42 pages • 1 hour read
Silvia FedericiCaliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2004A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapter 3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 3 Summary: “The Great Caliban”
The early modern period gave rise to a new concept of the conflicted individual, who struggles between reason and base, bodily instincts. This struggle is exemplified by Shakespeare’s The Tempest, in which Prospero, who symbolizes human reason, defeats Caliban, a witch’s monstrous son who represents the unruly body. Internal conflict between reason and the body reflects early modern reality. Europe’s powerful elites struggled to dominate the disorderly masses who succumbed to bodily urges, like idleness. These lower bodies, however, were also integral to the generation of wealth. They were “the container of labor-power” (137), thus explaining the intelligentsia’s focus on the body.
Mechanical philosophy approaches the body as a machine that can be dissected, understood, and manipulated. The philosopher René Descartes’s perspective made the human body a useful “tool” of capitalism that is “divorced from the person” and “dehumanized” (139-40). The rise of rational thought dismantled the medieval idea of the “magical” body “that did not admit to any separation between matter and spirit” (141). According to this medieval perspective, work was not essential to bettering one’s existence. Early modern elites’ desire to destroy this “magical” thinking fueled witch-hunting because “the very existence of magical beliefs was a source of social insubordination” (143). The state saw fit to regulate both physical and social bodies, which caused the “homogenization of social behavior” and social sciences’ reduction of humans to generalized types (145).
Descartes’s separation of the body machine from the rational mind promoted “self-mastery” and individualism. Elites used this thought to justify control over the proletariat and rationalize male power over irrational and inferior women and people of color. The physical body became an offensive site just as elites disdained the proletarian “body.” Mastery of both was critical for capitalism’s triumph.
Chapter 3 Analysis
The book’s third chapter provides an important basis for understanding the elite intellectual foundations of capitalist exploitation and The “Great Witch-Hunt” as a Patriarchal Tool of Oppression. Federici crafts a novel analysis of Enlightenment philosophy’s impact on the capitalist dehumanization of the literal and figurative proletarian body.
Some scholars of early modern witchcraft credit the Enlightenment’s rationalism with bringing the witch hunts to a close. Federici disagrees with this perspective and gives little attention to the role new scientific thought had in their conclusion. She claims:
The incompatibility of magic with the capitalist work-discipline and the requirement of social control is one of the reasons why a campaign of terror was launched against it by the state—a terror applauded without reservation by many who are presently considered among the founders of scientific rationalism (143).
Federici highlights René Descartes’s (1596-1650) dualism. Descartes was a philosopher and scientific revolutionary of the late early modern period whom she credits with introducing a distinction between the body and rational mind, thereby allowing capitalism to “other” the working class. Proletarians became corporeal. Meanwhile, educated elites were rational beings equipped to dominate the lower class “body.”
However, by 1700 witch-hunting had decreased. Federici attributes its demise to the security capitalist authorities felt, but questions if that is the only explanation for their decline, or if multiple factors brought early witch-hunting to its end. Further, how does one account for the coincidental growth of the Enlightenment and the end of witch-hunting? Historian Michael Wasser, for example, argues that mechanical philosophy was critical to witch-hunting’s demise in Scotland because it called into question the evidence used in prosecutions. Jeffrey Burton Russell contends that Descartes rendered the idea of demonic forces irrational. Similarly, witchcraft scholar Brian P. Levack credits Descartes with popularizing a “systematic expression of doubt” that contributed to skepticism of witchcraft and the decline of witch hunts. According to Levack:
[T]he spread of the belief in a universe governed by immutable laws of nature among the educated, especially towards the end of the 17th century, gradually helped to undermine witch beliefs and discourage witchcraft prosecutions during their final days (Levack, Brian P. The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe. 4th ed., Routledge, 2016).
Mechanical philosophy may well have played a significant role in capitalism’s triumph by divorcing the body from mind, subordinating the proletariat, and increasing labor expectations of a malleable workforce. Its role in fostering witch-hunting as a means of controlling the body, however, is debatable.
