Baconian Political Experiments

• In Event: The Political Thought of Francis Bacon

Abstract

Drawing on plural methodological traditions in the history of political philosophy (contextualist, textualist, and critical theoretical, whilst deploying material in dialogue with the history of science in general and the history of political science in particular), this paper will examine political philosophic themes in Francis Bacon's posthumously published experimental natural history, Sylva Sylvarum (1626/7), which has, on the one hand, been substantially ignored by students of political philosophy (even though the experiments contain much politically salient matter) with the majority of the great monographs on Bacon's political thought in the twentieth and twenty-first century ignoring this work and its political content entirely (White 1968; Weinberger 1985; Coquillette 1992; Martin 1992; Faulkner 1993; Wormald 1993; Peltonen 1995; Minkov 2010; Hurd Hale 2013; Paul 2020). On the other hand, historians of science have often underestimated the political aspects of the experiments (ranging from political psychology, politically salient discussions of human motivation and the human passions, to colonial and imperial warfare) to focus more narrowly on Bacon's experiments on wind, heat, and non-human natural phenomena. The paper will conclude by noting that as Bacon's New Atlantis appeared originally as an appendix to the Sylva Sylvarum, a re-examination and reinterpretation of Bacon's political experiments in the Sylva Sylvarum may suggest new lines of interpretation for how scholars, political philosophers, and historians of political thought read Bacon's more famous utopic fable as well as offering a view into a tradition of experimental political science which historians of the discipline have overlooked and neglected.

Author

• Samuel Garrett Zeitlin, University of Cambridge