From Tablet Magazine, January 31, 2017:
And what their French origins, and their waning and rising relevance to the power structures over the centuries, say about the new Washington
Think tanks are odd institutions. Experts solemnly line up, often to defend a specific political or economic cause, and whether they represent the Heritage Foundation or the Brookings Institution, and no matter how fine the expert, his or her findings will, most likely, be in line with the ideological leanings of the institution. From the Carnegie Foundation’s mission to “hasten the abolition of international war,” to the Brookings Institution’s focus on studying the federal government, each was founded with the idea that serious and focused research groups could solve the world’s wicked problems. Recent exposés by The New York Times and other publications of think tanks involved in questions of finance, energy regulation, environmental issues, and, of course, the cigarette companies, have shown direct think-tank involvement in twisting data, as well as the use of think-tank experts to attack scientific findings and whistleblowers or to retail government echo-chamber propaganda. It is not entirely surprising that many voters, reporters, and analysts are highly suspicious of these so-called experts, whose once-prestigious institutions have become synonymous with partisan warfare and servile analysis-for-hire.
Historically, groupings of experts to create data and reports for propaganda purposes have been powerful political tools, but these groupings also have a history of both taking cash to produce results while turning into independent forces of free thought. In Europe, the origins of think tanks go back to the 800s, when emperors and kings began arguing with the Catholic Church about taxes. A tradition of hiring teams of independent lawyers to advise monarchs about their financial and political prerogatives against the church spans from Charlemagne all the way to the 17th century, when the kings of France were still arguing about whether they had the right to appoint bishops and receive a cut of their income.
During this long tradition of ecclesiastical and feudal legal wrangling, popes and monarchs turned to lawyers—often independent nobles or clerics in their own right—who gave advice while retaining a certain amount of intellectual independence. Between 1500 and 1800, during the Protestant and Catholic Reformations, teams of ecclesiastical and legal historians worked in groups to scour archives and libraries to write histories defending their princes’ religion (and, often by association, their tax rights). The Centuriators of Magdeburg were Protestant ecclesiastical historians who, between 1559 and 1574, produced a massive history, The Magdebourg Centuries, to defend their religious claims.
This group of experts was seen as a threat by the Catholic Church, and, in turn, were countered by the great historian Caesar Baronius, in his later associated research team that produced Annales Ecclesiastici (1588-1607). These independently formed teams of scholars could rightly claim to be direct ancestors of today’s think tanks.
While the term “think tank” is modern, it can be traced to the humanist academies and scholarly networks of the 16th and 17th centuries. The Oxford English Dictionary defines think tank as a “body of experts, as a research organization, providing advice and ideas on specific national or commercial problems.” Pierre Richelet’s Dictionary definition of 1686 describes an academy only as a “place where persons of letters, or of certain arts, assemble, to speak about letters, or their art.” Richelet’s Dictionary defines “expert” in much the modern way, as “learned; consummate and accomplished in something: experienced.” The words expert and expertise were mainly associated with legal knowledge and decisions.
The term closest to the modern think tank was “bureau,” which was an “assemblage” of professionals, often within government. Richelet uses the term “bureau d’adresse [aides mercantiles],” in reference to Théophraste Renaudot’s (1586-1653) office in Paris that had a royal patent from Cardinal Richelieu, and which was not only a center for medical expertise and aid for the poor, but also a news and propaganda center for Richelieu’s administration. “It is a place,” explains Richelet, “where one goes to give and take advice concerning things which one needs.”
Research teams became common in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, when states often depended on independent scholars and their expertise. In the late 1630s, Richelieu, by then the prime minister of France, sent the historian and archivist Théodore Godefroy to Münster, where the powers of Europe were hammering out the treaty that would end the 30 Years’ War: in reality, 80 years of fighting that had devastated swaths of the continent. Neither a great nobleman nor a professional diplomat, Godefroy was an expert in dynastic precedence, ranks, feudal rights, canon and civil law, civil administration, political history, and international commerce. He received lucrative offices, all related to his archival skills. Louis XIII named Godefroy royal historiographer in 1613, director of the inventory of the royal archives in 1615, and chargé de mission to catalog the archives of the contentious Duchy of Lorraine in 1634, and as ambassadorial counselor and secretary at the Congress of Münster in 1643. Today, we would call him a technical expert, or even a consultant, who brought to these delicate negotiations his specialized knowledge....
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"Godefroy was an expert in dynastic precedence, ranks, feudal rights, canon and civil law, civil administration, political history, and international commerce."
What, no heraldry and vexillology? Poseur.