Sajdeep Soomal, Doctoral Candidate, University of Toronto, Alles ist Chemie: Lyon Playfair and the Chemicalization of Economy
This essay looks at how the emergence of synthetic chemistry in the mid 19th century changed the way that economy was conceptualized and governed. No longer would the “economy of nature” be conceptualized as a closed system comprised of natural forces living in perfect harmony and balance, but rather be understood as an open-ended and unbalanced economy brimming with wayward, unstable and dangerous chemical processes that desperately needed to be scientifically governed for the sake of protecting and securing human life. To save European civilization from the perils of chemicalized nature, a new economic agent emerged in the nineteenth century to provide vital aid: the deliberative chemist. To unfurl this story about chemistry and economics, I follow the life, activities and deliberations of the organic chemist Lyon Playfair from the 1830s to the 1850s, starting with the time of his budding interest in chemical philosophies of nature at the Medical College in Calcutta and its subsequent development in the modern chemical laboratories of Justus von Liebig before moving to his time as chief chemist of the Geological Survey of Great Britain and crowning appointment as Special Commissioner of the 1851 Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations.
Following Playfair helps to reveal how synthetic chemistry proffered a new way of looking at nature that prioritized studying the chemical processes of organic substance (de)formation, rather than focusing too heavily on the chemical constituents of substance. This shift from chemical ontological study to chemical phenomenology lent itself well to thinking about all kinds of production (from agricultural to industrial production) in terms of chemical principles. Playfair and other synthetic chemists actively worked to unify all economic production under the umbrella of chemistry, identifying its key components – time, labour and substance – as chemical, rather than mechanical, processes. More than physics and mechanics; it was the abstract principles of chemistry that promised to reveal how nature worked and equip civilized, European man (who alone had evolutionarily developed the requisite mental facilities to understand chemical principles according to Playfair) all the necessary material-semiotic tools to render the earth more economically productive. Chemistry played a foundational role in the denaturalization of the economy, rendering “economy of nature” in abstract terms and governing it according to speculative chemical principles rather than empirically observable facts. I argue that this functioned as a pre-cursor to the development of neoclassical economics in the 1870s, where Playfair’s intellectual progeny such as William Stanley Jevons would attempt to govern “the economy” based on the abstract principles of mathematical physics (that were built off the insights of physical chemistry). In that way, returning to Lyon Playfair helps to reveal the entwined birth of synthetic chemistry and neoclassical economics, historicizing a critical node in the development of science and capitalism in the 19th century.
Sajdeep Soomal is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at the University of Toronto. His research focuses on science and technology studies, histories of colonialism, empire and liberalism, and contemporary art practice. He is currently writing about the history and philosophy of chemistry in Canada and working with artists to re-imagine, play with and alter our synthetic surround. He is affiliated with the Technoscience Research Unit at the University of Toronto.
Personal Website: sajdeep.com