Sorel’s chief criticism of Laplace’s science is easily comprehended: its difficulty is its source in an “expressive support” which is terribly misleading. Laplace’s principal model is the solar system. “Natural nature” is generally less predictable than artificial nature, but the one great exception to this rule, according to Sorel, is astronomy, in which the positions of phenomena are as predictable as they are in most areas of “artificial nature.” In using the solar system as its expressive support, Laplacean science, in Sorel’s view, prevented many scholars from distinguishing between artificial and natural nature. The result of this unfortunate mistake in natural science was the perpetuation of the idea of unified science, an error which created a series of false assumptions about the nature of social science. By ignoring what would later become Sorel’s distinction between natural and artificial nature, by failing to distinguish between areas of science in which men actively intervene and those in which they do not, Laplace invited a host of future utopians to develop sciences of society that “are constructed in the same way as philosophical explanations of matter.” In using his planetary model, Laplace “reconstructs the world and makes a utopia having no other reason that its own logic.” In short, like the philosophers of matter, the utopians confuse the expressive support with reality.
Sorel found an example of such utopian thinking in the liberal theories of the social contract, originally hypothesised as an expressive support or model for a view or views of human nature, but taking on in later theories, a dimension of reality.
To Sorel, utopias, like Laplacean science, consist of an ensemble “of quite clear and distinct propositions, very well connected by logic, capable of being applied with fairly high accuracy.“ Like Laplace, the utopian attempts to eliminate chance from the realm of human affairs. That is why eighteenth-century utopians so admired Chinese despotism:
"Everything was reduced to prefigured formulas; it was decided that knowledge of the world could not surpass a certain moment of perfectly determined thought….All attempts at emancipation were stifled in the name of given principles; idealism was adapted in an absolute way to a routine, and has given to it the aspect of a philosophy which has attained perfect maturity.”
Sorel implies that the perfectly ordered, old-fashioned science of Laplace’s time is almost analogous to an independently ordered mental picture. Despite the strictures of the Newtonian tradition against Descartes, there is for Sorel an almost Cartesian tendency in early-nineteenth-century science to project one’s own mentality onto the physical world; only in our mind, in the realm of abstractions, are we “used never to pose questions about the real world, but about the world that is truly subjective, more perfect and truer (because it conforms more to the laws of the mind). This world–which is sometimes called metaphysics–is the only one which lends itself to the movements of the intelligence. Here, all is logical."
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from John L. Stanley's 'The Sociology of Virtue: Political and Social Theories of Georges Sorel"
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