A Historical Bridge over the Troubled Water of Humanities and Sciences: Rethinking C.P. Snow’s The Two Cultures Half-a-Century Later

Authors

  • Manuel Yang

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.25770/artc.11152

Keywords:

humanities, sciences, enclosure, Luddites

Abstract

In 1959 C.P. Snow published his widely influential Two Cultures, which set out to diagnose the then discernibly growing divide between the humanities and the sciences.  Although Snow’s recognition was prescient in light of today’s capital-intensive domination of the sciences over the ever-fractured, underfunded humanities in the neoliberal university, his analysis was based on a one-dimensional faith in scientific progress.  Contrary to Snow’s condescending characterization of Luddites and their intellectual analogues as indulging in an “Edenic fantasy”, the compatriot social historians of Snow’s times revealed the exact opposite: that it was the historical process of enclosures and capitalist expropriation that prompted the commoners’ insurrectionary struggles of machine-breaking in defense of their culture at the point of production and reproduction.  Any collective effort toward the making of a “third culture” is bound to fail without properly situating the arts/sciences cultural divide as an organic part of this historical privatization of knowledge and social relations.

Author Biography

Manuel Yang

Manuel Yang received his Ph.D. in history from the University of Toledo.  He specializes in the comparative history of the Atlantic and the Pacific.  His writings have appeared in Reconstruction, Nebula, Kyoto Journal, Comparative Literature and Culture, International Labor and Working Class History, among other places.  He is currently working on a couple of books -- a comparative history of the New Left and a travelogue about the hydrangea revolution -- and translating with colleagues Mike Davis's Late Victorian Holocausts into Japanese.  

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Published

2013-09-01

How to Cite

Yang, M. (2013). A Historical Bridge over the Troubled Water of Humanities and Sciences: Rethinking C.P. Snow’s The Two Cultures Half-a-Century Later. artciencia.Com, Revista De Arte, Ciência E Comunicação, (16). https://doi.org/10.25770/artc.11152