The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity [Paperback]

Anson Rabinbach (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 8, 1992

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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Drawing analogies from the 19th-century discovery of the laws of thermodynamics, European social scientists envisioned the toiling worker's body as a "human motor," a living machine; maximizing work-force efficiency and eradicating the "disease" of fatigue seemed within reach. Psychologists and physiologists subjected the body's rhythms and movements to laboratory study. The psychiatric complaint of neurasthenia, or nervous exhaustion, was epidemic, and German scientists in the early 1900s sought a vaccine to cure fatigue. In a dense, rewarding study, Rabinbach ( The Crisis of Austrian Socialism ) shows how the "science of work," spreading beyond such areas as industrial management, physical education and accident prevention, pervaded the language of technocrats, Marxists and fascists who viewed the worker as a machine. He pinpoints a source of modern spiritual malaise: the transformation from a strictly work-centered society to one in which work has been abandoned as a source of self-fulfillment.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review

"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

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Product Details

• Paperback: 432 pages
• Publisher: University of California Press (January 8, 1992)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0520078276
• ISBN-13: 978-0520078277
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.8 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #213,947 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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0 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good amount of historical human thermodynamic trivia., November 17, 2009

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Libb Thims (Chicago) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity (Paperback)

The book is similar in theme and content to Mirowski's 1989 More Heat than Light (albeit less technically rigorous), containing interesting trivia tidbits, e.g. that German mathematician Carl Neumann, the first to introduce the d-hat derivative symbol for inexact differentials (1875), had views on how economic life related to energetic components of energy exchanges between people. Here's a short bio on Rabinbach:

[...]

He states that the book originated from a 1993 paper he wrote.