Political Philosophy and Science Envy

"For just as Galileo could look at the path of a cannon ball and see it as the resultant of the force of gravity and linear velocity, or Priestley look at a chemical reaction and see it as an exchange of atoms, so the new social theorists looked at the state and saw it as the resultant of the actions of all the individuals who make it up. But note please that these individuals who are the primary constituents of the state and the elements of reductive analysis of society are not individual human beings. They are social atoms, totally denuded of individuality, of character, of emotion(except fear and greed) and ov value. The individual, in this mode of analysis, is not a real human being but an abstract quantity, comprehensible because of his abstract nature and ultimately manipulable by social controls. The relevance of the reductive mode of analysis for modern politics should be immediately obvious, for in the ideologies of modern totalitarian movements, we can see this method of perceiving human beings as abstract quantities in the full light of practice."
-John C. Caiazza, Modern Science and the Origins of Our Political Discontent(PDF File)
Intercollegiate Review, Fall 1977

I am beginning to better understand Chantal Delsol's suspicions of essentialism, since the "essentialism" of modern theory posits a reductive nature of man in order that man can be manipulated by a technocracy, in contradistinction to the essentialism of classical and Christian philosophy, where human nature is not a thing to be manipulated but a norm to be fulfilled.

Caiazza also notes how modern science follows the Cartesian route, moving away from experience and into abstraction. Modern political philosophy, in its envy of the promises and accomplishments of physical science, tries to follow suit: "Just as it becomes the mark of an educated man to say that the physical universe is not as it appears to be, so it becomes possible to say that the phenomena of politics are not what they appear to be; are not what our experience tells us they are." He critiques social contract theory as one such abstraction. "Hobbes based his idea of the state on the contract theory not because he was committed to the idea of individualism, but because he was modeling his analysis on the reductive method of science." Obviously, this preference for abstraction over experience engenders the rabid anti-traditionalism of modernity.