On the Shoulders of Merchants: Exchange and the Mathematical Conception of Nature (S U N Y SERIES IN SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY, AND SOCIETY) - Softcover

Hadden, Richard W.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0791420124 ISBN 13: 9780791420126

Publisher: State University of New York Press, 1994

Synopsis

This book shows how the universal quantification of science resulted from the routinization of commercial practices that were familiar in scientist’s daily lives. Following the work of Franz Borkenau and Jacob Klein in the 1930s, the book describes the rise of the mechanistic world-view as a reification of relations of exchange in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Critical of more orthodox, positivist Marxist accounts of the rise of science, it argues that commercial reckoners, in keeping with the social relations in which their activity took place, delivered a new mathematical object, “general magnitude,” to the new mechanics. The book is an historical extension of the sociology of scientific knowledge and develops and refines themes found in the work of Alfred Sohn-Rethel and Gideon Freudenthal.

About this title

About the Author:

Richard W. Hadden is Associate Professor at Saint Mary’s University in Nova Scotia.

Review:

“Hadden’s originality lies in the diligence with which he pursues, at the empirical level, the connection that Marxists generally draw between capitalism’s distinctive forms of social relations, based on commodity exchange and money, and modern science’s distinctive modes of thought, based on universal quantification and abstraction.” ― Steve Fuller, Executive Editor of Social Epistemology

About this edition

• Publisher: State University of New York Press
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0791420124
• ISBN 13: 9780791420126
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 220