This book investigates how people from different backgrounds and in different circumstances could accomplish a breakthrough in science or the arts. What did these pioneers, along with their differences, have in common? Which forces were operating in the development of a new point of view?

Insofar as these questions have been raised before, scholars have searched for an answer in the area of talent, intelligence, and other inborn gifts. Subsequent longitudinal research, however, has shown that highly intelligent students are not always also highly creative.¹ More recent research emphasizes the early acquisition of skills with feedback from a mentor: informal teaching, including self-study, is more likely to encourage radical innovation than formal education.² Due to the lack of systematic comparative research, little is known even now about the circumstances and drives that moved these people, often at an early age, to excel in a specific field of science or the arts and produce trailblazing achievements. The present book explores a collective biography of about one hundred pioneers in the sciences and the arts working in Europe and North America between about 1500 and 2000. The strength of a collective biography, writes Tilly, is not in supplying alternative explanations, but in specifying what is to be explained.³

To anticipate the outcome of this research, nearly all the pioneers were confronted with early adversity resulting in social exclusion. Adversity could take different forms, including illegitimate birth, parental loss, parental conflict, the father’s bankruptcy, chronic illness, minority status, poverty, physical deficiencies, detention, and exile. In histories of science and the arts, some of these conditions or “factors” have been explored to explain radical innovation, but mostly in the form of one-factor analysis, including chronic illness, parental loss, and birth order. What all the different forms of adversity turn out to have in common – justifying the use of one common denominator – is social exclusion, which implies the strategic position of the outsider. This comes down to Butterfield’s recommendation of “handling the same bundle of data as before, but placing them in a new system of relations with one another by giving them a different framework.”⁴ Bringing together a host of phenomena, usually seen as separated from one another, under one common denominator, as attempted in this book, constitutes a synthesis which Kuhn has called a “discovery.”⁵ Having little to lose, outsiders are more likely to notice and take chances to find a niche – including protection and support from relatives, friends, teachers, mentors, or patrons. As outsiders, they also have more space and freedom to experiment in their field – and are therefore more likely to notice anomalous, unanticipated, and strategic data in their field.⁶

The research for this book has taken about ten years. An early interest in biographies (at high school in the 1950s) could be turned into a systematic inquiry of a substantial collective biography. Second, I had to familiarize myself with the state of the art: the discussion among historians and psychologists on groundbreaking work of the great pioneers in science and the arts active between about 1500 and 2000. For a better understanding of the roots of radical innovation in these fields, the present book argues for a more comparative sociological and anthropological approach focused on the social position of pioneers: their place in sets of social relationships, whether institutional, conjunctural, or both.⁷

In writing this book, I have incurred numerous debts to friends and colleagues. An early single bibliographical reference had far-reaching consequences for the argument of this project. In a brief exchange, visiting classicist Karin Bassi referred me to Syme’s statement on the position of Thucydides: “exile may be the making of an historian. That is patent for Herodotus and Polybius. If a man be not compelled to leave his own country, some other calamity – a disappointment or a grievance – may be beneficial, permitting him to look at things with detachment, if not in estrangement.”⁸ This observation dovetailed with the overall detachment and aloofness that mark the habitus of the radical innovators outlined in the collective biography.

I am also indebted to Peter Burke, who carefully read the Dutch version of the book shortly after its publication in the fall of 2013. His letter provided several corrections of names and places as well as pointing out the absence of some outstanding examples of radical innovators who had been affected by early adversity, including Leonardo da Vinci (illegitimate birth, homosexual), Michelangelo (parental conflict, homosexual), and itinerant Thorstein Veblen (émigré, minority status, poverty). The book certainly shows “omissions” but this is perhaps inherent, even in a substantial collective biography that covers a long period of time. The foremost intention was to search for recurrent patterns in the collective biography and to make sense of them: explaining that following adversity and social exclusion, radical innovators tended to be outsiders – having less to lose, they could take more risks than their established colleagues, who tended to stick to mainstream views and practices.

Omissions may provide test cases. I hesitated to include the great Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer (1632–75), a contemporary of Spinoza: little is known about Vermeer’s youth. Research over more than a century produced more questions than answers, as Montias notes in his painstaking biography of Vermeer and his milieu in which he is careful “to identify conjectures and not let them be confused with solid facts.”⁹ All we know from documented facts about his youth are his baptism in October 1632 in Delft, as the son of a Protestant innkeeper and art dealer, and his conversion to Roman Catholicism to marry a girl from a rich and distinguished Roman Catholic family in April 1653 in nearby Schipluy. This step also made him a member of a minority discriminated against in Delft’s predominantly Protestant population.¹⁰

The same year Vermeer entered St. Luke’s Guild as a master painter. The local guild became the center of his public life. Vermeer kept a low profile. He lived with his wife (who gave him no fewer than fifteen children) in the big house of his wealthy mother-in-law, where he also had his studio. She took a genuine liking to him and from the beginning financially and materially supported her daughter’s family. Biographer Montias notes that Vermeer’s absence from Delft’s notarial archives “makes it seem as if he wished to withdraw from civil society, perhaps because he was engrossed in his work or because he had joined a religious minority subject to prejudice and discrimination.”¹¹ These circumstances help explain his modest production of masterworks, with rarely more than two paintings on average a year. Vermeer had one major patron and collector and never accepted commissions.¹²