note to homo oeconomicus 1

Mill, in his influential System of Logic, devoted Book six to the logic of the sciences of human nature, which he called ethology – the science of character. His first purpose in writing this chapter is to defend the notion that social sciences are exact sciences – that is, that they express laws, in the same way that the phenomena studied by astronomers or meteorologists express laws. His second point is that ethology is a deductive science – not an experimental one: “Are the laws of the formation of character susceptible of a satisfactory investigation by the methods of experimentation? Evidently not: because even if we suppose unlimited power of varying the experiment, (which is abstractedly possible, though no one but an oriental despot either has that power, or if he had, would be disposed to exercise it,) a still more essential condition is wanting; the power of performing any of the experiments with scientific accuracy.” (517)

This breathes the air of liberal doctrine. From Mill to Hayek, the idea that some central despotic power could or would ‘experiment’ with humans evokes the moral outrage that is the correlate of the liberal philosophy of markets. Markets, on the other hand, exert no despotism; markets, being free, free men from despotism.

In fact, Mill’s observation seems, from the point of view of the exact sciences, correct. And yet, from the point of view of the governance of men, it seems to miss the point. Almost any rule – whether derived from the management of a business enterprise or from a government agency – is in the manner of an experiment. It organizes human activity in a certain way. Looked at pragmatically, humans go from experiment to experiment – that is, from norm to norm.

And this brings us back to the question of the myth of homo oeconomicus. When I asked, parodying the title of Veyne’s work, if the moderns believe their myth, I am asking about how the myth affects the moderns. My hasty answer is that slowly, inexorably, a myth that was devised to explain society has become the myth to which society is being sacrificed. This is its ‘demonic’ power. In creating an economics that features, centrally, homo oeconomicus, the economists – in spite of their protest that homo oeconomicus is an ideal type, a fiction binding together the models of a science – embarked upon an experiment. But one must be careful here: for the power to design this experiment is surely not in the hands of the economists. Rather, the myth congeals into a recognizable figure central elements of the capitalist order, and in so doing reinforces them. It is as if an experiment were proposed by an occidental despot, in which the question explored is: can we devise a society in which homo oeconomicus is the norm?

In protesting that the rational economic agent is not meant to represent the typical human, with his ‘perturbatory’ human features, Walras was doubtless being sincere. But he was ignoring the unconscious, utopian side of his invention. When physicists devise their model of the atom, it is without a thought that the atom should take counsel from the physicists. But the same can’t be said for the economists.

To leap ahead: I don’t propose to become the biographer of homo oeconomicus because I delight in his hijinks. I propose to do so because I think the experiment is turning out badly.

Looking at global capitalism at the end of the Great Moderation, I am reminded of the end of the Soviet Union. In the eighties, with actually realized socialism in place, it was time for the New Soviet Man to emerge. As he did so, in the confident words of the regime’s ideologists, a satiric portrait of him – Homo Sovieticus – was promoted in dissident circles. But even Homo Sovieticus could not quite capture the forces that were steadily undermining the Soviet imperium. As the economy became more and more unreal, an empire of soft budget constraints – factories whose products were obsolete by the time they reached the end of the assembly line, workers who diverted the chemicals needed for their machines into beverages to be fermented and drunk on the line, etc – the New Soviet Man became more and more real.

A similar, unacknowledged process is taking place in the capitalist world, which is busy ignoring the signs of imminent environmental and moral collapse. As the experiment to make homo oeconomicus real effects the life histories of billions of people, the mixed exchange matrix that actually makes capitalism livable is being eroded. In the end, when the life of the fiction negates the life of the flesh, the fiction will die – but, if history is any guide, the death throes will make the life of the flesh miserable in some vast and catastrophic way.

homo oeconomicus 1

A mystery surrounds the birth of homo oeconomicus. His ‘hour of birth” is disputed. His parents are many – and they are all males. He has been traced back to Plato’s philosopher king – and more plausibly, to the all knowing fiction devised by Laplace to explain the explicability of the mechanistic universe: “An intelligence which in a given instant would know all the forces of which nature is animated and the respective situation of the beings that compose it, if it were besides of a vast enough scale to submit these givens to analysis, would embrace in the same formula the movements of the greatest bodies in the universe and those of the lightest atom: nothing would be uncertain for her, and the future, as the past, would be present to her eyes.”

