Sebastian Kühn's doctoral dissertation, written at the Freie Universität in Berlin under Claudia Ulbrich's supervision, offers a historical anthropological investigation of the inner workings of natural science research (Naturforschung) around the turn of the eighteenth century. Rather than the history of ideas, Kühn's focus is on the workaday routines and cultural norms of the scholarly world.

Though his empirical subjects were members at the academies in London, Paris, and Berlin, and those institutions serve as a backdrop, Kühn's study applies to the culture of the scholarly world in general. Kühn samples a handful of members at each academy instead of writing a comparison of the institutions themselves, and indeed, the scholars in his samplings are more similar than different, and the differences between them are more easily explained by their individual situations than their institutional affiliations or nationalities.

The book is split into two parts. The first analyzes the “economies” of early modern scholarship, that is, who performed scholarly work and how they were compensated. Kühn presents a plethora of evidence to help understand how scientists in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries actually worked on a day-to-day basis. He painstakingly “read against the grain” of hundreds (thousands?) of letters and reports for incidental mentions of how scientific work was actually performed, and in many cases he has found differing contemporary descriptions of the same happening. This is social-cultural research at its best.

While readily acknowledging that different economies were often intertwined or even misunderstood by contemporaries, Kühn identifies three economies, principally (1) exchanges between equals, (2) household production and dissemination of knowledge, and (3) outright purchase of equipment, specimens, and information. The “exchange” economy between equal scholars disdained the exchange of money and instead was based upon the reciprocal giving of “gifts” and a willingness to acknowledge such aid before a scholarly public. The scholarly household functioned very much like the artisanal household. Prominent individual early modern “scholars” (Gelehrten) left much of the day-to-day work to their associations and underlings and functioned more as organizers and overseers (the reader senses that no twenty-first-century primary investigator would be surprised by this division of labor). Like skilled artisans, these scholarly heads of household ultimately served as “brand names” who legitimized and took credit for the achievements of their households. Finally, scientists paid money to “non-scholars” to collect specimens, manufacture equipment, and perform menial/tedious tasks. These technicians and collectors of specimens and data on the fringe of the scholarly establishment were often rather knowledgeable and skilled, but because they monetized the scientific value of their work, rather than take any scholarly credit for it, they were not considered part of the scholarly world.

The second part of the book is about scholarly friendship and enmity. Here Kühn traces the course of scholarly controversies not only through the dozens (hundreds?) of published polemics, but also through the private correspondences of those who took part. Here it becomes clear that what defined one's status as a “scholar” was that one had scholarly friends and opponents. This builds on the first part of the book, to show that the relationships established in the “exchange economy” between scholars became the building blocks of scholarly factions in scholarly controversies. Kühn provides several case studies of controversies, each showing different structural characteristics of the scholarly world around the turn of the eighteenth century. For example, Kühn shows that scholarly controversies tended to “snowball” and escalate because friends were expected to show their support by publishing vociferous polemics against one's opponents—failure to do so could be seen as a lack of loyalty, which could quickly transform tacit friendship into enmity and thereby further expand and escalate the controversy. Similarly, attempts at mediation were often seen as failures to show support and therefore counterproductive. Attacks and counterattacks then often spilled over into ad hominem attacks and insults that clearly had more to do with personality conflicts than scholarly disputes. Only with the greatest effort and goodwill could well-intentioned scholars limit their disputes in scope and subject.

More importantly, Kühn shows that it was precisely in these controversies and the dynamic interactions of friendships and oppositions that one's status as a scholar was confirmed. Kühn thereby demonstrates that the idea of an idyllic and collegial republic of letters—which was often cited as the reason for establishing a scholarly academy—was a myth. On the contrary, the seemingly pathological and much lamented polemical culture (Streitkultur) among scholars was not a result of the character defects of individual scholars and did not constitute a violation of norms, but rather was a structural component of the contemporary scholarly world. Scholarly academies served not so often as loci of cooperation as they did as arenas for disputes.

Finally, Kühn shows how this structure of friendship and opposition influenced the substance of Naturforschung. Friends avoided publishing anything that could be seen as critical of each other, which stifled innovation, and friends often supported their friends’ theses (or condemned their opponents’ theses) out of personal allegiance, not on the basis of any rational or systematic research or analysis.

This is an exhaustively theorized, thoroughly researched, and well-executed study, and it should be of interest to anyone concerned with the history of early modern science or the study of networks, patronage, or institutions.