News – June 10, 2010

New Papers

B. Godin (2010), “Meddle Not With Them That Are Given to Change”: Innovation as Evil, Working Paper no. 6, Project on the Intellectual History of Innovation, Montreal: INRS. 46 p. Paper presented at 1) Workshop on “Rhetoric of Innovation in Contemporary Society”, University of Helsinki, Institute of Behavioral Sciences, 7-8 February 2010; 2) Public Understanding of Science Seminar, London School of Economics, 10 February 2010.

Abstract
Innovation has become a central value of modern society. It has not always been so. As a matter of fact, innovation had a pejorative connotation for centuries. This paper looks at one episode of the contested use of the category ‘innovation’. It documents the first controversy on innovation in the seventeenth century. Starting in the mid-1620s, Henry Burton, a Church of England minister and Puritan, accused the bishops of innovating in matters of Church doctrine and discipline, contrary to His Majesty’s instructions. In 1636, Burton published two of his sermons in a polemical form and was brought before the Court. His opponents produced answers accusing Burton himself of innovating. Burton had his ears cut and was sentenced to imprisonment.

The study of this controversy teaches us what innovation meant to contemporaries, the values it embedded, what uses were made of the category and what the context was from which Western representations of innovation emerged. One had to wait until the second half of the nineteenth century and early twentieth century for more positive evaluations of innovation. The study of the controversy teaches us about both the similarities and the differences in representations of innovation between the two periods.

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B. Godin (2010), The Culture of Numbers: From Science to Innovation. Talk Given to the Government-University-Industry Research Roundtable (GUIRR), US National Academy of Sciences, Washington, 21 May, 2010, GUIRR Leadership Dinner.