DRAFT

Social epistemology, LIS, and intellectual history

Archie L. Dick

Conceptions of social epistemology emerged inside and outside the LIS discipline with no obvious connections. A new research network could however identify shared themes or focus areas for future development. In the spirit of this conference to look at, or for, new directions, the best that I can do is to show where my thinking about social epistemology and LIS has taken me. In brief, and in response to Birger’s email about this conference producing “a better understanding”, I think we do well to ask how LIS should and can in Shera’s words “be concerned… with the epistemological problem in society” (Shera, 1973: 96) rather than argue for the viability of social epistemology as its theoretical framework. A few preliminary comments may be useful.

First, it is my impression that discussions about epistemology and social epistemology (which in my reading of Shera’s and Egan’s writings are not necessarily the same thing) appear in the LIS literature periodically, and then only briefly - roughly in 10 to 12 year cycles. These discussions quickly disappear because of the lack of sustained interest and debate, resulting in limited impact on the LIS research community and practicing professionals. Let’s hope that this conference makes a difference. Second, I have already shown how social epistemology was fraudulently used to justify the political ideology of apartheid in public library services in South Africa – a cautionary tale about cultural turns (Dick, 2002: 23-35).

Third, had Margaret Egan not passed away in 1959 we may have had a better understanding of the LIS aspects of social epistemology. Jesse Shera may have deliberately left social epistemology more suggestive than definitive. But this offers us the chance to take his pointers forward and in new directions, at least for LIS. And so I ask myself how can we do Shera’s social epistemology?

It is noteworthy that Shera talked about social epistemology and LIS theory in his presentation to the Centre for the study of Democratic Institutions in 1972. The political and intellectual connections made in that presentation are important for understanding his conception of social epistemology, and should not be lost on us. He said that: “we have not yet developed an ordered and comprehensive body of knowledge about intellectual differentiation and the integration of knowledge within a complex social organization”, and he envisaged that social epistemology could “provide a framework for the investigation of the entire complex problem of the nature of the intellectual process in society - a study of the ways in which society as a whole achieves a perceptive and understanding relationship to its environment” (Shera, 1973: 96).

He makes no reference to this or that particular theory of knowledge, but emphasizes the library as the main repository for the record that, in addition to experience, is for the human mind a source of knowledge, wisdom and truth – as well as vicarious experience. He then sketches the implications of an “enlightened electorate” for the “success of a democracy” (Shera, 1973: 108-110). In a later formulation he speaks of the library’s “implicit commitment to the democratic ethic” and to a “general public” – thus breaking with the traditional commitment to an elite (Shera, 1976: 48).

Shera’s vision of lifting the study of intellectual life from that of scrutiny of the individual to that of society, nation, or culture is at once ambitious, convoluted, and vague. He did however attempt to tie this down in more practical terms by saying that the focus of this new discipline should be the “production, flow, integration, and consumption of all forms of communicated thought throughout the entire social fabric”. These activities look similar to those examined in fields of inquiry that we know today as book history or print culture, and to which I shall return shortly. What I want to mention is that Shera connected his views of social epistemology and its political and intellectual contexts not just with LIS theory, but with LIS history as well.

He had already done so twenty years earlier. In an article in 1952 on the need to reorient research in library history, he had expressed similar views. Arguing for a departure from antiquarian and isolated approaches and towards what he called “valid library history”, which studied the library in relation to “its coeval social milieu”, the same connections are evident and they foreshadow the LIS theory presentation of twenty years later. They are: the library in relation to the “totality of the intellectual processes of society”; and again “the production, flow, and consumption of graphic communication” (Shera, 1952: 240-51).

Using the public library as an example, he explains that it is not about how it came to get its institutional patterns, but why it mattered and why it came to be the kind of public agency it is. When Shera proceeds from these arguments to describe what a research programme for such an historical enquiry would look like, he associates the history of the library with the history of book production (Shera, 1952: 188). This link would be taken up in the work of scholars like Robert Darnton, Roger Chartier, Henri-Jean Martin, Lucien Febvre, and other pioneers of book history and print culture.

I don’t know if social epistemology is or will ever become a discipline, or even become the discipline that Shera and Egan envisaged. But what I take away from Shera’s historical directions for social epistemology are the relations of ideas with time and space, and how they leave behind material traces in the processes of production, flow, and consumption. Time and space are also key concepts for classification and the organization of knowledge, and about which library thinkers like Ranganathan, Bliss, and Shera himself had thought long and hard (Shera, 1956). Intriguingly, in a conference presentation in July 1950 titled “Classification as the basis of bibliographic organization”, he explains that “any attempt to organize knowledge is conditioned by the social epistemology of the age” (my emphasis; Shera & Egan, 1951: 82). A reviewer of that conference’s proceedings explains that Shera’s “penetrating and subtle analysis” considered classification as the basis of bibliographic organization in relation to the history of human knowledge, in particular the theories of knowledge current in a given era” (Peiss, 1951: 230).

From his LIS theory and social epistemology presentation in 1972 I take away the wider commitment to democratic institutions. Bringing these ‘takeaways’ together I then consider as valuable, and worth investigating, how the collection, circulation, and reading of what Shera and Egan described as graphic communication (or what Shera later called all forms of communicated thought) - were shaped by, and themselves supported, wider ideas and movements that in their turn related to certain theories of knowledge. In other words - how LIS is and can be concerned with the epistemological problem in society. This, in my view, is one way of doing Shera’s social epistemology.

