The Savant And The State

This debate, Fox argues, became a contest for the hearts and minds of the French citizenry.

Several generations have faced this problem—a mediocre progeny born to a brilliant, outstanding parent. Dr. Achrekar, a software genius, faces the same problem with his biological son, Chetan. He decides to do something about it and invents a technological, identical, working alternative of his son. To test the performance of his invention, he appoints the brilliant, precocious teenager, Varsha Deshmukh. Varsha yearns to pursue her doctoral thesis on the subject of History of Technology and learn about sociology, under Dr. Achrekar’s guidance. But when twelve months have gone by, Varsha guesses that the “Chetan” she has been interacting with and observing, is not the real one. But she cannot let Dr. Achrekar know she is aware of it, as she has to achieve her academic objectives. Does Dr. Achrekar succeed in technologically supplanting his biological son, Chetan, who he feels is mediocre?

Novelist Honoré de Balzac was the first to use the phrase "Paris savant" to refer to the dynamic Parisian scientific and intellectual community of the late 18th century. The Academy of Sciences was highly active during this time, and was a meeting place for intellectual and scientific elite, who worked together toward the diffusion of scientific knowledge into Parisian society. The Royal Observatory was a headquarters for French astronomy, as well as the great geodesic project to map all of France. The Royal Mint hosted courses in chemistry and mining, and the Arsenal near the Bastille housed the laboratory of Lavoisier, the most celebrated chemist of the age. This book is the English translation of Bruno Belhoste's Paris Savant: Encounters in Enlightenment Science, originally published in France in 2011. Belhoste discusses how the Parisian scientific community came into its important place in the French Enlightenment, focusing on the Academy of Sciences. Chapters cover subjects such as what role Parisian geography played in the movement, the contributions of French scientists to industrial and urban improvement, and how the Academy of Sciences clashed with the revolutionary crisis, resulting in its closing in 1793. The translation includes a prologue for English readers.

With the increasing loss of biological diversity in this Sixth Age of Mass Extinction, it is timely to show that devolutionary paranoia is not new, but rather stretches back to the time of Charles Darwin. It is also an opportune moment to show how human-driven extinction, as designated by the term, Anthropocene, has long been acknowledged. The halcyon days of European industrial progress, colonial expansion and scientific revolution trumpeted from the Great Exhibition of 1851 until the Dresden International Hygiene Exhibition of 1930 were constantly marred by fears of rampant degeneration, depopulation, national decline, environmental devastation and racial extinction. This is demonstrated by the discourses of catastrophism charted in this book that percolated across Europe in response to the theories of Darwin and Jean Baptiste Lamarck, as well as Marcellin Berthelot, Camille Flammarion, Ernst Haeckel, Louis Landouzy, Félix Le Dantec, Cesare Lombroso, Thomas Huxley, Bénédite-Augustin Morel, Louis Pasteur, Élisée Reclus, Rudolf Steiner and Wilhelm Wundt, among others. This book presents pioneering explorations of the interrelationship between these discourses and modern visual cultures and the ways in which the “picturing of evolution and extinction” by artists as diverse as Roger Broders, Albert Besnard, Fernand Cormon, Hélène Dufau, Émile Gallé, František Kupka, Pablo Picasso, Carles Mani y Roig, Sophie Taeuber and Vasilii Vatagin betrayed anxieties subliminally festering over degeneration alongside latent hopes of regeneration. Following Darwin’s concept of evolution as Janus-faced, the dialectical interplay of evolution and extinction and degeneration and regeneration is explored in modern visual cultures in Australia, America, Britain, France, Germany, Russia, Spain and Switzerland at significant spatio-temporal junctures between 1860 and 1930. By unravelling the “picturing” of the dread of alcoholism, cholera, dysentery, tuberculosis, typhoid and rabies, alongside phobias of animalism, criminality, hysteria, impotency and ecological disaster, each chapter makes an original contribution to this new field of scholarship. By locating these discourses and visual cultures within the “golden age of Neo-Lamarckism”, they also reveal how regeneration was pictured as the Janus-face of degeneration able to facilitate evolution through the inheritance of beneficial characteristics in propitious environments. In striking such an uplifting note amidst the dissonant cacophony of catastrophism, this book reveals why the art and science of Transformism proved so appealing in France as elsewhere, and why visual cultures of regeneration became as dominant in the twentieth century as the picturing of degeneration had been in the nineteenth century. It also illuminates the paradoxical inversion that occurred in the twentieth century when devolution became equivalent to evolution for many Modernists. Hence, whilst this book opens with the picturing of indigenous people in Australia and North America as “doomed races” by the first publication of Darwin’s On The Origin of Species, it closes with the quest by 1930 for a regenerative suntan as dark as the skin of those indigenous people.

Transactions v. 30-44 (1944-1959) include the Proceedings of the International Law Conference, London.