Customer Reviews

The Measure of Reality: Quantification in Western Europe, 1250-1600

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After reading a positive recommendation in The Economist, I read this book twice and greatly enjoyed the rich tapestry of strands that Crosby weaves. With discerning eye and picking essential tendencies he explains how& why Europe surged ahead from the 11/12th century onward (with a nightmare pause in the 14th century) in economic and technological development, to dominate the world for an unprecedented period. He bases his story on many different elements that came to the fore in an increasingly complex and dynamic European society of the 12/13th century. I found his thesis of the increasing European mindset toward quantification altogether very convincing. I also liked how he points out the traces of these developments on our society today. Highly recommendend.

An important consideration when reading this book is to remember that it is the third part of a trilogy, with the first two parts being (1) "The Columbian Exchange" and (2) "Ecological Imperialism." Crosby's case studies in this book on the development of quantitative thinking in Europe are fascinating in and of themselves. But the overall impact of the shift from quanlitative to quantitative thinking in the emergence of Europe as a world power is absolutely critical to the understanding of the world today. I find this concept to be both more compelling and more predictive than the arguments put forth in G. Diamond's "Guns Germs and Steel." By way of example, look at what India, China and other East Asian countries have done with the adoption of quantitative thinking.

The author does a spectacular job of building a bridge from Medieval thought to a nascent scientific era using the theme of quantification. He uses an entertaining and readable style to document the emergence of measurement schemes in disciplines and activities as diverse as bookkeeping and music. I found the book both enjoyable and enlightening, and plan to cite it frequently in my teaching.

Measure for measure this is one of the most interesting books I've come across recently.

The big question he addresses is why the "undistinguished" West, who was just emerging from a long period of stagnation (just imagine - it has forgotten the abacus for one thousand years), as of the XVIth century was able to burst ahead of civilizations which, for a long time, had been superior both in innovation and in material conditions.

First, the conceptual framework. The author eschews the "heroic" or "chain of causation" view of history. Turns in history may not happen "for a sufficient reason" - but when there is a "change of mentality": a subliminal change in perception of the surrounding reality.

Such a change in perception operates in two steps: first "enablers" emerge: necessary but insufficient causes. The people who created these enablers were "not intentional innovators" (pg. 61). The authors identifies (a) ordering and compilation of information; (b) measurement of time; (c) measurement of space; and finally (d) measurement and manipulation of numbers - mathematics and geometry.

One sees at this stage already the shift in method taking place - it is a move from qualitative imagining of reality - projecting our worldview on it - to one of measuring it from observation. The search for mystically grasping quality dissolves into a secular search for precision. It is no longer enough to judge water to be "hot/cold": we want to know "by how much", so we find points of reference - boiling/freezing - and measure the temperature. In so doing, one eschews ideology, or faith, and humbly let reality speak to us. Reality has become our stern teacher.

The next step is to apply this quantitative way of thinking to reality - to visualize the method in everyday reality. The author gives us three examples: music, arts, and double-entry accounting.

By the time the West got through applying the quantitative methods to everything "the rationalistic character of modern culture had emerged: precise, punctual, calculable, standard, bureaucratic, rigid, invariant, finely coordinated, and routine" (pg. 230). The author concludes: "The West in the XVIth century was unique. It was advancing faster than any other large society in its ability to harness and control its environment" (pg. 238). The rest was a path-dependent outcome.

"The West's distinctive intellectual accomplishment was to bring mathematics and measurement together and to hold them to the task of making sense of a sensorially perceivable reality, which Westerners, in a flying leap of faith, assumed to be spatially and temporally uniform and therefore susceptible to such examination" (pg. 17).

Faced with the sudden complexification of knowledge - the arrival of learned (secular) books like the works of Plato and Aristotle as well as the corpus of Arab knowledge - Western scholars took to ordering and indexing just as the merchants and artisans were doing the same in the emerging cities. Practice opened the way, and theory followed, ordering practice and basis for the subsequent step of exploration. The anarchic conditions in the West, which allowed much unfettered and unprejudiced experimentation, had probably much to do with this. And may help explain why China, with its unequalled and age-old ability to organize and standardize, failed to generate the singularity.

There are so many insightful aspects packed in this very readable book that one must both admire the erudition of the author and his ability to expose the thoughts lucidly. It is a book that feels "exciting".

Crosby uses the metaphor of "striking a match" to describe the event, which combined with quantification, the kindling in Crosby's metaphor, to generate a revolution in the West. The match is visualization: "Visualization and quantification: together they snap the padlock - reality is fettered" (p. 229). As a type of visualization, a symbolic system allowed advancements that were not otherwise possible. In mathematics, accounting and music, having a concise and powerful symbolism freed the mind to range and to create - no longer a prisoner of memory. As Crosby notes: "Because the algebraist could concentrate on the symbols and put aside ... what they represented, he or she could perform unprecedented intellectual feats" (p. 120). Similarly in painting, perspective allowed a new way to manipulate light in order to make more accurate pictures, for the glory of God and man, thus replacing the multiple and spatially incongruous "Nows" in medieval painting with "'exactness and predictability'" (p. 197).

