Seite - 270 - in Maximilian Hell (1720–92) - And the Ends of Jesuit Science in Enlightenment Europe

Chapter 6270 what they, taken together, constituted: a gigantic international enterprise of eighteenth-century field science. This project of national-stately self-assertion through royal–governmental patronage to an expedition likely to earn prestige was inevitably embedded in a thoroughly cosmopolitan context, and from the perspective of the participating individual scholars and teams, the emulative drive had to be tempered by a sense of collegiality, while the lofty ideal of har- monious collaboration for the shared purpose of the advancement of knowl- edge was qualified by several sobering realities.41 In many ways, the complexi- ties of knowledge production were not unlike those involved in any other set of contemporary communicative practices that could be modeled after the then relatively newly discovered experience of the market, which depended on the maximization of one’s profit by satisfying the needs of one’s partners: it was exactly in the 1760s and 1770s that Adam Smith (1723–90) worked out his highly influential anthropology of commercial and sociable man.42 Whether at the marketplace, the stock exchange, the coffee-house, the assembly room, or the academy, men and women were in the first place seeking their own good. But what they coveted—a fair price, a good conversation, the applause and admiration of fine society, or recognition of scientific achievement—was un- derstood as a matter of giving as well as taking. For, in the course of such ex- changes, each of the parties felt that their own interests were best served if they placed themselves—to speak with Smith, as “impartial spectators”—in the position of the others, applying the faculty of empathy to perceive their interest in the transaction.43 Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) was to call ungesellige Geselligkeit, unsocial so- ciability, the paradoxical disposition of fellow feeling arising from reasonable and enlightened self-regard.44 Science was no exception. On the contrary, it could be understood as a social realm in which personal vanity and ambition 41 We have been reminded of the tension between such ideals and realities in the Republic of Letters (and of science), among others, by Lorraine Daston, “The Ideal and Reality of the Republic of Letters in the Enlightenment,” Science in Context 4 (1991): 367–86; Adrian Johns, “The Ideal of Scientific Collaboration: The ‘Man of Science’ and the Diffusion of Knowledge,” in Commercium litterarium, 1600–1750: La communication dans la république des lettres/Forms of Communication in the Republic of Letters, ed. Hans Bots and Françoise Waquet (Amsterdam: Apa-Holland University Press, 1994), 3–22. 42 Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. R.H. [Roy Hutcheson] Campbell and A.S. [Andrew Stewart] Skinner (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1981), book 1, Chapter 2, 1:26. 43 Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. D.D. [David Daiches] Raphael and A.L. [Alec Lawrence] Macfie (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1982), book 3, chapter 1.5, 112. 44 For important reconstructions of this tradition of thought, see Richard Tuck, Philoso- phy and Government, 1572–1651 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Knud