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The Sociology of the Mechanistic World-Picture1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 September 2008

Franz Borkenau
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Extract

From about 1620 on a profound revolution occurred in the thought of the most developed European nations (France, Italy, Holland, and England), which found its most pregnant expression in the birth of the new philosophical schools of Descartes, Gassendi, and Hobbes. The renewal of philosophy at this juncture in the history of thought, however, does not signify above all a change in the specific, metaphysical content of thought about God, the soul, and immortality, although the revolution in thought does concern these themes as well. Central to the whole “modern” school of philosophers of this period is the constitution of a new conception of nature and – directly for some of them, implicitly for all – of human society as well.

Type
Article
Information
Science in Context , Volume 1 , Issue 1 , March 1987 , pp. 109 - 127
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1987

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Footnotes

1

The following are trains of thought from a book which will appear soon in the series of the Institute for Social Research under the title The Transition from the Feudal to the Bourgeois World-Picture. In this shortened presentation all documentary material and the demonstration of countless connecting links in societal context had to be dispensed with.

References

Translated from: “Zur Soziologie des mechanistischen Weltbildes,” Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung 1(3), 1932, pp. 311–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar. (A reprint of the issues published from 1931 to 1941, in 9 volumes, was published by Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, München, 1980.) Translated by Hadden, Richard W., McMaster University, Hamilton, Canada. Published here by kind permission of the Fondazione Max Horkheimer, Lugano. The translator wishes to acknowledge the many valuable suggestions provided by Cyril Levitt and Gideon Freudenthal in the preparation of the translation.Google Scholar

The pagination of the original publication is given here in the margin.