The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America

by Leo Marx

For over four decades, Leo Marx's work has focused on the relationship between technology and culture in 19th- and 20th-century America. His research helped to define--and continues to give depth to--the area of American studies concerned with the links between scientific and technological advances, and the way society and culture both determine these links. The Machine in the Garden fully examines the difference between the "pastoral" and "progressive" ideals which characterized early 19th-century American culture, and which ultimately evolved into the basis for much of the environmental and nuclear debates of contemporary society.

This new edition is appearing in celebration of the 35th anniversary of Marx's classic text. It features a new afterword by the author on the process of writing this pioneering book, a work that all but founded the discipline now called American Studies.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Philosophy, Technology, Nature, Literary Criticism, American

430 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1964

About the author

A specialist in the relationship between technology and culture in 19th and 20th century America, Leo Marx was Professor of the History and Philosophy of Science Emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Marx graduated from Harvard University with a BA in history and literature in 1941 and a PhD in the history of American civilization in 1950. Prior to joining the faculty of MIT in 1976, Marx taught at the University of Minnesota and at Amherst College.

Reviews

[Mark Bowles · Rating 5 out of 5]

A. Synopsis: This book describes and evaluates the uses of the pastoral ideal in the interpretation of the American experience. Marx attempts to (1) trace how the ideal was adapted to the conditions of American experience (the train through the countryside) (2) Discuss how the pastoral ideal emerged as a distinctly American theory of society (the middle landscape) and (3) trace its transformation under industrialization (change from pastoral ideal to pastoral design). This is not a book about literature; it is about the “region of culture where literature, general ideas, and certain products of the collective imagination (cultural symbols) meet.” (4)
B. Argument:
1. The change is from the Pastoral ideal (the sentimental view of the utopian Garden of Eden) to a industrial Pastoral design (this is a cultivated garden by man and his machines--the middle landscape)
2. Middle Landscape: This is the incorporation of technology into a pastoral ideal without disturbing the bucolic rural nature of America. This enabled the nation to “continue to define its purpose as the pursuit of rural happiness while devoting itself to productivity, wealth, and power” (226)
3. The middle landscape is the synthesis of the dialectic of garden, machine, middle landscape.
4. The resolution of the conflict between machine and garden offers several interpretations
a) Transcendental: Emerson, “The Yound American,” Thoreau Walden
b) Tragic: Hawthorne, “Ethan Brand,” Melville Moby Dick
c) Vernacular: Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
C. Sleepy Hollow, Hawthorne 1844
1. This is used as the basis for discussing the relationship between pastorialism and technology.
2. As he writes he tells of the harmony between the farmers and nature
3. Suddenly a train whistle interrupts him.
4. This sudden appearance of the machine invading the garden is a common literary theme
5. This episode describes the emergence (after 1844) of a new American post-romantic industrial vision
D. Shakespeare’s American fable
1. In 1611 he writes The Tempest which can be seen as a story about the New World
2. The theme of the play is about the conflict between nature and art (civilization)
3. Paradox of America
a) America was seen as a pastoral utopia to Europeans at this time. America as garden
b) America was also viewed as a desolate wilderness with no amenities of civilization
c) This conflicting paradox becomes a central theme of our national literature
4. Shakespeare resolves this conflict by saying that the artificial is a special human category of the natural
E. The Garden
1. The fully articulated pastoral idea of America did not emerge until the late 18th
2. Thomas Jefferson provides a thorough study of the pastoral idea in Notes on Virginia
a) The problem was that to put such ideas in effect would require a legislation against manufacturing
b) This was the type of governmental power that Jefferson detested
c) Therefore there was an inconsistency with Jefferson; Progress v. Pastoral ideas
F. The Machine
1. Jefferson did not see the steam engine as a threat
a) He believed the machine would blend into the garden
b) America represented the middle landscape: a balance between art (technology, civilization) and nature
2. By 1830 the contrasting image of the machine was becoming prevalent
a) Thomas Carlyle in England associated the machine with a mechanistic social system that was detrimental to individuals
3. Timothy Walker responded to Carlyle and defended mechanization
a) He discounted Carlyle’s solemn fears and believed that the machine always had a place in the garden
b) He said that the intellect and culture is cultivated by the machine
G. Other examples of the interactions between the machine and the garden
1. Emerson’s transcendentalism: technological progress shows human capabilities
2. Thoreau’s Walden: More tragic than Emerson. He says that men have become tools of their tools
3. Melville: In Moby Dick. In the whaling world mans connection to nature is through technology (harpoons, the ship, etc.)

