Joel Barnes, University of Queensland
In a recent article for History of Education I have traced the Australian reception of the ‘Two Cultures’ controversy between C. P. Snow and F. R. Leavis in the early 1960s, and situated the local debate in shifting humanities-science relations at a time when Australian higher education was undergoing major expansion and transformation. In this post I reflect on the methodological approach of the article, which draws on concepts and methods from global histories of science and the nascent field of the history of knowledge. The approach reflects growing engagement between the history of education and the history of knowledge. Connections between the two fields are also the subject of a recent themed section of History of Education Review co-edited by Associate Professor Tamson Pietsch and myself; we discussed this work in an episode of the History of Education Society Podcast.
The ‘Two Cultures’ Debate
The ‘Two Cultures’ controversy began with the Cambridge scientist-turned-novelist Snow’s 1959 Rede Lecture The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution, which argued that science and the humanities had ossified into two mutually antagonistic ‘cultures’ existing in siloed ignorance of each other’s basic principles and significance. Snow was further critical of what he saw as the political influence of the ‘literary culture’ (he did not use the term ‘humanities’), which he believed ‘manages the western world’. The argument was widely discussed in Britain, the United States and elsewhere, leading Snow to conclude that the lecture had ‘touched a nerve’ as it addressed ideas that were then ‘in the air’. In 1962 the literary critic Leavis, also of Cambridge, responded to Snow in highly vitriolic terms, attacking Snow’s standing as a novelist and a social critic, and claiming that the seriousness with which Snow was treated as a social commentator was symptomatic of the debased intellectual standards of modern culture. This argument too was widely discussed.
The Circulation and Transformation of Knowledge
In Australia the debate was received in ways that reflected local conditions. The insight that knowledge transforms as it circulates into the new contexts has been a major focus of the new field of the history of knowledge. Before that the idea was well developed in global histories of science. Within the history of science, the historical geographer David Livingstone has argued that locality shapes ‘how things are said, and . . . the way they are heard’. Similarly, in ‘Knowledge in Transit’, a lecture published in Isis in 2004, James Secord argued for greater attention to histories of science as communication, which entailed giving central place to the movement and translation of knowledges across geographical, national and disciplinary contexts. Secord’s lecture has been influential on certain strains of the history of knowledge, for which ‘circulation’ has emerged as a central analytical category.
The circulation and transformation of knowledge provides a framework to consider knowledge claims beyond their most obvious geographies, which can denaturalise our sense of what such claims were about. In the case of the transmission of the ‘Two Cultures’ debate to Australia, such transformations involve a curious inversion, a return to a familiar meaning that much of the relevant historiography has sought to displace. Historians of the ‘Two Cultures’ as a British or British-American controversy, including Guy Ortolano, David Edgerton and Stefan Collini, have interpreted the Snow-Leavis debate in ways that decentre its disciplinary dimension. As Ortolano argues in his monograph on the subject, what is conventionally read ‘as a disciplinary dispute about the arts and the sciences was actually an ideological conflict between competing visions of Britain’s past, present, and future’. What were really at stake were larger issues of political management, both at home and globally.
Such revisionist historical work has not much affected the career of the ‘Two Cultures’ as something of a free-floating meme describing the humanities and the sciences, which ensures that its disciplinary interpretation retains a currency in contemporary commentaries and debate about the landscape of the academy. Examining the early reception of the ‘Two Cultures’ beyond the British-American public sphere brings the disciplinary dimension back into view, not only in contemporary perspective but also historically.
Australian Receptions
The disciplinary interpretation of the ‘Two Cultures’ in Australia emerges not only from the contents of Australian commentaries on the Snow-Leavis dispute, but also from what historians of knowledge call the ‘mediality’ (borrowed from the German Medialität) or formatting of knowledge. This term refers to the idea that knowledge always arrives formatted, in genres, discourses, artefacts and textual forms that themselves shape knowledge. As the Swedish historian of knowledge David Larsson Heidenblad puts it, knowledge ‘does not exist in any “pure” form. Knowledge requires channels and bearers in order to move and operate’.
In Britain the ‘Two Cultures’ debate moved constantly in and out of university contexts. Although the Snow-Leavis dispute was in some respects a parochial Cambridge affair, the general interest magazines Encounter and The Spectator, which published Snow’s and Leavis’s lectures respectively, were central to the wider debate. In time Snow himself came to express his dissatisfaction with what he called ‘the purely academic formulation of “The Two Cultures” concept’. In Australia, by contrast, most major engagements with the ‘Two Cultures’ idea in the early 1960s interpreted it in disciplinary terms, and appeared in specialist academic journals, student publications, and literary journals with special interests in educational issues. The Australian general interest magazines most comparable with Encounter and The Spectator paid only cursory attention, and the broader political issues to which Snow and Leavis averted were largely absent from Australian responses. Instead, scientists, critics and commentators interpreted the dispute in terms of university pedagogies or research, as a problem of cross-disciplinary collegial relations within higher education institutions, or in light of their experiences as students. They published in outlets that accorded with these priorities.
The Context of Higher Education Expansion
The Australian reception of the controversy reflected changes in the country’s higher education sector at the time. From the late 1950s, university enrolments increased dramatically, and disciplines and departments proliferated and expanded. Expansion forced a revision in basic conceptions of the purpose of higher education, as universities were no longer educating only a small gentlemanly elite expected to occupy positions of significant social authority, but an ever-wider cross-section of the population. This re-thinking combined with the growth of post-Sputnik technological society, and with the development of the first wave of post-war universities focused on science and technology, to produce significant antagonism between scientists and humanists, much as Snow highlighted. At the same time, there was considerable concern among academics on both sides of the divide that an older, comprehensive cultural vision was being lost as the ‘cultures’ diverged. It was commonly believed that some means of dialogue or form of bridging generalist education was needed to heal the rupture. Various educational schemes, actual and proposed, were advanced towards this end.
The ‘purely academic formulation’ of the ‘Two Cultures’ idea in Australia would have been a great disappointment to Snow. Yet this reception is a typical consequence of the circulation of knowledge and shows the importance of locality for the transmission and transformation of ideas, including in settings of concern to historians of education.
Joel Barnes is Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Queensland, Australia. Previously he was Research Associate on the Institutions of the Humanities project led by Lesley Johnson at the Australian Centre for Public History, University of Technology Sydney, from which the research described in this post arises.