Mark Patton. Science, Politics, and Business in the Work of Sir John Lubbock: A Man of Universal Mind.Science, Politics, and Business in the Work of Sir John Lubbock: A Man of Universal Mind.(Science, Technology, and Culture, 1700–1945.) by Mark PattonReview by: Reviewed by J. F. M.   ClarkIsis, Vol. 99, No. 3 (September 2008), pp. 639-640Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The History of Science SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/593262 .

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Scott W. Palmer. Dictatorship of the Air: Avia-tion Culture and the Fate of Modern Russia. xx �307 pp., figs., bibl., index. New York: Cam-bridge University Press, 2006. $46.95 (cloth).

Dictatorship of the Air is a well-written, thor-oughly researched study of Russian and Sovietaviation and “airmindedness.” Scott Palmerconsiders several important ideas: continuityand change between the Tsarist and Soviet re-gimes, the cultural significance of technology,the nature of Bolshevism and its impact on tech-nological style, technological transfer and re-verse engineering, and more. Palmer has mas-tered the archives and integrates this materialwith published sources, primary and secondary.He has examined literature, poetry, film, and art(including political posters) to help us under-stand the relentless propaganda campaigns topromote aeronautics for social, economic, andmilitary goals. Historians will relish the bibliog-raphy.

Palmer interweaves several stories seam-lessly. For Imperial Russian and Soviet leadersalike, aviation served as a symbol of modernityand change that was always tied to their insecu-rity about the nation’s ability to catch up withthe West and master technology. For the Sovietleadership, aviation was a sign of the gloriousimpending technological utopia. They used avi-ation to appeal to the backward peasants andovercome the rupture between the countrysideand cities. While they could not establish a“Red” air force during the disruptions of thecivil war and War Communism, they made avi-ation a part of the revolutionary experiment,beginning with a 1923 national campaign thatresembled other campaigns to increase literacy,encourage atheism, develop civil defense, anddiscourage drunkenness.

For Leon Trotsky, promoter of world revolu-tion and the founder of the Red Army, the air-plane was a tool to conquer the vast spaces ofthe empire and a symbol of the spread of revo-lution. For Joseph Stalin, it was a symbol ofresistance against enemies abroad and of vigi-lant civil defense at home as the nation struggledto create socialism in one country. But all Sovietleaders used aviation to showcase the USSR’smodernity and its ability to conquer nature it-self. They ordered various technological feats:the longest flights, the circumnavigation of theNorth Pole, the first all-female crews for someflights. Yet, as Palmer reveals, these efforts usu-ally squandered resources and often ended di-sastrously, with great human costs that demon-strated to many the inability of Soviet industryto innovate—or even produce spare parts.

Palmer adds significantly to our understand-ing of the expansion of aviation research anddevelopment under Stalin. Here he turns to adiscussion of an essential feature of innovationin that industry (and others): copying, industrialespionage, and reverse engineering. The Sovietssought autarky but never achieved it. They re-quired Western technology for innovation. Anissue for historians of technology that Palmerdoes not fully address is the extent to whichBolshevism itself, with its impulses to central-ize, its massive bureaucratic organizations tocontrol the masses, and its proclivities to engi-neer society through rationalized planning andcentralized control, shaped technological stylehere and in other industries.

Palmer concludes his study with a discussionof aviation during World War II. Among otherfactors, Stalin’s failure of leadership at the be-ginning of the war led to the destruction of theair force on the ground. He had already purgedthe military leadership, including the air force,and imprisoned leading aeronautical engineersin the Gulag labor camps. Still, the Soviets man-aged rapidly to turn out thousands of new planesthat were durable, reliable, and less complexthan Western models. Yet they remained relianton the West—for example, through lend-leaseprograms—for materials, technology, and ex-pertise. Ultimately, Palmer tells a fascinatingstory of what happens when the state is the mainengine of technological innovation. The result inSoviet aviation was institutionalized depen-dence on the West. This view stands in contrastto the traditional hagiographic view of Sovietaviation, a view you can read in the monthlymagazines of Aeroflot and other airlines in Rus-sia today.

Dictatorship of the Air includes sixty well-chosen illustrations that offer visual testimonyto Palmer’s story. I wish I had access to theillustrations through the Internet to use in myteaching about Soviet culture and technology. Irecommend this book most highly for historiansof science and technology, for historians oftwentieth-century Europe, and for advanced un-dergraduates and graduate students.

PAUL JOSEPHSON

Mark Patton. Science, Politics, and Business inthe Work of Sir John Lubbock: A Man of UniversalMind. (Science, Technology, and Culture, 1700–1945.) x � 270 pp., figs., bibl., index. Burling-ton, Vt.: Ashgate, 2007. $100, £55 (cloth).