[Jonathan · Rating 4 out of 5]

A lovely book. Leo Marx argues that the pastoral ideal in America -- developed first by Europeans projecting their hopes and fears onto a new landscape, then by native-born Americans examining their growing society -- expresses an ambivalence at the heart of the nation's character.

On the one hand, Marx argues, the pastoral always implies that the peaceful, natural countryside is threatened by the advance of technology and industry. Thus, pastoralism constitutes a form of protest against anxiety-inducing social change. It suggests (to invoke the book's leitmotif) that the noisy locomotive engine is a dangerous and upsetting intrusion into a valuable but fragile ("Arcadian") garden. On the other hand, he stresses, pastoralism is not primitivism. The rural landscape is not an untouched place; it is a place of habitation, proprietorship, and cultivation. The pastoral imagination situates itself in the "middle distance," in the frontier between decadence and savagery. It does not repudiate human society, but suggests a supposedly natural alternative to the way things have gone in the city, where population density and concentrated wealth make human society's flaws are most visible. In fact, pastoralism even presents a way to ratify technological development; Americans have frequently conjured what Marx calls the "technological sublime," the sense that human ingenuity manifests the deepest ways of God or nature. In the technological sublime, the machine actually becomes part of the pastoral landscape.

Marx builds his case on clever and persuasive readings of Shakespeare (The Tempest, which directly invokes the New World), Crèvecoeur, Jefferson, Hawthorne, Melville, Thoreau, Webster, and Twain, all of whom discussed or embodied this ambivalence, and on a brief analysis of certain American paintings that I wish were much more extensive.

The argument still holds up to scrutiny today. I am somewhat disappointed, however, that Marx does not do more to discuss the implicit image of the city in the American pastoral -- or the influence of very real Eastern and European cities on the development of the pastoral mode. I am convinced that the American pastoral itself is a product of urbanization and atlanticism, not of country or frontier life; yet for the most part, Marx takes the pastoral's existence for granted and does not investigate the reasons for its ascendancy in American writing.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting bout of literary criticism that seeks to tease out the thread of emerging industrialization as it threatened the Arcadian dream in 19th and 20th century American novels/art. Launching from Irving's Sleepy Hollow note to notice a train whistle toot off in the distance of Walden, Marx introduces some profound critical insights into how America is imagined.

Marx's chapter on Shakespeare's THE TEMPEST is an amazing exercise in critical extension, as he laces together a maze of speculation and careful reading to introduce us to a wonderful new potentiality encoded in the subtext of Prospero's sad journey - that it comments on the wilderness potential of the New World, America.

The progression from Jefferson's chapter, The Garden, into the chapter, The Machine, which deals with lesser known Coxe is a seamless maneavouer which makes narrative sense. Marx's careful study needs to be credited for such linear coherency.

The bits on Melville and Twain are brilliant too.

All in all, it had a good beat and I totally danced to it.

[allyson dunn-worthy · Rating 5 out of 5]

quite literally ripped to shreds - LOVED!! top 10 book. glueing pages into my journal. forming a book club & a fan club. getting a tattoo. jay miller recs ❌ never let me down

[Alexandra · Rating 4 out of 5]

Insanely long plot summary of Moby-Dick in here

[David Koerner · Rating 5 out of 5]

