Knowledge and the Public Interest, 1575-1725

Contents: 

Part 1. Introduction 

• Collecting the future in the early modern past 

Part 2. Origins 

• Knowledge in ruins
• A charlatan's promise 

Part 3. Inventing the Wish List 

• Jakob Bornitz and the joy of things
• Francis Bacon's new world of sciences
• Things fall apart: Desiderata in the Hartlib circle
• Rebelling against useful knowledge 

Part 4. Institutionalizing Desire 

• Restoring societies: the Orphean charms of science
• What men want: the private and public interests of the Royal Society
• Enemy camps: Desiderata and priority disputes
• Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and the hubris of the wish list
• Georg Hieronymus Welsch's fiction of consensus
• Wish lists enter the Academy: a new intellectual economy 

Part 5. Conclusion 

• No final frontiers