Science in Context, 1, 1 (1987), pp 109-127

FRANZ BORKENAU

The Sociology of the Mechanistic

World-Picture1

From about 1620 on a profound revolution occurred in the thought of the most [311]
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.
The complete transformation of the theory of knowledge, which sharply dis-
tinguishes (abhebt) the philosophical systems of this time from those of the preceding
period, provides the foundation of the new categories of natural and social science.
Consequently the great theorists of public law (Staatsrechtler) like Althusius and
Grotius, and the great natural scientists like Galileo, Fermat, Huyghens, Harvey,
and Pascal, have no less significance for the rise of the new world view than the
philosophers, in the strict sense of the word. During the formative process of modern
thought - in sharp opposition to the situation that obtained in its further develop-
ment - there was no boundary between metaphysics and the theory of knowledge on
the one side, and physics and social theory on the other.

I. The Mathematical-Mechanistic World-Picture and Manufacture

The new form of thought can best be defined as the mathematical-mechanistic
world-picture. It is mechanistic, insofar as every event is ultimately reduced to [312]

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.

Translated from: "Zur Soziologie des mechanistischen Weltbildes," ZeitschriftfiirSozialforschung 1(3),

1932, pp. 311-55. (A reprint of the issues published from 1931 to 1941, in 9 volumes, was published by
Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, Munchen, 1980.) Translated by Richard W. Hadden, McMaster Univer-
sity, 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.
The pagination of the original publication is given here in the margin.
 110 FRANZ BORKENAU

movements of qualitatively similar bodies and to the communication of motion

within a space-time continuum - in contrast to the following period, whose physics is
founded on the concept of forces acting at a distance and the re-introduction of
specific qualities. It is mathematical, insofar as scientificity and certainty are
conferred only on the form of proof of Euclidean geometry and its derivatives, and
insofar as there is a tendency to express all events, conceived as the sum of communi-
cations of motion, by means of a set of linear equations. Mathematical-mechanistic
thought is inseparably connected with the role of manufacture in the production
process. The relationship between natural science and industrial production in the
manufacture period, however, is quite different from that which prevailed in the
period of large-scale industry. While in the latter period science represents one of the
most important forces of production, the technical application of natural science in
the manufacture period was nil. Manufacture, as a systematic reduction of labor to
the most primitive handwork processes, as large-scale handwork production that
decomposes the job into parts, requires no natural science and cannot make use of it.
Of all the centuries of recent history, the seventeenth is by far the poorest in technical
inventions, and its natural science comprises the purest, most abstract theory.
Manufacture plays within it above all the role of a model (Vorbild), insofar as the
manufacturing process is characterized by the most thoroughgoing abstraction from
everything qualitative. The extreme decomposition of labor creates on the one hand
an abstract, general substrate that is worked on, whose chemical and other qualities
are ignored as much as possible, and which is to be considered only as raw material,
as pure matter, and on the other hand, the completely unqualified laborer, who is
considered only as labor power in itself, whose activity is abstract labor, pure physical
movement. Galileo, the greatest classical writer on physics of the manufacture
period, in his major work, the Discorsi, treats only the laws of this abstract labor. The
scientific problem (Fragestellung) of the age goes well beyond a simple investigation
of manufacturing technology. The bearers of the new world-picture want to explain
[313] every event by analogy with a manufacturing labor process. Some of them are not
content with that, and attempt to go beyond problems of dynamics in order to grasp
world events in a purely logical and mathematical way. This generalization of the
problem stemming from manufacture to the entire realm of human knowledge is not
to be explained by the requirements of the technical production process, but rather
by the class struggles linked to the rise of the new mode of production.

II. The Concept of Natural Law

What role does the generalization of the manufacturing viewpoint play in the class
struggles that bring about the rise of capitalist society? This is best revealed by
investigating the pre-history of the mechanistic conception of nature. This will be
carried out by a historical presentation of the development of the concept of "natural
 The Mechanistic World-Picture 111

law." The appropriate method for this is the history of the literal meaning of the term
"lex naturalis," since from the thirteenth century on this term unites the idea of
societal order with the concept of natural order.
In modern history this concept first becomes the object of systematic discussion
with Thomas Aquinas and his predecessors, Bonaventura and Alexander of Hales
(together with the rediscovery of Aristotelianism). The transition from a society of
hereditary estates to a society of occupational groups brings with it the transition
from the most severe asceticism to an attitude that is relatively open to the world. The
new concept of "lex naturalis" is the most important expression of this change. It
connects the two concepts "lex" and "natura," which had previously been opposed in
intransigent enmity as the principles of divine good andfleshlyevil. While Augustine
and the entire early middle ages saw the law of God as a command imposed on man
from without, for Aquinas it is the expression of man's general natural inclinations,
of a natural harmony of his physical components and his psychic strivings, which of
course can be fully achieved only in a well-ordered society. To acquire this and keep it
functioning requires a discerning reason, which puts into effect the divine law that is
only latently present in man. It is assumed, in accordance with what Aquinas saw as
the "naturally" valid feudal societal order, that the nature and therefore the natural [314]
law of the various estates is different. For Aquinas the concept of "lex naturalis"
serves as an apology for a society organized into occupational groups, as a polemic
against the doctrine of the Earth as the Vale of Tears, as a glorification of man who is
capable of actualizing God's works, and as the theory of the harmony of drive and
moral norms. Natural law is truly valid only for human society, and only by analogy
for external nature.
With the collapse of the feudal-traditionalistic societal order the conception of
man changes; the direct connection between the concept of natural law and the
conception of society is broken, and more and more middle terms are placed
between social doctrine and the picture of nature. The changed evaluation of human
nature leads, step by step, to the anthropology of the Reformation. While Aquinas
saw man as naturally in accord with all the demands of custom and morality, now,
with the collapse of the estate traditions, he is considered to be just an evil being,
incapable of effecting his own salvation, unconditionally dependent on the grace of
God. In such a situation the problem of order becomes doubly acute. Whereas
Aquinas could derive the order of the cosmos directly from the evident order of
human existence, henceforth an interpretation of the cosmos has to be provided, in
order to justify the belief in the possibility of harmony in human life, which can no
longer be demonstrated from the apparent reality of societal life.
With Nicholas of Cusa, the first thinker to consistently pose the problem of the
harmony of the world, the fundamental problems of modern philosophy are
announced. The world seems to be a realm of unrest, which cannot be understood.
To this realm of appearance is opposed a realm of essence, in which harmony and
order reign. This essence is not totally accessible to our earthly powers, deus
absconditus. Its traces, however, are to be found everywhere: On the one hand, they
 112 FRANZ BORKENAU