In 1964, Leo Marx published a classic and still relevant review of the conflict between industrial progress and the pastoral dream as described in American Literature. He begins in the early 19th century when Thomas Jefferson's vision for agrarian America echoed Virgilian pastorals and left the hideous factories to England. Reliance on English manufacturing failed, however, in the War of 1812; the "machine" roared into the American garden and advanced apace, spurred on by technological progress and capitalistic greed. Marx's survey of complex responses from American writers and painters is revelatory. As someone who has "escaped to nature" (I live off-grid in the West surrounded by national forest), I appreciated his many illustrations affirming that my lifestyle choice embodied a widely felt American impulse, albeit a frequently stymied one. Marx draws examples not only from Jefferson, but Irving, Hawthorne, Thoreau, Melville, Emerson, Twain, Adams, James, Fitzgerald and more. You'll be tempted to read or re-read all these sources! Indulging thus makes this a long journey. It's worth it, however, for those who feel a stake in defending America's remaining landscape oases in the ongoing fight over public land use.

[Henry Blood · Rating 5 out of 5]

Leo Marx’s The Machine in the Garden is a classic text that examines the tension in the literature of the United States between a pastoral, idealized America of the vanishing past and a rapidly industrializing technological America coming into being in the nineteenth century. Marx’s literary examples are a familiar list of the most famous American writers of the nineteenth century, Hawthorne, Jefferson, Theroux, Melville, Twain. His analysis of these authors are bookended by an analysis of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and Fitzgerald’s the Great Gatsby. Although Shakespeare is an Englishman and Fitzgerald a man of the 20th century, Marx interprets these authors as containing more rather than less of the same themes as Hawthorne, Jefferson, Theroux, Melville, and Twain. We can understand the tension between the pastoral and technological America as friction between the pre-capitalist and capitalist America’s identity. This understanding lies very close to the surface, and is not hidden. It is, however, I think a good reminder that the United States was not understood as an industrial capitalist polity from the beginning. Jefferson’s writings make this clear. However, Jefferson’s writings also illustrate that he could change his mind, and that there were major differences between the revolutionary Jefferson, and President Jefferson. This is a demonstration that any individual or national character is constantly in flux. For Marx, all these authors illuminate rather than solve this problem between the image of America as a garden and its technologically advanced character. It is in the realm of politics rather than art that Marx believes a solution lies. The book was first published in 1964, and is a development of ideas Marx had during his undergraduate years before the Second World War. As he admits in an addition published in 2000, the work is dated both in method and style. The most obvious evidence of this work's age is the dearth of women writers in Marx’s analysis. It shows that the environment that sparked the idea of this book in the 1940s was closer in time to the nineteenth century than to our current time. It is however still a work very much worth reading and inspires me to read more nineteenth century American literature.

[Stephen · Rating 4 out of 5]

From the title, I thought this book would be about the mechanization of agriculture. It's really a discussion of how industry supplanted the farming culture that once characterized America. That takeover is seen through first (English) writing (Shakespeare and The Tempest) then 19th C. America fiction and memoir (Jefferson, Hawthorne, Henry Adams) finally reaching Gatsby and the green light. The deep chapter on Moby-Dick or, the Whale turns the ocean into landscape. Climate breakdown is so much on my mind now that i see "the machine" = fossil fuels that powered its rise The world is now on a "Nantucket sleigh ride" careening after a harpooned whale that will be cut up and "tried" for oil. We need to cut the line.

[Mary Catelli · Rating 3 out of 5]

Discussion of views on machinery and rural life.

At the Founding, it was generally thought we would depend on European manufactures -- after all, people would not be forced into manufacture (not yet hand manufacture) because they could not get land to cultivate. One foresightful soul predicted that the problem of labor would mean that America would automate the faster. (And all the better. Look at the mill sites Providence had provided! Were they to go to waste?) The Napoleonic Wars interfering with the trade helped.

Discussion of pastorialism in Virgil and in American writers. The pure literary criticism of novels is the weakest. Figurative language about trains and what it meant.

More interesting in some parts than as a unified whole.

[Ava Chuppe · Rating 4 out of 5]

An illuminating read, though draggy at points. Marx articulates things about American literature and culture that I feel are part of our collective consciousness but would not have been able to describe myself.

