Borkenau explained seventeenth-century epistemology as class ideology of production methods

Evidence

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

• XREF: Connects to Lukács’s theory of reification from History and Class Consciousness, and to the Institute’s broader project of imputing thought to class positions. — connects to: Borkenau explained Descartes and Hobbes as class ideologists of the gentry — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 505; Frankfurt School published Borkenau’s work on the bourgeois mechanistic worldview — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 504; Marx distinguished scientific determination of material production from ideological forms of consciousness (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• Marx distinguished scientific determination of material production from ideological forms of consciousness #expands (0.85)
• Horkheimer mapped rationalism and irrationalism onto distinct class-historical conditions #corroborates (0.80) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 547
• Intellectual strata emerge from concrete historical class processes, not abstract democracy #expands (0.78) — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 275