can be found in the "lex naturalis," which, although no longer an expression of man's
natural drive-constitution, is present as a conscience planted by God in man's heart.
On the other hand, they can be found in the "lex naturalis" of the eternal stability of
the beautiful order of nature, which points to a beneficent creator. Thus the certainty
of the essential character of the moral natural law, which can no longer be obtained
[315] from defiled human life, is wrested from nature, which for this purpose must be
consciously interpreted in mathematical measures, in the manner of neo-
Pythagoreanism. As a result of the separation of physical from moral natural law,
societal life can now be only deductively or analogically understood from the laws of
external nature, whereas Aquinas, in precisely the reverse fashion, had wanted to
explain nature on the basis of the purposes of human life. In the rising capitalist social
order, social orders no longer appear to man, as in feudal traditionalism, as his
in-born "nature"; and not yet, as in socialist theory, as his product. Like every
societal phenomenon in capitalism, his deeds appeared to him as imposed from
without by fate, which is therefore cut off from every anthropocentric-teleological
interpretation. Nicholas represents a societal group striving to maintain, during the
dissolution of feudalism, a harmonious social order through the domination of a
"wise" oligarchy. His harmonistic interpretation of the cosmos has no value for those
strata who were expelled from their traditional forms of life by the disintegration of
feudalism, but, not being compensated by new possibilities of domination, found
themselves facing the urgent and painful process of adapting to the conditions of
monetary capitalism. For the petty nobility, guildworkers, and intellectuals who are
threatened with destruction, and whose spokesman is Calvin, the destruction of the
"natural" feudal society means the absence of any order whatsoever. The connection
between the conception of nature and the estimation of man's moral character is
nowhere so clear as with Calvin. True, he does not deny the existence of a moral
natural law and a divine world order; but in the fundamental depravity that follows
the fall from grace man can no longer recognize either. The only purpose of
conscience is to accuse man before himself, without there being any way for him to
attain the good. Deus absconditus is now a completely serious matter. Since man
is evil through and through, the only possible world order is the kingdom of the
devil. Calvin explicitly denounces as blasphemy the claim of a law-like regular-
ity or beautiful harmony in nature. He denies moral as well as physical natural
law.
The ruling monetary-capitalist stratum attempts to escape the consequences of
[316] Calvinist pessimism. This is, however, the only consistent world view in the period of
monetary capitalism; since feudalism no longer exists and capitalistic forms of life
have not yet pervaded the masses, social reality appears to be the sheer domination
of destructive forces. The ideology of monetary capital, the philosophy of the
Renaissance, is therefore forced, in its apologetic efforts, to renounce every attribu-
tion of meaning to society in order to justify its harmonistic theories purely from the
standpoint of the perfected individual; but in spite of this it approaches the Calvinist
position more and more closely.
 The Mechanistic World-Picture 113

The philosophy of Ficino, which places the problem of the human soul at the
center, represents the first stage on this path. The "appetites" drive the soul irresist-
ibly toward meaningless motion. That is its "fatalis lex." But while the apparent
motion is meaningless, at the same time it has a substantial significance. In the cycle
of numerous earthly lives bound by the transmigration of souls (Seelenwanderung),
the soul runs through all objects of desire in order to free itself from all of them; so it
orbits around God in order finally to succumb to Him. In Ficino the doctrine of the
complete meaninglessness of human existence, which anticipates Calvin, stands side
by side with the harmonistic philosophy of essence; there is no synthesis between
them. Much greater emphasis is given to the harmonistic interpretation of nature,
however. To lend credibility to the cycle of the souls, Ficino construes the whole
physical and spiritual world as a system of circles. This conception of nature as a
harmonious system of circles, the noblest of curves, decisively affected the natural
science of the Renaissance. The static order of society that underlay the basic view of
the High Middle Ages had at least enabled the emergence of a scientific statics;
dynamics of any sort remained closed to the Middle Ages. A dynamics of circular
motion now steps into the foreground, and with it the physics of heavenly bodies as
the purest representation of this dynamics. Copernicus solved this problem.
Throughout the High Middle Ages everything depended upon seeing man as the
crown of creation, the pinnacle of the hierarchical order of the world, and therefore
the earth as its center; it meant nothing that the tortured Ptolemaic epicycles were
void of all beautiful simplicity. Now the souls of the heavenly bodies are considered
to be nobler than the human soul - in accordance with the pessimistic evaluation of
man and the superiority of nature over society. The view of harmony in nature stood [317]
opposed to this above all others. Copernicus explicitly states that his motive for
denying the Ptolemaic system was the impossibility of using it to construe the
universe as simple and harmonious.
If Ficino's purely anthropological, asocial posing of the question provides only
indirect validation of the decisive role of the fully developed individual devoid of all
social limitations, Ludovico Vives places it explicitly in the center. For him neither a
teleological nor a harmonious world order exists. Meaning, drive, and "lex naturalis"
of world events is the perfection of every species in its most perfect individuals. The
unity of drive and norm appears to be re-established, although on completely
naturalistic grounds. From here on a broad field of empirical natural research opens
up, elaborated by the natural historians of the late Renaissance. It aims to establish
the particular behavior of every species, making broad use of the concept of the
functional purpose of the organs for the individual. The problem for these empiricists
is thoroughly vitalistic; problems of mechanics do not arise in their circle. For Vives
and his successors, however, the theory of knowledge enters their horizon as an
independent problem. If the point of departure of the medieval understanding of the
world is the seemingly evident "naturalness" of man and his endeavors, then in Vives'
naturalism the superiority of nature over man is ultimately established, and the
theory of man is now a component of the theory of external nature. What was
 114 FRANZ BORKENAU

