Steven Johnson's "The Invention of Air"

This is a good read but a bit disconcerting. Johnson is handling more than a story of invention and more than a biography. He dabbles a bit in the philosophy of science and even a bit of historiography:

Seeing human history as a series of intensifying energy flows in one way around the classic opposition between the Great Men and Collectivist visions of history. You can tell the history of the world through the lives of individuals or groups of individuals, and pat of that explanation is no doubt true. But you can also tell that story with the humans in a supporting role, not the lead. You can tell it as the story of flows of energy: growing, subsiding, being captured, being released. Think of those flows as a vast, surging ocean, and the individual human lives of history crowded on a sailboat in that turbulent water. The humans can still steer their vessel, and exploit the waters and wind that happen to be pushing in the direction they wish to go. But the humans are largely subservient to the conditions set by those oceanic forces.

While I agree with his statement, I find his forays into theory a distraction from the storyline of the book. The above is the most egregious. When he talks of Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions I'm less displeased because that is a little more relevant, especially the fact:

The classic case study for the concept of a paradigm shift is the Copernican revolution in astronomy, but in actual fact, the first extended story that Kuhn tells in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is the paradigm shift in chemistry that took place in the 1770s, led by the revolutionary science of Joseph Priestly.

The core message of the book is that politics, religion, and science are necessarily intermingled and the modern idea that you can separate expertise may advance "normal science" but it undermines Kuhn's "revolutionary science". Here's a bit from the closing pages of Johnson's book:

The faith in science and progress necessitated one other core core value that Priestley shared with Jefferson and Frankline, and that is the radical's belief that progress inevitably undermines the institutions and belief systems of the past. ... To embrace the sublime vista of reason was, inevitably, to shake off a thousand old conventions and pieties. It forced you to rewrite the Bible, and contest the divinity of Jesus Christ; it forced you to throw out all the august, Latinate traditions of the educational establishment; it forced you to invest whole new modes of government, it forced you to think of the air we breathe as part of a natural system that could be disturbed by human intervention; it forced you to dream up entirely new structures for the transmission and cultivation of ideas. You could no longer put stock in "the education of our ancestors," as Jefferson derisively called it. Embracing change means embracing the possibility that everything would have to be re-invented.

The book is a solid retelling of Priestly's life and his science. What makes this book interesting is that Johnson points out the overlap between this early science and the developing democratic movement, especially the American revolution. He documents the close relationship between Priestly and Benjamin Franklin. There is an interesting overlap between this book and Timothy Ferris's The Science of Liberty. Ferris's book is the stronger, more profound read with a much broader scope. But Johnson's book is a smaller, more focused book with its own lively style, and delves more deeply into the details of specific people and their ideas. I recommend them both.