Newton: The Making of Genius Book

This book isn't really about Newton so much as the evolving concept of "genius" as a cultural, social, nationalist and gendered construct. Some of Fara's commentary on this subject is interesting but as a case study on Newton it's not so great. In the first chapter Fara assesses Newton's achievement which, in her telling, includes "provid[ing] a new cosmology" and "set[ting' theoretical work on a new experimental basis." But if Newton provided a brand new cosmology and invented the modern scientific method then we hardly need any cultural explanation for why he was and is revered as a genius. In fact, this is about the most hagiographic interpretation of Newton possible -- a more modest view, which certainly has currency among modern historians, is that Newton (brilliantly) formalized an existing (mainly Keplerian) cosmology and made excellent use of Galilean inductive science in his work on optics, much like Huygens was doing on the Continent, only perhaps better.

If we accept this latter view, then Fara's question later in the book as to why Newton but not Galileo or Kepler was hailed as a "genius" in the 18th century is a lot more pertinent. She doesn't really attempt to answer the question though, and she ignores a related (and to me really interesting) question: why did Galileo, who was not particularly revered in the 18th century, surpass Newton in the 19th in the popular imagination to become the hero of the Scientific Revolution, a position he has -- in my opinion --never lost? Evidence that he did so abounds: for instance, Fara briefly discusses the statues in the courtyard at Oxford, constructed in the middle of the 19th century by various Victorian sculptors. Newton is there of course, but so are Davy, Harvey, Roger Bacon, Francis Bacon, and others. The only non-Englishmen who aren't ancient Greeks? Galileo and Leibniz. And that Leibniz shows up at all, presumably as a co-inventor of the calculus, suggests that Newton's cultural dominance had limits.

I have theories about this. The late 17th and 18th century Enlightenment writers were classicists who made a clear distinction between the Ancients and the Moderns but much less of one among different generations of moderns. Hence, commentators might argue Newton vs. Descartes but Descartes' partisans rarely argued that Newton *needed* Descartes' writings (or Galileo's etc) to accomplish his own work. That is, they had a very different view of history than the modern one. In the 19th century, though, three factors came together to make Galileo more attractive as a "genius" than Newton, even in England (though, to be sure, among historians like Brewster there was some pushback.) The first was the rise of the positivist view of science in which generations of "geniuses" build on previous generation's accomplishments -- in that case, it mattered less that Newton was further along the chain than Galileo or Kepler or Descartes and hence more sophisticated than them. Second, the cutting edge of science was shifting from cosmology, technical astronomy and "laws of nature" to chemistry, medicine and life sciences, and the physics of energy (electromagnetism, radio waves) that were only loosely explained by Newtonian concepts and required searching, inductive approaches that harkened back Galileo's early experiments rather than to Newton's grander synthesis of 17th century physics. Third, the rise of genuine secular society and atheism (rather than deism) made secular reformers who had stood up to the clerical establishment -- of which Galileo was the obvious prime example in science -- enormously relatable and worthy of adulation.

One upshot of Galileo's capture of the historical imagination in the 19th century, though, was that it led gradually to an increasingly non-hagiographic treatment of Newton. Bailly's biography of Flamsteed was an early example that Fara touches on briefly. The rehabilitation of Leibniz was another. But modern Newton scholars, even Westfall (who Fara quite unfairly claims played down Newton's alchemial activities), have been remarkably clear eyed and unromantic about Newton -- his difficult character and ungenerous treatment of his influences; his questionable priority claims (see e.g. DT Whiteside's rejection of Newton's claims about his "Moon Test", closely related to the apple story), his un-modern (although hardly irrational) interests in alchemy, chronology and milleniarism.

Fine, but all this is a bit unfair to Fara since I'm basically criticizing her for focusing on aspects of her subject other than the ones I find most interesting. But even on its own terms, the book has some issues. It doesn't really have a clear thesis and the tone changes constantly. In the worst sections, Fara comes off as sniping and sour not just toward Newton but toward his historical admirers. Her opinions can also seem a bit trite: she weighs in repeatedly on the demerits 18th century poetic style and sneers at Voltaire's over-the-top praise of du Chalelet, but then later doesn't bother to tell us if she thinks the Marxist-materialist interpretation of Newton has held up against AR Hall's (and other's) criticisms. Once or twice she also comes very close to arguing that Newton's interest in alchemy undermines his claim to genius, which she surely doesn't believe. Put simply, to be a good historian you above all have to respect the past and try to approach it on its own terms. I strongly expect Fara does, but it doesn't always come through very well in this book.