heretofore self-evident becomes a problem: How can we be certain of the adequacy

of our knowledge about the external world? Epistemology thus proves to be a copy of
metaphysics. Whoever claims the cogency of eternal order in nature must also claim
the presence of eternal, evident knowledge of human ratio. Conversely, anyone who,
like Vives, professes a realm of lawfulness and a realm of contingency, must assert a
realm of eternal ratio and one of fluctuating opinio. The theory of knowledge,
apparently a presupposition, proves to be an outcome of the socially conditioned
view of the world order.
[318] In fact Vives' concept of "lex naturalis" does not possess the precision to which it
pretends, for it lacks any criterion for deciding which individual within a species
should be considered to be perfect. The concept of the norm has in fact disappeared
from Vives' anthropology. The concept of "lex naturalis" disappears later. Just as in
public law (Staatsrecht) the theory of divine grace replaces the doctrine of natural
law, so too in natural philosophy since the second half of the sixteenth century, above
all in Bodin and Campanella, concepts like fatum, fortuna, and providentia, which
express the contingent character of all phenomena - first man and then all natural
phenomena - take the place of the concept of natural law, which signifies regularity.
Bacon's Novum Organon represents the peak of this development. Baconian natural
philosophy is a single demand to exclude the question of norms from the observation
of nature and to abandon the illusion of a unified, general lawfulness. In this
connection Bacon signifies, not a beginning, but the end-point of a centuries-long
development; he brings to natural philosophy the new element of the systematic
energy of a practical-industrial goal. Monetary capital accomplished its transition to
the sphere of production, but Bacon's research remained unfruitful. His allegedly
pure empiricism produced no result other than a jumble of the categories of Renais-
sance science. He could not create the new mechanistic world-picture; instead, it
arose precisely from the re-establishment of the close connection between moral and
physical "lex naturalis," which rested on the generalization of the methods of
considering nature that were created by manufacture.

III. Natural Right and the Social Contract

One of the most important mediations between the medieval and modern concepts
of natural law is the revolution in the theory of the State that resulted from the victory
of royal absolutism at the beginning of the sixteenth century and from the early
bourgeois republican revolutions (rebellion in the Netherlands, the Huguenot wars,
the Grand [Glorious?] Revolution). Machiavelli is the first thinker to build con-
sistently from the existential conditions of royal absolutism. It is true that this is not
his ideal - on the contrary, he reveres the freedom of the medieval city. But he accepts
tyranny as an unavoidable fact and develops the technical conditions under which it
can function. This leads to the close connection between the new form of the state
[319] and a new conception of the human being and morality. Inasmuch as Machiavelli's
 The Mechanistic World-Picture 115

politics omits all moral judgments of the state, he implicitly denies the significance of
natural law for societal life; without making it explicit, he proceeds from the assump-
tion that men are naturally hostile to one another. Since his time absolutism and
pessimistic anthropology have been inseparable. The Reformation articulates this
connection explicitly, grounding the doctrine of the magistracy of God's grace in the
necessity of forcefully restraining naturally evil men. There is no place here for the
individual's claim of natural rights.
Only with Bodin, however, does absolutism, in the concept of sovereignty, become
part of public law in the narrower sense. The impossibility of a theological justifica-
tion of absolutism forces Bodin into a juridical formulation of its legitimacy; this
results from the stance of the royalist middle party in the Huguenot wars, which
contrasted the legitimate Bourbon absolutism, religiously tolerant and intent upon
the inner-worldly well-being of its subjects, to the religious fanaticism of both the
Calvinists and the Leaguers. Bodin is in no position to carry the inner-worldly
justification of sovereignty to the end, since the inner-worldly goal of absolutism can
be only the protection of the life, property, faith, and well-being of the subjects; but
absolutism cannot be bound to these human rights, because then it would cease to be
absolute. Hence Bodin must simply posit sovereignty as an apparent and empirical
fact and impute it forcibly to all existing constitutions, while supporting it meta-
physically by analogies to the order of the world (the rule of God, patriarchy, etc.).
Just as Bodin finds its difficult to justify sovereignty, so his opponents, the Calvinist
and Jesuit king-makers, are hard-pressed to ground human rights in a systematic
construction of society. Against the background of the "Machiavellian" horror of the
St. Bartholomew's Eve Massacre they point to the right of the individual to his
existence, his safety, his faith in God, and his status (stdndisch) claims guaranteed by
inalienable rights. They support the right of subjects to depose as a tyrant any ruler
who disregards these presuppositions of his rule. Here they argue, however, as a
minority whose rights are threatened, without attempting to demonstrate that these [320]
rights, which for them are simply facts of life, are necessary elements of a moral social
order. For them human rights are no longer components of a natural law that
organizes society as a whole, but rather a pure subjective natural right.
Althusius, the ideologue of the democratic Caesarism of the House of Orange (he
was a professor at the Naussau-Orange provincial university of Herborn-Siegen),
attempts to overcome the opposition between sovereignty and human rights. He is
not, as Gierke maintained, the theorist of abstract democracy, but the representative
of royal absolutism. In his system the popular sovereignty serves only to justify the
absolute power of whomever the people have chosen; the sovereign installed by the
people cannot normally be deposed. But Althusius champions, in contrast to Bodin,
not the legitimate power of the ruler, but his revolutionary power, which owes its
right only to his direct installation (Einsetzung) by the people. For him the point is
the revolutionary dictatorship with a monarchic head, created for the achievement
(Durchsetzung) of modern bourgeois relations. In order to secure the absoluteness
of the rulers in the face of all societal relations, he must on the one hand explain
 116 FRANZ BORKENAU

