Andrew Ure

Andrew Ure (1778–1857) was a Scottish physician, chemist, and professor at the Andersonian Institution in Glasgow, best known today for his 1835 treatise The Philosophy of Manufactures. Before that work made him notorious, he had achieved a different kind of fame through his 1818 galvanic experiments on executed murderer Matthew Clydesdale — experiments that inhabited the same cultural moment as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Ure turned from electrifying corpses to defending factories with the same underlying intuition: that the boundary between the animate and the mechanical was less stable than theology supposed, and that the correct application of scientific technique could produce effects previously reserved for living intelligence. Karl Marx made Ure the villain of Capital's factory chapters, quoting him extensively precisely because he articulated industrial capitalism's logic without the euphemisms that subsequent apologists would learn to deploy.