Franz Borkenau, Der Übergang vom feudalen zum bürgerlichen Weltbild (1934)Ⅱ [English article]

Additional questions
Please elaborate on the proposal from ChatGPT regarding “Reconnecting Borkenau's work to 21st-century ‘Theories of Scientific Revolution’ (in relation to Latour, Shapin, Shapin, etc.).”

ChatGPT' s Answer
That's an excellent perspective.
Borkenau’s Feudal Worldview to Civic Worldview was a “social history of the scientific revolution” that was ahead of its time in the 1930s. When read in conjunction with the subsequent developments in the late 20th to early 21st century—namely “Science Studies (SSK),” “constructivist history of science,” and “Actor-Network Theory (ANT)”—as advanced by Bruno Latour, Steven Shapin, and Simon Schaffer, its pioneering nature becomes even more apparent. Below, I organize these connections into four stages.

I. Borkenau’s Original Horizon: The Scientific Revolution as a Transformation of Social Totality

Franz Borkenau’s Der Übergang vom feudalen zum bürgerlichen Weltbild (1934) anticipated many of the central concerns of today’s science studies.
He approached the birth of modern science not as a purely intellectual or epistemological process, but as an expression of the transition from feudalism to the bourgeois mode of production—that is, as a transformation of the total social order.

• From Contemplation to Production:
  Nature, once seen as an object of metaphysical contemplation, becomes a machine to be operated.

• Parallel Moral and Legal Changes:
  The rise of natural law, contract theory, and Protestant ethics provided the moral and juridical foundation for this new worldview.

• The New Subject of Knowledge:
  The scientific observer is redefined as a rational, autonomous, and socially productive individual—no longer a contemplative monk but a civic actor embedded in a system of exchange and verification.

In this sense, Borkenau offered one of the earliest models of the Scientific Revolution as social revolution, decades before Kuhn or Latour would formalize the sociology of scientific knowledge.

---

II. Reappearance in the Late 20th Century: Constructivism and the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge

1. Steven Shapin & Simon Schaffer: The Micro-Translation of Borkenau’s Macro Model

In Leviathan and the Air-Pump(1985), Shapin and Schaffer reinterpreted the 17th-century dispute between Boyle and Hobbes as a social drama of epistemic authority.
Their argument—that experimental science depends upon trust, civility, and gentlemanly ethos—mirrors Borkenau’s insight that scientific rationality arises from bourgeois forms of cooperation and verification.

Where Borkenau spoke in terms of “world pictures” and “modes of production,” Shapin and Schaffer translated these categories into micro-practices of laboratory life, thereby operationalizing Borkenau’s social history at the level of experimental culture.

2. Steven Shapin:A Social History of Truth(1994)

Shapin’s later work explicitly historicizes the epistemic virtue of “truth-telling” within the context of 17th-century English gentlemen’s culture.
He demonstrates that the credibility of science depended upon social hierarchies of trust, not upon universal rationality.
This analysis can be viewed as a direct descendant of Borkenau’s effort to correlate ethics, social position, and epistemology within the structure of early modern society.

---

III. Bruno Latour: Networks, Hybrids, and the Deconstruction of Modernity

Bruno Latour’s work—from La science en action (1987) to Nous n’avons jamais été modernes (1991)—extends Borkenau’s macrosociological framework into a micropolitics of material and symbolic networks.

Latour rejects the classical division between “nature” and “society,” arguing that scientific modernity is constituted by hybrid networks of humans and non-humans (actants).
In his framework, instruments, machines, and texts are not passive media but actors in the production of knowledge.

Analytical Dimension	Franz Borkenau (1934)	Bruno Latour (1990s)
Core Problem	Transition of social orders (feudal → bourgeois)	Modern division of nature/society
Method	Macro-historical synthesis (economy, religion, ethics)	Micro-network analysis of actants
Concept of Science	Product of class and production structure	Outcome of heterogeneous assemblages
Form of Critique	Ideology critique of bourgeois rationality	Ontological critique of modernity
Common Ground	Science and society as co-constituted	Science and society as co-produced

Thus, Latour’s Actor–Network Theory (ANT) can be read as a micro-technological restatement of Borkenau’s socio-historical thesis.
Where Borkenau analyzed the macro structure of power and production, Latour renders visible the material and semiotic intermediaries—instruments, laboratories, and inscriptions—that perform the same social functions at the level of practice.

---

IV. The 21st-Century Renewal: Beyond the “Scientific Revolution” Model

By the 21st century, the very concept of a singular “Scientific Revolution” has been critically revised.
Yet Borkenau’s structural insights survive within three major research directions that dominate present-day science studies.

1. The Geopolitics and Situatedness of Knowledge

Contemporary theorists—Donna Haraway, Sandra Harding, and Latour himself—redefine scientific knowledge as situated and embodied rather than universal.
Borkenau’s linking of social position (class, vocation, ethos) with forms of knowledge prefigures this “positional epistemology.”
The modern question is no longer what is science? but whose science, and under what historical conditions?

2. The Turn to Material Culture and Practice

Historians such as Andrew Pickering and Hans-Jörg Rheinberger emphasize the material practices, instruments, and inscriptions of laboratory work.
Their notion of science as a “machinery of production” closely echoes Borkenau’s original idea of a manufacture of knowledge, connecting epistemology back to economic and technological forms.

3. The Pluralization of Modernity

Latour’s and John Law’s theories of “multiple modernities” and “heterogeneous engineering” move beyond Borkenau’s Eurocentric linear model (“feudal → bourgeois”).
Yet they preserve his underlying insight: that scientific rationality is a historical mode of world-ordering, not an inevitable universal trajectory.
In this sense, Borkenau becomes a foundational reference for the post-Western histories of science that now explore Indian, Chinese, Islamic, and African modernities.

---

V. Conclusion: From Borkenau to Latour—A Structural Continuum

Dimension	Borkenau (1934)	21st-Century Science Studies (Shapin, Latour, Haraway, etc.)
Concept of Science	Social product (linked to economy, religion, ethics)	Socially constructed and materially mediated knowledge
Methodology	Grand historical synthesis (macro-sociology)	Micro-practice analysis, material culture, network theory
Purpose	Explain rise of modern worldview	Critique and de-center the modern worldview
Continuity	Co-constitution of knowledge and social order	Co-production of knowledge and heterogeneous actors

---

Final Assessment

Franz Borkenau’s The Transition from the Feudal to the Bourgeois World Picture represents a proto-sociology of scientific knowledge avant la lettre.
His attempt to describe science as an expression of moral economy and social transformation anticipated the very questions that animate contemporary science studies.

In the 21st century, the most fruitful way to inherit Borkenau’s legacy is not to treat him as a historical curiosity of the 1930s,
but to re-connect his macro-social model with the micro-practices and actor-networks illuminated by Latour, Shapin, and others.

Such a synthesis—combining Borkenau’s historical depth with the relational and material insights of modern STS—
would realize what he himself could only intuit: a total history of knowledge that unites production, belief, technology, and power into a single dynamic field.