Shall we restart the Republic of Letters?

When I was a teenager, I loved reading literature and philosophy of the 17th - 19th century. Later, at university, one of my specializations was Western literature. It often perplexed me how, despite vast geographical distances and relatively poor lines of communication, all these writers and scientists knew each other and were constantly exchanging letters. Only recently did I discover the answer - there was a vibrant self-organized community of the greatest (mostly) minds in Europe! The Republic of Letters: the forgotten forerunner of modern social media.

Long before the Internet was invented, namely between the 16th and end of the 19th century, the spirit of free thinking, collective creation, and the sharing of knowledge manifested through the letter exchange between the intellectuals, scholars, scientists and writers of Europe and wider lands. A vast and dense intellectual net covering Europe and touching upon Africa, America, and Asia became a massive social phenomenon. At a time when powerful monarchies were taking shape in Europe and religious wars kept shaking the lands, a highly democratic phenomenon arose, a free and self-regulated community devoted to the quest for new knowledge. No institutionalized structures, just the exchange of ideas between scientists separated by national and religious barriers, not to mention numerous wars, usually carried out via written correspondence and rarely by personal encounters.

It was common for scholars traveling through Europe, when arriving in a new city, to inquire about the addresses of fellow scholars and register with them. It was also customary for them to record their opinions about their host in travel diaries; they only knew each other from publications and were now face-to-face for the first and often only time. These often unsparing character sketches were then often posthumously published, to the general delight of the scholarly republic. A common brief ending among republicans was:

“Greetings, and do help, as you indeed are doing, the Republic of Letters.”?

In Latin, Res publica?means "state, belonging to the people", and the adjective literaria?can be translated as both “belonging to reading and writing” and “learning”. This was not about letters in the sense of our modern emails, however, many of these letters were full-fledged scholarly treatises or polemical works. The topics and ideas they discussed crossed all fields of intellectual life: mathematics, philosophy, theology, physics, antiquity, the natural sciences, the mechanical arts, and music. European intellectuals questioned practically everything, and constantly demonstrated their willingness to encroach on the sacred. Together, they decided to conduct their scientific work openly, making practical experimentation their main tool of inquiry and using the ever-improving field of mathematics to measure and codify nature. Among the republicans were university professors and students, who at the same time formed regional milieus in clubs and learned societies. In Scotland, for instance, a whole school of social and economic thought emerged from the work of David Hume, Thomas Reid, and Adam Smith.

How many people were involved in the Republic of Letters? By the middle of the 16th century, the number of “citizens” in the Republic was already estimated in the thousands. Erasmus of Rotterdam, one of the first most important networkers, corresponded with about seven hundred people. An awesome 19,000 letters from Voltaire (1694 - 1778) and about 20,000 from Gottfried Leibniz (1646 - 1716) have been identified to date, making two particularly fervent correspondents.

Interestingly, as in today’s social media networks, the rank and importance of a scholar was determined not least by his strong networking abilities. Researchers estimate that the number of republicans in the whole of Europe by the time of the French revolution was about 35,000! This number should not be taken lightly, it constitutes practically every notable person you could pick from that period of time.?

But how was it possible for such a powerful and independent community to thrive? Guess who felt most endangered by the growth of the Republic? Not so much the monarchs, (although they did, too), but the corporation of medieval university scholars, scholastics, and theologians. This contingent immediately assumed the leading role in the struggle against the New Science. In fact, it is the Republic of Letters, not the rigid European universities, that served as the foundation of the modern scientific community. It's an interesting idea for our times, isn’t it?

What if a new Republic of Letters emerged to take science to the next level, outside of a modern academia that’s in crisis? All over the world, scientists complain about corruption and the decay of the true spirit of science. The smartest people in the world have to compete for very limited funding. Scientists have learned to be very cautious about keeping their discoveries and ideas under wraps until they are published. Instead of cooperating, it has become common for more notable scientists to steal from lesser-known ones. As Franco Moretti, a modern scientific polymath, bitterly pointed out: “Nowadays, our system has encouraged the emergence of a type of scholar who is exceptionally good, not at doing research, but at promising research. The type of scholar who writes grant proposals and who persuades people with money that certain things are worth doing. This is a very special ability that has absolutely nothing to do with being good at research.” And this is just one aspect of the problem.

The Republic of Letters is certainly a good story, but how much relevance does it have for modern polymaths? A hundred percent. It was shaped and sustained by polymaths, it could well be called “The Republic of Polymaths”. Simply because the nature of learning of that time was holistic, a learned man, inspired by the humanism of the Renaissance, would naturally possess a multidimensional personality.

The Republic of Letters was the birth of collective polymathy, and, sadly enough, it was polymathy that led to its decay.?The gate of the Republic of Letters, as once happened to the gate of Islamic Ijtihad, was closed by its own actions, the move towards specialization in the beginning of the 19th century. Professor Emeritus Hans Bots comments on it in his book “The Republic of Letters: The European Intellectual World 1500-1760”:?

“Until the second half of the seventeenth century, a scholar could still be a polymath and talk knowledgeably on any subject. But with the rise of empirical science and a fast-changing worldview, it was no longer possible for individual scholars to understand everyone.”?

While there were many polymaths still in the 19th?century, their numbers dwindled with the advent of specialization. They became increasingly rare until the 20th-century, when the term “polymath” practically became taboo.

from WHY POLYMATHS? by Aksinya Samoylova