Description
The Eclipse of the Utopias of Labor traces the shift from the eighteenth-century concept of man as machine to the late twentieth-century notion of digital organisms. Step by step--from Jacques de Vaucanson and his Digesting Duck, through Karl Marx's Capital, Hermann von Helmholtz's social thermodynamics, Albert Speer's Beauty of Labor program in Nazi Germany, and on to the post-Fordist workplace, Rabinbach shows how society, the body, and labor utopias dreamt up future societies and worked to bring them about.
This masterful follow-up to The Human Motor, Rabinbach's brilliant study of the European science of work, bridges intellectual history, labor history, and the history of the body. It shows the intellectual and policy reasons as to how a utopia of the body as motor won wide acceptance and moved beyond the "man as machine" model before tracing its steep decline after 1945--and along with it the eclipse of the great hopes that a more efficient workplace could provide the basis of a new, more socially satisfactory society.Author: Anson Rabinbach
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Published: 02/06/2018
Pages: 232
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.75lbs
Size: 8.90h x 5.90w x 1.20d
ISBN13: 9780823278572
ISBN10: 0823278573
BISAC Categories:
- Computers | Human-Computer Interaction (HCI)
- Political Science | Labor & Industrial Relations
About the Author
Anson Rabinbach is Philip and Beulah Rollins Professor of History at Princeton University. Among his recent books is The Third Reich Sourcebook.