Borkenau explained Descartes and Hobbes as class ideologists of the gentry

Evidence

The most important of the remaining contributions to the first volume of the journal was Franz Borkenau’s article on The Sociology of the Mechanistic World-View'. It was an extract from the book on The Transition from the Feudal to the Bourgeois World-View: Studies in the History of Philosophy in the Period of Manufacture, which he had written as an Institute scholarship holder. … Inspired above all by Lukács's penetrating study on reification’, Borkenau attempted to explain, in terms of transformations of social existence, the emergence in the seventeenth century of a new form of thinking, the modern world-view, in which a revolution in epistemology went hand in hand with the formation of a new conception of nature and of human society. He made the manufacturing process into a model of an all-embracing abstraction from everything qualitative. Furthermore, his explanations rested on class struggles', which begin with the appearance of new methods of production’. A thinker', his research motto ran, can only really count as having been understood when he has been understood in connection with struggles in which he has taken sides.’ Descartes, for example, with his rationalist fatalism, was seen by Borkenau as the ideologist of the French gentry, Hobbes was seen as `the ideologist of the most advanced sections of the landed gentry’. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 505

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines Borkenau’s method: assigning thinkers to class positions via the manufacturing process as model of abstraction.
• XREF: Connects to earlier chapters on Lukács and Fromm/Lowenthal’s functionalist reduction of intellectual products to classes. — connects to: Borkenau explained seventeenth-century epistemology as class ideology of production methods — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 505

Broader Connections

• Borkenau explained seventeenth-century epistemology as class ideology of production methods #expands (0.92) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 505