A view from the bridge: The two cultures debate, its legacy, and the history of science

Daedalus

Volumn 128, Issue 2, 1999, Pages 193-218

  Graham Burnett, D ^a  

^a Howard Hughes Medical Institute   (United States)

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EID: 19844381014     PISSN: 00115266     EISSN: 15486192     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (58)

1. I will refer to the lecture and the printed versions of this piece by the more common short title "The Two Cultures." The printed version saw a number of changes from the original lecture; and later printed versions saw additional slight revisions. No variorum edition exists. For a discussion see John de la Mothe, C. P. Snow and the Struggle of Modernity (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992), 49,
2. especially n. 4 and 5. I have used C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures, ed. Stefan Collini (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press [Canto], 1993).
3. On Snow's scientific career, see J. C. D. Brand, "The Scientific Papers of C. P. Snow," History of Science XXVI (1988): 111-127. Twayne's English Authors Series (TEAS) provides a useful volume for an introduction to Snow's literary oeuvre: David Shusterman, C. P. Snow, rev. ed. (Boston: Twayne, 1991).
4. For the relationship between his "two lives" see Nora Calhoun Graves, The Two Culture Theory in C. P. Snow's Novels (Hattiesburg: The University and College Press of Mississippi, 1971);
5. or (for the opposite conclusions) Nail Bezel, "Autobiography and 'The Two Cultures' in the Novels of C. P. Snow," Annals of Science 32 (1975): 555-571.
6. De la Mothe, C. P. Snow and the Struggle for Modernity, 51.
7. New York Times Book Review, 28 October 1984, 1.
8. For instance, see references in Andrew Ross, ed., Science Wars (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996).
9. On a recent use of the "Two Cultures" idea to explain certain dimensions of environmental policy in the United States, see Leo Marx, "The Environment and the Two Cultures Divide," in Science, Technology, and the Environment, ed. James Fleming and Henry Gemery (Akron: University of Akron Press, 1994).
10. Caroline A. Jones and Peter Galison cite Snow as a salient instance of the assumed "binary economy" of art and science. See Caroline A. Jones and Peter Galison, eds., Picturing Science, Producing Art (New York: Routledge, 1998), introduction.
11. The quotes are from Blackfriars, May 1964. Leo Marx describes much the same reaction in "The Environment and the Two Cultures Divide," 10 n. 5.
12. De la Mothe, C. P Snow and the Struggle of Modernity, 51.
13. Lionel Trilling, "Science, Literature & Culture: A Comment on the Leavis-Snow Controversy," Commentary (June 1962): 464.
14. BBC transcript in Cambridge University Press archives.
15. 10 Observer, 24 May 1959; Encounter, August 1959.
16. Encounter and elsewhere; Listener, September 1959.
17. Observer, 24 May 1959.
18. Listener, September 1959.
19. New Statesman, 6 June 1959.
20. Review in Nature, Snow document collection at Cambridge University Press, n.d.
21. Scientific American, October 1959.
22. Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, October 1961.
23. Northwest Review, July 1960.
24. Listener, 17 September 1959.
25. Spectator, 7 August 1959.
26. See Michael Yudkin, "Sir Charles Snow's Rede Lecture," Cambridge Review, 1960. This was republished in the 1963 Random House volume containing Leavis's lecture,
27. F. R. Leavis, Two Cultures? The Significance of C. P. Snow. Being the Richmond Lecture, 1962 (New York: Pantheon Books; 1963).
28. Monthly Labor Review, October 1960.
29. Cambridge Review, 21 November 1959.
30. Michael Polanyi, "The Two Cultures," Encounter 13 (September 1959): 62.
31. Philosophy of Sciences Group, The Newman Society, January 1960.
32. The doyen of literary studies at Columbia wrote, "A lively young person of advanced tastes would surely say that if ever two men were committed to England, Home, and Duty, they are Leavis and Snow - he would say that in this they are as alike as two squares." Trilling, "Science, Literature & Culture," n. 8.
