Title page to John Desaqulier’s 1728 The Newtonian System of the World: the Best Model of Government, wherein he attempts to outline a “Newtonian government” system, a celestial mechanics stylized politics, i.e. government based on Newtonian mechanics, the three laws of motion. [1]

“Among my philosophical inquiries, I have considered government as a phenomenon, and looked upon that form of it to be most perfect, which did most nearly resemble the natural government [see: natural government] of our system, according to the laws settled by the all-wife and almighty architect of the universe.

Those philosophers who wanted observations and mathematics, or would not make use of them, have given us such incoherent hypotheses concerning celestial appearances, and the causes of the motions of the heavenly bodies; that the very worst form of government cannot be so inconvenient to those who live under it, as the wild notions of such philosophers are shocking to unprejudiced reason and common sense.

But when the incomparable Isaac Newton gives us facts and demonstrations, instead of suppositions and conjectures, how is the mind charmed with the beauty of the system? What traces of divine wisdom do we see in the most regular action of universal gravity, (or attraction) whose power is diffused from the sun to the very centers of all the planets and comets, and acts upon the most distant of those bodies, in as mathematical a manner as it does upon the nearest? How wonderfully does it bring back the comets from their immensely distant aphelion, in their very long ellipses, by the same laws that it keeps the nearest planet mercury in its orbit: The former describing equal areas in equal times round the sun, as regularly as the latter, whilst gravity always checks the projectile force, (whereby the bodies tend to fly from the sun) in proportion to the quantity of that force.

The limited monarchy, whereby our liberties, rights, and privileges are so well secured to us, as to make us happier than all the nations round about us, seems to be a lively image of our system; and the happiness that we enjoy under his present majesty's government, makes us sensible, that ATTRACTION is now as universal in the political, as the philosophical world.

Your lordship's consummate knowledge of the laws of mature which are established in the heavens, as well as that of the laws of nations, and particularly those of Great Britain, makes the patronage of this poem your undoubted right. Your lordship can best judge, whether the allegory be just; and it is by your lordship’s approbation that I desire to stand or fall: only begging, that the truth of the philosophy may excuse the badness of the poetry.”

“The generic principles of a constitution are intended to perform a similar explanatory function to that of general hypothetical principles of the natural sciences—the principles of Newtonian mechanics, thermodynamics, relativity, quantum mechanics, genetics.”