| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Europe: Early Modern and Modern

Jessica Riskin. Science in the Age of Sensibility: The Sentimental Empiricists of the French Enlightenment. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2002. Pp. xii, 338. $25.00.

According to Jessica Riskin, a proper reading of the scientific Enlightenment must take into account a struggle between the taxonomies of system makers and the achievements that sentimental empiricists manufactured from an elixir of sensation and sentiment. In such a world, she argues, it was inevitable that moral issues would arise even among the practitioners of the air pump and the champions of the lightning rod. Riskin's book also struggles with system building, seeking out a broad and deep conflict between those who sought to catalogue nature and those whose experimental passions led them to new empirical discoveries that, nonetheless, were laden with teleology. No one familiar with the experimental obsessions of a Newtonian century could easily differ. While a Carl Linnaeus or an Antoine Lavoisier might construct a system or a nomenclature, Riskin argues that many disputes over the causes of gravity, magnetism, or electricity were inherently conflicts over purpose in the natural world. Her book is a brilliant effort to contextualize controversies over natural forces, of lightning, of animal magnetism and chemical affinities, in a century that clearly struggled over legitimacy, economic management, and the fear of the mob.

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