sovereignty as a necessary property of state power, and on the other hand identify
state and society. Without this identification societal life would remain a realm of
inalienable, individual liberties, which the sovereign may not touch. But if the
sovereign state belongs inseparably to society, and the sovereign, on the other hand,
owes his rights to a contract, then the society itself must be the product of a contract.
The theory of social contract founded by Althusius draws the ultimate conclusions
from the antinomy between sovereignty and moral natural law. Althusius denies
natural law to such an extent that all relationships of human life are derived from
contractual stipulation, i.e., from the arbitrary discretion (Willkur) of the individual.
From here the way is open to Hobbes' sociological theory of the state. Because of the
Calvinist foundations of his system Althusius avoids the final consequences of
Hobbes, to whom he is otherwise extremely close, only by means of the single
natural-right vestige in his system, the sanctity of contracts. Althusius's opponent
Grotius (who has been unjustly taken to be the founder of the modern theory of the
[321] state), attempts in his role as ideologue of a traditional stratum, the Dutch urban
patricians, to retain, by borrowing from scholasticism, an objective natural law,
which sets limits on state power and derives from it the inalienability of secured,
traditional (stdndisch) rights.

IV. The New Theology and the New Anthropology

The doctrine of sovereignty and of social contract hence presupposes a pessimistic

anthropology. It is, therefore, consistently developed only within Protestantism.
Conversely, the philosophical problem of the Catholic cultural sphere was connected
with its firmly held assumption of man's virtue and capacity for redemption. This
assumption had to be brought into accord with the given facts of the destruction of
the feudal social order and the "inner-worldly asceticism" demanded by the capitalis-
tic labor process.
Calvinism too knows the anthropological problems; but there they have no philo-
sophical bearing, because it solves them by means of a pessimism that is free of
contradictions. Calvinism became the most important breeding ground of the
capitalistic spirit. It is true that Calvinism itself is not a product of the capitalist labor
process, but of adaptation to the penetration of monetary capital into the traditional
economy by means of inner-worldly asceticism, which opens the way to the capitalis-
tic labor process. In this connection, and in opposition to Max Weber, the dogma of
probation seems to us of less significance than the doctrine of the fundamental
depravity of man, which is not mitigated in Calvinism, as it is in Lutheranism, by the
possibility of salvation through faith. This doctrine is then so transformed that every
beatification of this depraved life counts as service to the devil. The result is inner-
worldly asceticism per se. God, who rules this world - only a life with no moral
barriers could follow from the depravity of a world without His existence, His express
commandments - can only be a deus absconditus. In the final analysis inner-worldly
 The Mechanistic World-Picture 117

asceticism is irrationally founded. But precisely thus is Calvinism spared the problem
of bringing the meaninglessness of capitalistic existence and the war of all against all
into accord with some ideal of the good and the beautiful. Instead, it accepts this as
fact.
At the beginning of the seventeenth century Calvinism became the confession of
bankers, the manufacturing bourgeoisie, and the industrial workers. The noble [322]
strata do not join it. It is unacceptable also for the intermediate stratum of the gentry,
the nobility of office, which in Holland, as in England and France, coalesced from
feudal and bourgeois elements, acquired offices by dint of their wealth, and attained
hereditary transmission of their titles. In France this stratum appears as the noblesse
de robe, consolidates itself during the civil wars, and achieves the heritability of
offices in 1604. Thereafter it is the only class that is relatively independent of the
crown, and the main standard-bearer of modern currents in cultural life. Bound to
the ideal of an estate-like noble life, it rejected Calvinist pessimism. Bearer of the
movement of the "Politiciens" and the main defender of rising absolutism in its first
stages, it is hostile to the feudal theory of the state as well as to Ultramontanism.
The first ideology it adopts is the new stoicism of Lipsius and du Vair, glorified in
the dramas of Corneille. Societal life during the civil war appears to them as a
meaningless/atam, a fundamental condition bringing suffering, where men are acted
upon from without and all evil forces rule. Their judgment of reality does not differ
widely from the Calvinists', but they oppose to this fatum the ataraxy of a calm soul,
which does not let itself be challenged by the course of the world. Thus they also
teach the freedom of the will - not, like the Thomists, as the ability of men to find the
way to the good on their own, but rather as the negative power of warding off evil
from the soul. In stoicism,firstof all, outer event and interiority are sharply divorced;
all outer events, even in human life, are conceived as being alien to man. Stoicism
does not yet know the problem of modern mass morality; it is not yet concerned with
capitalist construction, but rather with the self-assertion of rational independence
amidst the decline of the feudal world.
Self-assertion in the general dissolution is the purpose also of the court nobility's
ideology of libertinism, as represented by Vanini, Theophile, and others. While the
landed nobility holds on to its feudal and Catholic traditions, the court nobility that
arose after the end of the civil wars, a class of functionless, but thereby infinitely
brutal, leeches, is free of all feudal ties but not yet subdued by capitalist ones.
Libertinism too proclaims the depravity of the world, but draws the conclusion that
all moral statements are proposed only in the interest of those who profess them, that [323]
great men and philosophers should not let themselves be fooled like the masses, that
one should make oneself as comfortable as possible in this evil world. Atheism and
materialism first appear in the modern history of thought in this form, without any
connection to mechanistic theories, but rather permeated by all sorts of
superstitions.
With the penetration of mercantilism and manufacture the court nobility and
gentry see the problem that the new forms of mass morality posed for them. As long
 118 FRANZ BORKENAU

