The War on Newton By Mordechai Feingold *

To J. B. Shank, the engrained notion that Newton’s genius can account for the advent of scientific modernity and the subsequent French Enlightenment is seriously misguided. Though conceding the centrality of Newtonianism to the philosophe movement, Shank seeks to root out the “myth” that Newtonianism served as the “natural springboard” for the Enlightenment. He tethers his narrative to the self-serving philosophes, whose version of events was accepted de facto and then perpetuated by generations of scholars. Newton’s critical role, Shank asserts, was historically contingent, becoming effective only after the publication in 1734 of Voltaire’s Lettres philosophiques. Shank accordingly devotes the first part of The Newton Wars and the Beginning of the Enlightenment to establishing the context of Voltaire’s work: the new public culture in France that reshaped the Republic of Letters during the early eighteenth century. Seminal to this transformation, he contends, were structural shifts in French institutional and public science, including the proliferation of new journals; the emergence of a critical spirit that replaced the civility that had hitherto informed transactions in the Republic of Letters; and the rise of a particularly aggressive strain of Newtonianism—with the concomitant coalescence of a hostile Cartesian party. This new cultural landscape enabled Voltaire to articulate the identity of the philosophe, and it was this novel identity that then launched the Enlightenment. The second part of The Newton Wars seeks to instantiate the argument through a detailed analysis of the personae and literary productions of Voltaire and Maupertuis in the context of the public rows they provoked. Such analysis is in line with Shank’s thesis that philosophical ideas—in and of themselves—were marginal to the emergence of the French Enlightenment; what mattered was the manner in which such ideas were deployed by Voltaire and “the particular self-fashioning he accomplished with them, a selffashioning that led to the definition of a new kind of critical, libertarian intellectual in France” (p. 31). Maupertuis exhibited a complementary model. Whereas Voltaire operated exclusively within the domain of the public sphere, Maupertuis’s base was initially the Académie des Sciences, which he transformed, then supplemented, with his own public sociability. This sociability included the same markings of libertinism and philosophical