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BOOK REVIEW

Jonathan Lyons (2013). The Society for Useful Knowledge: How Benjamin Franklin and Friends Brought the Enlightenment to America (New York: Bloomsbury), p/b, pp. 220, ISBN 978-1-60819-572-5

INTRODUCTION

What sort of an education would fit the purposes of ‘the American Adam?’ How would such an education differ from that of the Old World? What is the difference between ‘thinking well’ and ‘doing good?’ And, finally, is education a solitary or a social pursuit? These then are four of the representative questions that Jonathan Lyons, an American historian of ideas sets out to address in this book. An alternative title to this book might well have been: ‘The Education of Benjamin Franklin.’ This would have not only been reminiscent of ‘The Education of Henry Adams,’ but would have dramatized similar themes such as the ‘mechanical versus the aesthetic’ in the formation of the American subject. While the American founding fathers like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Alexander Hamilton had a lot to say on this subject, this book focuses mainly on the life, career, and teachings of Ben Franklin. Lyons however takes the trouble to situate Franklin’s views on a number of educational themes within the context of what the founding fathers had to say. The title of this book makes it obvious that what is really at stake however is not Franklin or his friends per se, but the pursuit of ‘useful knowledge’ as a prelude to the Declaration of Independence in 1776. It would not be far-fetched to say that the pursuit of useful knowledge was not merely a curiosity of the 18th century, but a leitmotif of subsequent American history. The pursuit of useful knowledge then might be said to have begun for all practical purposes in colonial America. But what does it really mean to pursue useful knowledge? Is there, for instance, such a thing as ‘useless knowledge?’ Obviously not, but what the Americans mean by useful knowledge takes the form that the English were to term ‘utilitarian’ in the 19th century.

UTILITARIANISM AND PRAGMATISM

Utilitarianism was a philosophy that was associated in the history of ideas with English philosophers like Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. These philosophers coined what is probably the most important technical term in economics – utility. A great deal of 19th century economics is no more than thinking through the ideological implications of designing a society that prizes and prices utility with a high level of accuracy. Needless to say, what

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we mean by utility in 20th century economics is different from what the term originally meant. So, for instance, the early utilitarians would define a mechanical device as having higher levels of utility or usefulness than say an aesthetic object, but contemporary economists at the University of Chicago would not necessarily think in that way since they work with an extended definition of utility. So for them certain aesthetic objects like, say, a painting may be infinitely more valuable as an investment opportunity than a mechanical device. So it is important to look at the dynamics of the market in terms of demand and supply rather than pre-determine what the price, utility, or value of an object might be in terms of the inherent attributes of a widget as the early utilitarians might have done. Likewise, when Ben Franklin argues that it is more important to do good than to think well, he must not be misunderstood as saying that thinking well is not at all of consequence.

The correct interpretation should rather be that if we learnt to think well, we should be prompted into doing the sort of things that will make society more livable rather than refrain from taking the action necessary to do so. Franklin’s binary oppositions are differences of degree rather than differences of kind. If this not clearly understood, Franklin’s positions will be politicized rather than contextualized within the history of education. Another important distinction is the difference between pragmatism and utilitarianism. Lyons has positioned Franklin as an early utilitarian rather than as a pragmatist. What could this possibly mean? The utilitarian is preoccupied with making things ‘useful’ whereas the pragmatist is preoccupied with making things ‘work.’ These are not the same. So, for instance, pragmatists are looking for a guide to determine what is the right thing to do in any given situation. The most important criterion for pragmatists is whether something ‘works.’ This term, ‘works,’ could either mean that something is ‘useful’ in everyday life or it could mean that the truth of a proposition can only (or should mainly) be determined by its ‘practical consequences.’ So there are important similarities between the approaches associated with utilitarianism and pragmatism, but they are not exactly the same. Both these approaches, needless to say, have affected what Americans mean by the science of ‘economics.’

THE EUROPEAN ENLIGHTENMENT

Another important aspect of the title is the invocation of the term ‘Enlightenment.’ This invocation is a bit of a problem because what this term means in Europe is different from what it means in America. So, for instance, a great deal of the European Enlightenment meant the pursuit of theoretical

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knowledge. The philosophes of the European Enlightenment were not really preoccupied with doing good, but with thinking well. The philosophes were also interested like the Americans in the realm of human action, but their forays into this topic were not mediated by the sense of urgency that we find in colonial America since they were not into building a new nation. They were mainly preoccupied with questions in political theory, epistemology, the form of scientific theories, and in systems of classification. There was not any attempt to do good or even the belief that just about anybody could better his lot in life by doing good to himself or the society to which he belonged. Most of the scientific work in Europe was done by members of the aristocracies and the learned societies; scientist funded themselves; the societies were mainly places in which they would share their findings. The European model exhibits neither a utilitarian nor even a pragmatist flavor. So when Lyons argues that Ben Frankin and his friends took the model of the Enlightenment from England and Europe to colonial America, we must be sure about what the connotations of the term ‘Enlightenment’ were on the continent. Lyons is mainly preoccupied with English coffee-houses of the 18 th

century which would attract both men of letters and the stock-jobbers, but that was only an aspect of the Enlightenment that was associated with the rapid diffusion of information and ideas; it was not the Enlightenment as such. What Franklin imbibed in these coffee-houses was the feeling that the pursuit of knowledge, the useful arts, and even literary forms of learning need not be ‘solitary’ pursuits as he must have imagined them to be when he started off as an apprentice printer in Philadelphia, but could be situated within social contexts in which there was a sense of give-and-take with the intellectual excitement that comes from being recognized for being able to articulate and discuss ideas effectively in a social forum. So in that sense what Franklin understood in London was that he was not as solitary a creature as he imagined himself to be, but rather that he deployed the romantic notion of solitude to console himself for the dreary hours that he spent as an apprentice in a printer’s shop.