I do so by drawing on LIS history and book history, and their wider connections with intellectual history (Soll, 2016). My focus is the Western Cape region of South Africa from the late 18th to mid-19th centuries. I will sketch only the broad outlines of a more detailed study of how private book collections, book auctions, reading societies, and subscription libraries were used to spread Enlightenment ideas and promote what emerged as so-called Cape liberalism, and their relations with an empiricist epistemology.

It struck me that several Enlightenment authors were cited in pamphlets circulating among citizens or ‘burghers’ at the Cape in the late 18th century protesting against trade monopoly by Dutch East India Company (VOC) officials. I was especially curious about how in a tiny Dutch settlement that was established at the tip of Africa in 1652, and then seized for a second time by the British in 1806, the books of John Locke, Hugo Grotius, Johann Heineccius, Samuel von Pufendorf and others - and in several translations - had been acquired, circulated, and read. Also, how did the Enlightenment ideas of natural rights, social progress and improvement, and the diffusion of knowledge shape protest against authorities and demands for representative government and freedom of the press at the early Cape.

My analysis of probate inventories of the period, as well as catalogues of private book collections, auction rolls, newspaper advertisements of book sales, diaries, private journals, as well as the catalogues of circulation and subscription libraries showed that authors of the Enlightenment were not unknown. In 1761 a VOC administrator, Joachim von Dessin, for example had already bequeathed his collection of books to the Dutch Reformed Church for a ‘public’ library. Jonathan Israel, who has written extensively on the Enlightenment, actually cites the circulation of the protest pamphlets and this ‘library’ as examples of what he calls radical Enlightenment at the Cape.

Von Dessin had acquired these books over decades through purchases from European booksellers, as well as at Cape private auctions, revealing their prior ownership and method of circulation. Inventories also show evidence of the circulation of books among friends. The ‘public’ library carried the works of the natural law scholars mentioned – Locke, Grotius, Heineccius, and Pufendorf, and Cape burghers may well have read their books. It was open “to all respectable citizens between 13:00 and 16:00 every Wednesday afternoon”, and “the books (could) be borrowed and taken home for one month or for three months for those living outside the city”.

Purchase of the books of Enlightenment authors continued after the British had seized the Cape in 1806. Analysis of advertisements of private book sales in the Cape Town Gazette and African Advertiser newspaper between 1800 and 1822 confirms the possession and circulation, among others, of Rousseau, Montesquieu, Grotius, Voltaire, Linnaeus, Martinet, La Fontaine, and Bolingbroke, as well as the Dictionnaire de Trévoux that was a much-published encyclopaedia during the Enlightenment, and that preceded Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert’s more famous Encyclopédie.

The Cape of Good Hope Penny Magazine and The Cape Cyclopedia were among several so-called ‘cheap’ publications also promoting the diffusion of knowledge to the working classes in the early 19th century. At the elite level there were literary journals in both English and Dutch” with a view “to enlighten South Africa”, and several cultural, educational, and scientific institutions were founded to underscore the spirit of the Enlightenment. These developments marked the rise of a kind of literary public sphere associated with the Enlightenment, similar to earlier events in Europe. The South African Public Library opened its doors to the public in 1822 as a study and reference library, and provided pen, ink, and paper for readers to take extracts from any book, and in this way producing their own copies. Using books donated from wealthier Cape colonists, a Penny Library was established in 1834 and served a large number of working class readers.

The catalogues of these libraries for the period 1821 to 1829 list the works of several Enlightenment authors, and local newspapers carried reports of readers of their books. Importantly, some of the earliest librarians established reading societies and village libraries in the Cape countryside, and became involved in the struggle for a free press, surfacing clear connections between libraries, Enlightenment ideas, reading, and social progress. Spurred by the liberalising spirit of the Reform Act of 1832 in the United Kingdom for example, librarian and poet Thomas Pringle supported the campaign for representative government at the Cape. This was associated with the emergence of what was called Cape liberalism. Its other key ideas included a free press, a free market, a non-racial franchise, and free rather than forced or slave labour.

Like some of the indigenous Khoisan, slaves were not unaware either of the ideas of authors of the Enlightenment, and the aims of Cape liberalism. It was well known at the time that slaves hired people to read the newspapers to them, and kept themselves informed of the latest developments. In this way, by having it read to them, they “read” in the Dutch and English-language newspaper De Zuid-Afrikaan of 21 January 1831 a direct quotation from Section 138 of Chapter 11 in John Locke’s The Second Treatise of Civil Government (1690). The newspaper had drawn on Locke’s ideas about private property in a debate about compensation for slave owners in view of the forthcoming abolition of slavery in 1834. At these open-air meetings ordinary readers discussed these views, and wrote back letters to newspapers and in this way shaped debates and contributed to ideas of the day.

These are just some of the ways that Enlightenment ideas and those of liberalism spread throughout all levels and ranks of urban and rural Cape society, and among serious and ordinary readers by the early 19th century. The reading culture, which is deeply entangled with knowing and how people “distinguish between the creditable and the suspect in their reading” (Burnett 1999: 50), connected in this case with Enlightenment ideas, as well as those of Cape liberalism more generally. As a pragmatic governing philosophy, and more open to change and policies aimed at improving social conditions, liberalism tends to be more receptive to empiricism as a theory of knowledge. The many colonial government surveys, investigations, and reports of commissions of inquiry at the Cape in this period subsequently aimed at progress and modernisation, and were perhaps unsurprisingly characterised by empiricism.