Proto-Positivists on Society

According to the “mechanistic philosophy” (Ball, 2004 p. 19) of Thomas Hobbes, man is a puppet animated by the impersonal forces of the world (with obvious implications for free will, but that is beyond this discussion). Hobbes proposed a physics of society, and with French mechanists Mersenne and Gassendi wove this notion into a formula for civic utopia based on scientific reason (articulated in Leviathan, 1651). Earlier (1625), Grotius attempted to find the irreducible aspects of social co-existence in “natural laws” and Francis Bacon expressed similar ideals in the, unfinished The New Atlantis (1627), whose perfect society is scientifically governed.

Thomas More’s Utopia (1518), which heavily predates Hobbes’ utopian treatise Leviathan, is in some important senses, anti-positivist and, foreshadowing the phenomenology that would arrive four centuries later, highly humanistic. In Utopia, man is a reasonable and reasoning but self-aware and empathetic animal who has attained societal harmony and individual happiness through liberty and moderation, not science.