Book Review of *The Polymath*

British historian Peter Burke has written many books and essays exploring the history of knowledge. This new prosopographical study examines the careers of 500 polymaths over the last 500 years.  During this period of time, typically referred to as the “modern age,” learning increasingly was organized around an intellectual division of labor and the proliferation of super-specialists.  Burke’s polymaths worked in multiple fields, now considered completely separate disciplines, but his subjects insisted instead on the unity of knowledge.  Burke argues that, for this heresy, historians have generally treated polymaths with contempt.  Labeled “specialists in generalities,” polymaths are typically condemned for the superficiality of their ideas.  They are associated with charlatans and dilettantes.  Famous polymaths whose reputations have endured are known primarily for contributions in only one of the many fields in which they labored.  Thomas Jefferson, for example, is best known for his work in politics, practical and philosophical, that contributed to the founding of the United States.  Jefferson, like others equally famous, may be saluted as the “last of the Renaissance men.”  Nonetheless, his activities as a farmer, a musician and composer, an architect, an archaeologist, or an inventor are generally noted only in passing, a curiosity about the man, rather than something essential to who he was or how his contemporaries saw him.  Burke argues that polymaths have long provoked conflicting opinions over where scholars should place them within the history of knowledge. They hover in the gaps between theory and practice, pure and applied knowledge, detailed analysis and general vision, rigor and impressionism, uncertain spaces that many historians of knowledge prefer to ignore.  Burke argues instead that polymaths created their own distinct discipline—“the art of learning.”  This contribution was a necessary and vital part of the constitution of knowledge in the modern era.

Burke discusses 500 polymaths whose life trajectories that were often idiosyncratic and difficult to reduce to a limited number of patterns.  The presentation is, as a result, provocatively impressionistic rather than rigorously analytical.  The main factor unifying his subjects is that overwhelmingly they were white European men who assumed that the cultural traditions of the West were the necessary starting point for all branches of learning.  They were however operating in an environment of rapidly expanding information, speaking to publics growing increasingly indifferent, if not hostile, to universal conceptions of knowledge.  Burke notes that since the invention of the printing press, the increase in books published has been inversely proportional to the trust given to those who desire to know everything.

At the beginning of the modern era, Burke argues, most polymaths were like Leonardo da Vinci, whose genius was based on practical experimentation rather than deep knowledge of classical literature.  Leonardo developed many projects, most of them inconclusive, that took for granted connections between bodies of technical knowledge contemporary scholars treat as absolutely distinct. In the eighteenth century as the amount of information available in many subjects turned into an avalanche, specialization slowly emerged as the best strategy for determining which bodies of information were most relevant to one’s work and needed to be followed in detail.  Expertise was needed to evaluate conflicting evidence. Universities stood for the principle of universal knowledge, divided into branches whose underlying unity was assumed.  As universities debated the boundaries of knowledge, the value of increasing amounts of new information, the relationship of originality and innovation, these communities of learning often included and even embraced polymaths, but they also could reject and despise them. 

If in the middle ages, the foundation of comprehensive knowledge had been canonical texts inherited from antiquity, modern knowledge increasingly grew out of imagining innovative possibilities for the future. The growing obsession with discovering and conquering a future was in fact integral to the colonial subordination of the world to Europe.  Selecting, recording, cataloguing, and classifying various types of knowledge organized humanity, societies, and nature into hierarchies that instituted modern racism as a form of intellectual governance that helped European priorities prevail whether they ruled directly or not.

The ideal of “universal man in almost all sciences” (a phrase from fifteenth-century printer and publisher William Caxton) and the desire for encyclopedic knowledge inspired expeditions to collect objects from all over the world, the starting point for museums (the focus of Burke’s discussion of King Christian IV of Denmark), as well as projects to systematically explore and describe the world so all its parts would merge into comprehensible picture for Europeans (exemplified for Burke in the adventures of Alexander von Humboldt).  Activities to collect universal knowledge proved every bit as important to colonial and imperial projects as the work of experts.  According to decolonial studies such as the work of British historian Jack Goody, polymaths contributed to the theft of the history of other cultures.  Polymaths fomented appropriation and epistemicide of indigenous knowledge in every part of the globe.

In the nineteenth century, the value of polymaths for the construction of knowledge came into question. Old words such as scientist developed new meanings and new words like specialization (from August Comte, “spécialisation”) entered the vocabularies of European languages.  Connotations of development and progress marked these new usages.  Universities turned the scholastic branches of knowledge into academic disciplines, including History, whose professional practitioners divided the history of all humanity into periods and types derived almost solely from accounts of the European past.  Subdivisions proliferated, so that in many academic institutions, Ethics had its own chair.  As a result, only some people with appropriate training could discuss ethical questions as professional experts.  The process of determining a problem, turning it into a subfield and then into autonomous disciplines came to be perceived as a paradigmatic example of “evolution” (as Herbert Spencer argued).  Specialized knowledge takes command in the nineteenth century in those fields where it was most deemed irresistible, inevitable, and, above all, impersonal—based on accumulated collective activity.

