Margaret Cavendish
“For I doubt not, but if it had been a thing contrary to any
man's right of dominion, or to the interest of men that have dominion, that the
three angles of a triangle should be equal to two angles of a square, that
doctrine should have been, if not disputed, yet by the burning of all books of
geometry suppressed, as far as he whom it concerned was able.”
Thomas Hobbes
“Thus, Karl Marx wrote about the British origin of modern
materialism. If Englishmen nowadays do not exactly relish the compliment he
paid their ancestors, more's the pity. It is none the less undeniable that
Bacon, Hobbes, and Locke are the fathers of that brilliant school of French
materialism which made the eighteenth century, despite all battles on land and
sea won over Frenchmen by Germans and Englishmen, a pre-eminently French
century, even before that crowning French Revolution, the results of which we
outsiders, in England as well as Germany, are still trying to acclimatize.”
Frederick Engels- Dialectics of Nature
The first thing that emerges from Francesca Peacock's 2023
book is that Margaret Cavendish (1623–1673), Duchess of Newcastle, a staunch
Royalist author and philosopher, was profoundly influenced by the English
bourgeois revolution. Although hostile to the revolution and all it stood for,
she utilised her unique intellectual voice to understand what was unfolding
around her as the world turned upside down.
The English Civil War and Revolution of the 1640s was not,
as Whig historians preferred to imagine, a constitutional misunderstanding
between king and Parliament. According to historian Christopher Hill, it was a
genuine class revolution: the rising bourgeoisie, allied with sections of the
gentry, overthrew the feudal monarchical order and cleared the ground for the
development of capitalism in England. Hill, the greatest historian of this
period, demonstrated that the execution of Charles I was not a ghastly mistake
but "a complete break with the feudal past," of profound
revolutionary significance. When the people put their king on trial and
beheaded him, no subsequent monarch ever sat entirely comfortably on that
throne again.
Although she lived over a century before Karl Marx, some
left-leaning modern academics and writers who analyse her work through a
semi-Marxist lens have even argued that there are strong parallels between her
17th-century natural philosophy and later theories of dialectical materialism.
Specifically, her belief in a self-moving, intelligent, and interconnected
material world renders her a "precursor" to Marxist dialectical
materialism.
This has made Cavendish a genuinely fascinating figure of
the 17th-century English bourgeois revolution. A prolific writer across genres
(philosophy, poetry, drama, fiction, and early proto-science fiction with The
Blazing World), she engaged seriously with the mechanist natural philosophy
of her era, debating figures like Descartes, Hobbes, and van Helmont. She was
one of the first women admitted to a meeting of the Royal Society. Her
intellectual ambitions were remarkable for any person of her time.
The connection between Margaret Cavendish and Thomas Hobbes
is well worth a look at. Both were central figures in 17th-century English
intellectual life, and their relationship illuminates some of the deepest
questions in the history of materialism.
Hobbes (1588–1679) was not, as some liberal and postmodern
academics would have it, a reactionary ideologue of authoritarianism. He was,
as Engels recognised, one of the founders of modern materialism, a thinker who,
alongside Bacon and Locke, formed the philosophical chain that ran from England
through the French Enlightenment, ultimately contributing to the intellectual
conditions that made the French Revolution possible and, beyond it, to
dialectical and historical materialism itself.
Hobbes’s connection with Cavendish was both direct and
personal. Margaret Cavendish was the wife of William Cavendish, Duke of
Newcastle, the very Cavendish family whose patronage sustained Hobbes for over
seven decades. Margaret Cavendish lived at the centre of this intellectual
world. During the Civil War and the Interregnum, the Cavendish household, in
exile on the Continent, was a gathering point for Royalist émigrés and natural
philosophers, and Hobbes was part of this milieu.
Her philosophical position puts her in an interesting
relationship to Hobbes. Both were materialists but of significantly different
kinds. Cavendish rejected the mechanistic materialism that Hobbes (and
Descartes, whom she also engaged with critically) championed. Against the view
that matter is inert and moved only by external mechanical force, Cavendish
argued for a vitalist materialism: matter itself, she held, is active,
self-moving, and possessed of something like perception or cognition at every
level. She was also an outspoken critic of the experimental method championed
by the Royal Society, arguing (in her Observations upon Experimental
Philosophy, 1666) that telescopes and microscopes distort rather than reveal
nature. That reason applied to natural observation without a mechanical
apparatus is more reliable.