as their aversion to the religious fanaticism of both extremes predominates, the

gentry first seizes upon the rejuvenation of natural-law theory, whose characteristic
representative is Charron. Charron's attempt, however, only makes obvious the
impossibility of an inner-worldly - rational justification of the new morality. Human
nature, on which the moral life should be grounded, must be good. However, point
by point it proves itself to be bad, so that these two theses stand opposed to each
other in a consistently contradictory manner. In order to accomplish the domestica-
tion of the masses in the sense of inner-worldly asceticism, the gentry, like the
manufacturing bourgeoisie, must reach for the irrational justification based on the
deus absconditus. With the intense interest of the gentry, as the strongest of the
bourgeois strata, in the reshaping of morality, it throws itself with all its strength into
the religious revival movement, and thereby puts its stamp on it, at first half
unconsciously.
Bourgeois Catholic religiosity, however, fully developed itself only in the struggle
with the religious theory of the court nobility, Jesuitism. The court nobility too had
been obliged, since the time of Richelieu, to adapt itself to the religious revival
movement and give up its overt theoretical libertinism. It does this, however, in a way
that is compatible with its practical libertinism. The Jesuit theory of morality
developed by Molina completely ignores the question, fundamental to all previous
moral theology, whether man's will is good or evil. It knows only concrete command-
ments, in part positive godly prescripts, in part natural right statements that arise
from the essence of the matter. It therefore shares the purely positivistic conception
of morality with the Calvinists, but separates itself from them by its lack of inner-
worldly asceticism. It instead subjects the individual and moral commandments to a
juridical interpretation, which, in the absence of a principle of interpretation tending
[324] toward strict maxims, leads necessarily in the direction of extreme laxity. This
heretofore-unknown reduction of moral demands enables the Jesuits to accommo-
date themselves to all the needs of the libertine court nobility, on the one hand, and
grant man the ability to effect his salvation himself, on the other. In Molina the
reduction of morality to the narrowest positive lawfulness corresponds to the doc-
trine of the indifference of the will. Every doctrine that asserts the uniform relation-
ship of man to a teleological world order must also assert the determined character of
the human will. Since Molina denies the positive Thomistic relation of man to the
highest good as well as the Calvinist negative one, he arrives at the doctrine of the
indifference of the will, which can freely and indiscriminately decide on its own. The
dissolution of faith in a uniform world-order follows from the dissolution of the
unified moral position into a bundle of positive legal axioms. This permits Molina -
for the first time in modern thought - to make a sharp separation between outer and
inner necessity. In his polemic against the teleological system of morality Molina
represents the omnipresence of external efficient causality in the world, with the
single exception of the contingency of resolutions of the human will. Gassendi, a
conscious follower of Molinism, later expanded this doctrine into a philosophical
system. The only counter-balancing factor opposed to all this is the doctrine, drawn
 The Mechanistic World-Picture 119

up for the purpose of religious domestication, that man, who is capable of fulfilling
the demands of morality on his own power, imperatively requires the grace of
sacrament for the accomplishment of supernatural salvation: the laxest morality, but
the indispensability of the ecclesiastic means to salvation; the libertine life-style of
the court nobility, but the inexorable wielding of the religious instruments of
domination.
The morality of the gentry is opposed to this laxity. Its goal is the rationalization of
the life-style, its ideological means the doctrine of predestination and neo- Plato-
nism. Its center of agitation is, first of all, Berulles' Oratorians, with Gibieuf as
theorist, followed by the Jansenists. It departs from Calvin at his doctrine of the
depravity of everything human. There is an attainable system of virtue, for they are
the ideologues of the optimistic gentry. They join with Calvin in the doctrine that all
earthly lust is the sin of concupiscence. As the leading stratum of the bourgeoisie •
they represent inner-worldly asceticism. They overcome this contradiction by Pla-
tonizing the basic doctrine of their school, that the true essence of man is not his [325]
apparent existence but rather the divine in him. This conception is distinguished
from Thomistic teleology by the abrupt rejection of everything earthly. Predestina-
tionism follows automatically from Gibieuf s anthropology. Whether a human is in a
position to attain his divine essence depends on God's predetermination. This leads
to the basic dilemma that has condemned Catholic rigorism to failure. In contrast to
Calvinism, which recognizes evil as unavoidable and does not regard it as necessarily
a barrier to election, Catholic rigorism teaches the possibility of a good life, but,
seizing upon the concept of depravity no less broadly than Calvinism, comes to make
an excess of moral demands. In practice it thereby limits itself to a small circle of the
elect. But this, on the other hand, caused double offense. For the doctrine that the
fewest are elected, arising unavoidably from the tension between reality and moral
demands, leads to a pessimistic world-picture, which contradicts the intentions of
Catholicism and the gentry. Gibieuf teaches offhand, in contradiction to reality, the
election of most, Jansenius the election of the few. This not only brings him close to
the edge of Calvinism, but also places his main goal in question, the moral radicaliza-
tion of the cure of souls (Seelsorge). If in Calvinism election is a gratia gratuita and the
moral life only its uncertain sign, so in Jansenism salvation is the result of a life free of
sin, and this, of course, is the result of divine predestination. If moral accomplish-
ments do not rise to virtuosity, they are valueless for salvation and therefore offer no
reward. Hence Jansenism was not effective as a positive transforming power, but only
as a critical sect of holy laity opposed to Jesuit laxity. Modern Catholicism in its strict
version results in such a sect of holy laity. For, in contrast to the feudal-traditionalistic
social order, the capitalist social order is no longer founded on the "natural" identity
of drive and norm, but rather on their sharp opposition. If one does not want to infer
from this the depravity of everything earthly, as Calvin did, one must create a sphere [326]
of moral life in which earthly drives do not come into play.
Since, however, this sphere can be conditionally accessible only to virtuosos of
asceticism, the vast majority of mankind unavoidably appears as depraved; the
 120 FRANZ BORKENAU

optimistic intention that led to the rejection of Calvinist anthropology is not realized
in the area of practical morality. This leads precisely to the task of setting in theory the
essential good of the world against its evil appearance.

