What was happily proved by this early revolution is something that we perhaps need to be reminded of again today: that neither exact science nor engi… - Lewis Mumford

In his conception of science's method and role, then, Descartes openly followed the style of the Renascence despot; he preferred absolute government, with its Procrustean simplifications, to democratic government, with its divided powers, its tenacious traditions, its embarrassing historic contradictions, its confusion and compromises and obscurities. But the acceptance of the latter is in fact the necessary price for a method capable of embracing the complexities of life without leaving any function or purpose unrecognized, uncounted, or uncared for. By his penchant for political absolutism Descartes paved the way for the eventual militarization of both science and technics.

This New World utopia, this promised land, was soon buried under the ashes and cinders that erupted over the Western World in the nineteenth century, thanks tot he resurrection and intensification of all the forces that had originally brought 'civilization' itself into existence. The rise of the centralized state, teh expansion of the bureaucracy and the conscript army, the regimentation of the factory system, the depredations of speculative finance, the spread of imperialism, as in the Mexican War, and the continued encroachment of slavery-all these negative movements not only sullied the New World dream but brought back on a larger scale than ever the Old World nightmares that the immigrants to America had risked their lives and forfeited their cultural treasures to escape.

The settlement of America had its origins in the unsettlement of Europe. America came into existence when the European was already so distant from the ancient ideas and ways of his birthplace that the whole span of the Atlantic did not widen the gulf.