Technology the emergence of a hazardous concept

Technology and Culture

Volumn 51, Issue 3, 2010, Pages 561-577

  Marx, Leo ^a  

^a MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 77958057270     PISSN: 0040165X     EISSN: 10973729     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/tech.2010.0009     Document Type: Review

References (34)

1. Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovett (New York, 1977), 4.
2. Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson, Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence (New York, 1996), 61.
3. Erik Schatzberg, "Technik Comes to America: Changing Meanings of Technology before 1930," Technology and Culture 47 (2006): 486-512. The first use of the amplified sense of the word, referring to the mechanic arts themselves, according to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), was in 1859; variants of the older meaning of technology e.g., technik, technique, etc. also had appeared in German, Swedish, French, and Spanish in the late eighteenth century. 2.
4. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Phillips Bradley (New York, 1946), II:98 (the OED credits the Henry Reeve translation of 1835 with the first use of the word in English);
5. Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, 1780-1950 (New York: 1983), xiii-xviii; Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (New York, 1985), 11-26 and 315-16.
6. Thomas Carlyle, "Signs of the Times," Edinburgh Review (1829), reprinted in Selected Writings, ed. Alan Shelston (New York, 1971), 64. Carlyle, incidentally, is credited with the first use of the word industrialism, in Sartor Resartus (1831). 2.
7. Daniel Webster, Writing and Speeches of Daniel Webster (Boston, 1903), IV:105-7.
8. For a more detailed analysis of the speech in the context of American pastoralism, see Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York, 1964), 209-14.
9. Thus when Benjamin Franklin was offered a potentially lucrative patent for his ingenious new stove, he explained his refusal to accept the patent by invoking the communitarian republican notion that inventions are valued for their contribution to the polity: "I declined it from a principle which has ever weighed with me on such occasions, that as we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours" (The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin [NewYork 1950] 132). For other discussions of this topic, see Leo Marx, "Does Improved Technology Mean Progress?" Technology Review (January 1987, 32-41, and Leo Marx and Bruce Mazlish, eds., Progress: Fact or Illusion? (Ann Arbor, Mich. 1996).
10. Robert F. Dalzell Jr., Enterprising Elite: The Boston Associates and the World They Made (Cambridge, Mass., 1987).
11. John Stuart Mill, "M. de Tocqueville on Democracy in America," Edinburgh Review (October 1840), reprinted in John Stuart Mill, Dissertations and Discussions . . . (Boston, 1865), II:148. 8.
12. Henry Thoreau, Walden and Other Writings (New York, 1950), 46 (my emphasis).
13. Herman Melville, Moby Dick (New York, 1967 [1851]), 161.
14. I add the qualification, "the modern era," to acknowledge the provocative theory, advanced by Lewis Mumford, to the effect that the first "machine" was in fact such a system, the systematic organization of work contrived by the Egyptians to build the pyramids. A fatal shortcoming of Mumford's theory is that it omits the indispensable arti-factual component of both the machine and also, when it later emerges, the concept of technology. Lewis Mumford, The Myth of the Machine: Technics and Human Development (New York, 1966); for a more extended critical analysis of Mumford's theory, see Leo Marx, "Lewis Mumford, Prophet of Organicism," in Lewis Mumford, Public Intellectual, ed. Thomas P. Hughes and Agatha C. Hughes (New York, 1990), 164-80.
15. Wiebe E. Bijker, Thomas P. Hughes, and Trevor J. Pinch, eds., The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology (Cambridge, Mass., 1987), 51-82;
16. Alfred D. Chandler Jr., The Visible Hand: The Managerial Innovation in American Business (Cambridge, Mass., 1977), 79-120.
17. Colleen Dunlavy, Politics and Industrialization: Early Railroads in the United States and Prussia (Princeton, N.J., 1994); Forest G. Hill, Roads, Rails, and Waterways: The Army Engineers andEarly Transportation (Tulsa, Okla., 1957). At West Point, the military engineers, trained in the tradition of the École Polytechnique, acquired a more sophisticated knowledge of geometry, physics, and of science generally than most American engineers of that era. A number of them left the army to became "civil" engineers and worked on the railroad. I am grateful to Merritt Roe Smith for calling my attention to this development.
18. David Noble, America by Design: Science, Technology, and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism (New York, 1977).
19. Jacob Bigelow, Elements of Technology (Boston, 1829). Bigelow's lectures were supported by the endowment of Count Rumford, who, in his 1815 will, had left Harvard $1,000 a year for lectures designed to teach the utility of the physical and mathematical sciences for the improvement of the useful arts, and for the extension of the industry, prosperity, happiness, and well-being of society.
20. See Dirk Struik, Yankee Science in the Making (Boston, 1948), 58 and 169-70.
21. Struik, 169-70; Noble, 3-4; and Marx, The Machine in the Garden (n. 6 above), 149. 14.
22. Ruth Oldenziel, Making Technology Masculine: Men, Women, and Modern Machines in America (Amsterdam, 1999), 23; Schatzberg (n. 3 above).
23. Arnold Toynbee, The Industrial Revolution (Boston, 1960).
24. Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th ed., XXVI:487.
25. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, ed. Friedrich Engels (New York, 1906), 406n2. The text is that of the first American edition of the initial (1867) English translation. 14.
26. Cited by Peter Schjeldahl, "Bauhaus Rules: The Making of a Modern Aesthetic," The New Yorker, 16 November 2009, 82.
27. Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams, ed. Ernest Samuels (Boston, 1973), 496-97. 14.
28. Thorstein Veblen, "The Place of Science in Modern Civilization," in What Veblen Taught, ed. Wesley C. Mitchell (New York, 1945), 20;
29. Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of Business Enterprise (New York, 1932), 303 and 310-11. For a detailed analysis of Veblen's pivotal role in introducing the concept of technology in America, see Schatzberg (n. 3 above).
30. Heidegger (n. 1 above), 4. For my criticism of Heidegger's argument, see "On Heidegger's Conception of 'Technology' and Its Historical Validity," The Massachusetts Review 25 (winter 1984): 638-52.
31. Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America (New York, 1982), 55.
32. George Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. R. Livingstone (Cambridge, 1971), 83-87.
33. See also Langdon Winner, Autonomous Technology: Technology-out-of-Control as a Theme of Political Thought (Cambridge, 1977).
34. In 1996-97, in writing the first iteration of this argument, I conducted an unscientific survey of the uses of the concept of technology in public discourse. Among the typical items I found were a special issue of the New York Times Magazine from 28 September 1997 devoted to a discussion entitled "What Technology Is Doing to Us"; since then I have also encountered Anthony Doerr, "Which Way Will Technology Take Us?" Boston Globe, 2 October 2005.