[Joshua Stein · Rating 3 out of 5]

For what it is, I'm sure The Machine in the Garden is very good. Marx puts forward an interesting analysis of the social consciousness of intellectual communities considering technology during the late-17th through mid-19th centuries, and presents the analysis in a thoughtful and artful way. That is no doubt why the book is still relevant to curriculums in the states decades after its initial publication. It is profoundly readable for something closing in on 400 pages, if you include the afterword [which I strongly recommend reading] and it is methodologically more sound, and more coherent, than most of the literature scholarship I've run across as a young academic.

That said, there are a lot of problems. The first is that Marx's general analysis of the importance of the myths and symbols present in the literature is at all of historical importance; this is a common objection to Marx and that school of literary scholars, as he notes in the afterword. It is hard to find the book convincing, given the very limited scope of the data; Marx's analysis might do well at explaining a sort of pastoral ideal among a subsection of the wealthy and literate during the period he's looking at, but it definitely fails at identifying anything widespread. It has to, because of the nature of the data available to a literary scholar.

Marx also, quite unfortunately, suppresses his own political voice in favor of the professorial tone that's typical of a lot of the writing from the '50s and early '60s coming out of the fairly well-to-do academic environment [like Harvard, where Marx studied]. The failures here are remedied slightly in the afterword, where he discusses the importance of his own leftist views and why he chose not to do an analysis of leftist literature from the early 20th century. Unfortunately, Marx checked too much of his political ideology at the door, and it leaves the book wanting.

Overall, for those interested in American studies and the analysis of history via literature, my understanding is that the book is a classic in the field, and so you should read it. As I said initially, the book is very readable and shouldn't take long, especially for people who are used to the more theoretical work [which is often incredibly painful]. Don't let me own not-so-sparkly review turn you off to it; I have a suspicion that for those in other ares of the academy Marx will make for an engaging and thought provoking read, even though he wasn't for me.

[Fekete Macska · Rating 5 out of 5]

A thorough and captivating essay that will make you look at any American film differently.
Although his study is more concerned with America's literary canons, the Technology/Nature dichotomy is so present in America even now that reading this book will shed light on much more than just American literature.

[Preston Scott Blakeley · Rating 3 out of 5]

Re-read for g-school seminar: definitely aged and lacks some needed criticism on the implications of a supposedly unspoiled agrarian pastoral (colonization, terra nullis, etc), but helpful for tracing different attitudes towards the pastoral.

[Shelby · Rating 2 out of 5]

Does exactly what you would expect scholarship from the 60s to do--focuses solely on white male writers from the 19th century and beats an argument to death for close to 400 pages.

[Kevin Fitzpatrick · Rating 4 out of 5]

"The power of these fables to move us derives from the magnitude of the protean conflict figured by the machine's increasing domination of the visible world. This recurrent metaphor of contradiction makes vividi, as no other figure does, the bearing of public events upon private lives. it discloses that our inherited symbols of order and beauty have been divested of meaning. It compels us to recognize that the aspirations once represented by the symbol ofan ideal landscape have not, and probably cannot, be embodied in our traditional institutions. ...in the end the American hero is either dead or totally alienated from society, alone and powerless, like the evicted shepard of Virgil's eclogue...To change the situation we require new symbols of possibility, and although the creation of those symbols is in some measure the responsibility of artists, it is in greater measure the responsibility of society. The machine's sudden entrance into the garden presents a problem that ultimately belongs not to art but to politics." (Marx, 364-365)

Thus ends Leo Marx's seminal exploration of the archetypes that inform American literature and character, the book "The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America." This book, whose life began as a doctoral thesis, is one of the foundational works of "American Studies," and an overview of this work determines that it deserves the sobriquet of "American classic" which has been awarded to it over the generations since its publication. For this work, comprehensive yet lyrical in parts, reviews the appearances and rearrivals of the images of the "Garden" and the "Machine" going all the way back to Shakespeare's "The Tempest," that wonderful exploration of the encounter of the 'savage' ('Caliban') and the pastoral in the newly discovered "New" World. The work then details Thomas Jefferson's 'take' on the pastoral in the New World ("Notes on Virginia"), as well as the works of several more minor but significant writers (Crevecoeur) and their views of what the American landscape offered the world, especially in relation to the literary 'world' represented by the works of Virgil and Theocritus, two pioneers of the pastoral in poetry. And, especially interesting to this particular reader, the author also pioneers an evaluation of these elements in the works of Hawthorne ("Ethan Brand"), Thoreau, Melville ("Moby Dick") and even F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic 20th century novel "The Great Gatsby." All throughout this in depth exploration one is amazed (and entertained) (and instructed) by the profound knowledge and analysis of Mr. Marx. This is a fine book, to be recommended to all those interested in literature and what it means to be an American.

