J. J. Rousseau's Letters on botany: a subversive take on a non-elite science

Abstract

An elementary botany text would not seem to have much to do with power. However, for Jean Jacques Rousseau the study of botany, is above all, a democratic activity, and hence one pursued in contrast with and in opposition to the elite, gentlemanly study of physics and chemistry that rely on affluence and/or patronage. Unlike elite sciences embedded in the relations of power and the cash nexus, studying botany is inherently free—it is the poor man’s science, with no strings attached, accessible to anyone with some leisure and the ability to purchase a few inexpensive instruments. Furthermore, it has nothing to do with the transmutation of base metals into precious ones, the focus of chemistry’s ancestor, alchemy. Rousseau’s botany is inclusive; he explicated botany to a female correspondent and her children in his posthumously-published Lettres élémentaires sur la botanique (1782). These ranked among the most popular botanical learning texts of the last quarter of the eighteenth century and remained so into the nineteenth century. Rousseau’s approach has also been called ‘revolutionary’ (Cohn, 1886) because he took as his framework not the widely-used artificial sexual system of Linnaeus, but rather, six of the seven core plant families of Antoine-Laurent de Jussieu’s natural method of classification. First published in full in 1789, shortly before the French Revolution erupted, Jussieu’s method was a system under development at the time Rousseau was writing in the 1770s. That in teaching botany Rousseau resisted using hegemonic Linnaean taxonomy has hardly been recognized. Indeed, Rousseau’s English translator, Thomas Martyn, presented not only the original eight letters explicating natural families, but also an additional twenty-four expounding the artificial system of sexual classification; he thereby helped prolong the life of Linnaean classification and at the same time, bury the ‘revolutionary’ and even subversive character of Rousseau’s text. REFERENCES: J. J. Rousseau, Lettres élémentaires sur la botanique in Collection complète des oeuvres de Jean-Jacques Rousseau, xiv (Geneva, [Société typographique], 1782). Letters on the elements of botany addressed to a lady by the celebrated J. J. Rousseau; translated into English, with notes, and twenty-four additional letters, fully explaining the system of Linnaeus, trans. and ed. Thomas Martyn (London, B. White, 1785).