Just as ancient rationalist ideas can be traced back to Aristocratic notions invented and then propagated by Greek Philosophers (concerning the ‘natural’ hierarchical or divine order underpinning the Universe, a view itself motivated by the need to ‘justify’ ruling-class power, social stratification, exploitation, oppression and inequality), the origin of more recent Atomist and Empiricist theories of the so-called ‘Universals’ can be linked to the post-Renaissance and early modern rise of Bourgeois ‘democracy’, with its characteristic emphasis on “possessive individualism”. [On that, see Note 2.]
If this new, post-Renaissance social order was meant to be democratic (but only “within certain limits”), founded on the presumed psychology of the fabled Bourgeois Individual, then private ownership in the means of mental production made eminent good sense.
The fragmentation introduced into society by the break-up of feudal relations of production and rise of Capitalism was mirrored by an analogous dissolution of Aristotelian universals into ‘ideas’ scattered across countless million isolated bourgeois heads. Out of the window went the ‘necessary’ connection between an object and its properties, or a subject and its predicates; along with that went the link between a general term and what it supposedly represented, or reflected, in ‘reality’ – or even in the ‘mind’.
[The helps explain Hegel’s adoption of the Identity Theory of Predication mentioned earlier, since that theory and its attendant concepts attempted to re-establish these ‘necessary’ connections, which endeavour also formed part of his answer to Hume’s criticisms of rationalist theories of causation.]
Capitalism ‘freed’ workers from the land and Empiricism freed Ideas from the Platonic Forms and all those Aristotelian Universals; the old ontological pecking-order crumbled as new market conditions swept all before them. However, the need still remained to ‘justify’ undemocratic and oppressive state power and rationalise the newly emerging class relations that came in their train; this in turn meant that theorists now had to concoct novel ways of conceptualising ‘bourgeois reality’.
As we will soon see, in this respect Empiricism couldn’t cut mustard. A fresh wave of Rationalist thought was urgently needed to (i) Counter this novel fragmentation of knowledge, (ii) Provide the theoretical and ideological unification required by the recently emerged, Absolutist Bourgeois Nation State, and (iii) ‘Justify’ its ‘rightful’, or ‘god-given’, sovereignty. The ideas of Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Wolff, Kant and Hegel were thus thrown into the breach, as fresh waves of boss-class theory flowed from these newly commissioned ruling-class hacks.1c0
Even so, just as workers still got screwed by this novel ‘market economy’ (only now in new ways), general ideas were similarly shafted (but in the same old way).1c
Once more, this turn to Rationalism was futile; the fragmentation of general ideas carried out in Ancient Greece can’t be reversed – whoever tries to do it – unless and until the syntactic sins of yesteryear have themselves been acknowledged and then corrected.
Indeed, as those fabled soldiers found with respect to Humpty Dumpty, once in pieces, ‘general concepts’ are impossible to put back together again.