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3:27

(In »The four paradigms in the history of metaphysics«)

By building a maximally functional hierarchy of literate soldiers – even the cannon-fodder at the front lines were educated before waging war in Napoleon’s army – with himself in the function as God’s all-seeing eye at the very top of the hierarchy, Napoleon created a fascinating killing machine of a kind never beheld before. Subsequently, all the institutions of industrialism were built in the 19th century with Napoleon’s army as a shining example: the nation state and all its bureaucrats, the company and its factories, the police, the prison, the school, the hospital, the colony on the other side of the ocean: organisationally they are all direct copies of Napoleon’s feared and admired army. According to Isaac Newton, the father of classical physics, history is a kind of perfect machine that grinds away in a completely deterministic manner without the smallest departure from preordained laws and rules. Newton’s idea of the Universe as a (by God) wound-up clock that ticks on forever inspired both Napoleon’s organisational architecture and Hegel’s historicism.