[Jessica · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is unsurprising that Leo Marx's book is considered a classic in American Studies--it dives deep into the themes and investments made in the pastoral ideal across a wide swath of classic American literature, both fiction and nonfiction, and tries to articulate both why that ideal has been so resonant and how it fell out of favor during the emergence of the industrial age. Marx's tone is not entirely supportive of pastoral landscapes as sites of virtue and redemption (he has plenty of fun with the fatuous self-regard of Thoreau), but he also does not reject the potency of the pastoral ideal as carrying with it the potential of a "middle landscape" or "middle ground," an ideal between the dangerous wilderness and the modern world. The pastoral ideal, he notes, is a metaphor of contradiction, one that promises an escape from the modern world but only to the point that the modern man can look inward and locate a new consciousness of himself. He is right to foreground the importance of consciousness in literary depictions of nature, for the notion is that pastorialism carries with it a psychic power to remove oneself from the anomie of self-satisfaction of the industrial age. He investigates this especially well in his analysis of Moby Dick in “The Machine” chapter, in which he looks at the ship as a microcosm of the technological age, Ahab’s vengeance as driven by an appetite for the mastery and control of knowledge and nature, and Ishmael’s coming-of-age story as facilitated by an immersion within a landscape of both wilderness and an imagining of a pastoral medium.
Marx was right to be criticized for trying to locate something innately American in an analysis almost entirely composed of literary texts; even after his 3rd chapter, looking at political philosophers as wide-ranging as Beverly, Jefferson, and Crevecoeur, he does little to contextualize each text’s significance in the broader historical movements of the day. So this is not a history of pastoral practice, or even policies enacted on the foundations of pastoral ideology. Rather, it is a forward-thinking mediation about the tensions felt within American society between the pull of the productive industrial age—the draw of the machine, the draw of capitalism—and the nostalgia and longing for the more poetic age of the pastoral ideal. The modern American man, Marx would argue, is neither yeoman farmer nor factory cog, but rather someone who is constantly torn between and tempted within these oppositional potentialities.

[Aaron · Rating 2 out of 5]

During my American Studies undergrad I wrote a paper on the technological sublime in baseball. It was one of those papers for a grade: safe thesis, pedestrian observations, grading rubric boxes checked, minimum word count achieved. Early in the research process my professor recommended I read this book. The book demanded more than I cared to invest, so I brushed off the suggestion and made do without it. The semester ended, I got an A in the class, and life moved on. Except not entirely. I felt a lingering, unresolved guilt that I hadn't taken advantage of an opportunity that I ought to have taken.

Eight years later, I've read the book. It wasn't gripping. If it hadn't been for COVID-19, I wouldn't have finished it before having to return it to the college library 150 miles away (thank you, interlibrary loan, for the pandemic extension). But I'm glad I read it and I enjoyed parts of it. I'm partial to Moby-Dick and The Great Gatsby - for deeply personal reasons unanticipated by literary critics and wholly distinct from modern fans - so I particularly liked Marx's expositions on those two works. A few of my favorite passages:

"The significance that Melville attaches to Ishmael's survival is indicated by the line from Job he takes as a motto of the Epiloguge: 'And I only am escaped alone to tell thee.' In other words Ishmael's relation to us, the readers of Moby-Dick, is like that of Job's messenger to Job. the calamity he recounts is a portent of further trials to come: we too may expect our integrity and faith to be tested."

"In accomplishing Ishmael's 'salvation,' Melville in effect puts his blessing upon the Ishmaelian view of life: a complex pastoralism in which the ideal is inseparably yoked to its opposite."