Often Crosby's extended metaphors are annoying without being instructive: "Bruno was executed for heresy in 1600 - to no avail. The cat, already out of the bag was having kittens" (p. 105); "For us today, things exist in space like vegetables in an aspic salad ... the aspic was starting to stiffen" (pp. 170, 172); "The moment had arrived for a trumpet solo, and the only instrument available was a hunting horn... But let us deal first with getting from the hunting horn to the trumpet" (p. 111). It seems as if he's chuckling to himself as he's writing this.

Otherwise this is a wonderful summary of how the West's development was distinct from that of other areas, such as China and the Middle East, by arguing how quantification and visualization allowed Europeans to perceive the world in a unique manner which allowed them to manipulate the world in ways not dreamt of before. Ironically, Crosby quotes Johan Huizinga (pp. 131-2), who argued that this new emphasis on sight was an indication of the decline in Western civilization because of its insistence on seeing something visible as a necessary precursor to initiate thought.

The question of how the world became dominated by Europe has been the topic of several excellent books, among them Crosby's The Columbian Exchange and Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. Crosby seeks an intellecutal (rather than biological) answer to the question here, which is appropriate given that Europe held at best technological and scientific pairity with India, Asia and the Near East. So what happend? What made Europe different that allowed them to eventually conquor (both figuratively and literally) much of the world?

Crosby argues that Europe made the crucial move from a "qualifying" view of the world (ie. measuring the world in qualifying terms like 'a pinch') to a "quantifying" view of the world (as in precise measurement - ie. 5 gm.) This transition was slow (the book covers some 250 years) and uneven, and certainly would not have happened without the benefit of the advances made in the East (in terms of Hindu-Arabic numerals, algebra, the concept of "zero" and the like) - but it was the Europeans who began to think in greater abstraction, to measure, quantify and thereby gradually have the tools and wherewithal to explore and eventually "conquor" the world (for better or worse.)

At the center of the book are economic motives: time, since recorded history seen in qualifying terms (ie "night" and "day") became carefully organized. To European city-dwellers, time was money. And money is key here - the difference, for example between "price" and "value" is an abstraction that European merchants were quick to seize upon. This revolution of mentality is what was revolutionary Crosby argues. The revolution is seen in a variety of ways: in art (with the gradual change in persepctive as evidenced by the Renaissance masters), in music (as it moves from monophony to polyphony), and especially in bookeeping. The revolution, of course, was tremendously aided by the development of the moveable-type printing press (another adaptaiton of a Chinese invention.)

That the Chinese, who had many of these technologies centuries before Europe did not use them to exploit the world as the Europeans did (remember Zheng He?) is a function of mentalite: in the Confucian world, the merchants occupy the bottom rung of the social ladder, as they produce nothing (but rather simply move it from one place to another, thereby not helping or advancing society.) In Europe, the businessman is king - from the Di Medici, the Sforzas, the Fuggers and the Rothschilds it is the bankers and the merchants that helped the nation state centralize, it was the merchant class that colonized, it was the merchant class that pushed for faster and more efficient production.

A brilliant examination of well-trod ground. Highly recommended.

With great respect and sensitivity, Professor Crosby characterizes the transition in mentalité from the longstanding "Venerable Model" to the "New Model" of interpreting reality that coalesced in the decades from 1275 to 1325. Recommended for history, Western Civilization, comparative cultures, philosophy of history, and philosophy of science courses. An excellent addition to graduate school libraries and major public libraries. Robert S. Frey, M.A.; Editor, BRIDGE

Crosby takes on a very difficult and complicated subject here and manages a book of remarkable clarity and balance. The book is lightly written and though the footnotes were a bit distracting (I'd have preferred they be set out in an appendix) it's a fast, friendly read. I would recommend it to readers with a wide range of interests from general world or medieval European history, to those interested in the roots of western business practices, music history and notation, physics, astronomy, mathematics . . . Bravo, Mr. Crosby!

Crosby does a fantastic job covering a vast change in the overall society changes from 1250-1600. For the amount of vast knowledge packed in you'd think the book would be 3,000 pages. He brings us an interesting approach to the actual birth and uprise of modern techonology, arts and literature as we know it.

Let me start by saying that I try not to inflate my ratings like so many on amazon.com, so this is actually a very positive rating.

Crosby presents no original research here, but he does do a marvelous job of pulling together the work of others to bolster his argument that it was the shift in Europeans viewing reality in quanitificational concepts rather than qualitative ones that laid the intellectual groundwork for their global expansion. Fortunately, in presenting the work of others Crosby has an eye equally attuned to the more entertaining moments in the shift to the age of quantification as to the more crucial. He is also a highly entertaining writer. The result is perhaps the easiest-to-read work of pre-modern history that I have encountered. Not heavy duty stuff, but an extraordinarily pleasant way to spend a few hours.