пути к Просвещению: другой Кольбер

Интересная рецензия на недавно вышедшую книгу о Кольбере:

Colbert ... worked to restrict the public flow of information, and here he set particularly long-lasting precedents. He made secrecy his byword, and insisted that no one outside government had any right to a knowledge of its workings--particularly its financial workings. Soll depicts him at work ensuring that no Paris printer could learn Greek or Latin without official approval, so that potentially seditious classical scholarship would remain under close surveillance. He shows Colbert striving to suppress Richard Simon's pioneering critical treatment of the Old Testament--one of the first attempts to treat Scripture as a historical text--and promoting the idea that "history should serve only to conserve the splendor of the King's enterprises." While Louis XIV abandoned other elements of Colbert's information system, he happily retained all of these.

. . .

The path from Colbert to the Enlightenment needs further investigation. So, for that matter, does the path to the Enlightenment from the scholarly forms of information management studied by historians such as Blair. How does our relationship to formal knowledge change when we do not read through a book from start to finish, submitting ourselves to its logic and authority--when we impose our own organizational scheme on it through sophisticated forms of note-taking and the use of reference guides? The suddenness and completeness of the shift from one form of reading to another should not be exaggerated, but the phenomenon still has clear importance to the development of what we call, however imperfectly, modernity. The still more radical challenge to reading posed by the electronic dissemination of texts likewise promises, in the long run, to have profound effects on our broader intellectual universe.

The great irony about Colbert is that the ways of knowing that he championed would ultimately prove incompatible with the social and political values that he defended. He himself, of course, did not see any contradiction between a utilitarian perspective and a system of absolute monarchy grounded in the divine right of kings, brutal religious intolerance, and social privilege; but later generations would see a flagrant contradiction, and act decisively to resolve it. In this sense, the aristocrats and the scholars who saw Colbert as an alien, threatening presence in their midst had things exactly right. It is true, as Jacob Soll claims, that in the short term the French monarchy benefited from Colbert's ministrations, and might have benefited still more if his "system" had persisted after his death. From another perspective, however, he was less the state's servant than one of its gravediggers.

Рекомендую.

пути к Просвещению: информационное общество

Оттуда же, специально для тех, кто озабочен регрессивным эффектом Интернета:

While the extreme availability of information today should presumably have highlighted its relative paucity in earlier periods, historians--most notably Ann Blair--have in fact extended the concept of "information overload" all the way back to the sixteenth century, arguing that while we now associate the phenomenon with the internet, the printing press had a comparable effect. Until its invention, most literate people had access to relatively little written material. They could manage to read literally everything they could get their hands on. After Gutenberg, however, books multiplied rapidly, and soon many libraries became too large for their owners to read more than a small percentage of the texts. It became necessary to devise strategies for dealing with the excess. Scholars invented systems of note-taking, methods of summarizing and skimming, and principles of triage. As Francis Bacon famously remarked: "Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested: that is, some books are to be read only in parts; others to be read, but not curiously; and some few to be read wholly, with diligence and attention." That is, among other things, a comment about coping.

We cope in the same way; and anyone who identifies Wikipedia with the end of civilization should be reassured to learn that early modern Europeans already possessed an impressive arsenal of intellectual crutches and shortcuts, some of them quite dubious. By the seventeenth century there already existed a large genre of reference works, compendia, and reading guides, so as to lead the uninitiated through the increasingly dense thickets of learning, sometimes at breakneck speed. Some readers made use of little else, with classical compendia particularly prized for the quick simulacra of learning that they provided. As Jonathan Swift advised young critics, "Get scraps of Horace from your friends, / And have them at your fingers' ends." More serious scholars put together their own guides and reference works. Ann Blair has shown that many of the greatest Renaissance thinkers had no compunction about attacking their books with scissors, cutting and pasting what they considered the crucial passages into commonplace books or card files for easy reference.

Интересная книга, как раз об этом, но в викторианской Англии: Tom Standage, The Victorian Internet. Надо взглянуть.