V. Descartes

Descartes undertook the solution of this task. Coming from the gentry, he builds on
the presupposition of stoic morality. He recognizes the fatal necessity of world events
and rejects its teleological interpretation. At the same time, however, he declines to
haughtily keep these events away from the soul. By making them understandable, he
hopes to show that they are good. Mathematical mechanics is to be made the basis of
• morality, so he takes up again the medieval idea of a universal science. He first of all
considers the question of the form of the search for the key to the sciences. His
doubting of the traditional conception of nature and the human world and vision of a
systematic reformulation of the whole of human knowledge on metaphysical presup-
positions requires that he question religious truths. This accounts for the deep crisis
of conscience which was loosed in three dreams on November 11,1619, and which he
took as God's direct revelation. He believes he received in them God's permission to
follow the path of doubt, and the assurance that this path would not lead him to
destruction, but rather to the restoration of God-given religious and moral truths.
As provisional morality he decides upon the temporary recognition of all customs
of the fatherland, in order subsequently to provide systematic justification of what is
essential in them. This already constitutes the most important presupposition of his
theoretical works. He sets himself the goal of overcoming stoic pessimism, not by
changing the world, but rather by changing the thoughts about the world while
retaining the stoic concept oifatum. The chief content of the stoic concept oifatum is
the contingency of human fate. Overcoming contingency - in thought, not in action -
becomes the central problem of Cartesian philosophy. It would succeed if that which
[327] happens to man in his exterior life could be shown to be his inner essence. This
agreement of outer with inner essence can be only an intellectual accord within the
domain of a basically contemplative attitude. It is necessary to show that the essence
of the world is identical with the essence of human ratio. Here Descartes formulates
the fundamental problem of bourgeois philosophy as it was posed again and again
from himself until Hegel. This basic philosophical problem is supposed to overcome
the tension that exists between the undeniable mechanistic fatality of bourgeois fate
and the effort to interpret it optimistically.
The contemplative attitude is conditioned only secondarily by the French gentry's
acceptance of the basic characteristics of the social relations of power of its time. All
bourgeois philosophy has this contemplative attitude, which arises from the subjec-
tion of human beings to the fatality of events in capitalism. The specific contribution
of the gentry to the formulation of Descartes's question lies in his effort to conceive
this fatality optimistically; all great idealistic schools of the bourgeoisie are after all
 The Mechanistic World-Picture 121

not sustained by the bourgeoisie itself, but rather by the intermediate strata. Thus
Descartes also polemicizes against Hobbes' pessimistic theory of society, to which
he replies with the possibility of realizing objective good under absolute rule.
But this does not lead to the formulation of a concrete, let alone a revolutionary,
morality. It is always merely a matter of the optimistic interpretation of unavoidable
events.
The law-like interpretation of fatum as a purely external event means, first, its
mechanical interpretation as a chain of purely external causal connections, and
second, the rationalization of this external context of causality, i.e., its conversion
into mathematical laws. The philosophical goal can be seen as achieved only if the
entire cosmos is interpreted mechanistically and mechanics is reduced to pure
mathematics. Only then does the cosmos present a mathematical system in which
everything concrete can be deduced more geometrico from a small number of evident
premises. Only then would contingency really be overcome. The tendency towards
the rationalist system thus results form the way in which rationalist fatalism posed its
task. Originally Descartes thought he had grasped it in one sweep, by means of an all-
encompassing key to the sciences. Immediately before the night of the dream he [328]
believed he had found it in an all-encompassing system of the application of pro-
portions. He has to surrender this illusion. But it is still the geometric method
that connects the demand of visualization with mathematization and logical
deduction.
The handicraft basis of production in the manufacture period is reflected in the
demand for visualization (Anschaulichkeit). Descartes constantly rejected the
employment of those mathematical methods - e.g., magnitudes of higher power
which are not visualizable - that exceeded the bounds of Euclidean geometry. The
concept of "clara et distincta perceptio" covers the rejection both of such non-
visualizable proofs-by-calculation and of visualized proofs without calculation.
Beyond this demand, however, he proceeds in the direction of universal mathemat-
ics, on the one hand, by attempting to ground visualized magnitudes on logical self-
evidence and, on the other, in the attempt to reduce matter to pure space. Both
tendencies stand in the service of universal mathematics, which constantly inter-
sected and influenced Descartes' concrete physical researches. The requirement of
basing visible appearances on self-evidence finds its validation especially in the
establishment of the laws of motion. Descartes discovers a law of the conservation of
motion and grounds it in the benevolence of God. The special perfection of this law
of conservation, which he claims as evident truth without grounding it, lies in truth in
the exchange of equivalents in the communication of motion from one body to the
other. Bourgeois exchange equality thus proves to be a basic category of nature. The
universal- rationalist tendency of the Cartesian method became most fruitful in its
renewal of mathematics. By creating a uniform mathematical sign language he made
possible the reduction of equations of various powers, opened his own path to
analytic geometry, and thus created the original groundwork of a purely quantitative
mathematics, which proceeds deductively, in place of the separate treatment of
 122 FRANZ BORKENAU

various equations and various curves in the mathematics of the Middle Ages.
All this he consciously undertakes in the service of the bourgeois, Catholic-
rigoristic world view. A secret pact with Berulles enabled him to dodge the
theological battles of the day by emigrating to Holland, where he worked out his
[329] philosophy. This philosophy, expanded in the continual struggle with the Jesuits and
systematically promoted by the Oratorians, becomes in the course of the ideological
struggles the philosophical grounding both of Oratorian mysticism and of Jansenism,
and was persecuted along with them after the reactionary turn of the regime of Louis
XIV. It succumbs to the same inner contradictions as its sister schools of theology.
The identity of the self with the external world cannot be effected in practice, just as
the identity of the self reduced to pure thought with an external world reduced to
pure ratio cannot be effected in theory. Descartes's rational theology helps out here.
Man, unsatisfied in his concrete appearance, is referred to the infinite progress of
knowledge. As he is, however, his will is more extensive than his intellect. What is
specifically new in the Cartesian anthropology is the infinity of the will, the philo-
sophical proclamation of the infinite striving of the bourgeois as being human essence
pure and simple. This antagonism between volition and ability spawns the
unavoidability of error, which has to be the cardinal sin in a universal-rationalist
world-picture. The possibility of error means the failure of the universal rationalist
system. This shows in Descartes's concept of freedom: we are free as long as we are
cognizant (wissend), i.e., as long as. we necessarily strive for the good. Thus for the
most part we are not free. Descartes bridges the resulting gulf with his proofs of the
existence of God. By means of an arbitrary postulate he derives the existence of a
perfect being from the discrepancy between our striving for perfection and our
imperfection. The sole purpose of proving the existence of God is to posit the identity
of the self and the world, in which Descartes places the highest good but which is
accessible to us only in infinite approximation, as outside of our existence . Thus the
ontological proof of the existence of God compensates for the failure of the system,
which above all is manifested in the abandonment of the deduction of the individual
appearances of nature. In fact the proof of the existence of God does not bridge this
gulf. The universal-rationalist system remains a sketch, and the tension between the
partial rationalization of meaningless mechanistic fatum and its systematic optimistic
interpretation remains a task for following generations.

