Censorship and the institution of knowledge in Bacon’s New Atlantis

Critical readers of Bacon’s New Atlantis have often drawn attention to the complex relationship between, on the one hand, the production and dissemination of enlightened scientific knowledge in Bensalem – and, indeed, the forms of social community for which it implicitly provides a model – and, on the other, the secret or concealed conditions of this very same process of production. For example, Robert K. Faulkner in Francis Bacon and the Project of Progress notes that, while ‘every official performs his function [and] everyone does what he is ordered,’ nevertheless ‘all this order is the more remarkable since the relation of king, city, nation, state, and scientist is not clarified. The order that orders ... is hidden.’ Jerry Weinberger, meanwhile, argues that Bensalemite ‘science is shrouded in secrecy, denying the possibility of full enlightenment.’ Such secrecy surrounding the activities which contribute to the production of scientific knowledge Weinberger reads in terms of, as he sees it, Bacon’s idea that ‘the politics of science must be secret and retired because only the most resolute souls will be willing to embrace such a world with full knowledge of its moral risks and dangers.’ What these critics would appear to suggest, then, is that the production of various sorts of ground-breaking scientific knowledge and enlightened social relationships remain dependent, at bottom, upon a supplementary dose of censorship that simply cannot be dispensed