REVIEWS

THE ANCESTORS OF MODERN CHEMISTRY AND THEIRFACTITIOUS HEIRS

Mi Gyung Kim, Affinity, that Elusive Dream: A Genealogy of theChemical Revolution, Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2003. Pp 599 + xii.

US$55.00 HB.

By Jonathan Simon

In a refreshing re-examination of the chemical revolution, Mi Gyung Kimapproaches this key episode in the history of science by placing affinities,rather than combustion or acidity at the centre of her story. While affinitieswere the subject of two seminal texts in the history of chemistry in 1970(Schofield, Mechanism and Materialism, Princeton, 1970 and more partic-ularly Thackray, Atoms and Powers, Harvard, 1970), they both had theirultimate focus on British Newtonianism and neither offered any extensiveanalysis of the chemical revolution associated with the work of Lavoisier.More recently, Alistair Duncan’s Laws and Order in Eighteenth-CenturyChemistry (Oxford, 1996) treated affinity in the eighteenth century in somedetail, but he also avoided looking explicitly at the chemical revolutionfrom this perspective, and, as he admits, he did not aim to integrate newapproaches in the history of science into his work. Thus, while affinityis a relatively well represented topic in the field, Kim is fully justified inproviding an up-to-date study that explicitly relates affinity to the chem-ical revolution and also takes historiographical developments over the lastthirty years into account. Indeed, one of the strengths of this book is herintegration of the work of many recent scholars in the field, particularlythat of F. L. Holmes who did as much as anyone to transform the land-scape of the history of chemistry in the twentieth century. Not all Kim’sreferences are so recent, however, and the influence of Hélène Metzger isclearly perceptible, particularly Metzger’s argument for continuity withineighteenth-century chemistry in opposition to seeing Lavoisier’s chemicalrevolution as constituting a radical break with the past.

In order to provide the genealogy of the chemical revolution promisedin the title, Kim covers over a century of chemistry, from the end of theseventeenth to the beginning of the nineteenth centuries. For the seven-

Metascience 13: 87–90, 2004.© 2004 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

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teenth century, she lays particular emphasis on the work of Homberg(1652–1715), who brought a compositional view of chemistry to a widerphilosophically inclined audience, a phenomenon that she places at thecentre of the first of two ‘theoretical moments’. Homberg’s approach was,she claims, tied to the introduction of solvent analysis to complementanalysis by fire (distillation) in chemical practice. Along with Homberg,she discusses Lemery and his famous corpuscular mechanisms and, ofcourse, the work of E.-F. Geoffroy, whose affinity tables published in1718 have aroused much interest among historians of chemistry in the lasttwenty years.

Kim’s second theoretical moment is the chemical revolution itself,when Lavoisier promoted a new theory and language on the back of hisrevolutionary conception of the science, in turn based on his mastery of thenew field of pneumatic chemistry. The lesson she wants to take from thisevent is that affinity, although important to Lavoisier – and even more soto his fellow travellers at the arsenal laboratory in Paris – was temporarilysidelined, most notably in Lavoisier’s influential textbook, the Elements ofChemistry (1789). Lavoisier did this so that he could concentrate on thealgebraic chemical logic that flowed from his combinatorial conception ofelements and their compounds, but the unintended historical consequenceof this choice is that affinity has been similarly marginalised in if not leftout of the stories of the birth of modern chemistry that focus on Lavoisier’swork. By pointing out the centrality of affinity in the research of othercontemporary chemists, phlogistonists – Macquer and Kirwan – and anti-phlogistonists – Guyton de Morveau, Fourcroy and particularly Berthollet– alike, Kim aims to resituate the topic of affinity in its central place inlate eighteenth-century chemistry. While Kim offers thought-provokingtreatments of all these figures, mixing social and scientific biography withanalysis of their chemical research, she is at her best in her masterlypresentation of Berthollet, skilfully locating this difficult but crucial figurein French chemistry. In the process of covering this history, Kim addressesa number of central questions in the history of eighteenth-century Frenchchemistry, such as the real influence of Stahl, and the multiple interpreta-tions of the nature of light, heat and phlogiston by the various chemistsconcerned.

As far as the overall argument of the book is concerned, Kim backs acurrently popular position that emphasises the multiplicity of the chemicalrevolution, both in terms of contemporary and retrospective interpreta-tion. Thus, there is more to the event than simply the development andpromulgation of the oxygen theory of combustion by Lavoisier. Anotherelement that Kim emphasises in addition to her concern with affinity, is the

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changing place of chemistry in French society, something that she tracesacross a wider time period than just the end of the eighteenth century. Sheargues that “[t]he institutionalisation of philosophical chemistry requireda social evolution of chemists from the ‘sooty empirics’ who preparedmedicaments in the basement into learned savants who could converse onequal terms with the scholarly world” (p. 3). While I agree entirely thatsuch an evolution took place and constitutes an essential part of the chem-ical revolution, it is not clear to me how in Kim’s view it was supposedto have come about, that is to say whether it was a transformation pushedby supply (of philosophical chemistry) or by demand (of the bourgeoispublic). Ultimately, Kim seems to opt for the desires and demands of the‘public sphere’ as an explanation for the rise of philosophical chemistryand the resultant acceptability of the science among the French bour-geoisie. I find her use of the public sphere as an actor in this contextproblematic and would myself have liked to have seen more explora-tion of the important institutional shifts in eighteenth-century chemistry.Nevertheless, the story is clearly neither simple nor monocausal, and Kimskilfully opens up new avenues for investigation for those who want topursue the issue. Her analysis of the innovative literary practices deployedby bourgeois chemists is one such avenue.

Finally I want to turn to the question of practice. Chemistry is a labora-tory science based on practical experimentation and production, and Kimconsciously sets out to integrate chemical practice into her book. Thismeans the book escapes becoming another history of ideas that abstractsthinking about affinity from the laboratory phenomena it was meant toexplain. Thus, Kim writes of theoretical chemistry as ‘mediating’ betweenchemical philosophy and practice. In her account, she offers some detailedinvestigation of particular sets of reactions, such as Kirwan’s attempt touse saturated marine acid (hydrochloric acid) to determine the quantitiesof acid and alkali in neutral salts. Nevertheless, the fact that the book isabout affinity makes it hard to keep the focus on such practices, and Kiminevitably accompanies her protagonists up the ladder of abstraction tohigh theory. This tension between practice and theory reflects an essentialparadox at the heart of the history of chemistry itself. The most thoroughlypractice-based analysis of the chemical revolution is Archibald and NanClows’ The Chemical Revolution (London, 1952), a book that ends updescribing quite a different historical episode, one tied to the industrialrevolution rather than to the introduction of Lavoisier’s new chemicaltheory and nomenclature. However much historians might wish to keeppractice to the fore, if they aim to analyse the chemical revolution aroundLavoisier, they are, it seems, obliged to turn their attention to theory.

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Another perennial problem in writing the history of chemistry is that ofterminology. In general, Kim has opted to use the original eighteenth-century names for the reagents, which can make the text a little hard tofollow for those not familiar with these archaic terms, and there is noglossary to help out the reader who doesn’t know his marine from hisvitriolic acid. Nevertheless, Kim’s insistence on the practical details ofsuch chemical investigations lend much depth to the book. Overall, Affinity,That Elusive Dream offers a thorough and thought-provoking study of itssubject and is destined to become an essential reference for any futurehistorian of eighteenth-century chemistry.

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