weird how throughout the history of the western world (as far as i know!), ‘learned’ people, scientists, historians, etc. were usually tied (in varying degrees) to some kind of patron; eg greek slaves in rome, kepler on the court of some king. (s> if they were so smart, why couldn’t they be the patron? (/s>
There are a few reasons. First off, a lot of social structures of the time tended to have anti-meritocratic effects. While being smart was certainly an advantage in keeping crown or title and advancing the interests of one’s nation and dynasty, most people didn’t get into hereditary monarchy or peerage through intelligence.
Another issue, which crops up for intellectuals in the modern day as well, is that a lot of these forms of learning only provided wealth and power indirectly, or with a substantial delay. While basic scientific and mathematical research, stuff like calculus and relativity, has undoubtedly enabled the creation of an enormous amount of value, it required a great deal of practical implementation to do so. And even the more immediately practical inventions and discoveries required substantial resources to create, which in turn had to come from people who already had them.
And of course, while it wasn’t the typical case, there were some intellectuals who did manage to achieve wealth and power through their learning. The classic example is Thales of Miletus, a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher whose knowledge of meteorology allowed him to corner the olive market and become independently wealthy.
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An interesting case is that of renowned french chemist Antoine Lavoisier, who gave hydrogen, oxygen their names (also the french name of nitrogen, “azote”), and also was one of the discoverers of the law of conservation of mass, which he stated eloquently in a sentence that is still famous to this day in France : “rien ne se perd, rien ne se crée, tout se transforme” (”nothing is lost, nothing is gained, everything is transforming”).
Now the reason for why Lavoisier was able to do all that research was that after studying law, he had been able to become a “fermier général”, which literally translates as “general farmer”, but actually what he was farming was taxes, he was a tax collector for a while and then worked in the fiscal bureaucracy of the kingdom (on the royal monopolies of gunpowder and tobacco).
As such he had access to the highest precision scales available at the time, and to quite a bit of money, so he was able to do a lot of important, groundbreaking fundamental scientific research.
And unfortunately for Lavoisier, the French revolution came.
The hated ferme générale was abolished, and a few years later during the Terror, he was convicted and sent to the guillotine.
A very famous (and probably very apocryphal) story states that when Lavoisier was condemned, he pleaded for a delay in his execution, so that he could finish some scientific work, to which his judge is said to have answered that “the Republic does not need savants” (”la république n’a pas besoin de savant”, another famous sentence).
Thus ended the life of one of the most important scientists of the 18th century, because of his day job as a civil servant in fiscal bureaucracy.
Now that I think about it, he was probably one of the first scientists to be paid by tax revenue, which in his case he personnally collected.
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