From thermostatics -- to the thermokinetics
  Present-day thermodynamics has long outgrown the initial frames of the heat-engine theory and transmuted into a rather general macroscopic method for studying kinetics of various transfer processes in their inseparable connection with the thermal form of motion. However its primary notions and mathematical instrument as before based on concepts of thermostatics, to wich time, speed and productivity of processes are alien, and on the equations transitory in case of irreversible processes in inequalities. It is offered essentially other approach at wich the thermostatics equations follow from thermokinetics of spatially non-uniform systems. 
V.A Etkin
physics.gen-ph physics.hist-ph