Positivism, Whiggism and the Chemical Revolution

A full appreciation of the importance of positivism in the discipline of the history of science must take into account the complexity and variability of this protean philosophy. Tire term positivism was first used by the Utopian Socialist Saint-Simon to designate the scientific method and its extension to the solution of problems in philosophy and society. Adopted by Auguste Comte in the 1840s, it came to designate a general philosophical and cultural movement which exerted a powerful influence on scholars and intellectuals in Europe and America for over a century. The Positivist Movement found its philosophical inspiration in a blend of empiricism, rationalism and utilitarian philosophies developed in the previous century. Combining positive philosophy with positive polity . 

Sarton used the Comtean doctrine of the three stages of human progress to emphasize the unity of science. Held together like branches on a tree, the disciplines of science are demarcated from nonscientific disciplines by their epistemological, methodological and developmental unity. Linking the unity of 

For Sarton and like-minded positivists, the ultimate value of the history of science, with its story of heroic acts of individual discovery, lay in its service to the new humanism Tire history of science is the history of mankind s unity, of its sublime purpose, of its gradual redemption . Like the Renaissance humanists, with whom they compared themselves, the new humanists sought to increase knowledge, expand understanding and elevate intellectual and moral standards in order to deepen our understanding of human beings and their 

In the spirit of the new humanism, the historiographical focus on method functioned not only to appropriate past science to the internal interests of present science, but also as a strategic bridge between science and its cultural milieu. Both Sarton and Conant presented the history of science as a way of bridging the growing cultural gap between modern science and the educated 

Manichean Dualism and Cognitive Inversion The teleological orientation of the positivist-Whig historiography is immediately evident in the idea of the Chemical Revolution as the origins of modern chemistry, as the originary moment in the exfoliation of the facts, theories and methods to be found in modern textbooks of chemistry. Thus James R. Partington claimed in 1937 that Lavoisier s Traite read like a rather old edition of a 

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McEvoy, John G. Positivism, Whiggism, and the Chemical Revolution A Study in the Historiography of Chemistry. History of Science 35, 1997, 1-33. McKie, Douglas. Antoine Laurent Lavoisier The Lather of Modern Chemistry (Philadelphia Lippincott, 1935). 

F. Suppe, The Search for Philosophic Understanding of Scientific Theories , in F. Suppe (ed.). The Structure of Scientific Theories (Urbana, IL University of Illinois Press, 1974), pp. 3-232, p. 3. A more complete documentation of the issues covered in this chapter can be found in J. G. McEvoy, Positivism, Whiggism and the Chemical Revolution A Study in the Historiography of Science , History of Science, 35 (1997), pp. 1-33. 

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