Newton, Maxwell, Marx

In these pages, we meet Newton, Maxwell, and Marx as we have never seen them before, as champions of a scientific vision that leads to intellectual freedom and human emancipation. We see Newton, the last of the alchemists, creating a visionary physics that was intended as a direct refutation of the dead mechanism of Cartesian philosophy. We see Maxwell striving to free the human intellect from the dogmatism of the “Newtonian” physics of his day, the champion of a new democratic science as exemplified by the work of Michael Faraday. We are astonished to meet Marx, the ultimate libertarian, envisioning “a society in which the full and free development of every individual forms the ruling principle,” a society that could be attained through a rational understanding deliberately constructed to emulate Newton’s physics. Simpson points toward a vision of science, common to these three thinkers, as a powerful means of attaining human freedom? material, intellectual, and even spiritual.