Authority, Liberty, and Automatic Machinery in Early Modern Europe

Erscheinungsjahr 1989
ISBN: 978-0-8018-3939-9
Verlag: Johns Hopkins University Press

Buch, Englisch, Band 8, 288 Seiten, Format (B × H): 152 mm x 229 mm, Gewicht: 471 g

Reihe: Johns Hopkins Studies in the History of Technology

Perhaps never in history has society been so fascinated with a single machine as when, in early modern Europe, the clock evolved into a major cultural image, widely used in literature, science, and especially Cartesian philosophy. Yet in England, there was greater interest in a different class of technology-the feedback device, such as the safety valve on a steam engine, that could control itself internally;self-regulating systems were hallmarks not only of practical technology but also of the abstract theories of Newton and Adam Smith.

Otto Mayr, the director of Germany's leading technological museum, explores the relationship between machinery, technological thought, and culture. Contrasting England and the Continent, particularly in the eighteenth century, he uncovers a stikring pattern of technological metaphors applied to political systems-and lays the foundations of a new intellectual history of technology

Autoren/Hrsg.

Mayr, Otto

Fachgebiete

• Technische Wissenschaften Technik Allgemein Technikgeschichte
• Technische Wissenschaften Maschinenbau | Werkstoffkunde Maschinenbau
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Europäische Geschichte
• Technische Wissenschaften Technik Allgemein Erfindungen und Erfinder 

Inhaltsverzeichnis

List of Illustrations
Ackowledgments
Introduction
Part I. Authoritarian Systems
1. The Mechanical Clock, Its Makers and Users
2. The Rise of the Clock Metaphor
3. The Clockwork Universe
4. The Clockwork State
5. The Authoritarian Conception of Order
6. Rejection of the Clock Metaphor in the Name of Liberty
Part II. Liberal Systems
7. Imagery of Balance and Equilibrium
8. Attraction and Repulsion
9. Self-balancing Political Systems
10. Self-regulation in Economic Thought
11. Self-regulation and the Liberal Conception of Order
12. Self-regulating Mechanisms in Practical Technology
Notes
Illustration Credits
Index

Über Autor(innen)

Mayr, Otto
Ottor Mayr is director of the Deutsches Museum in Munich and former curator and acting director of the National Museum of History and Technology at the Smithsonian Institution. He is the author of Origins of Feedback Control and Feedback Mechanism and the editor of Philosophers and Machines, The Clockwork Universe, and Yankee Enterprise.