The Social gravity as an application of Newtonian gravity to the system of commerce influence. For instance in The Administration of the Colonies (1764), Thomas Pownall (1722–1805) had used the Newtonian concept of "attraction" to form the basis of his political and commercial theory of empire. Pownall's vision provided an important explanation of the mechanism by which colonial theorists understood the possibility of empire being "transferred" from one state to another. Pownall applied the Newtonian concept of gravity to his theory of empire, as evident in his suggestion that the "laws of nature" held the colonies to Great Britain in a manner "analogous in all cases, by which the center of gravity in the solar system" held the planets in their orbits. In making this analogy, Pownall's notion of 'social gravity' drew upon earlier visions of social cohesion, particularly ideas of sociability in eighteenth-century Britain. These ideas, in turn, were often predicated upon Stoic notions of cosmopolitanism, expressed by the key term oikeiôsis, in order to stress the "moral" imperative for like-minded humans to forge bonds dedicated to the common good.
Famous quotes containing the words social and/or gravity:
“The rebel, unlike the revolutionary, does not attempt to undermine the social order as a whole. The rebel attacks the tyrant; the revolutionary attacks tyranny. I grant that there are rebels who regard all governments as tyrannical; nonetheless, it is abuses that they condemn, not power itself. Revolutionaries, on the other hand, are convinced that the evil does not lie in the excesses of the constituted order but in order itself. The difference, it seems to me, is considerable.”
—Octavio Paz (b. 1914)
“Grown beyond nature now, soft food for worms,
They lift frail heads in gravity and good faith.”
—Derek Mahon (b. 1941)