Anson Rabinbach
The Human Motor
Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity
$26.95, £15.95 paperback
978-0-520-07827-7
Available Now
,
January 1992, Available worldwide
Categories: History; History of Science; Social & Political Thought
January 1992, Available worldwide
Categories: History; History of Science; Social & Political Thought
"A fine example of what might be called the new cultural history of science. Tracing in great detail how one metaphor from science and technology has shaped contemporary political and social thought, The Human Motor is an intriguing study."—Robert Howard, New York Times Book Review
"Rabinbach has performed a major feat of historical reconstruction. The Human Motor is a skillful and theoretically informed synthesis of social and intellectual history."—Jackson Lears, The New Republic
"Rabinbach has performed a major feat of historical reconstruction. The Human Motor is a skillful and theoretically informed synthesis of social and intellectual history."—Jackson Lears, The New Republic
"Masterfully integrating Europe-wide debates in science, philosophy, technology, economics, and social policy, Rabinbach has provided us with a profoundly original understanding of the productivist obsessions from which we are still painfully freeing ourselves. . . . A splendid example of the mutual enrichment of intellectual and social history. It goes well beyond its central concern with the 'science of work' to illuminate everything it discusses, from Marxism to the social uses of photography, from cultural decadence to the impact of the First World War."—Martin Jay, University of California, Berkeley
Science once had an unshakable faith in its ability to bring the forces of nature—even human nature—under control. In this wide-ranging book Anson Rabinbach examines how developments in physics, biology, medicine, psychology, politics, and art employed the metaphor of the working body as a human motor.
From nineteenth-century theories of thermodynamics and political economy to the twentieth-century ideals of Taylorism and Fordism, Rabinbach demonstrates how the utopian obsession with energy and fatigue shaped social thought across the ideological spectrum.
From nineteenth-century theories of thermodynamics and political economy to the twentieth-century ideals of Taylorism and Fordism, Rabinbach demonstrates how the utopian obsession with energy and fatigue shaped social thought across the ideological spectrum.
In the Shadow of Catastrophe, by Anson Rabinbach