Gentlemen and Geology: the Emergence of a Scientific Career, 1660–1920

Abstract

Historians will give no thanks for being told that professionalization models are fraught with pitfalls as putative interpretations of scientific development. When deployed stricto sensu , essentially to trace the evolution of the remunerated career structure, the concept of professionalization invites blinkered antiquarian administrative history. Too easily, however, the jargon can serve as a blanket pseudo-explanation of the key phenomena of modern science, and thereby it loses all precision. Thus a recent author, having noted that professionalization is a Protean term, concludes ‘perhaps we can use it to mean the emergence of a scientific community’. But this runs the risk of collapsing quite distinct concepts into each other, and thereby of begging the very questions which must be faced.