ABSTRACT
In his account of the rise of ߢchaos theory’, James Gleick describes how its converts often view themselves as evangelists of a new paradigm, allowing them to ߢspeculate about determinism and free will, about evolution, about the nature of conscious intelligence. They feel they are turning back the trend in science towards reductionism […], they believe they are looking for the whole.’ 1 I would like to argue that Margaret Cavendish’s natural philosophy betrays a similar kind of evangelism. Indeed, as part of the umbrella movement termed ߢnew philosophy’, Cavendish’s philosophy should be evaluated in relation to the acceptance of the laws of mechanics as the fundamental laws of nature. Yet, just as Gleick’s ߢchaos theorists’ felt empowered to speculate about a future science of ߢthe whole’, I would like to argue that Cavendish’s natural philosophy implicitly engages with more than the physics of the new philosophy to address its most controversial political off-shoot, Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan. Cavendish’s ideas concerning matter and motion, I argue, can best be understood as a counter to the attempt by Hobbes to produce a unified theory of nature, man and society. To this end, Cavendish appropriates the central analogy of the Leviathan, the ߢartificial man’, in order to oppose Hobbes’s conclusions concerning subjectivity and a brutal and competitive ߢstate of nature’. To simplify matters I will hereafter use the term ‘paradigm’ to designate my understanding of the assumptions underlying Hobbes’s and Cavendish’s philosophical projects. 2
