Hobbes’s sovereign governs atomized society externally as a technician operates a machine

Evidence

His sovereign, who was the external embodiment of contracted unity and dispenser of these rules, operated from outside the machine like a technician. The state, created ex nihilo, was an artificial ordering of individual parts, not bound together by cohesion, as in an organic community, but united by fear. — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, 816

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Hobbes reduced human free will, appetite, and liberty to mechanical motion — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology,…, 810; Hobbes’s state of nature reframed humans as atomized, appetitive competitors — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology,…, 812; Bacon’s bureaucratic utopia mirrored the mechanical philosophy’s passive-inert universe — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology,…, 741

Broader Connections

• Hobbes reduced human free will, appetite, and liberty to mechanical motion #expands (0.90) — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, 810
• Hobbes’s state of nature reframed humans as atomized, appetitive competitors #expands (0.80) — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, 812
• Bacon’s bureaucratic utopia mirrored the mechanical philosophy’s passive-inert universe #expands (0.78) — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, 741