In an interview on The Enlightenment

Stephenson’s book reminds one that the novel is a genre which thrives on multiplicity and plurality, and which, as you say, is championing the expert over the totalizing, all-round genius. But your next book has a title which suggests both.

Leviathan and the Air Pump. Yes. A history of science book. It’s a brilliant title that perhaps doesn’t perhaps draw you into reading the book, but to me, this is perhaps the single best history of science book that’s ever been written. It’s a fantastic book, though again it’s gone a little out of fashion. But at the time it fundamentally changed the way that people saw the history of science. The claims that the authors are making in the book are essentially that the political philosophy of Hobbes and other contemporaries, including Locke, and the scientific breakthroughs of Boyle who did the first set of experiments using an air pump – that these two bodies of thought weren’t developing human understanding in parallel. They were part of a cultural shift that was interlinked and that was going to produce a new account of what it meant to be a human being. So in other words what this book really did was to show that changes taking place in apparently different areas of human understanding were actually linked to one another and that the Enlightenment, while dependent on immensely talented individuals and specialists, was a kind of collective commitment – a commitment which paradoxically transcended the individual.

Some of the optimism which informed the age of Enlightenment may have dwindled since. But we’re going to come back to Foucault at this point, a man who you’ve said is one of the most interesting thinkers of the twentieth century. And one of the things that perhaps makes Foucault a moving as well as an enlightening thinker is the way in which he is prepared to engage with the limits of experience, with the frustration of that early optimism….