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COPYRIGHT 2003 Indiana University, Purdue University of Fort Wayne
By Christopher Herbert. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2001. xv + 302 pages.
Christopher Herbert's Victorian Relativity is a surprising and compelling piece of intellectual history. It simultaneously recovers an important strand of Victorian thought, challenges the dominant understanding of Einsteinian physics as disconnected from philosophical and cultural relativism, and provides a genealogy for much of postmodern literary theory and cultural studies of science. In Herbert's telling, the view that knowledge, even of physical entities, is not absolute but relative, that nothing can be known except in relation to other things, was given its modern form starting roughly in the middle of the nineteenth century. The "principle of relativity," as it was called by its Victorian advocates in the physical sciences and a host of other fields, was also, Herbert shows, almost invariably intertwined with a strong moral resistance to intellectual and political absolutism. In the course of the book, Herbert thus offers a spirited defense of relativism, tracing its distinguished lineage and challenging the distortions of its opponents past and present.
In his chapter-length introduction, Herbert outlines the general contours of relativity in the second half of the nineteenth century. He argues that the emphasis on objectivity in Victorian scientific discourse cannot be understood without the recognition that objectivity was neither a monolithic nor an uncontested concept. Indeed, for many Victorian scientists and intellectuals, it was the increasing acceptance of relativity, not of objectivity, that defined the age. Yet to embrace relativity was to become vulnerable to...
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