VI. Hobbes

Hobbes, a genuine mechanistic materialist and ideologue of the gentry in the English
[330] revolution, is opposed to this. His materialism arises from his purely inner-worldly
apology for sovereignty. If absolute power (Gewalt) cannot be justified legitimately,
harmonistically, or by a simple contract scheme, as earlier natural-rights theorists
had done, the irremediable depravity of human nature, which can be contained only
by force, remains as its only possible foundation, because good has no reality in
human nature. To make this conclusion irrefutable, Hobbes must exclude every
 The Mechanistic World-Picture 123

belief in drives (Triebkrdfte) that are other than purely egoistic and material.
Bourgeois materialism is thus inseparably connected with a pessimistic evaluation of
the bourgeois personality and with the struggle against bourgeois-revolutionary
alignments. (When, in the eighteenth century, materialism combines with the belief
in progress, it transcends bourgeois limits in the direction of communism, as Marx
emphasized.)
For Hobbes personality consists in the striving for power. One source of this
striving is the assumption that everyone wants to possess as much as possible, i.e., the
sphere of competitive struggle. The decisive motivation for this psychology of power
arises, however, from the realm of class struggle. Hobbes grounds the necessity for
absolute power in the striving of every party for the whole of state power; unless
absolute state power sets limits on it, this striving, in principle unlimited, and hence
also devoid of internal limits in its choice of means, leads inevitably to civil war, the
worst of all evils. Here Hobbes is very close to a historical-materialist insight into the
essence of the bourgeois revolution. To achieve this he would have only to display the
various material interests of the different parties. But this would subvert his bour-
geois standpoint in general, and especially his position as the defender of absolutism.
He avoids this consequence by bringing party conflict down to the level of the
competitive struggle, conceiving of the party as the result of the ambition of its
leading individuals, who strive for unlimited power quite independently of the
ideologies advanced. What remains of the reality of the class struggle in Hobbes'
theory of the state is only the psychological facts of the striving for power, misin-
terpreted in terms of individual psychology. The assertion of a natural unlimited
striving for power is indispensable for Hobbes, because without it he cannot justify [331]
the absoluteness of state power.
Hobbes does not deny that even in the pre-civil {yorstaatlich) natural condition
there are principles of reason, of self-preservation, that command peaceful negotia-
tion with one's neighbors, hence a natural right in the actual sense. But Hobbes, like
Calvin, in whose world of thought Hobbesianism is rooted, denies the practical
effectiveness of the "first natural right," which is rendered ineffective through the
bellum omnium in omnes. In order to avoid this and put into effect the "first natural
right," the individual must surrender all his natural rights to the absolute ruler. This is
the "second natural right," which formally cancels all propositions of the first in
order to realize their content. By this "second natural right" Hobbes does not at all
mean the Stuart regime of ever-present state intervention; he is rather, as a strictly
bourgeois thinker, an opponent of the state church, the monopoly economy, etc. His
absolutism is not as that of the welfare state, but rather formally juridical, bourgeois,
and in favor of free trade. There is a gaping contradiction here, however, which
invalidates Hobbes' entire system. For him the necessity of sovereignty ensues from
the consideration that absolute power alone can guarantee the life of the citizens, so
that the struggle against it is tantamount to suicide and an absurdity. But the absolute
sovereign is not materially stronger than the collective individuals who have trans-
ferred their independence to him, and is therefore powerless if their striving for
 124 FRANZ BORKENAU

power is actually invincible. Thus Hobbes must place greatest weight on the unity of
political opinions, which is to be produced through absolutism. But absolutism is
superfluous if it has ultimately to support itself by convincing the subjects of the
necessity of social life, for this conviction itself suffices to avoid civil war without the
formal-juridical absoluteness of the ruler. In his efforts to abstract from the real
power-relations of real classes in the service of a formal-juridical construction, but
simultaneously to provide a materialist foundation for his theory of the state, Hobbes
comes to the conclusion that something that is indeed possible (namely the party
struggle) is logically absurd. This contradiction is insoluble.
So Hobbes begins from the drives of natural beings to pit against them a rational
[332] system of legal norms in dialectical antithesis. This unique interpretation provides
the key to the controversial question of Hobbes' philosophical and epistemological
affiliation. The materialist Hobbes influenced the history of modern natural science
no more than did Gassendi. He explicitly rejected experiment, and considered
human knowledge of nature to be complete with the basic mechanistic insights of his
time; his conception of nature is determined more exclusively by social science than
that of any other thinker of the time. He is neither pure empiricist nor pure
rationalist. He is separated from rationalism by the distinction that he makes
between space and body, which he endeavors to bridge by the concept of conatus; by
his strictly nominalist logic; and by his starting point in sensory knowledge. He is
separated from empiricism and sensualism not only by his strictly mechanistic
conception of nature, but also by his definition of thought as calculation and the
attempt to construct a synthetic-deductive logic on nominalist presuppositions. From
presuppositions that contradict rationalism he endeavors to obtain a deductive
rationalist system more geometrico. This is the consequence of the fundamental
contradiction in his doctrine of the state.
Hobbes is the ideologue of the most progressive part of the landed gentry. The
Cromwellian dictatorship brought about the realization of his absolutist theory, and
he served it as well. But he originally developed his theory in service of the Stuarts,
not because he approved of their politics but because, in his practical political
attitude as in his theoretical attitude, the omnipotence of the state appeared more
important than its concrete provisions; that is, the bourgeois form of state power
(sovereignty) appeared more important than its next steps. This is part of the
situation of the early bourgeois revolutions, which, in contrast to the classic bour-
geois revolutions, first created modern state power; at that time every party struggle
posed the immediate danger of regression to feudal autonomies. Of course at first
this insight was clearer to the provincial landowners than to the urban bourgeoisie,
who were directly damaged by the welfare-state policy of the Stuarts. But Hobbes
[333] remained a representative of the gentry even under Cromwell. Just as under the
Stuarts he counsels the gentry to have absolute obedience and the king to have a
purely inner-worldly foundation of his sovereignty and regard for bourgeois needs,
so under the Cromwellian dictatorship he preaches submission to the gentry, but
reconciliation with the provincial landowners to the dictator, in order to create a bloc
 The Mechanistic World-Picture 125

of the landed classes against the rebellious manufacturing and proletarian strata.
Thus Hobbes is the first consistent bourgeois theorist of the state, but at the same
time the representative of a conservative bourgeoisie. The conservative bourgeoisie
appeared for the first time in the English Revolution as a result of the process of
original accumulation in agriculture.