33. This is reproduced in David Lodge, 20th Century Literary Criticism: A Reader (London: Longman, 1972).
34. A number of responses to the Richmond Lecture were collected in Cultures in Conflict: Perspectives on the Snow-Leavis Controversy, ed. David K. Cornelius and Edwin St. Vincent (Chicago: Scott, Foresman and Company, 1964).
35. The Works of Matthew Arnold (London: Macmillan, 1903-1904), vol. IV, 340-341.
36. Leavis, Two Cultures? The Significance of C. P. Snow, 46.
37. See the Oxford English Dictionary under "Humanities" for a sample chronology of uses.
38. Lynn White, Jr., "Science and the Sense of Self: The Medieval Background of a Modern Confrontation," Dœdalus 107 (2) (Spring 1978): 54.
39. This point is made by Leo Marx in "The Environment and the Two Cultures Divide," 12-13 n. 5. 34 Ibid., 12.
40. I am borrowing the terms "binary economy" from Jones and Galison, eds., Picturing Science, Producing Art, 2-8 n. 5.
41. Peter Galison, "The Americanization of Unity," Dœdalus 127 (1) (Winter 1998).
42. See also the essays in Peter Galison and David Stump, eds., The Disunity of Science (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996).
43. Lorraine Daston, "Fear and Loathing of the Imagination in Science," Dœdalus 127 (1) (Winter 1998).
44. Peter Hanns Reill, "Science and the Construction of the Cultural Sciences in Late Enlightenment Germany: The Case of Wilhelm Von Humboldt," History and Theory (33) (1996): 345-366.
45. Cited in Loren Graham, "History of Science in the University Curriculum," in Scientific Education and Humane Values, Seminar Reports 4, Spring 1975, Columbia University.
46. This is in keeping with the vision of several commentators at the time: reviews in the Times Literary Supplement, Blackfriars, and several other sources drew attention to history of science as a discipline that defied Snow's polarization and that was reshaping social understanding of science.
47. Those not expert in physics may now develop some appreciation for the intricacies of thermodynamics by consulting one of the volumes in the Scientific American Library: P. W. Atkins, The Second Law (New York: W. H. Freeman and Company, 1984).
48. Those prepared to do the math may consult C. Truesdell, The Tragicomical History of Thermodynamics 1822-1854 (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1980).
49. Jerome Hamilton Buckley, The Triumph of Time: A Study of the Victorian Concepts of Time, History, Progress, and Decadence (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1966), 66.
50. See Greg Meyer, "Nineteenth-Century Popularizations of Thermodynamics and the Rhetoric of Social Prophecy," in Energy and Entropy, ed. Patrick Brantlinger (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 327.
51. A good starting place for the (extensive) literature on thermodynamics and religion is Erwin N. Hiebert, "The Uses and Abuses of Thermodynamics in Religion," Dœdalus 95 (4) (Fall 1966): 1046-1081.
52. More recently, see Bruce Clarke, "Allegories of Victorian Thermodynamics," Configurations (4.1) (1996): 67-90.
53. On the link to decadent literature and art, see Stephen Brush, The Temperature of History: Phases of Science and Culture in the Nineteenth Century (New York: B. Franklin, 1978);
54. Meyer, "Nineteenth-Century Popularizations of Thermodynamics and the Rhetoric of Social Prophecy," 312-313 n. 44;
55. and Bruce Clarke, Energy Forms: Allegory and Science in the Era of Classical Thermodynamics, 1850-1930 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, forthcoming).
56. Joseph Conrad, The Shadow Line: A Confession (New York: Doubleday, 1917). The novella was first serialized in the Metropolitan Magazine and subsequently appeared in the English Review (seven parts, September 1916 to March 1917).
57. E. O. Wilson, Consilience (New York: Knopf, 1998), 40.
58. Ibid., 126.