the death of nature women ecology and the scientific revolution

Horkheimer and Adorno thus argued that critical investigations into the western project of mastery of nonhuman nature must recognize the dimensions of human domination intertwined into the drive to subjugate the green world.Ĭarolyn Merchant's distinguished text The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution engaged in just such a critical investigation as it endeavored to reveal the historic connection between the domination of nature and women. Enlightened man's quest to overcome the primitive forces of nature demanded that he deploy entrepreneurial power over men and patriarchal power over women and children. Moreover, the drive for domination that Horkheimer and Adorno found at the core of western reason contained a gendered dimension. The values of calculation, quantification, and exchange that form the heart of bourgeois thinking are essential to social processes that seek to master nature.

Adorno argued that the Western project of enlightened thought - which they distinguished from 'the Enlightenment' as a historic period - conflated the technical domination of nature with the social domination of people. In their classic work Dialectic of Enlightenment, German Critical Theorists Max Horkheimer and Theodor W.

A Dialectic of Domination: Carolyn Merchant's The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution

The death of nature women ecology and the scientific revolution