Homo oeconomicus, of course, has not yet been elevated to a principle as universal as all that. But he is still a hero, and as such, a piece of the marvelous that no plebian copulation can explain. The hero’s birth, which is always a matter of cultic interest, divides us into initates and the uninitiated – and never more so than in the mysteries celebrated in the name of the rational maximizer. We understand the mysteries or we don’t. And the priests work to ensure that the mysteries become ever more mysterious and ensnaring as we enter the sacred places.

The phrase appears, all at once, in the 1890s in the works of several political economists. In an essay from 1891, Lasciate Fare, Lasciate Passare, Vilfredo Pareto writes: “now the science of economics tends to separate itself into two branches. In the first case, one departs from some postulates, in fact only one postulate, that of hedonism, and having assumed a homo oeconomicus whose actions are hedonistic in every, one establishes a workable basis of a deductive science that represents what would happen in a society composed of such men. In the other, one brings together like facts and tries to deduce laws from them, which cannot be non-empirical…” [cited by Michael McLure 2001, 41] Leon Walras in 1898 writes: “In fact, the man who has needs, who divides labor and who, in view of the maxima satisfaction of his needs sells his services and buys products in quantities such that his scarcities should be reciprocal to the virtually exchangeable quantities of goods and services, homo oeconomicus, is also he who is endowed with sympathy and an aesthetic sense, with understanding and reason, with a free and conscious ill, homo ethicus; and both are man living in society, cultivating art, making science, having manners and morals and practicing industry, in brief, homo coenonicus.” 1898 Irving Fisher, reviewing a book by the Italian economist, Matteo Pantaleone in 1898, asks: “Is it necessary, for instance, to predicate of “homo oeconomicus” perfect foresight and papal infallibility (pp. 87, 240)…”

In fact, even as homo oeconomicus steps into history, who and what he is, his properties, what he is for, the destiny that lies before him, the charge he must keep, all are subject to doubt and dispute. That he is a fiction is granted all the way around: but isn’t it true of all sciences that they operate by creating useable fictions? That is, generalizations or ideals, models or laws, that are not used to explain every physical occurrence, since occurrences happen in the friction of altering circumstance.

Walras, in 1875, corresponded with the French philosopher, Renouvier, about the justification for his conception of the economic actor - this, one should note, is before the homo oeconomicus was named, but not before the sages were dimly conceiving of him. Of his prehistory we will speak later.

Renouvier wrote that “psychological, social and other conditions are of a nature to introduce a separation between the previsions of mathematical economics and the determination of economic facts.” Walras responded, defending his Elements of Pure Political Economics: “It is exclusively a work of theory, in which I believed I was able to make an abstraction of ‘psychological, social and other conditions” of which you speak as accessory perturbations. [Cited by Donald Walker in Etudes Walrrassiennes, 2004]

This ability to put aside the perturbations of society and psychology, and to abstract the unit of pleasure – or utility – to a mathematical quantity that is, at one and the same thing, the object of some agent’s direst predilection and a mere variable for any pleasure whatsoever, is what characterizes the most heroic act of the homo oeconomicus. It is not so much that he is a calculator – it is that he is a substituter.

Doing intellectual history: the Great and Little Tradition

Is intellectual history about intellectuals? Or is it about the intellectual spirit of a given epoch and culture, the mix of ideas and assumptions? Is it, in other words, about what James Scott has called the Great Tradition and the Little Tradition?

