The Circulation of Energy

Studying the construction of the science of energy in the Victorian context, Crosbie Smith has argued that terms such as force, energy and thermodynamics should be employed as categories of historical actors that were constructed within specific local contexts and in relation to particular audiences. ² Furthermore, several studies have shown that the meanings of thermodynamics underwent multiple transformations and were used in many discourses. In the Victorian context, for instance, William Thomson and his allies used the laws of thermodynamics to characterize the visible creation of the universe, stressing that the dissipation of energy (and the thermal death of the universe as its consequence) was the ‘strongest weapon in the armoury against anti-Christian materialists and naturalists’. ³ Later, in the hands of such scientific popularizers and social thinkers as Belfour Stewart, Peter Tait and Thomas Henry Huxley, thermodynamic arguments were explicitly used to support social discourses. The economic system of capitalism was portrayed as a thermodynamic system where the dissipation of energy (in the form of heat) was used to characterize – and criticize – a communist society destined for thermal death. ⁴