Radicals, Whigs and conservatives: the middle and lower classes in the analytical revolution at Cambridge in the age of aristocracy

Abstract

With the coming of the French Revolution in 1789 and its attack on monarchy, the landed aristocracy, the religious establishment and religion itself, and especially with the coming of the sans culottes and the First French Republic and its 'Terror' in 1793-94, fear of revolution swept the British establishment. Sensing revolution everywhere, successive Tory governments, rooted in the alliance of the Church of England, the landed aristocracy and the monarchy, practised a consistent and harsh policy of repression. Neither the fear nor the repression eased with the arrival of, or indeed, with the departure of, Napoleon who, as Emperor from 1804 to 1815, seemed determined to conquer Britain by means of revolutionary propaganda, economic blockade and/or military invasion.As the revolution and then Napoleon swept across Europe, French research mathematicians such as J. L. Lagrange and S. P. Laplace, and French textbook writers such as S. F. Lacroix, made .it obvious that British mathematicians who adhered to the geometrically oriented fluxional mathematics and dot notation of Newton had become anachronisms. The more powerful abstract and generalized analysis developed on the Continent had become the focus of mathematicians and the language of the physical sciences. This mathematical transmutation fused with social revolution. 'Lagrange's treatises on the calculus were written in response to the educational needs of the Revolution', recounts Ivor Grattan-Guinness, and Lagrange, Laplace and Lacroix were intimately involved with the educational and scientific reorganizations of the earlier revolutionaries and Napoleon. 1 Thus, French mathematics became associated with revolutionary France.This confluence of social and mathematical revolution washed into the heart of Cambridge University because the main purpose of the Cambridge mathematics curriculum, as the core of a liberal education, Cambridge's raison d'etre, was to produce

Knowledge communities in Europe from the Renaissance through the Cold War

“…After Waterloo he observed, '[w]hat should a poor sniveling democratic dog do in this aristocratic world?' 60 Babbage and Herschel challenged authority in the Royal Society, wishing to purge it of those gentlemen and socially ambitious physicians who did not devote themselves completely to natural philosophy. 61 Peacock was a Whig who welcomed the Royal Commission on universities (indeed he sat on it).…”

“In a rational world all radicals would be exterminated”: Mathematics, Logic and Secular Thinking in Augustus De Morgan's England

“…The subject was calculus, but the editors' introduction and notes clearly establish an over-riding interest in algebra, which the young editors followed in one form or another into the 1820s and beyond (for the Analytical Society see Ashworth 1996;Becher 1980Becher , 1995Enros 1981Enros , 1983Knox 1996;Richards 1991;Wilkes 1990. This interest followed in the wake of efforts by the student group, the Analytical Society, to open the Cambridge curriculum to Continental mathematics.…”

“…While they were still undergraduates, Charles Babbage, John Herschel, and George Peacock collaborated on an English edition of Sylvestre-François Lacroix's Traité du calcul différentiel et du calcul intégral published in 1816. The subject was calculus, but the editors' introduction and notes clearly establish an over-riding interest in algebra, which the young editors followed in one form or another into the 1820s and beyond (for the Analytical Society see Ashworth 1996;Becher 1980Becher , 1995Enros 1981Enros , 1983Knox 1996;Richards 1991;Wilkes 1990. For further steps in the Analytics' development see Ashworth 1994;Fisch 1999;Dubbey 1978;Richards 1980;Schaffer 1994;Schweber 1981).…”

“…(For the role of mathematics at Cambridge in the eighteenth century see Gascoigne 1989. For mathematics at Cambridge in the early nineteenth century see Becher 1980Becher , 1995Enros 1981Enros , 1983Knox 1995Knox , 1996Richards 1991;Wilkes 1990. For the development of these ideas in the period of the 1820s and beyond see Ashworth 1994;Becher 1981;Fisch 1999;Dubbey 1978;Richards 1980;Schaffer 1994;Schweber 1981Williams 1991.…”