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J. B. Shank, Stephen Gaukroger. The Natural and the Human: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1739–1841., The American Historical Review, Volume 122, Issue 5, December 2017, Pages 1678–1679, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/122.5.1678
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The Natural and the Human: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1739–1841, is the third volume in Stephen Gaukroger’s emerging magnum opus, which narrates the story of how science has shaped modernity from its beginnings (as he discerns them) in the thirteenth century until the present. All three extant volumes carry the same subtitle stating their unified conception, and each advances a single overarching argument in chapters that are marked by exceptional precision, erudition, and incisiveness, all hallmarks of Gaukroger’s large and distinguished corpus of previous scholarship. This third volume adds three hundred and fifty pages of analysis to the thousand that have already been published, and it also tightens the narrative overall by focusing on a single, precisely delimited century: the one spanning the publication of David Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature in 1739 and Ludwig Feuerbach’s Das Wesen des Christentums in 1841. The first volume of Science and the Shaping of Modernity (2006) focused on the rise of mechanism as a unifying conceptual paradigm in Europe after 1210. The second volume (2010) traced “the collapse of mechanism” between 1680 and 1760 and the “rise of sensibility” in response. The Natural and the Human picks up the argument here, looking at the turn toward naturalization that the shift to sensibility produced. The story unfolds first through the naturalization of the human, Hume’s innovation, which produced a set of newly important human and moral sciences, and then ultimately through Feuerbach’s achievement in 1841 of a naturalization of Christianity, or, as Gaukroger often describes it, the humanization of nature, akin to what others call secularization and the disenchantment of the world.