Recall what Scott says about the two traditions in his seminal essays about peasant revolts from the seventies: the Great Tradition, which is usually developed in the urban setting by ‘high culture’ intellectuals, then spreads out into the rural setting, where it encounters the set of beliefs and symbols held by peasants, or the Little Tradition. The process of dissemination, however, is full of slippages:

“My contention … will be that there is something systematic about this slippage between religious and political ideas as understood and practiced in the city and their little tradition variants in the countryside. This slippage, I argue, is scarcely random or accidental - quite simply because the social characteristics of an idea's great tradition adherents differ in clear and identifiable ways from the social characteristics of its little tradition ad-herents. The former, taken broadly, live in large differentiated cities where much of their life is governed by impersonal legal norms, are generally middle or upper class, and are masters of a written tradition. The latter, also taken broadly, live in small, relatively homogeneous villages where much of their life is governed by local custom, are generally lower-class subsistence-oriented producers, and are part of an oral tradition. To the extent that this gross characterization has any validity, it alerts us to the fact that religious and political ideas may each be transformed in comparable ways as they reach the peasantry. If folk Catholicism is to the New Testament and St. Peter as folk communism is to Das Kapital and Lenin, we may then be able to say something meaningful about folk variants of great tradition ideas and practices in general.”

Scott’s contention originally conceives of the Great Tradition in terms of the systematic possibilities afforded by the text – with its rules of relevance, truth, consistency, etc. – and the Little Tradition in terms of the possibilities of the oral – with the veridical weight it puts on the relationship between speaker and speech, its subordination of coherence to a host of exceptions, etc. This looks much like an old division between those with and those without the book, or writing. However, if the framework here is creaky, I think it is useful to have these two traditions in mind when trying to understand the past from an anthropologically informed perspective. I would, however, add to the dialectic between them that the Great Tradition continually distances itself from a past that it casts as ‘superstitious’ or outmoded – that it describes in Little Tradition terms – and that this perception is not completely false. The little tradition is not completely un-textualizable. On the contrary, it thrives on what Bakhtin called the “word” – on the maxim, proverb, verse, fable, figure, divination – which in turn operates as a sort of doxic disturbance within the Great Tradition.

In order to represent the intellectual landscape of, say, French culture in the seventeenth century, it is best to keep in mind the existence of both of these traditions. An intellectual history that takes up, say, Descartes, Gassendi, Pascal, etc., may miss important things about French intellectual culture. For instance, we know that in the 17th century, both the Nahua in Mexico and the French in the countryside, and in churches and parlements, believed human beings could change themselves into other animals. The French belief in this fact was confirmed over and over in many witch trials. The difference between the Nahua and the French was, in fact, not so much a difference in belief as in governance, which allowed certain figures in the Great Tradition the discursive possibility of examining the human body and, in the end, doubting that it could change into the body of other animals. This condition was the result of certain unique features of social control in France that were not generated by the Nahua – the policing of belief, for example.

Of course, members of the “high culture” could very well use witchcraft beliefs – even if they didn’t share them – tactically.

Take the sad tale of Baron and Baronne Beausoleil. This tale is less known than it should be – feminist historians, take note! Baronne Beausoleil, born Martine de Bertereau, came from a noble French family in Touraine or Berry. Her husband, Jean du Châtelet, Baron de Beausoleil and D’Auffembach, was a 17th century virtuoso. His nephew was a well known surgeon and Cartesian. Beausoleil was a geologist and alchemist, who became well enough known for his work on mineralogy to attract the attention of the Holy Roman Emperor, Rudolph, and his successor, who made him commissioner general of the mines of Hungary. He was enticed back to France by officials of the court of Henry IV. The French state was alarmed by the disarray in which they found the French mining industry. Thus, Beausoleil – who worked with his wife, Martine – was given broad powers to restart the mining sector in the provinces.

