Measuring the World

A First-Year Tutorial offered fall 2021, taught by Michael Guenther, associate professor of history, chair of science, medicine, and society

All cultures develop their own systems of measurement that help them make sense of the physical world while providing a shared framework for material culture, exchange, value, and authority. But if measurement is a universal impulse, the ways in which particular societies (in different times and places) have approached this issue could not be more different. This tutorial invites students to explore how our modern systems of measurement emerged from the intellectual ferment of the scientific revolution, the cultural aspirations of the Enlightenment, the economic imperatives of modern capitalism, and the administrative goals of the bureaucratic State. Although we tend to think of measurement as a boring, technocratic subject, our course readings will explore how the question of measurement — What should we measure? How should we measure it? Whose interests are served? — lay at the heart of some of the most controversial debates of this transformative period (i.e., 1600–1900). From the rationalizing utopia of the metric system in the French Revolution, to the birth of the census as a tool of statecraft, to the insidious schemes to measure racial and gender differences through fields like anthropometry, the science and politics of measurement have decisively shaped the kind of world we all inhabit today.