VV(11): Any Sovereign or Broken Yo-Yo cont'd ...

[Dave Monroe]

"Any sovereign or broken yo-yo" (V., Ch. 8, Sec. i, p. 217)

Returning to Otto Mayr, Authority, Liberty and Automatic Machinery in
Early Modern Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1986), Chapter 4, "The
Clockwork State," pp. 102-14 ...

Since Plato's Laws, Aristotle's Politics, and Livy's legend of Meninius
Agrippa, Europeans have been accustomed to comparing the state with the
human body.  In the late Renaissance, while this metaphor continued to
flourish undiminished, others appeared by its side, for example, the
images of the "ship of state," of the planetary system ruled by the
primum mobile or, after Copernicus, by a monarchical sun, and, by the
late sixteenth century, the metaphor of the clock. (102)

A few early authors offered the clock as an illustration of the king's
function in the realm: being visible to everyone, he gave precept and
direction to all his subjects. (102)

More compelling, however, was another form of the clock metaphor which
concentrated on the internal workings of clockwork and state.  (102)

Such imagery expressed accurately the aspirations of the rising
political doctrine of absolutism: government should work with the
harmony of a smoothly running clockwork.  (103)

... Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), who put the automaton analogy into the
center of an ambitious philosophical system....  He was one of the few
in England who accepted Descartes's theory of animal automatism and,
believing in determinism and rejecting free will, he easily extended
that theory to include man. (104)

... De Cive and Leviathan ... (104)

He was familiar with both the popularity and the efficacy of the
traditional "body politic" analogy for the state and incorporated this
analogy into the mechanistic program by simply expanding it to include
the clock, that is, by equating both the living body and the state with
the clockwork-driven automaton. (104)

His result was a centralistic, hierarchical form of government, where
the actions of the lower members were controlled through rigid
administrative linkages by the sovereign above. (104)

[A-and recall the Hobbesian law firm of "Salitieri, Poore, Nash, De
Brutus and Short" from GR, p. 591]

By the end of the seventeenth century, political thought in Britain was
developing in a somewhat different direction than on the Continent, and
the difference was reflected in the fortunes of the clock metaphor.  In
English political literature, the use of mechanical imagery declined.
Explicit clock metaphors became rare and tended to have anti-mechanical
connotations. (105)

On the Continent, however, the use of the clock metaphor to illustrate
political ideas continued in the tradition established at the beginning
of the seventeenth century.  Until well into the eighteenth century ...
such metaphors were seriously descriptive and affirmative about their
subjects. (106)

A change occurred in the early eighteenth century.  A new movement
emerged in Continental political thought that combined a commitment to
the established principles of absolute monarchy with an enthusiasm for
the teachings of recent, especially mechanical, philosophy....
"enlightened despotism" ... (107)

The enlightened version of absolutism may be characterized as a
mechanical theory of government.... its literature teemed with analogies
and metaphors of machines, especially clockworks.  (107)

King Frederick II, "the Great," of Prussia (1712-86) ... (107)

... a generally determinist outlook and a mechanist vocabulary ... (107)

Characteristic was his insistence that the successful ruler must
exercise comprehensive control over all functions and actions of the
state, present and future.  Explicitly mechanistic attitudes,
incidentally, were not irreconcilable with the view of the state as an
organism. (108)

Mechanical imagery played a more central role in the writing of
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-78), himself the son of a clockmaker.... he
saw himself as an engineer of political machinery. (109)

Rousseau's mechanical imagery reveals an ambivalent attitude toward the
question of freedom.... Whatever Rousseau said about freedom, his
machinery of state was centralistic; authority was to rule without
dispute, and problems were to be solved by intervention of the
government ... (110)

In the manner of many absolutist political thinkers, Rousseau's
mechanistic imagery appeared side by side with the ancient body-politic
metaphor ... (110)

The custom of Continental thinkers of representing society, government,
and the state in terms of clock and machine analogies ran its course in
the last quarter of the eighteenth century.  The generation succeeding
them not only rejected a state that resembled machinery; it also
rejected quite expressly as being vicious the machine analogy itself.
(114)

To be further cont'd ...