In doing so, they established a base at Morlaix. It was there that their first misadventure befell them: a priest, a Prevot Provincial she names, charmingly, Touche-Grippé, ransacked their chateau while they were away on some survey of mines in the area. He justified his search by alluding to his suspicion that they were dabbling in magic. After all, how could they succeed in their task if they were not using magic? One has to remember, too, that in the early 1600s, magic could be a synonym for science – it is used with this signification in Porta and Bacon.

Rather remarkably, Martine seems to have been entrusted with the task of public relations for the pair – which is how we know of this first, and as it turns out, premonitory dustup with the priest. For a while, the couple left France, but they were enticed back under Louis XIII. It was then they made the mistake of using their own fortune to explore for and open mines – thinking, evidently, that they would be reimbursed by the state.

Such were the circumstances when she published her pamphlet, La Restitution de Pluton. In it, she tackles the subject of her sex:

But how about what is said by others about a women who undertakes to dig holes in and pierce mountains: this is too bold, and surpasses the forces and industry of this sex, and perhaps, there is more empty words and vanity in such promises (vices for which flighty persons are often remarked) than the appearance of truth. I would refer this disbeliever, and all those who arm themselves with such and other like arguments, to profane histories, where they will find that, in the past, there have been women who were not only bellicose and skilled in arms, but even more, expert in arts and speculative sciences, professed so much by the Greeks as by the Romans.”

And here, after alluding to some classical instances, she gives her bonafides in the “occult art”: having descended myself in the shafts and caverns of mines (although they are frighteningly deep), as those of gold and silver in Potosi, in the Kingdom of Peru…In those of Neusoln, Cremitz, and Schemnitz, in the Kingdom of Hungary…”

Which has given rise to the report that she actually went across the ocean on some expedition to visit Peru. One wonders if this claim is exaggerated – it would certainly be interesting. And it is politically possible that the Beausoleils, who worked for the Habsburgs, could have gotten such passage. Of course, right after this claim comes another – about what is met with in the mines of Hungary and Germany: .. where one often meets small dwarves, of about three or four palms in height, old, and clothed like those who work in the mines, to wit with an old short jacket, and a leather vest, which hangs down over most their body, with a white cape with a hood, a lamp, and a stick in their hand, horrible specters to those who have not long had experience in the descent into the mine.”

The Restitution of Pluto is a rather strange title for a mining manual – for Pluto to receive restitution, one would think, something was called for on the order of returning ore – a sort of antimining. But the restitution that Baronne Beausoleil has in mind is the restitution of the fortune she and her husband spent on exploring mines for the French government. In addition, she complains of having had the household maps and documents concerning mining pilfered by Touche-Grippé. In the course of her pamphlet, she also undertakes to show how astrology and the ‘wand’ used by miners were employed in renewing old and worn out mines.

Perhaps this was the excuse that provided the base for her downfall. The case of baron and baronne Beausoleil is curious, in that we have no record of their trial, no documentation to tell us why they were separated and imprisoned, Martine de Bertereau in Vincennes, her husband, Jean du Châtelet, Baron de Beausoleil and D’Auffembach, in the Bastille. Martine was imprisoned with her daughter. The last indication we have of Martine, the woman who may have plunged into the fearsome mines of Potosi, and certainly did go down into many Hungarian and German mines, is contained in the letters of the Abbé de Saint-Cyran, who was imprisoned in Vincennes as a Jansenist priest. According to Saint-Cyran, Martine was ‘assez mal en ordre’ - she wore threadbare clothes. He was able to procure some better clothes for both of them. He also wrote to a friend as a favor for Martine, requesting him to inquire about the couple’s daughter, Anne du Châtelet, who had been left in the care of one of their friends. Anne had been taught Latin in order to “render her capable of the science of mining, which is hereditary in the family”. In another letter, Saint-Cyran defends Châtelet from the accusation of necromancy. His interest in astrology, Saint-Cyran assures his correspondent, was entirely scientific – the kind of divination that Saint Thomas approved of.

