Carolyn Merchant. The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the
Scientific Revolution. New York: HarperCollins, 1980. 348 pp.
$16.00 (paper), ISBN 978-0-06-250595-8. Reviewed by Kevin C.
Armitage (Department of History, University of Kansas) Published
on H-Ideas (September, 2000) A Dialectic of Domination: Carolyn
Merchant's The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the
Scientific Revolution [Note: This review is part of the H-Ideas
Retrospective Reviews series. This series reviews books
published during the twentieth century which have been deemed to
be among the most important contributions to the field of
intellectual history.] In their classic work Dialectic of
Enlightenment, German Critical Theorists Max Horkheimer and
Theodor W. 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. The values of
calculation, quantification, and exchange that