HISTORIANS date the beginning of modern times to the period of the late Renaissance, the Reformation and the scientific revolution. These tectonic shifts in the western mind resulted in the 18th-century Enlightenment and the liberal democracies of the 19th and 20th centuries.
This broad-brush picture is a familiar one, and it is, equally broadly, right; but interesting questions remain about the relationship between the strands involved. In this lucid and captivating study, argues that the growth of science and the growth of liberal democracy were not merely contemporaneous, but causally connected. The growth of science, he says, caused the growth of democracy – and science continues to underwrite the political freedoms enjoyed by developed societies today.
His argument is not simply that the technological applications of science have promoted wealth-creation, military prowess and security in those nations that have, as a result, become both dominant and free. This is undeniably part of the story. But the more important point for Ferris is that scientific enquiry demands the freedom to enquire and debate, and that liberal democracy – meaning a pluralistic political system in which individual rights, free speech, privacy and autonomy are promoted and defended – is itself an experimental system requiring the same conditions of freedom and openness as science itself.
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As he surveys how science influenced the social and political developments of the countries where it flourished, Ferris makes full and (as he acknowledges himself) potentially tendentious use of hindsight. But he keeps the risks in view, and is able to show how matters developed as expected given the influence of scientific styles of thought on social and political questions.
Inevitably, Ferris also addresses the conflict between scientific and non-scientific thought today, and the social and political urgencies many feel in light of the revival of dogma, faith and non-rational influences.
Ferris’s clear and educative account of these matters makes for an enjoyable read. More importantly, there is a lot to be said for the thesis he offers. Science could neither have arisen nor flourished in circumstances of oppression of thought. Indeed the churches made strenuous efforts – persecuting and even executing people – in the early phases of the scientific revolution in an effort to quell it.
The science-freedom link is an intimate one, and the task undertaken by Ferris of specifying its details and describing the causal relations at work is deeply important. That is not merely a rhetorical remark: an understanding of the link could have major utility to societies eager to develop and progress, and wishing to know what conditions would best serve their aims.
I would suggest to Ferris that rather than taking the rise of science to be the literal cause of the growth of political liberty, they might be regarded as the joint outcome of an antecedent cause. I argued this in Towards The Light (Bloomsbury, 2007): aspirations to liberty of religious conscience in the 16th century rapidly evolved into demands for liberty of enquiry in all fields, including science; and once people had asserted the right to think for themselves without conforming to an orthodoxy on pain of death, they were able to ask questions both about nature and sociopolitical arrangements. On this view, science and democracy grew together from a fundamental impulse towards liberty; they are its joint fruits.
HarperCollins