| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Joyce E. Chaplin. The First Scientific American: Benjamin Franklin and the Pursuit of Genius. New York: Basic Books. 2006. Pp. 352. $27.50.
Elaborately simple, ostentatiously modest, dogmatically moderate, Benjamin Franklin had a genius for marrying opposites in winning combinations. The author of positive and negative electricity wielded humility as a tool of self-promotion and rose through the society he called classless from artisan to gentleman. Indeed, Franklin elevated the practice of pairing contraries into a general theory encompassing both nature and society: no pleasure without pain, no buying without selling, no surplus without a deficit. No life without death. Or maybe in that one instance the rule might be suspended? The man who stayed meek by admonishing himself to "imitate Jesus and Socrates" aspired to immortality, and not just undying fame, either, but actual, eternal life. As Joyce E. Chaplin recounts in her remarkably engaging biography Franklin looked for his deliverance not to spirit but to science.	1
The idea that the natural sciences might actually deliver immortality so compelled Franklin that, to express it, he deviated more than once from his otherwise firm policy of understatement. These deviations fleetingly laid bare an attitude usually clothed in homely aphorisms and professions of temperance and restraint. It was, however, a fundamentally intemperate and unrestrained attitude regarding the possibilities that the natural sciences opened up for individual and social transformation. Arguably Franklin's most important invention, this stance—defined partly by its presentation in the guise of practicality and moderation—provides the organizing theme for Chaplin's important book.	. . .

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