What a great line!

I remember once saying something along those lines here myself. I remarked that the old (dare I say, reactionary?) world view was finally demolished by Karl Marx, Charles Darwin, Sigmund Freud and Isaac Newton. All for pretty much the same reasons. They replaced a world created and planned by god with one which could be understood by scientific principles. Of course, scientific principles are not fixed, they can be updated, revised, even replaced, but they do not rely on mysticism. They posit that the world can be understood as the manifestation of relations which arise naturally, you don't need a puppet master pulling the strings. It was the final triumph of the pre-Socratic philosophers of Ionia: there is a real world out there independent of man and the gods, and it can be observed and understood by reason.

Newton showed us that the physical universe was not run by the diety, but was based on simple rules derivable by mathematics from observation. Physics has progressed greatly since then, with Maxwell, Einstein and the quantum, but Newton was the breakthrough. Mechanics is not magic, its math.

In Economics, Marx showed that the observations of Adam Smith could be explained, not just accepted as received wisdom, and that they could be related, to sociology, politics and history, in fact, were inseparable from them. Again, there were reasons why things happened, it wasn't the will of god manifesting itself. Trying to apply these observations into a political program led to disaster, but you can't really understand economics without his insights. Without Marx, economics becomes a blatant justification to protect the wealth and political influence of those who have already accumulated it.

Much the same can be said for Freudian psychology. Today it has been pretty much discredited as a means of clinical treatment, or even as a model for the human personality, but it was the first attempt to place human psychology on a scientific basis, to divorce it from the concept of the spirit and the soul and replace that with a model, albeit a 19th century hydraulic one. We have other models, today, but Freud was the first. Prior to him it was all mumbo-jumbo.

And finally, Darwinism. Living creatures were exquisitely adapted to their environment not by the design of a creator, but by a stochastic mechanism, natural selection, one that has to work, it is inevitable. Evolution was not the whole story, Darwin had no knowledge of Mendelian genetics, and could not conceive of molecular biology and DNA, but he was still able to see their result and effect by simple observation. It was a triumph of the human mind.

Reactionaries have always attacked Marx, Freud and Darwin. Not because they were mistaken, or needed correction, but because the very idea that there was an external reality capable of being understood by reason was anathema to them.

On the other hand, Newtonian mechanics recieved very little opposition when it was introduced in the 18th century. Perhaps it was because physics was perceived as a field which could not threaten the existing political, economic, or religious power structure. Or perhaps because it provided such immediately verifiable proofs, a characterestic absent from philosophical speculations in economics, psychology and biology.

Or perhaps it was because Newtonian mechanics arose in an age when the ability to understand and predict its consequences was limited to an educated elite. Or perhaps because it was the Age of Reason, the Enlightenment. Marx, Freud and Darwin are products of the 19th century, the Age of Romanticism and revolution...the age of reaction and nostalgia for a pastoral, simpler age, for a past that never really was.