In the not-too-distant past, the ascendance ofsocial history resulted in a spurning of biogra-

BOOK REVIEWS—ISIS, 99 : 3 (2008) 639

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phy as the product of intellectualist elitism. Overthe past decade and a half, however, biographyhas undergone a veritable renaissance in thehistory of science. Ironically, the “social historyof science” that fell in the wake of the Kuhnianturn embraced biography as an effective tool fora contextualist history of science: a necessarycorrective to ahistorical, positivistic accounts.Perhaps unsurprisingly, therefore, biographicalstudies loom large in the relatively recent Ash-gate series devoted to “Science, Technology,and Culture, 1700–1945.”

A contextualized account of the life and intel-lectual career of John Lubbock (1834–1913)would be a welcome addition to the growing bodyof biographical literature in the history of science.Thankfully, Mark Patton does not make claims forthe retrieval of a “neglected” individual. As aneighbor and friend of Charles Darwin, a promi-nent banker, an MP, a member of the X Club, andan author of numerous books and articles, Lub-bock has been a ubiquitous minor figure in polit-ical history, banking history, and the history ofscience. Patton’s self-proclaimed aspiration is toprovide missing pieces to the “jig-saw puzzle” (p.10) of Victorian society that has thus far beenconstructed from various lives and careers—ofRuskin, Darwin, Huxley, Chamberlain, and Glad-stone. Commendably, he draws on these fine bio-graphical studies.

Patton acknowledges Horace Hutchinson’stwo-volume Life of Sir John Lubbock, Lord Ave-bury (1914), and Ursula Grant Duff’s edited TheLife-Work of Lord Avebury (Sir John Lubbock),1834–1913 (1924), as antecedents, but his workis informed by greater historical distance fromhis subject and an intimate knowledge of theformidable archival sources. In general, Pattondoes an admirable job of distilling the differentfacets of a very public life, and he provides newinsight into Lubbock’s personal life. He shedslight on the nature of his first wife Ellen’s illnessand provides further insight into the importanceof his wives’ relationships with fellow X Clubmembers.

Patton’s greatest strength lies in his analysisof Lubbock’s liberalism. Numerous historianshave endeavored to locate Darwinian sciencewithin the context of British liberalism. AdrianDesmond reconciles Huxley, the marginalizedradical of the 1840s and 1850s, with Huxley, thebastion of the establishment of the 1880s; and heconcludes that the path from radical to reaction-ary mirrors the fate of British liberalism in thenineteenth century. Patton tells a very similarstory as Lubbock progresses from “scientificLiberal” to Moderate Unionist. Significantly,however, “scientific Liberalism” seems to be a

descriptive term for a Liberal who cultivates aninterest in progressive science. Reference toLubbock’s faith in progressive developmental-ism, and to his commitment to religion shorn ofdogmatism, is a useful springboard, but moredepth is required to appreciate the impressivelydiverse contributions of Lubbock.

Herein lies a difficulty with Science, Poli-tics, and Business in the Work of Sir JohnLubbock. Although the title clearly gives “sci-ence” priority and purports to examine “thework” of John Lubbock, this is a narrative lifein which science features as a minor distrac-tion and in which the analyses of “the work”struggle to rise above cursory descriptions.Scientific works quickly become landmarksthat blink by as Lubbock speeds along thehighway of his political career. Lubbock’s en-tomological work, for example, is noted as itarises within the narrative of his life, but thereis little sense of its place within the develop-ment of the discipline of entomology or thelife sciences. For his brief assessment of Lub-bock’s enduring contribution to zoologicalscience, Patton relies on J. A. Thomson’sanalysis, which appeared in Grant Duff’s ed-ited volume (1924). A number of further as-sessments have followed in the interveningyears, but these do not appear among Patton’ssources; and, unfortunately, there are similaromissions for the historiography of anthropol-ogy, politics, and banking.

In light of these shortcomings for the his-torian of science, we should consider the in-tended audience for this book. For the generalreader, it does a fine job of placing sciencewithin general intellectualist culture in Victo-rian Britain. Given the price of this volume,however, I suspect that the series is not in-tended for the general reader. Alternatively,this book may be considered a meticulous,archive-based resource for the life of Lub-bock. Unfortunately, reference to Lubbock’searly schooling in Abington [sic; Abingdon]and persistent references to one of his closestfriends, Mountstewart [sic; Mountstuart]Grant Duff, and to Alfred Russell [sic; Russel]Wallace undermine credibility on this front. Inthe end, Patton’s life of Lubbock cannot betouted as an exemplar of the rich analyticalfruit to be reaped from biographical studies ofpersons engaged in the production of a sys-tematic study of the natural world. It does,however, provide a useful alternative toHutchinson and Grant Duff, both of which arelong out of print.

J. F. M. CLARK

640 BOOK REVIEWS—ISIS, 99 : 3 (2008)

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