In July we spotlighted a new book by Sveinn Jóhannesson, The Scientific-Military State: How Enlightened Engineers Reinvented Early American Government. The book presents a striking portrait of the far-reaching influence of French military science on the US Army and, by extension, US history before the Civil War. Jóhannesson received his PhD in American history from the University of Cambridge in 2019 and is currently Koch History Centre Fellow at Wadham College and the University of Oxford. Given the novel way his book fits the history of science into broader national historical narratives, we were eager to ask him some further questions about how he developed his research and ideas.

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Will Thomas: Your book takes a close look at some areas of United States history that tend to receive less attention, even here in the US, notably the War of 1812, the war between the US and Mexico, and the development of the US Army officer corps. But from these areas you draw out a very broad and significant story about science and state-building. Can you tell us how you came to this topic, and also how you navigated different historical subdisciplines—US history, European history, history of the state, military history, and the history of science and technology—to bring your argument together?

Sveinn Jóhannesson: I arrived at the topic, in the broadest sense, quite early as a graduate student. I was interested in understanding “the state,” and particularly in how the ages of Enlightenment and revolutions shaped its formation. I was fascinated by, but also somewhat dissatisfied with, the literature on the so-called “fiscal-military state,” which had shown how profoundly early modern state formation was driven by the imperatives of war and, above all, by the need to raise money to pay for it. Once incorporated into broader narratives of the eighteenth century, the story tended to become one in which Enlightenment and revolution placed constitutional and representative constraints upon this apparatus while simultaneously, as John Brewer had argued, making it more effective. The state simply became stronger by becoming more representative.

I was particularly interested in what happened to the fiscal-military problem itself after the revolutions. This drew me toward the United States and France, and eventually toward American history as my principal field, although writing the book has increasingly drawn me into French and international history as well. In the American literature, the older emphasis on the militia and republican hostility to standing armies had increasingly given way to an argument that the United States ultimately constructed its own, British-inspired version of the fiscal-military state. I wondered whether those were really the only alternatives.

That question connected with another longstanding interest of mine, in the history of political thought. I wanted to know how contemporaries themselves confronted what they regarded as the pathologies of the eighteenth-century fiscal-military system: enormous standing armies and navies, taxation, public debt, and the political power associated with them. An important body of scholarship had already shown that their response was not simply a nostalgic attempt to recover the citizen militia and the martial virtue of the ancient republics. Enlightenment and revolutionary thinkers were searching for ways to reconcile modern military power with republican statehood.

At the same time, I had always been fascinated by the history of knowledge and its relationship to power. Following that thread led me to science, engineering, and the military. And that turned out to be where a remarkable amount of the action was. I began encountering military officers, engineers, mathematicians, and statesmen who believed that scientific knowledge could fundamentally alter the relationship between military power and the state. Following them led outward from military education into fortifications, mapping and surveying, transportation infrastructure, economic development, and ultimately the organization of the state itself and its relationship to society.

The subject very quickly made it impossible to remain within disciplinary boundaries. If I wanted to understand why the United States focused so heavily on mathematically trained officers and engineers, I needed military history to understand what those officers were expected to do, the history of science to understand what contemporaries thought mathematical and scientific knowledge actually enabled them to do, and the history of technology to understand how that knowledge became embodied in fortifications, weapons, maps, roads, and canals. Following the connections with France then pulled me increasingly into French history and into a much more transnational story.

The book grew out of my PhD dissertation at Cambridge, but this interdisciplinary dimension became considerably stronger as I turned the dissertation into a book. I had always been interested in the history of knowledge, but the history of science component was much more muted in the dissertation. One of the most important things I did during the revision was therefore to immerse myself much more deeply in that literature. This really reshaped the argument and the book itself.

Thomas: You argue against a historiographical perspective that education at West Point in this period was narrowly technical, asserting that descriptive geometry was actually intended to provide a general, flexible foundation for decision-making and to cultivate talent in the “coup d’oeil militaire.” Can you elaborate on the particular importance of descriptive geometry to your argument and the importance of the work of some of the historians of science and technology that you draw on?