The Great Tradition is built on many bones, and some of the bones it grinds are of unfortunates who are caught in out of joint moments, and purged from our collective memory.

logic and strategy

The other day, a friend told me about a class she is teaching. The students had to make presentations, and two of them presented about South Africa. Oddly, she said, these student seemed barely aware that once upon a time, South Africa had a racist, apartheid regime. I said (falling into my old codger routine) that I remembered the day I protested the University of Texas' investment in South Africa, along with hundreds of other students. And then I said, I now think that was a mistake.

And then I thought about it and said, no, it wasn’t a mistake. It was right to protest. It was wrong for U.T. to have that investment. But it was, at the same time, good that U.T. had an investment we couldd protest.

My reactions led me to reflect on the difference between strategy and logic.

To illustrate that difference, take the 'human rights' game. Say that there is a country - call it, a U.S.-like country, that is, one that doesn't torture and invade countries illegally, but that is nevertheless wealthy and has an interest in promoting human rights. And take a human rights violator, like, say, Iran. It would be better, in my opinion, for the U.S.-like country to recognize Iran and make investments in that country. At the same time, it would also be better for people to protest those investments and demand that the U.S.-like country boycott Iran.

Logically, these positions are incompatible. One comes to a decision fork – A or Not-A. Logically, one can’t embrace both.

Strategically, however, both may be preferable. It is preferable that Iran have an internal interest that is vulnerable to protest. And it is preferable that protest exists to make the threat of loss credible.

This is the kind of thing that Deleuze and Guattari are talking about when they speak of affirming both sides of a disjunction. One leaps, here, from logic to strategy.

Of course, there is a problem. In order for the protests to be credible, the protestors must sincerely believe in disinvesting in Iran. And in order for the investments to be credible, the investors must act credibly like investors, defending with all their might and main investment in Iran.

So – where is the strategist, given this field of beliefs? The strategist is in the position of a sort of Maxwell’s demon – or a Chinese sage. She has anchored herself to the ‘uncanny’ position within the social field. She does have a strategic goal – the strategy is meant to move Iran to another regime point. But she can’t really reveal her goal for the strategy to succeed. And she must be on both sides of the decision branch.

It is a tough life for Fortuna, the game theorist. But she must be pitiless – even with herself.



the exchange matrix

The other day, my friend M. sent me a copy of a letter that was written by an editor of a press to another person, in which the editor solicited a small essay for a line of books that would contain small, one hundred page essays on a variety of topics. M. suggested that this was definitely up my alley – and I have to agree.
So I have been thinking of carving out a small bit from my human limit project for a book to be tentatively entitled, Homo Oeconomicus: the biography of a myth. Much of what I’ve been writing lately (about the origin of the equilibrium idea in economics) would flow very easily into a book about the rise of the idea of the homo oeconomicus – the rational actor whose ectoplasmic calculations are at the center of mainstream economics. To paraphrase Paul Veyne’s book, “Did the Greeks believe their myths”, I think an essay about whether the economists believe theirs – and more importantly, how their belief has helped form the political and economic order of modernity – is worth a nice one hundred pages.

This essay would have to begin in Rouen. I’d like to start with Pascal, Boisguilbert and Fontenelle and go forward until, in the 20th and 21st century, I bump into Robert Lucas, the Ownership society and the Browne report. The essay would really be the development of a phrase of Fontenelle, who, in his Eloge de Montmort, wrote that the scientific spirit will in the end bring about the belief “that the political world as well as physics is ruled by weight, number and measurement.” The great transformation of the economic and political arrangements under capitalism, outlined by Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto and Karl Polanyi in the Great Transformation, took place not only in the vast recombination and recreation of everyday routines, but also in the thoughts entertained by the clerks, the policymaking intellectuals, the poets, the dissenters, the political arithmeticians, the pamphleteers and scientists, and in general the entire crowd of Burke’s “theorists”. Such is the ‘spirit’ of capitalism.

