The Business of Alchemy: Science and Culture in the Holy Roman Empire

"I adore this book. I teach it a lot as well. She chose not to have the name of the main figure, Johann Joachim Becher, in her title. He is not a household name. There is so that much is wonderful about this book but one of the things that is quite astounding is the recovery of alchemy. That’s been a very big trend in the history of science in the last couple of decades, and Smith is at the forefront. Again, there is the shift away from a Cold War view of knowledge as completely separate from society. Alchemy was a tradition that had always intertwined laboratory work, work of the hand and work of the mind. It had always been both about knowledge acquisition, and about powers over nature. It had always had a useful aspect to it since antiquity. Bringing alchemy back into the picture of the origin of experimental sciences is a way to bring back the intertwined knowledge of the hand and of the mind. In other words, that there are forms of knowledge that are very manual and that we can only acquire through practice, and there are forms of knowledge that do not require manual skill. Experimentation, as a manual engagement with matter for the purposes of producing knowledge, requires both. That’s gone on to be Pamela Smith’s main focus. Since this book, she’s done a lot of work on artisans and their role in the scientific revolution. But what I particularly love about this book is that it’s not just about alchemy, it is about alchemy and business. It’s about how Becher’s innovative ideas about the economy were being developed together with, and at the same time as, his scientific concepts were being explored. It takes that integration of science with the rest of society to a whole different plane. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Very often, when folks are trying to fight against a disembodied notion of the scientific revolution, what they do is they’ll take social phenomena, social types, maybe economic history, and set that as a context within which to understand scientific ideas. But what Smith does in this book is look at economic ideas together with scientific ideas interacting and producing each other at the same time. It integrates the two at a much more fundamental level. I would say that Barbara Shapiro does something similar when she’s talking about ‘the fact’ as a legal concept, not just a legal practice, and the way that she relates it to scientific concepts, except that Barbara Shapiro’s is a one-way direction. You have an origin (law ) that produces ideas that are borrowed by scientists. For Pamela Smith, these things are happening at the same time, modern economics is developing hand-in-hand with modern experimental science, inextricably. The range of what she has to look at and the interdisciplinary elegance that she employs are incredibly admirable. He was an economic adviser to Leopold I, and he was an alchemist. He was from a generation of alchemists who were producing many chemical innovations that would be really important economically. Beyond that, conceptually, he’s developing views on the circulation of money throughout society, about the consumption of goods, about how to promote that and how to organize it for the state. At the same time, he’s thinking about things like the circulation of matter in alchemical processes. So his hands-on experiments in the laboratory, that are very innovative, are really part of his experiments with ways of organizing the economy and society. That’s how he’s bringing it all together. He publishes works that are political but that include a lot of scientific ideas, and vice versa."