Ego and the international. The modernist circle of George Sarton

摘要

The early years of Isis are examined in the light of George Sarton’s connection with Paul Otlet (1868 –1944) and Henri Lafontaine (1854 –1943), founders in 1895 of the InternationalOffice of Bibliography and in 1907 of the Union of International Associations, both in Brussels. Otlet, known as one of the fathers of the Information Age, invented the science of information, which he called, in French, documentation. Lafontaine, a socialist senator in Belgium, won the 1913 Nobel Prize for Peace. Sarton shared Otlet and Lafontaine’s views about pacifism, internationalism, and rational bibliography; he designed Isis to fit with the modernist goal, expressed by Otlet and Lafontaine, of using information to generate new knowledge.