Jóhannesson: Descriptive geometry really forms the spine of the book from the perspective of the history of science. One of the things that initially surprised me was simply how central it was to the West Point curriculum and the army itself and yet how little attention historians of the United States had paid to it. European scholars, by contrast, had identified descriptive geometry as one of the important innovations associated with the French Enlightenment and Revolution, particularly through the work of Gaspard Monge and the École Polytechnique. I learned enormously from historians of science and technology, particularly Ken Alder and Lorraine Daston, but their work also helped me see something in my sources that leads the book in a somewhat different direction.

Descriptive geometry was a method for representing three-dimensional objects rigorously in two dimensions, but Monge and his disciples conceived its significance in much more expansive terms. They regarded it as a foundational science for the state’s scientific services: fortification, artillery, topographical mapping, roads and bridges, mining, and eventually military planning itself. It provided a common mathematical and visual language through which engineers could move between different kinds of objects and problems. In that sense, descriptive geometry supplied a shared epistemic framework not only for institutions such as the École Polytechnique and West Point, but even for the scientific administration of the state more broadly.

Alder’s wonderful work on French engineering, drawing in part on Foucault, emphasizes what he calls the “disciplining of the artifact”: descriptive geometry helped separate conception from execution and enabled engineers to impose precision, standardization, and uniformity upon production. The book documents that process at work in the United States as well. The book follows it into armories, fortifications, and infrastructure projects, where mathematically trained engineers increasingly conceived and directed work performed by subordinate laborers—often enslaved and convict labor.

But I found that contemporaries privileged another function to descriptive geometry that is harder to capture through the language of discipline, uniformity, and standardization. They repeatedly described it as cultivating the mind itself: the imagination, the capacity to visualize complex forms, and above all the ability to synthesize information and exercise judgment in circumstances that could not be reduced to predetermined rules.

Monge and his followers in the United States explicitly associated geometrical training with the coup d’œil: the ability to grasp rapidly the essential structure and relationships of complex wholes. The engineer of roads and bridges should be able to look across mountains and valleys and perceive the best line for a road or canal. The military engineer should look at irregular terrain and immediately perceive its possibilities for movement, attack, and defense, deciphering the apparent chaos of terrain and battle—and then rapidly discern what should be done. This permitted enlightened engineers to articulate a rival conception of command to the aristocratic ethos and thereby carve out a place for themselves at the apex of the military apparatus and the state itself. So descriptive geometry helps me explain how and why figures who before were regarded as narrow technical specialists moved toward the center of power.

Thomas: The story you trace unfolds over about a century, and along the way you make a number of more specific arguments that hinge on your broader thesis, like the importance of the French model in the Battle of Yorktown, how army engineering projects were managed in the antebellum period, and how the US fought its war with Mexico. Did these subarguments develop alongside your broader thesis? Were some of them applications of it once it was fully developed? Were there any that you found particularly surprising or important?

Jóhannesson: This is one of the most exciting parts of doing historical research. You begin by encountering particular puzzles and connections without necessarily knowing how they fit together, and gradually a larger argument emerges that, in turn, allows you to see new significance in the individual cases. That was very much how this book developed. I did not begin with a fully formed concept and then apply it to a series of episodes. The broader argument grew out of the more specific arguments, and, once it had taken shape, it sent me back to those episodes with different questions.

The book really began with what became the chapter on the transformation that followed the War of 1812. That was the moment I initially needed to understand. The earlier chapters grew out of asking how the intellectual and institutional possibilities for that transformation had developed, while the later chapters ask what happened once this new configuration was put into practice.

Perhaps the most unexpected thread was tracing the role of descriptive geometry. It was genuinely striking to discover how descriptive geometry traveled as a framework of analysis and organization, not only from France to the United States, but, through mathematically trained engineers, beyond West Point into some of the federal government’s principal activities in the antebellum period. The same officers and forms of knowledge appeared in the construction of a national system of fortifications, the surveying and design of roads, canals, and railroads across states and territories, topographical mapping, and the conduct of warfare.

Following that story also revealed some less comfortable dimensions of this new order. The elevation of formal expertise was accompanied by stark hierarchies of labor and power. On engineering projects, officers employed enslaved people to make bricks, move earth, lay track, and drill tunnels—making the engineering department of the federal government a major leaser of slaves—while some of the infrastructures they surveyed and constructed were explicitly directed against Native peoples and used to penetrate and control their homelands.

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William Thomas
American Institute of Physics
wthomas@aip.org

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