Historians have long been convinced that Adam Smith’s conjectural history is basically right Smith puts “commercial society”, or a society based on the cash nexus, at the endpoint of history. Myself, I want to dispute one of the premises of this idea, which is that we have gone from a society in which the dominant form in which the matrix of exchange occurs is barter to one in which the dominant form is money. I think this claim is made, to an extent, by engaging in a definitional tour de passe-passe, in which a system of exchanges is mysteriously expelled from economics, and is then, as mysteriously, crunched into a system of rational choice, a method by which mountains regularly give birth to mice, and all is dissolved in the triviality of a decisional form without, of course, explaining decisions at all. I take the term “exchange matrix” from Robert Cowen, who was very concerned with the fact that, in the Walrasian and neo-Walrasian schemas which are at the heart of neo-classical economics, the stripping away of the “veil of money”, which is meant to help us understand the self-regulating nature of money, is the equivalent of the claim that, in essence, money simply is a refined form of barter. D. Dillard, in The Barter Illusion, helps us to see what Cowen tries to show formally in matrix form – namely, that the idea that money is barter undergirds a completely fictitious view of firms, which premise that they exist solely for the sake of consumption. As Dillard – echoing Marx – points out, a firm’s output is ‘reconstituted as money capital” for the very good reason that firms do not exist – except on the most abstract level – to increase consumption. “What is real from the point of view of the objective of the firm is money.” As Dillard points out, “A corollary of the barter illusion is that money is neutral with regard to output and unemployment.”

All of which is one part of the illusion of the pure exchange system – that is, that barter and money are essentially the same. So the first part of understanding the myth of homo oeconomicus is to remove the illusion of the equivalence of money and barter, and the corollary illusion that, on the one hand, there is a pure barter system, and, on the other hand, that there is an equilibrium towards which markets tend.

Homo Oeconomicus, that eternal calculator of profit, operates within these larger mythical frameworks. My proposal is, firstly, to go from the mixed matrixes of the late medieval European economies up through the genesis of political arithmetic in the early modern period by looking at some plays – I’m thinking of Everyman, King Lear, the Alchemist, L’avare; secondly, to look at some analogies of the wheel – the wheel of Fortune or Nemesis, the circulation of the blood, and the circulation of money; thirdly, to examine Pascal’s meditations on the difference between reasoning and authority, against the background of Pascal’s development of a theory of probabilities based on the example of the game; fourthly, to examine the Enlightenment development of man the machine as man the calculating machine; fifthly, to go from Smith’s pin-factory to Marx’s theory of alienation, with its deep reach into how he conceives the economic sphere; sixthly, to discuss Polanyi’s double movement – that fold in the development of Capitalist culture in which the state intervenes as a guarantor (of social welfare, of banks, of farming culture, etc.); and finally, to discuss the social coordinates of individualism.

This may be too ambitious. Hey, commentors, tell me what you think!

Pascal's modernity

Ernst Coumel, in an essay on Pascal’s contribution to the theory of probability (La théorie du hasard est-elle née par hasard ? 1970), cites a Jesuit opponent of Pascal’s, one Abbe de Villars, who, in responding to Pascal’s devastating attack on casuists in Lettres écrites à un provincial, asked a very good question about Pascal’s interest in and contribution to the theory of gaming: But I had heard that you were a very great enemy of permissive Casuists: from whence, then, does it come that you not only do not condemn gambling, but that you make religion and divinity depend on a game of heads or tails?”

Coumel, in his essay, is at pains to point out that Pascal’s interest in the theory of games must have deeper reasons than that, by chance, he was the friend of Chevalier de Méré. Coumel is combating the opinion of Cournet, who wrote that it was simply by historical chance that the problems of chance in games – for instance, the problem of dividing the stakes of a game that had been interrupted – had not fallen under the purview of some ancient Alexandrian geometer. On the contrary, Coumel writes, the growth of game theory up to Von Neumann and Morgenstern characterizes a very modern development.

