Abstract

In 1949, Benjamin Farrington published his book Francis Bacon, Philosopher of Industrial Science. It was a Marxist take on Bacon and his significance, and, despite a degree of single-mindedness in its characterization, it presented a Francis Bacon who foretold the future stunning successes of a state-run technoscientific enterprise. Nowadays, when those successes have ceased to seem so stunning and the Soviet state that produced them is no more, Farrington’s is a reading that is both less obviously ideologically charged and, as it has been for a good many years, less popular. But he had focused on an important way of understanding Francis Bacon. Now, in Stephen Gaukroger’s new book, a much more sophisticated and complex picture of Bacon the philosopher is unveiled, but one that, at root, resonates strongly with Farrington’s.