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Traces the scientific revolution and its effects on women, the environment and the meaning of science today. This journey through the scientific revolution shows how the mechanistic world view of modern science sanctioned the exploitation of nature, unrestrained commercial expansion and a new socioeconomic order that subordinated women. It combines the politics, literature, art, popular culture and philosophy of the period with developments in physics, mathematics and technology to show the driving forces in the rise of modern science.
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The world we have lost was organic. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
The world we have lost was organic. Read the first page
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
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14 of 15 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Merchant sets the record straight in this powerful, straightforward book. She illustrates the abuses of political power that drove the scientific revolution, dethrones its "father," Sir Francis Bacon, and unravels the presumption of the scientific, paternal myth. This scholarly book provides the reader with the knowledge to ask the right questions and demand answers: about ecology, nature, the economics of science, and the torture and sexualization of the feminine. And even better, Merchant gifts us with the opportunity to imagine something better.
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6 reviews
35 of 41 people found the following review helpful
Flat treatment of important topic
26 July 2000
Format:Paperback
This is a book on the important topic of ecofeminism. The author wants to show how the modern destruction of nature and our environment ties in with the subjugation of women during the same period. However, to understand how these assaults occurred, we have to first examine the history of ideas. As Merchant shows, these destructive attitudes toward women and nature reflect changing ideas of how we think about people and our place in the world. What characterizes this new way of thinking which began about 500 years ago is the idea that trees, colors, ideas, people, in short, the entire cosmos, are really just the mechanical actions of matter in motion, no matter how much things may seem otherwise. From this modern perspective, the natural world and everything in it really amounts to a gigantic machine in motion, thereby debasing our ordinary experience of that world. Nonetheless, this reduction of things to numbers greatly helps the rise of modern science, especially technology, by showing how mathematics can be applied concretely and experimentally to just about everything there is. Moreover, during this period, how people think about society also changes. Society too is conceived as a colossal machine, a human one, possessing definite structures, with components conceived as self-contained and independent little atoms, who associate with one another not because of inner need but because of external advantage. Thus, moral philosophy too, follows modern thinking by becoming a credo of "it's okay for the selfish man to get ahead in life", while economic science becomes a means of determining how we can all get ahead without destroying the social fabric. Or, put another way, we're really only interested in ourselves, but cooperate with others as a means of gaining our own ends and avoiding a consuming war of all against all. It's not too hard to see the seeds of destructive assault in such thinking.
Nature thus undergoes a profound change from the traditional conception of nurturing mother to one of dead machine, that is, from an object of affection to an object of subjugation and exploitation. Correspondingly, the traditionally moral way of looking at our natural surroundings changes to a non-moral, strictly neutral, it-is-there-to-be-used point of view. Moreover, these new aggressive attitudes are associated with how men should act, are supposed to act; while women,on the other hand, are thought of (like nature) as passive, there-to-be-used objects of exploitation. Such thinking thus enables industry and technology to historically combine in an ongoing assault upon the environment, on one hand, and women, on the other. What is needed, of course, is a new way of thinking that will end these horrific abuses - What has changed, can be changed. Unfortunately, Merchant treats this fascinating subject in a lifeless manner. She walks through the historical precedents in dry, uninspired, and thoroughly descriptive fashion, leaving the impression of an embroidered postgraduate dissertation. Her thesis cries out for greater color, synthesis and argumentation. As a student of the humanist philosopher Theodore Roszak, she could use more of his chutzpah.
31 of 44 people found the following review helpful
This insightful book unpeels the scientific revolution.
16 Jun 1999
Format:Paperback
Merchant sets the record straight in this powerful, straightforward book. She illustrates the abuses of political power that drove the scientific revolution, dethrones its "father," Sir Francis Bacon, and unravels the presumption of the scientific, paternal myth. This scholarly book provides the reader with the knowledge to ask the right questions and demand answers: about ecology, nature, the economics of science, and the torture and sexualization of the feminine. And even better, Merchant gifts us with the opportunity to imagine something better.
5 of 9 people found the following review helpful
A landmark, if flawed work
1 Jun 2006
Format:Paperback
Merchant's book is the only one out there which incorporates the history of environmental degradation with the history of ideas and ideology. I had never considered the power of "mechanism" as an ideology; I had assumed it was an objective account of natural processes as they actually occur. So, that was a good point the book brings into the center of the discussion. But the problem is that this idea of mechanism is inadequately theorized in this book. Where did it come from? How did it become the authoritative worldview? I read Merchant's "Radical Ecology" published 20 years later, and the idea of mechanism is still underdeveloped here too. The world is corpuscular, mechanical, lifeless -- why? Says who? Why do they start saying it? There are links here to Protestantism, but Merchant does not realize this.
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