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	Basic Books A Well-Ordered Thing: Dmitrii Mendeleev and the Shadow of the Periodic Table By Michael D. Gordin Basic Books 364 Pages. $30

Social Science

Famed for inventing the periodic table of elements, 19th-century chemist Dmitry Mendeleyev believed in science's potential to govern society.

By Yakov M. Rabkin
Published: August 6, 2004

As a student at Leningrad State University in the 1960s, I made a habit of dropping by a perfectly preserved 19th-century apartment on the ground floor of the university's headquarters. With its low windows, the apartment appeared almost sunk in the ground, and one had to step down when going inside. The incongruous presence of this apartment in the midst of a modern university was due to the fame of its one-time tenant, Dmitry Mendeleyev, whose periodic table of elements remains a major contribution to chemistry. Despite major upheavals in the country's history, Mendeleyev's renown had survived, and his hopes for a Russia governed by law rather than by arbitrary bureaucrats had been passed on to generations of scientists.

One need only look at the two monuments bookmarking the university headquarters to see how those hopes developed over time. One, facing the Neva River, is dedicated to Mikhail Lomonosov, the lonely scientist and deft courtier who funded his chemical experiments by composing odes to the empress a century before Mendeleyev was born. The other, guarding the entrance to the library of the Academy of Sciences, commemorates Andrei Sakharov, the physicist who built the hydrogen bomb only to later speak out against nuclear warfare and violations of human rights.

Sakharov died nearly a century after Mendeleyev while redacting a new constitution for a Soviet Union he hoped to reform and save. Some say he was lucky not to witness the country's collapse and the subsequent emergence of a motley bunch of republics, a few governed by liberals, most by autocrats and former KGB agents. For most of these republics, Sakharov's vision of a rational, reliable, law-abiding government remains a dream -- except that scientists are no longer among its most vocal advocates, having lost much of the social and political standing that Mendeleyev worked so hard to build.

A St. Petersburg University chemist and government consultant, Mendeleyev lived through the enthusiasm of Alexander II's social reforms and the more conservative reign of Alexander III, and died under Nicholas II, who took little genuine interest in affairs of state. But rather than structure the biography chronologically, Michael D. Gordin groups together diverse, sporadic facets of Mendeleyev's career around his scientific interests. In this sense, as the author himself acknowledges, he is following the literary example of Primo Levi's "The Periodic Table."

Gordin belongs to a new generation of historians of science who attempt to blend political, social and cognitive evidence into one seamless narrative. Until the middle of the 20th century, Western historians of science traced the filiation of ideas without much concern for the environment in which they had developed. A scientist's research was deliberately "cleansed" of personal influences such as family, religion or politics. This approach first came under attack in Soviet Russia during the 1920s and '30s, when Marxist theory was asserted over all aspects of human creativity, past, present and future. It was only after World War II that the integration of political, religious and cultural ingredients into the history of science began in earnest in Western Europe and North America. As science came to be recognized as a potent factor in world politics, historians embraced a more complex and demanding standard. Written in a lively, sometimes sparkling style, Gordin's book on Mendeleyev is among the best examples of this approach. And while many a reader may find its abundance of scientific detail somewhat arduous, this is only inevitable when doctoral theses are transformed into commercial publications.

Itar-Tass Mendeleyev used his social clout to turn Russian scientists into public figures.

Mendeleyev is presented as an ambitious conservative intent on integrating science into mainstream life and on fomenting reforms that would preserve the tsarist autocracy for future generations. His firm belief that science offered a paradigm for societal amelioration was typical of his day. The explicit rationality of science had tempted many Russians to look for salvation in a scientific -- or, to be more precise, scientistic -- approach to society. The eventual triumph of Marxism (and of scientific communism, a compulsory subject during my university years) can partly be traced to this tradition, as can the opposition to the Soviet regime that later followed. Gordin shows how the scientific worldview came to be integrated into political discourse, a phenomenon that acquired more importance in Russia than in other countries.

The author also demonstrates how Mendeleyev's political and social views shaped his approach to science. His description of Mendeleyev's struggle against the Spiritualists, and the trust that he placed in the scientific method to tackle all questions about human existence, is brilliant and convincing. So is his account of the gradual formulation of the periodic table, Mendeleyev's only enduring claim to fame. Having made it possible to predict the existence of new elements, Mendeleyev believed that political and social processes could be regularized as well.

Meanwhile, Gordin attends to the details of his protagonist's personal life, showing how the 43-year-old scientist's controversial infatuation with a teenage student enhanced his status in society and affected his career. Rejected by the Academy of Sciences for marrying the student while still technically wed to his previous wife, Mendeleyev attracted the sympathy of the capital's intelligentsia. It was in the wake of this affair that he transformed himself into a public scientist, responsible not only for interpreting science to the layman, but for a myriad of general-interest projects ranging from reforming the calendar to hot-air aeronautics, from the introduction of the metric system to a transfer of American know-how to Russia's growing petroleum industry.

Despite the public's praise, Mendeleyev's standing among his peers was quite uneven. Some scientists overtly called him amateurish and superficial, while his stubborn commitment to the concept of the chemical ether, a supposed pillar of "the unity of the forces of nature," was typical of scientists who, once having made a great discovery, insist on its validity in the face of mounting empirical evidence to the contrary.

Mendeleyev's story is an instructive lesson in the history of Russian modernization. Adapting to the changing political circumstances of three very different monarchs, he maintained a faith in Russia, a faith in the progressive responsibility of science itself. Later, many Russian scientists profoundly averse to the new Soviet regime would take after him, turning the country into a pioneer in space exploration and nuclear weapons. But Mendeleyev's ability to predict new chemical elements did not extend to forecasting political events, and scientific modernization never led to cultural stability. As the subsequent history of the 20th century showed, it would have been illusory to expect otherwise.

Yakov M. Rabkin is a professor of history at the University of Montreal. His most recent book, a history of Jewish opposition to Zionism ("Au nom de la Torah: une histoire de l'opposition juive au sionisme"), was published in April.

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