Shadows of the Enlightenment sheds light on the deeply political agenda underlying Western science from the so-called “Age of Reason” to the present. George McCarthy uncovers the economic, social, and historical origins of modern science, and illuminates the a priori and innate features which furnish the justifications for the technical domination and control of nature and humanity.

The natural sciences were born of a market economy, commercial trade, and industrial production, and were furthermore reflective of the values and institutions of modern capitalism and its class system in the seventeenth century. As such, one of the central roles of Western science has been to legitimate its theoretical imperative to dominate nature and to reorganize human labor for profit, property, and power. Breaking with the medieval scholastic tradition, modern science viewed nature as a reified mechanism which could be mathematically measured, empirically predicted, causally explained, and managed. Nature itself was recast as a dead machine stripped of any inherent meaning or purpose.

Building upon the radical analysis of Marx and Engels, McCarthy articulates a new liberatory postmodern science and technology grounded in Marx’s theory of social justice, integrating ancient and modern traditions from classical Greece to the French Revolution, the Paris Commune to the Native American Iroquois Confederacy. In the process, McCarthy invites us to move beyond a falsely mechanistic sense of reality, break free from the sense of alienation that binds us all, and make space for imagining the world we want to see.

George E McCarthy is professor of sociology at Kenyon College. His books include Marx and the Ancients, Classical Horizons, and Marx and Social Justice.