On the Shoulders of Merchants: Exchange and the Mathematical Conception of Nature in Early Modern Europe(SUNY series in Science, Technology, and Society)

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.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments Introduction 1. Accounts of the Rise of Early Modern Science Introduction Post-World War II Accounts of the Rise of Science Marxism, Praxis and Science Social Relations, Value and the Mechanistic Abstraction 2. Marx, the Commodity Abstraction and Mechanistic Knowledge of Nature Introduction Marx, Technique and Industrial Science Society, Thought and Historical Specification Commodities, Value, Abstraction and Homogeneity Commodity Fetishism and the Representation of Society and Nature The Concrete Existence of Abstract Relations Commerce, Finance, Credit and the Money Economy Production, Labour and Labour-Time 3. Mathematical Mechanics and Abstraction Introduction Ancient Mathematics-Discontinuities The Ontological Shift to Modern Mathematics-Jacob Klein Mathematics and Mechanics-The Homogenization of Nature 4. Exchange Relations, Commercial Arithmetic and the Foundations of Mathematical Mechanics Introduction John Philoponos The Early European Arithmetic and Record-Keeping Traditions Thomas Bradwardine Nicole Oresme Robert Recorde John Dee Thomas Harriot Rafael Bombelli 5. Exchange, Labour, Mathematics and Natural Philosophy: The Social Roots of a Science of Mechanics Introduction Niccolo Tartaglia Galileo Galilei Francois Viete Rene Descartes Simon Stevin The Hartlib Circle and the Royal Society Conclusion: Social Relations and the Intellectual Appropriation of Nature Notes References Index

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