"[Nick Carraway's vision of the American landscape] also represents the curious state of the modern American consciousness. It reveals that Gatsby's uncommon 'gift for hope' was born in that transitory, enchanted moment when Europeans first came into the presence of the 'fresh, green breast of the new world.' We are reminded of Shakespeare's Gonzalo and Miranda, of Robert Beverley and Crevecoeur and Jefferson: in America hopefulness had been incorporated in a style of life, a culture, a national character. Hence Gatsby's simple-minded notion that everything can be made right again. Daisy is for him what the green island once had been for Dutch sailors; like them he mistakes a temporary feeling for a lasting possibility."

[Amy Carson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Picked up on a whim in college a used book store, and it's one of the books that has stuck the most with me in terms of how I view the world around me. Marx argues that the Early American view of the nation's identity was centered on an agrarian, horn-of-plenty pastoralism, and that the introduction of industrialized machinery into that self-portrait created a sense of disease and discomfort amongst the people as it reflected a change in economic power and societal identity as America entered the Industrial age.

It's a work on historical shifts in how America views itself, but it felt very pertinent to America's modern shift from an industrial economy to a service-based one. As someone who grew up in the 21st century Rust Belt, the narrative American culture fed to me was one that centered American manufacturing, and that the shift of the nation's economy from the factory to the costal office was one that was unprecedented, going against the innate core of what America really is. The responses to the "machine in the garden" Marx highlights felt remarkably reminiscent of those I heard around me growing up around overseas manufacturing, mechanized factories, and the white collared costal elites who were positioned as falsely looking down upon "Proper Americans TM" in old factory towns.

While somewhere in my academic brain I had understood that America began as an agrarian nation, the emotional understanding that agrarian-ness was the original center of American identity had never hit me before this book. I also loved Marx's ideas around pastoralism, and I think of them whenever I see any idealized depiction of rural life, which I see all the time now! This book was also my first time reading a proper Academic Text (also TM) for fun.

While I wouldn't call it an easy read, it was the book that got me back into pleasure reading, and I appriciate it for that as well <3

[Tyler Swanson · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book elaborate on the division between pastoral and industrial ideals in American culture through an analysis of mid 19th century American literature. While this argument and analytical process may seem niche and bland, I believe this book is of perennial importance, especially today. Marx's argument that a division between nature and industrial society is traceable from Roman times to the modern day rings true in the face of a renewable energy transition bringing new forms of machinery into rural landscapes. I found myself reading Marx's analysis of Thoreau and Emerson lamenting the railroad altering the countryside and imagining what they would have said of wind and solar energy facilities today.

Marx also discusses the distinction between the pastoral as a set of ideals, and as a set of complex relationships in a landscape, which is very important today as truly pastoral landscapes continue to urbanize. Finally, I think Marx makes an interesting connection to the work of Karl Marx through his comparison of the freedom associated with natural landscapes to the restricted lifestyle associated with industrial society.

[Michael Meister · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this because my teachers at college kept name-dropping it and I was curious to know what they meant by "the whole machine in the garden thing". Honestly, this was arguably one of the most engaging pieces of full-length academic writing that I've ever read. More than 50 years on, I feel like its claim about human's proclivity for a "middle landscape" is still accurate and seems to have endured since the turn of the 20th century. Apart from his confident reliance on Freud in some of his readings, I loved his interpretation of different texts and the train image that he develops throughout as the central symbol of the dialectic underlying the pastoral ideal. It really made me wonder what a 21st-century pastoral would look like, which new components would have to be featured into the concept today after multiple technolocigal revolutions, and which contemporary and late-20th-century texts could capture this most appropriately. Lastly, he also sold Moby Dick in an oddly convincing manner. It's definitely on my reading list now.

[Evan Streeby · Rating 3 out of 5]

My three stars may seem a bit unfair. As a study of America’s unique flavor of pastoralism, this book could hardly do better. It is packed with information that helps understand our literary and cultural traditions, and the conclusions Marx reaches are, I think, largely correct.

