SOURCE: "Surveillance and Enlightenment: Toward Bacon's New Atlantis," in Sovereignty and Intelligence: Spying and Court Culture in the English Renaissance, Stanford University Press, 1993, pp. 121-51.

In the following excerpt, Archer examines the aspect of political power in the New Atlantis, concluding that Bacon's "representation of the sciences of nature implies the unwritten methodology of the sciences of human control within the modern state."

In the Essays, Bacon had been largely concerned with the constitution of what he calls "a man's self; in the New Atlantis, the production of a new self by means of a reconceptualization of the relationship between knowledge and power is part of Bacon's narrative method. Timothy Reiss [in The Discourse of Modernism, 1982] has pointed out "the use throughout the fiction of the first person, both singular and plural" by which "the new scientist imposes the discursive I upon the world outside him." Bacon's European...