Public knowledge, natural philosophy, and the eighteenth-century Republic of Letters

There is a burgeoning scholarly literature on the Republic of Letters in eighteenth-century America, and indeed the Atlantic world. Originally inspired as a critical response to the 1989 translation of Jurgen Habermas's Structural Translation of the Public Sphere, this literature has made important critiques of Habermas's thesis, including challenging his notion of a singular public sphere with that of a plurality of competing counterpublics, as Michael Warner, Anna Brickhouse, and others have, and questioning the dominance of print culture by demonstrating the importance of the performative politics of oratory and rhetoric, as Sandra Gustafson and Jay Fliegelman have done. Other significant contributions have shown the importance of issues of gender (Dillon), religion (Searle), a private, affective sphere of friendship (Parrish), and codes of sociability (Goldgar). This article suggests a further dimension to this field by illuminating the role of natural philosophy in shaping the conception of public knowledge in, and the discursive practices of, the eighteenth-century Republic of Letters. I argue that Smith and his colleagues' concern to ensure that personal beliefs were removed from public debate was primarily shaped by their participation in a long-running discussion in natural philosophy concerning how reliable natural knowledge was produced. This debate focused on whether trustworthy natural knowledge depended on having credible, gentlemanly informers, or by contrast, whether it was produced in a realm that removed personal subjectivity from the business of natural philosophy. This epistemological concern, as much as the culture of republicanism, I argue, shaped the belief that participating in the Republic of Letters required keeping one's "parties, persuasions, and prejudices" to oneself.