Worries about excessive specialization haunted this process well into the twentieth century.  Fernand Braudel argued that historians write better when they escape the limits of their discipline.  Burke discusses the University of Chicago as a particularly important battleground in the fight between specialized and universal knowledge.  In the 1890s, the university gained national and international fame for advancing the cause of academic specialization as it reorganized its faculty into graduate research institutions.  In the 1930s, a new president, Robert Maynard Hutchins, proposed that the university’s curriculum needed to present students with a “common core,” a body of knowledge that all university graduates should know in order to be considered “educated.”  Hutchins implemented some of these reforms, often associated with the “Great Books” program, but his proposals were controversial with faculty committed to developing their disciplines.  The university’s professors strongly resisted and modified what Hutchins wanted to do in order to protect the primacy of specialization. 

Burke concludes his study by discussing how polymaths survived in an academic market organized around superspecialization.   Many twentieth-century polymaths, including  José Ortega y Gasset, George Steiner, and Susan Sontag, gravitated towards cultural criticism, often preferring that their work appear in the mass media rather than in academic publications.  Susan Sontag is one of the handful of women whose careers Peter Burke recognizes. The women included Burke’s 500 polymaths include Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, George Eliot, Germaine de Staël, Clara Gallini, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Mieke Bal.  Burke clearly reveres Sontag, to the point of including her name in the title, as if her career might illustrate how the age of polymaths came to an end.  Sontag was a student at the University of Chicago when the common core curriculum was introduced and being debated.  Burke celebrates Sontag’s library of more than 8,000 books, as well as her insatiable curiosity and determination to write about literally anything and everything.  Her efforts to integrate her understanding of science, art, politics, war, and many other topics into a knowledge that transcended disciplines shine through in her many thought-provoking essays that turned her into an international celebrity of sorts.  Sontag is an isolated female figure in the book because, until very, very recently, women were barred from participating in scholarly societies and institutions.  The handful of privileged women who gained access to advanced education and literate culture always participated in intellectual and scholarly life from the sidelines.  We should keep in mind that many women had intellectual interests and made intellectual contributions that are yet to be recognized.  Even when a woman’s intellectual work exceptionally came to the attention of “public culture,” its value was likely to be minimized.  To have a truly accurate understanding of modern intellectual life, the stories of the women who preceded Sontag need to be revealed and included more fully.

Peter Burke asks readers to reflect on the costs of excessive specialization and the defense of isolated disciplines identified with material progress.  His argument underlines how much can be lost when potential connections between fields of knowledge are minimized if not absolutely excluded.  Burke also devotes much of his book to discussing the ethical responsibilities associated with the exercise of knowledge.  An ethics of how one knows is inherent to the indigenous traditions of the Andean highlands, where the divide between polymaths and specialists is subsumed in traditional Quechua principles of “sumak kawsay” (“living well”).  The contemporary Suma Qamaña movement (“living well together” in Aymara) deploys indigenous knowledge and indigenous concepts to reevaluate European constructions of “humanity” and “nature,” in the process providing tested alternative epistemic foundations for reconceptualizing what European-derived scholarship and activism refers to as “the environment.”  

In the book’s appendices, Burke confesses that he left out several important figures who might have been part of the story but belonged to cultures whose languages he would not be able to read.  His phrasing indicates the limitations that burden intellectual history as it has historically developed.  Historians are not yet able to understand, much less analyze, the diversity of knowledges and intellectual interests available for study in the modern world.  For engaged thinkers working in indigenous American and African frameworks, the term “intellectual” fits awkwardly with the various concepts of “knowledge keepers” that predated the European invasions.  Indigenous concepts of knowledge, tradition, and their social utility often played important roles in the development of modern thought but disguised within the terminologies of European languages.  As a result there is as yet an undetermined number of indigenous thinkers that Burke did not include because of the linguistic and conceptual difficulties that block recognizing them as “polymaths.”  The cosmovision of “living well together,” for example, takes as a foundational principle the interdependency of all beings, human and otherwise, in the production of knowledge.  There can be no separation between culture and nature, body and mind, individual and society.  Meritocracy is an approach to the social organization of intellectual work that is incompatible with Andean conceptions of what knowledge is and how it is preserved, as is the concept that knowledge from trying to control the world.  

Burke argues that polymaths currently may well be an endangered species.  Given the recent astonishing speed with which epidemiologists developed covid-19 vaccines, many today may be tempted to conclude that the intellectual work of experts is sufficient for solving any and all complex problems.  Burke’s history of polymaths shows how much contemporary knowledge, including that of specialists, owes to individuals whose oversized curiosity allowed them to see unusual connections linking multiple aspects of the world they inhabited.

(translation by Richard Cándida Smith)