ABSTRACT
Throughout history mechanical metaphors have played an important role in the political imagination. They have been used in various contexts to generate perceptions of politics that have necessarily changed as conceptions of nature and mechanics have altered. Politics has usually been viewed as on the receiving end of the relationship, borrowing imagery and vocabulary from mechanics and the natural sciences in general. However, recent studies (e.g. Keller 1995) have shown that there is a relationship of mutual construction and that concepts in the natural sciences are themselves affected by political, technological and informational discourses. This chapter looks into the relationship between the natural sciences and political discourses by examining selected metaphors and trajectories of change, exploring the changes in one or the other domain and carefully examining the linkages. I begin by outlining major theoretical considerations relevant to a study of metaphor in political science and then move on to focus interpretatively on discovering and recovering the relationship between mechanical visions of nature and political metaphors.
