, however, Evolution has the stature of a textbook, with its own illustrations, text-boxes for important theoretical digressions and a glossary of concepts seventeen-pages long. The book is a densely complex web of cross-referenced ideas and case studies bookended by detailed discussion on the meaning of the anthropocene, staggering in its breadth of scholarship. But one doubts whether Evolution will enjoy the persuasive celebrity that Structure has exerted over the luminaries of our current knowledge economy. In 2015 Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, selected Kuhn’s Structure as his book of the year, recommending it to his followers on the largest social media platform in the world. In doing so, he joined a long list of notable American figures who have praised the book, including Al Gore and Bill Clinton. Renn dispels the ideas of dramatic paradigm shifts and scientific revolutions which helped make Kuhn’s book appear as a lightning rod for intellectual change. But perhaps what our present needs more than revolutions is intellectual common ground. For that reason alone, this book should be required reading for all who consider themselves students of the history of knowledge.
[i] Daston, Lorraine. “History of Science without Structure”, in Robert J. Richards and Lorraine Daston, Kuhn’s “Structure of Scientific Revolutions” at Fifty: Reflections on a Science Classic (University of Chicago Press, 2016), 117.
[ii] See chapter above and also Lorraine Daston, “The History of Science and the History of Knowledge,” KNOW: A Journal on the Formation of Knowledge 1, no. 1 (March 1, 2017): 131–54
Alfred Freeborn (@Alfred_Freeborn) is a doctoral candidate in the History of Science at Humboldt University, Berlin. His research focuses on the history of biological psychiatry in postwar Britain, North America and Germany, with a special focus on the changing field of schizophrenia research – and he has published on the history of the Mind and Brain Sciences in HHS. He is a member of the junior research group “Learning from Alzheimer’s disease: A History of Biomedical Models of Mental Illness” (2015–2020)