Meditações - o Leviatã de Hobbes e os relógios mecânicos

[...] In a similar way, Marx’s historicist view of society as undergoing a series of fundamental changes or transformations (“The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill society with the industrial capitalist”) connects to the steam engine in several ways.1 If Hobbes’s Leviathan relates to the mechanical clock, in which all power is centralized in a single prime mover and the motion it generates is passed on through passive mechanisms, and Montesquieu’s L’esprit des lois is the political representation of the weighing scales, in which different powers are carefully balanced, then Marx’s Das Kapital naturally connects to the steam engine, in which power is successively transformed from one kind into another. Of course, drawing such connections can easily degenerate into a frivolous game without the scrutiny inherent in a more detailed analysis. As yet, I can only say that I strongly believe that such connections can be shown to be more than superficial analogies.

Frans van Lunteren