Modern – the word must be underlined. Surely, on the one side, there is the fact that historical circumstances were pressing in. In the seventeenth century, the de-monetized, medieval economy, with its system of in-kind exchanges – barter – was giving way to a monetized economy. As Sasan Fayazmenesh has shown in Money and Exchange, this fact can’t be interpreted as simply the substitution of a more efficient form of barter for a diffuse form – the Walrasian interpretation of money as the representative of a barter exchange fails to comprehend the multiple affordances of money. Fayazmenesh refers to Robert Clower’s analysis of money and barter as modeled by a ‘exchange matrix’, in which their functional differences come out. Clower assumes the universal exchangeability of goods for goods in the barter economy – which is a convenient assumption when mathematizing barter, but has the disadvantage of not being the case. In the whig view of the economists, of course, the monetary system is superior because it is a universal solvent in which any and all exchanges can take place. This, too, conveniently overlooks the vast number of barter exchanges and their multiple restrictions that undergird our daily lives. If I do a favor for my mother, for instance, I can’t, under normal conditions, monetize and sell my perception that I expect her eventually to do a favor for me, even if I can predict that she will, in fact, do a favor for me in the future. Our real life – with friends, co-workers, family members, lovers – is tangled in nets of in-kind and monetary exchanges, which are simply grandly overlooked by the economist.

However, it is also the case that Pascal’s France was monetizing a great number of exchanges. Colbert’s system, with its vast number of taxes, speeded up the process. And it is at this point that speculative questions arise that had no space in an in-kind economy.

Such, then, is one approach to the modernity of Pascal’s situation. But there is another sense of the modern, which Pascal himself diagnosed in the fragmentary preface to the treatise on the Vacuum.

Which I will get to in my next post.

sun, king, and heart: circulation of the blood 2

Part two

William Harvey was acquainted with Francis Bacon – of course. Harvey was, after all, a physician at James I’s court. He remarked to John Aubrey that Bacon “wrote philosophy like a Lord Chancellor.” This remark has been taken to mean that Bacon was, in Harvey’s eyes, no philosopher. And yet, it is not simply a disparagement – a meaningless quip. For what does it mean to write philosophy like a Lord Chancellor? Could it mean that Bacon’s administrative rationality – or his sense of stratagems – prevented him from understanding nature (which is presumably what Harvey is getting at – as Harvey was not interested in larger metaphysical issues)? And yet, were not Harvey and Bacon part of the same ‘team’, the team that turned upon a culture of reading – in which the sacred book emblematized the value of books – in favor of seeing, using instruments, measuring?

Harvey, as Walter Pagel has pointed out, did not derive his conclusions about blood circulating in a the closed system from experiment – that is, he did not ‘discover’ the circulation of the blood, in the sense that ‘discovery’ is an event that is not predetermined but thrust upon the observer by the facts as they are. “On such a view,” Pagel writes, “discovery should normally be the result of a sum total of observations and suitably designed experiments, and such a process should be discernible in Harvey’s own account of his discovery as the immediate conclusion from observations and experiments – as Willis’ ‘standard’ translation has it: ‘When I surveyed my mass of evidence.’” However – Pagels points out – Willis’ nineteenth century translation slips into Havey’s text a sentence – that sentence – which does not exist in the text. So much did Willis desire to believe in a certain image of Harvey, the experimentalist, that he overwrites what Harvey wrote, which was that “I often and seriously considered with myself what great abundance there was (sc. of blood)”. (3)

Pagel emphasizes that Willis’ Harvey, who operates like a Newtonian scientist, is not the Harvey who presents himself as a Cartesian scientist – whose idea that the blood circulates was due to a meditation, which depended, in turn, on a confidence that nature never acted without purpose. From that meditation, Harvey moved to create evidence – “to become science it required the chain of brilliantly conceived and executed experiments and observations…”

In this nuanced shuffle between scientific models, where is the Baconian?

