ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Affinity: A Genealogical Metaphor at the Centre of Eighteenth-Century Sciences

• In Event: Genealogy & Inheritance between Passion, Law, and Science, I

English Abstract

“Affinity” was a pervasive concept in eighteenth-century sciences. In natural history, it was used to address relations of overall similarity that were difficult to capture by traditional means of definition, but seemed to “hold together” organisms in “natural” systems of classes, order, families and genera. It also played a crucial role in the chemical revolution, referring to the capacity of substances to displace other substances from compounds, and it was also invoked in writings about electricity, magnetism, and the generation and development of organisms. Occupying a position at the threshold between the living and the non-living, affinities thus referred to relationships of both form and force. The tableaus of nature that eighteenth-century naturalists constructed were not just juxtaposing independent elements, but also opened up a playing field for the imagination of dynamic forces of life. I will propose to take “affinity” (Lat. affinitas, Germ. Verwandtschaft) seriously as a genealogical metaphor to understand what was going on here. In a pre-Darwinian world, it did not emphasize vertical descent or consanguinity but rather the horizontal dimension of collateral and affine relationships. Interpreted within the legal tradition of “tables of affinity” it furnished naturalists and natural philosophy with new diagrammatic
and quasi-mathematical means to imagine affinities as distances measured out by degrees. At the same time, “affinity” resonated with bourgeois ideas of friendship and free association that also played a crucial role in organizing scientific sociability.

Author

• Staffan Mueller-WIlle, Cambridge University