Reviewing, like life, is full of paradoxes, and this has been no exception. The authors have written something that is both a historical study and an in‐your‐face polemic, both a conceptually challenging view of scholarship and a conceptually naïve analysis of it, both a very useful book for students (clearly its main and probably only market) and an irritating over‐simplification of pretty well all the issues it addresses. I always find books like this of particular interest and believe that, at its level and in its place, it will do quite well. Not, though, a book for students to buy – very much one for the academic and research library shelf where courses in libraries and education and history are taught. And certainly not one to consider if your coverage is already good on the historical side (ancient and medieval libraries, the effect of the Enlightenment and the public library movement) and on current topics like scholarly journals and the future of universities. The “Western world” is seen here, by the way, as Australia, Europe and the USA.
The over‐arching thesis of the book is one of the dominant “epistemes” or intellectual/cultural paradigms that shape what happens and what is thought and believed. Early on in the book, the early history part on Egypt and Greece and Rome, the Jews and the Bible, the Muslims and the Qu'ran, Alcuin and the medieval monasteries up to printing is characterised as an era of religious orthodoxy and control (mainly Christian). Competing knowledge was suppressed, no knowledge was encouraged that disturbed religious compliance and “the Christian world […] sank further and further into the Dark Ages”. Even though printing “unchained” the book, “the spectre of church control” persisted, as universities and libraries defended “the episteme of the defence of orthodoxy”, despite the fact that theirs was “a losing battle”. This “blinkered approach to the world” continued: some indeed read Newton (who “destroyed the medieval paradigm”) but “the others simply ignored what was happening”, above all those in the “stagnant universities”. Fortunately, the Enlightenment “repositioned Man as central to the proper concerns of the scholar” and a new episteme of scientific objectivity superseded ignorance and superstition. Vernacular scripture and the publication of “profane” writers like Dante and Chaucer opened up knowledge to an ever wider demographic.
You get the idea. Prising the idea of gate‐keeping out of all this needs persistence but it can be done. Clearly, early on, access to knowledge, the production of it and the control of it were all the task of a self‐serving bigoted and obscurantist elite – universities only to train religious bureaucrats, competing forms of knowledge to be suppressed, a dogmatic resistance to all forms of new knowledge. Even with the paradigm change after printing, these dark forces persisted. While denying a teleological and linear approach to history, the authors interestingly represent their slice of intellectual and cultural history as one where one world‐view “supplants” another (Ptolemaic to Copernican, Newton to Einstein, sub‐atomic theory with perhaps a flavour of chaos, p. 98), but, overall, where the world seems to have grown up like an ugly child into a handsome adult – hierarchy to democracy, ignorance to knowledge, superstition to secularity. To support this, there is a crude tally of the “good guys” – Darwin and Newton and Gosse for instance (with no mention of their deep religious anxieties and beliefs), Hobbes and Kepler, Adam Smith and Gibbon, Burns and Kant and Jefferson and Hegel. These are opposed to the bad guys who, with inquisitional cunning and power, have spread their bigotry and elitism far and wide. If it had not been for the foresight of, say, the German (and then the USA) universities to develop professional forms of knowledge and professional curricula (as opposed to the scholar‐centrism of Oxbridge), the universities would have stuck in their own dark ages.
So we have “the walls of the fortress” determined to repress forms of knowledge they do not like. The later stages of the book try to follow up this idea and do it with mixed success. In fact, the later chapters retread old grapes and shift all about and are certainly the weakest. Or perhaps the strongest in the sense that they are less strident as polemic and attempt to factor in issues that support their view at times and do not at others. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries are full of contradictions, and to capture these is way beyond the scope of a book as short and dichotomising as this one. We have learned libraries (bad and privileged) and circulating libraries (a little better) and Chartism and Mechanics' Institutes (good and inclusive); we have book clubs (why these at all?) and the growth of specialist libraries (good) and the Manhattan Project (presumably bad); we have the growth of digital repositories and digital journals (good and bad in all sorts of ways, many more of which could and should have been examined), and economic factors (like research quality assessments) which, again presumably, demonstrate both (another paradox) how good it is to grow post‐Enlightenment knowledge methodologies and how bad it is to have powerful elites controlling the ways in which knowledge works.
If there is a conspiracy theory here, and the authors clearly think so, then spending more time on exactly how knowledge protocols operate and how knowledge is legitimated would be more convincing than what the final chapters offer. I was not surprised to find Foucault prominent early on, and Durkheim later on: they help to shape the argument overall and make it fun to read. Now is best, now is not, watch out because there are demons abroad. If the universities and the libraries and the publishers and the authors all disappear, who will be left? Can we trust a postmodern world of relativism and commerce? So many straw men in this book that it is really hard to herd them into any coherence. The authors are both university lecturers in Australia and highlight universities within the general discussion. Even so no focused analysis emerges even on these, nor any clear idea whether universities are gatekeepers or the gate‐kept, let alone where the wider population (such as the people who use the internet, go to work, use bookshops and public libraries, wonder about privacy and freedom of information and social capital) sits in all this. A lively work, then, full of annoying loose ends and confrontational over‐simplifications, well‐named a “consideration” for that's really all it is.