My primary criticism concerns my, some might foolishly call “anachronistic”, belief that a book focusing on Thomas Jefferson’s agrarian idealism for seventy pages should at least spare a passing thought to the obvious contradiction evident in American society from day one that our “prelapsarian home” already had a gaping hole. That any pastoral dreams were contingent upon the enslavement of others seems like it would be ripe for analyzing, and I think this work is lesser for not having done so.

If you’re interested in the ways literature has influenced the American ideal, and vice-versa, including Shakespearean works, then this is your book! I just wish more had been said

[Jules · Rating 4 out of 5]

This work grew out of Marx’s doctoral dissertation, written in 1949. Having said that, this thirty-fifth anniversary edition could use a bit of an update, as it feels archaic, and outmoded at times, as far as its presentation of history. Still, the central thesis and his exploration of the trope of the machine interjecting into the serene, romantic pasture, is really thought-provoking. We are grappling with the same question in our time: What is the cost of progress? In his chapter, Two Kingdoms of Force, he provides an interesting analysis of Thoreau’s Walden and Melville’s Moby Dick. There is a lot to ponder, especially given the increasing intimacy between humans and machines in our world.

[David Jackson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Marx's observation of the sudden appearance of machines in nature in the 19th Century and its cultural and artistic impact is a very clever idea for a book. The concept is fairly straightforward but Marx gets a tremendous amount of mileage out of it. This is such a well-researched and fascinating book; I'm frequently seeing its insights in the 19th Century oeuvre. This trope has had such a big impact on 19th Century America and beyond that I keep finding more and more uses for it. I cited this book in my master's thesis and again in a published article. I recently found it useful as a key text in another piece that I'm currently writing. This book will be interesting for scholars interested in 19th and early 20th Century American cultural studies, history of technology and American studies.

[Susan · Rating 4 out of 5]

When your dad has a doctorate and you ask a simple question, sometimes you end up with books. This time, there were three. I began with Henry Nash Smith’s Virgin Land. Since Leo Marx studied under HNS, it seemed appropriate to read this next.

Possibly because I read this after Virgin Land, I felt the Garden portion was better here. The Machine material felt overly focused on railroads and later steamboats. I understand that this may be because they literally intrude into the garden, but the end seemed to hint at industry paving over the garden. It seemed there was more to say there. That being said, it’s not recent scholarship and so I am approaching it having read and experienced much that postdates Marx.

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

Live long enough, there comes a kind of Indian Summer when you suddenly realize that certain books certain people told you twenty-five years ago that you should read -- you should read. When I was instructed to read Leo Marx, I was an Americanist, a technologist, a graduate student studying the aesthetics of the Sublime; today...I'm just this guy, you know? But last week I finally read and loved this book. It's ALL smart; crazy-smart; smart as Empson-on-the-Pastoral-smart (& a local boy!) Towards the magnificent ending, the stuff on Scott Fitzgerald somehow moved me to tears.

[Matt Wyatt · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you are a student of 19th century American literature, then this a must-read. Otherwise it would still be an enlightening read. Although some of the text is difficult to comprehend. I didn't always understand what Marx was trying to say. I'm not much on diving too deep into thematic elements of books. Sometimes the writer is just trying to communicate what's in his mind. There isn't always a deeper, hidden meaning. Everything doesn't always have to be a metaphor for something else.

[Emma · Rating 4 out of 5]

Insightful and thought-provoking analysis within it's chosen scope.

However it unfortunately flubs class analysis and completely ignores slavery and indigenous displacement in colonial America. Claims that the industrial revolution saw "the unprecedented claim of the property-less, working masses for a fair share of the necessities... Of life. What now made this claim reasonable for the first time was science and technology."

[Timothy Morrow · Rating 5 out of 5]

A foundational text worth the read. I’ve been waiting to read this book for over two years and every chapter was a worthy endeavor. Many of the anxieties and concerns of the 1800s between man and machine are as relevant then as it is now. A fantastic read which only yields more avenues to wander in understanding the complexity of this issue.

[Andrés Quesada]

Excelente!

[Richard Gaunt · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting investigation into the conflict between the pastoral ideal and technological advancement in Ameica during the 18th and 19th centuries.