Winter 1996
Volume 22, Number 2

Recently, historians of science have begun to look at the role of polite discourse and behavior within scientific societies and, more generally, at the moral economy of the republic of letters.1 These studies, by creating a comparative framework, suggest a relationship between local scientific etiquettes and the regimes of princely power within which they were articulated. As a working hypothesis whose full corroboration would require more evidence than I am able to provide here, I suggest that the development of these academy-based forms of scientific politeness may be related to what Norbert Elias has described as the symbiotic development of polite manners, court society, and political absolutism.2

In particular, I argue that the codes of civility associated with politcal absolutism framed the conditions of possiblity of a range of scientific sociabilities, forms of authorship, and notions of evidence. These codes did not determine the truth-value of specific claims about nature but structured how legitimate candidates for true or false claims ought to look.3 Civility may be seen as a microprocess (in Foucault's sense) through which the power regimes of absolutism shaped their subjects and their discourses (including those of savanrts working within princely academies) through fine-grained disciplining. This process was not without tensions, nor did it simply reproduce the power regime that framed it. As we know, the very meaning of subject changed in time. While natural philosophers were, quite literally, princely subjects, they eventually managed to legitimize methodologies, disciplines, and institutions that later became emblematic of modern subjectivity, not of baroque reason of state.

This essay looks at the first decades of scientific academies and relates the sociabilities and scientific styles developed in Italy, France, and England to the different degrees of princely involvement in those institutions, to the power of those various princes, and top the different institutional structures regulating the relationship between practitioners and princes. By doing so, I trace the transformation of the codes of princely etiquette that framed the legitimation of individual practitioners through dependence on individual princes into the academic politeness that, by structuring the interdependence among practitioners, informed their subjectivities, practices, and claims as members of scientific institutions.