Borkenau linked Cartesian mechanical philosophy to the rise of abstract labor

Evidence

Most of his time at the Institut was spent probing the ideological changes that accompanied the rise of capitalism. The result was a volume in the Institut’s series of publications released after some delay in 1934 as The Transition from the Feudal to the Bourgeois World View.’ Although now almost completely forgotten, it has invited favorable comparison with Lucien Goldmann’s more recent The Hidden God. Borkenau’s major argument was that the emergence of an abstract, mechanical philosophy, best exemplified in the work of Descartes, was intimately connected to the rise of abstract labor in the capitalist system of manufacturing. The connection was not to be understood as causal in one direction, but rather as a mutual reinforcement. — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 124

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Weber’s rationalization thesis and Marx’s commodity fetishism; also to Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness on reification. — connects to: Borkenau explained seventeenth-century epistemology as class ideology of production methods — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 505; Capitalist exchange abstracts objects from the real labor that produced them — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 95; Newtonian passive-matter physics sanctioned nature’s domination for economic development. — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology,…, 1028

Broader Connections

• Borkenau explained seventeenth-century epistemology as class ideology of production methods #expands (0.95) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 505
• Capitalist exchange abstracts objects from the real labor that produced them #expands (0.75) — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 95
• Newtonian passive-matter physics sanctioned nature’s domination for economic development. #expands (0.72) — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, 1028