This is where the contradictions of her class position
become interesting. She was an aristocratic Royalist — her husband, William
Cavendish, was a leading commander for Charles I, and the family spent years in
exile during the Interregnum. Her intellectual freedom was inseparable from her
class privilege. Her access to books, philosophical correspondence, and
scientific circles was a product of her position at the apex of the
aristocratic hierarchy, not a challenge to it. She was not, in any meaningful
sense, a "revolutionary"; she was a defender of the old feudal-aristocratic
order against the revolutionary bourgeoisie that was remaking England.
The bourgeois revolution she opposed was, at the same time,
creating social ferment that was generating the Scientific Revolution,
dismantling Aristotelian scholasticism, fostering a new interest in nature as a
material reality governed by discoverable laws, and challenging religious
authority. The very intellectual tools she used were being forged by the same
historical process that had destroyed her family's wealth and power. She could
not entirely escape the spirit of her age, even as she tried to reconstruct the
aristocratic world that had been shattered.
As the Marxist writer David North so eloquently put it, “Until
the early seventeenth century, even educated people still generally accepted
that the ultimate answers to all the mysteries of the universe and the problems
of life were to be found in the Old Testament. But its unchallengeable
authority had been slowly eroding, especially since the publication of
Copernicus’s De Revolutionibus in the year of his death in 1543, which dealt
the death blow to the Ptolemaic conception of the universe and provided the
essential point of departure for the future conquests of Tycho Brahe
(1546-1601), Johann Kepler (1571-1630) and, of course, Galileo Galilei
(1564-1642). Intellectually, if not yet socially, the liberation of man from
the fetters of Medieval superstition and the political structures that rested
upon it was well underway. The discoveries in astronomy profoundly changed the
general intellectual environment. Above all, there was a new sense of the power
of thought and what it could achieve if allowed to operate without the
artificial restraints of untested and unverifiable dogmas.
Religion began to encounter the type of disrespect it
deserved, and the gradual decline of its authority introduced a new optimism.
All human misery, the Bible had taught for centuries, was the inescapable
product of the Fall of Man. But the invigorating scepticism encouraged by
science in the absolute validity of the Book of Genesis led thinking people to
wonder whether man couldn't change the conditions of his existence and enjoy a
better world.”[1]
Peacock’s first book, Pure Wit: The Revolutionary Life of
Margaret Cavendish, makes a valuable contribution by rescuing Cavendish
from the obscurity imposed by earlier critics who had laid a considerable
number of dead dogs on top of her reputation. However, it exemplifies a trend
often found in modern cultural biography: the application of contemporary
identity-political categories to historical figures. In this case, Cavendish is
portrayed through the lens of modern preoccupations, with her eccentricity,
gender nonconformity, prolific publication, and resistance to social
expectations for women recast as attributes of a proto-feminist
"revolutionary".
This approach reflects more the concerns of today's
upper-middle-class academic culture than the realities of 17th-century England.
While reading Peacock’s work critically can yield valuable insights into
Cavendish's intellectual life, the reader needs to maintain a degree of
scepticism regarding the "revolutionary" framing. Such a perspective
tends to absorb a complex historical figure into present-day identity-political
narratives, thereby oversimplifying the intricate class dynamics that
characterised the English Revolution.
Cavendish is now celebrated as an
early feminist icon. She was the first woman to participate in a Royal Society
meeting, boldly published her work despite norms that expected women to stay
hidden, and earned the nickname "Mad Madge" for her unconventional
behaviour. This recuperation is not entirely wrong, but it is
ideologically loaded in a specific way: it abstracts Cavendish's gender from
her class. It presents her eccentricity as a kind of individual heroism.
She stands in this constellation as a paradox: a serious
philosophical mind whose very creativity was unlocked by the same revolution
she personally mourned. That paradox is not a biographical curiosity; it is a
demonstration of the materialist conception of history itself: that the
development of human thought is inseparable from the class conflicts that drive
history forward.
[1] Equality, the Rights of Man and the Birth of Socialism-www.wsws.org/en/articles/1996/10/lect-o24.html