VII. Pascal

If Hobbes is the founder of mechanistic pessimism, then it is Pascal who completes its
development. What is unique in Pascal's situation is that for him, as a member of the
second generation of mechanists, the mechanistic principles of the theory of nature
and society have become purely and simply self-evident (he no longer endeavors to
ground them, since for him these principles are the only ones possible). Out of his
individual despair over his own existence he consistently thinks all antinomies of
these principles through to the end, without, however, transcending the limits of the
bourgeois world-picture. Such an attitude would not have been possible with the
approach of the classical bourgeois revolutions, since these summoned the pro-
letariat into the plan. Pascal is thus the only consistent critic of the bourgeois form of
existence who is neither feudally nor socialistically oriented. Though he is usually
classed as a Jansenist, he parts company from them on the decisive question of the
validity of the insight of ratio. His sharp anti-rationalism, although based on rational-
ist presuppositions, would be Calvinist, if the thoroughly Catholic problem of
experienceable, individual salvation did not stand in the center of his thought. Pascal
remains Catholic only by holdingfirmlyto this question, and not by virtue of one or
another of his answers to it.
Pascal measures the rationalist systems of Descartes and Hobbes against the
reality of life, opposing to rationalism the unsublated (unaufgehobene) contingency [334]
of human fate. He has no confidence that the antinomies of life will disappear in
reality if they are solved in thought. He thus disdains the regression from the
individual and social problems of human existence to the theory of nature, and
restores the problem of man's moral existence squarely to the center. Consequently,
for him both affirmation and denial of divine natural law in man are equally
impossible.
The moral essence of man, as the stoics preached, is a fiction. The content of
natural right varies according to who is enunciating it, and the only objective
measure of right is might. Pascal rejects the Cartesian apology, but does not dwell on
the rationalist consequences that Hobbes draws from this "might" theory of the state
(Machtstaatslehre). Instead he arrives at the Calvinist conclusion that every right is an
expression of might, which is neither logically nor morally justifiable, but precisely
for this reason must be accepted. If the exercise of power ceases to be the function of
a higher right, it becomes, as with Machiavelli, simply the result of desire. Pascal,
 126 FRANZ BORKENAU

combining Hobbes and Machiavelli, annihilates all doctrines of bourgeois natural

right.
But he does not rest with this Calvinist conclusion. He establishes that a life purely
according to drives is not possible. In this lies his Catholicism; and precisely this
Catholic problem enables him to develop the antinomies of bourgeois existence in all
its facets. His rejection of libertine existence is epitomized in his critique of "Diver-
tissement." By "divertissement" he means every diversion, whether that labor which
ostensibly occurs for the sake of benefit or that enjoyment which is often sought as an
end in itself. Pascal proves that none of these endeavors carry their purpose in
themselves, but point beyond themselves into infinity; all are therefore contradic-
tory. The pessimistic turn of Catholic anthropology enables Pascal to recognize that
no qualitatively determined goal counts for much within capitalism, but only never-
ending progress as such. This never-ending progress, however, comes up against the
unalterable fact of death, which becomes the meaning-destructive central truth of
life. Every activity appears to be contradictory within this contradiction be-
tween ceaseless striving and the limited character of human existence. On the
[335] questions connected to infinite progress Pascal has developed the general contradic-
tion of bourgeois existence, which for him is that of man pure and simple, and
expressly formulates this "negative dialectic" as the most general form of human
existence.
The negative dialectic is transferred from life to thought. Pascal was the first to
apply rationalism consistently in natural research in awareness of its piecemeal
character (Stiickhaftigkeit); he was the first to vigorously subordinate the formulation
of natural laws to verification through experiment, thereby revealing his insight into
the basically open character of natural research. The moral uselessness of natural
research, however, is a direct consequence of this. For fate, which could become
bearable only by being made intelligible, remains in force (unaufgehoben); we
remain helpless points in the midst of infinity.
Thus there is no direct satisfaction in the good, for man is evil: thus Thomism fails.
There is no direct certainty of the moral truths inscribed in the heart; thus the
seeming optimism of the stoics, the Jesuits, and Grotius fails. There is no overcoming
of contingent evil in rational thought, because our knowledge is basically open; thus
the rationalist system of Descartes fails. Nor is there any self-contentment
(Sichbescheiden) in this evil world, because the individual cannot give up the demand
for an existence fulfilled in the good; thus the various renunciations of the Libertines,
the Calvinists, and Hobbes fail. What remains is the hopeless contradiction as
general form, the abstract need for salvation in the midst of a world that is completely
alien to salvation. God, who could effect this salvation, is a deus absconditus in the
sharpest sense; only quite external signs can lead to him - like biblical proof and the
dull habit of belief on the one hand, and a supernatural grace unconnected with
anything human, on the other.
What Pascal - who like all mechanists is ahistoric-conceives as the essence of man
pure and simple, is, however, the essence of the particular epoch in which he lives. Its
 The Mechanistic World-Picture 127

overcoming is also conditioned by the insight into its historical character. When
Fichte defines as the "age of complete sinfulness" what Pascal calls the eternal
depravity of man, the basic anthropological position remained the same, but the
historical conception of the problem heralds the dawn of the conquest of this age.