Knowledge Is Power

technology and culture Book Reviews 617 building certainly would have made a more interesting Public Broad­ casting System television series. Jane Morley Ms. Morley is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania. Knowledge Is Power: The Diffusion of Information in Early America, 1700—1865. By Richard D. Brown. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. Pp. xii + 372; illustrations, notes, appendix, index. $39.95. The relationship of knowledge to power has long intrigued an impressive array of social theorists ranging from cultural anthropol­ ogists Mary Douglas and Jack Goody to interpretative sociologists Peter Berger and Michel Foucault. Yet, until recently, it has received little sustained attention from historians. In Knowledge Is Power, distinguished early-American historian Richard D. Brown sets out to fill this gap. Taking as his theme the dramatic changes in information diffusion wrought by the 19th-century communications revolution, Brown seeks to describe the “social significance” of the various kinds of information that moved through American society in the 250-year period between the founding ofJamestown and the Civil War and to chart some of the implications of the gradual emergence, in the 19th century, of a political order that was organized around, and to a considerable degree defined by, what has generally come to be known (Raymond Williams notwithstanding) as “mass communications” (P· 8). Brown’s approach to the communications revolution is somewhat unorthodox. Rather than focus on the institutional transformations that ushered in the modern “information age”—the rise of the professions, the culture industry, the research university, and the like—he chooses instead to reconstruct its impact on the subjective experience of selected individuals. Readers familiar with the criticisms leveled at Brown’s Modernization: The Transformation of American Life, 1600—1865—and, in particular, with the contention that its Olympian detachment masked a thinly veiled ideological determinism—may well suspect that he has taken his critics’ advice to heart. As Brown puts it, he has chosen this time around to view the landscape by foot, rather than from an airplane flying overhead. Although Brown is careful to stress that his argument is tentative and subject to future revision, its basic outlines are clear. In the colonial period, information about international commerce, imperial politics, or high culture was largely monopolized by a tiny genteel elite and only gradually trickled down to the lower reaches of the social 618 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE order. Beginning in the mid-18th century, however, and accelerating in the early republic, access to information gradually became democ­ ratized. Dramatic changes in the production and distribution of newspapers, books, and religious tracts made it possible for the first time for ordinary men and women to obtain information that had formerly been the exclusive province of a favored few. Although Brown is quick to stress that access to information remained hierar­ chical, with elites retaining their traditional control of the market for knowledge, he finds even more impressive the degree to which it became genuinely popular. The consequence of this “democratization of gentility” (the phrase is Gordon Wood’s) was the emergence of a far more individualistic, competitive, and pluralistic social order— or, to use a term that Brown scrupulously avoids, the “modernization” of American society. Brown’s richly textured reconstruction of the older, hierarchical pattern of information diffusion is the most persuasive part of the book. No brief review can do full justice to its many illuminating insights and telling anecdotes. His meticulous attention to detail, to what cultural anthropologists call “thick description,” renders plausi­ ble his reconstruction of the mental world of the Boston merchant Samuel Sewell, a world in which face-to-face encounters were a far more important source of up-to-date information than newspapers and where, or so he provocatively asserts, ordinary people rarely questioned their exclusion from the circles of those privileged enough to be in the know. Equally successful are his portraits of the planter William Byrd II, who struggled mightily in the wilds of Tidewater Virginia to retain the trappings of English gentility, and of Salem Unitarian minister William Bentley, who earnestly aspired to master every field of knowledge known to man. Even

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