It is here that Christopher Hill’s essay on Harvey intervenes. In 1966, Hill, who was writing his book on the English Revolution, pointed out that Harvey’s first book on the circulation of the blood was prefaced with an address to the King. This address combined two analogies: one to the absolute place of the monarch in the body politics, and one to Copernicus’ discovery of the heliocentric system.

"The heart of creatures is the foundation of life, the prime of all, the sun of their microcosm, on which all vegetation does depend, from whence all vigour and strength does flow. Likewise the King is the foundation of his kingdoms, and the sun of his microcosm, the heart of his commonwealth, from whence all power and mercy proceeds"

And, just so that we don’t think that this is a matter of dedications alone, see how Harvey defends the claim that his dissection of animals has import on the constitution of the human body:

“Since the intimate connexion of the heart with the lungs, which is apparent in the human subject, has been the probable cause of the errors that have been committed on this point, they plainly do amiss who, pretending to speak of the parts of animals generally, as anatomists for the most part do, confine their researches to the human body alone, and that when it is dead. They obviously do not act otherwise than he who, having studied the forms of a single commonwealth, should set about the composition of a general system of polity; or who, having taken cognizance of the nature of a single field, should imagine that he had mastered the science of agriculture; or who, upon the ground of one particular proposition, should proceed to draw general conclusions.”

One notices, in passing, that the connection of the animal to the human is purely physical, not a fact indicating a common interiority – to push Descola’s thesis. But the absolute distinction between nature and culture was in the making – and what one notices, as well, is the tendency of the natural philosophers to push a new sense of universality. What Harvey writes here about the homology between the animal and the human body participates in the same logic that makes Newton put the domain of physics on a unified footing, dissolving the line between the sublunar and the celestial.

This is done, by Harvey, with reference, as well, to political terms – to the Lord Chancellor’s rhetoric. And, as Hill notices, this reference to the commonwealth is also entangled with the analogy to the sun. In the crucial chapter in which Harvey announces that blood flows in a circle in the body, he writes:

“The heart, consequently, is the beginning of life; the sun of the microcosm, even as the sun in his turn might well be designated the heart of the world; for it is the heart by whose virtue and pulse the blood is moved, perfected, and made nutrient, and is preserved from corruption and coagulation; it is the household divinity which, discharging its function, nourishes, cherishes, quickens the whole body, and is indeed the foundation of life, the source of all action. But of these things we shall speak more opportunely when we come to speculate upon the final cause of this motion of the heart.”

These analogies may, of course, simply be the lateral poetry that opens the scientific imagination. And yet, Hill is right to point out the background noise, here – the ceaseless cataract of history. For Harvey’s claim that the heart is central, like a sun, or a monarch, changes when he comes to write his treatise on the circulation of the blood of 1649, and on the generation of animals of 1651 – changes in accord with the beheading of King Charles. Whether or not these changes are evidence of Harvey’s republicanism – Hill’s claim – they are changes in the analogy holding between the human body, the monarch, and the solar system. Even as the human is bound to the animal kingdom, kingdoms and cosmological centers seem to fall out of the realm of essences. Or out of the realm of those analogies that give us a clue about the circulation of the blood and the function of the heart.

“In I649, moreover, Harvey went out of his way to repudiate the astronomical analogy which he had used in I628. "The knowledge we have of the heavenly bodies" is "uncertain and conjectural"; its example "is not here to be followed".'1 An astronomical allusion in the De Generationec onfirms this point, since Harvey no longer draws a parallel between the heart and the sun but between the blood and "the superior orbs, (but especially the sun and moon)", which "do by their continual motions quicken and preserve the inferior world".12 (That inveterate obscurantist, Alexander Ross, was quick to spot the dangers of Harvey's new position. In a book published in I65I, which also attacked Bacon and Comenius, he particularly insisted on the sovereignty, the prerogative, of the heart, and on the hierarchical order in the human body: the testicles are "ignobler than the heart and brain".)”