FRANKLIN IN PHILADELPHIA

The formation of the Junto, and the attempt to disseminate different forms of useful knowledge in Philadelphia, was an important step in this direction. So were a number of other important reforms that Franklin embarked upon to improve civic life in Philadelphia like forming a library, a fire-brigade, and so on, but these were not the forms that the Enlightenment took in Europe. It is therefore possible in my contention to make knowledge useful in colonial America without it having to do anything with the Enlightenment in the

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strong sense of the term. The insights that Franklin had about the social dimensions of knowledge production and dissemination during his stint in London is more a way of asking what sort of an education is affordable to the immigrants who clustered in large cities like Boston, New York, Charleston, and Philadelphia, and whether (given the constraints) it did not make sense to pursue the useful arts in the first instance. This is usually forgotten by those who study this era of American history. They come to the hasty and wrong conclusion that the American Adam cannot read, write, or appreciate an aesthetic object or doing such things in America is necessarily a waste of time and effort.

FRANKLIN IN ENGLAND

The founding fathers felt that Americans should concentrate on the practical arts so that they could get on with the task of putting a new nation together, but that was not tantamount to a rejection of the aesthetic or theoretical dimensions of education. Their assumption was that given the modest state of affairs that prevailed in colonial America that was the best that they could do then. They were however a lot more ambitious for their children and grand-children. It would therefore not be correct to appropriate the aura of the European Enlightenment to add dignity to everyday life in colonial America and simultaneously argue that Americans were rejecting the aesthetic, political, and theoretical values of the Enlightenment. I think this mis-understanding persists to this day. I also think Lyons over-emphasizes what Franklin learnt from his forays in the coffee shops of London. In any case, what Franklin partook of in those coffee-shops did not have much to do with the European Enlightenment per se. There is no such thing as the English Enlightenment in the history of ideas. There is only such a thing as the Scottish Enlightenment. So it was more an instance, for Ben Franklin, of seeing London as a city that could accommodate both the commercial and literary dimensions of English life.

THE SCIENTIFIC LETTER

Studying the role played by English coffee-shops is a staple theme in the social history of England. That however is not reducible to any form of the Enlightenment. It would be a bit of a stretch to say that the invocation of a coffee-shop culture in distant Philadelphia is tantamount to importing the European Enlightenment into colonial America. A more accurate interpretation might be to say that cities like Boston, New York, Charleston, and Philadelphia were growing into big cities. Sooner or later they would

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have wanted to emulate, replicate, or simply experiment with the forms of social interaction that constituted the great cities of England and Europe. Lyons is however right in invoking the Enlightenment in the latter half of the book when he discusses the interactions that Franklin had with scientists in Europe, and the fame that he acquired for inventing the lightning rod, the Franklin stove, and in theorizing electricity. It would have been a good idea if Lyons had differentiated more strongly between Franklin’s transference to English society (in which he bears an affinity to Voltaire - who too was a great admirer of civil liberties in England), and the more scientific dimensions of the Enlightenment which prompted Franklin to perfect the genre of the ‘scientific letter.’ The main agreement between Franklin and the philosophers of the Enlightenment was the belief that the rapid diffusion of political and scientific ideas can have practical - indeed even revolutionary consequences outside the academies and learned societies and re-shape societies beyond recognition.

CONCLUSION

What Lyons does an admirable job of in this book is showing what the actual transmission mechanisms are in the history of ideas, and the enormous role that was played by colonial versions of media and academia in making rapid diffusion of ideas and technology possible. It is hard to believe that ideas can have such enormous consequences in the shaping of the American nation or any other nation. If we have bouts of skepticism about the efficacy of ideas in changing, or re-shaping society, or in bringing about economic and social progress, it is not because ideas have lost their ability to make things better. It is because we live in a world that is saturated with media and information. Furthermore, our expectations have assumed proportions that would have been impossible to envisage in colonial America or even in the Europe of the Enlightenment. Lyons’s book gives us the historical context to appreciate how far we have come, and how much further we have to go before we truly succeed, like Ben Franklin and his friends attempted to do, in bringing ‘the Enlightenment to America.’ Reading, reviewing, and disseminating the ideas in books like this is an important step in doing so. I would strongly urge the inclusion of this book in the curricula of courses in both humanities and in professional schools where faculty and students struggle everyday with the philosophical and pedagogical legacies of rationalism, utilitarianism, and pragmatism without knowing why the struggle between these schools of thought constitutes who we are, who we aspire to be, and who we could be in our attempt to think well and do good by ourselves and the society at large.

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SHIVA KUMAR SRINIVASAN