Third factor of production

The binary structure of the land–labour regime was first broken in Europe during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. A new social formation had emerged. The hallmark of this new formation was a third ‘factor of production’ – the industrial machine – and a new class of owners – the capitalists. The owners and their factories marked the beginning of a new political order – the regime of capital.

Triple revolution

The new capitalist order was an outgrowth of a triple revolution: the scientific revolution, the industrial revolution and the French revolution. The forbearers [ האבות המייסדים] of this revolution were Nicolò Machiavelli, Johannes Kepler, Galileo Galilei, René Descartes, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, David Hume, Gottfried Leibnitz and, most importantly, Isaac Newton.

Mchanical worldview

These thinkers offered a totally novel staring point: a mechanical worldview. The cosmos, they argued, is like a machine. In order to understand it – kosmeo in ancient Greek means to ‘order’ and to ‘organize’ – you need to take it apart, identify its elementary particles and discover the mechanical forces that hold these particles together and regulate their interaction. For the first time there emerged a secular understanding of force, one that stood in sharp contrast to the earlier, religious manifestations of force [4].

Force is a relationship

This secular cosmology developed hand in hand with a new vision of society. Human consciousness, says Friedrich Hegel (1807: 183–88), cannot grasp force in the abstract. Force is not an isolated thing, but a relationship, and as such it can be understood only through its actual, concrete manifestations. The main relationship is negation: we comprehend force through its specific contradictions and forms of resistance.

Cosmology of politicization of nature

Perhaps the most important of these is the negation of subject and object. Stated simply and without sounding pompous, we can say that human beings understand themselves as subjects by investigating the world around them. And as they discover/create [p.37] their own social being, they articulate nature based on the power relations of their own society. In this sense, their cosmology is the politicization of nature. The power relations that organize their society also order their universe.[5]

Pre-statist societies divinities

Thus, in pre-statist societies force took the form of naming natural objects and phenomena – moon, thunder, birth, flood. In ‘anarchic’ cultures, these objects and phenomena got embedded in a plethora of rituals and gods. Hellenic legends speak of relatively egalitarian cities, some with popular, communal rule. Pre-historical hunters and gatherers lived in similarly flat structures. In such societies, the gods tended to be relatively equal, more familial, often matriarchal, and not particularly vengeful. They were neither all-knowing nor terribly rational. They were more like capricious bullies who demanded respect and occasional appeasement.[6]

A new cosmology of force

The transition to centralized, statist societies brought a new cosmology of force. Hierarchical political rule introduced a rigid pantheon of god-kings and, eventually, an omnipotent god-emperor. Multiplicity gave rise to singularity and the rituals became centralized and exclusionary. Nature was increasingly objectified and the gods grew alien. Although their logic was still mysterious, the gods now began to plan and calculate. They threatened, blamed and retaliated. They demanded complete obedience and punished with unforgiving violence.

Science challenges the religious cosmology

The emerging scientific approach of the sixteenth century, along with its new creature – later to be named ‘scientist’ – challenged this religious cosmology.[7] Although many of the new scientists continued to believe in the guiding hand of God, that guidance was considered a singular event. When Laplace presented Napoleon with his magnum opus on celestial mechanics, System of the World, the emperor inquired why it did not mention God. Laplace replied: ‘Sire, I have no need of that hypothesis’. God may have invented the universe, but once the blueprint was finished and the cosmos assembled, he locked the plans and threw away the key.

God has no interest in politics and diplomacy

For the new scientists, God was universal force. This force – whether embedded in Machiavelli’s secular Prince, in Hobbes’ Leviathan or in the celestial movements of Galileo and Newton – is concentrated, deterministic and balanced. It never disappears. It is embedded in the mutual attraction and repulsion of all bodies. As universal force, God has no interest in princely politics and statist diplomacy. It doesn’t care about the church and needs no representatives on earth or elsewhere. It has no quirks and doesn’t act on impulse. God is permanent rationality and eternal order – or simply law. The [ p.38] purpose of science is to discover this abstract rationality and order, to uncover the universal ‘laws of nature’. And since the harmony of natural laws is the invention of God, the best society is the one that reproduces those laws in its own politics. [8]