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The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity
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.
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.
432 pages, Paperback
First published January 8, 1990
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About the author
Anson Rabinbach
23 books5 followersAnson Gilbert Rabinbach was an American historian of modern Europe and the Philip and Beulah Rollins Professor of History, Emeritus at Princeton University. He is best known for his writings on labor, Nazi Germany, Austria, and European thought in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In 1973 he co-founded the journal New German Critique, which he continued to co-edit.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
August 27, 2017
This is a great book with a layer of turgid and redundant accretion around the fascinating core. Anson Rabinbach's work centers on research into the nature of energy, and the question of to what extent we as humans are "moist machines" as someone once posited, or to which degree we have some vitalist core that can't be reduced or encapsulated by scientific materialism. Thermodynamics destroyed entire theories, which, while faulty, are fascinating to read about. It's tempting at this great remove to laugh at some of the ideas man came up with to explain what he saw but didn't understand, but it's also endearing and a bit enchanting to see how curiosity, ambition, and perhaps a touch of insanity lead down blind paths before finally arriving at something that is irrefutably true.
There are a lot of cool devices and plucky inventors whose lives and works are described in this book (including, I was shocked to discover, the father of the French writer Marcel Proust), and lot of the apparatus has a whimsy Victorian futurist/steampunk aesthetic to it that makes for inspiring reading and viewing (think of how determined someone had to be to rig a harness to a bird that would capture the creature's motion in flight while not breaking or constraining the wee animal).
That said, too much of the book's interdisciplinary pretensions create a jumbled style that makes certain sections read like actuary tables or death by PowerPoint. After slogging through sections on Taylorism and efficiency and rationalization, I felt like I'd been trapped on a transatlantic flight with someone from the human resources department of a Midwest shipping concern. A little less Marx and a bit more Faust could have made the book much better. Conversely, the sections I found most fascinating (like those conducted with soldiers near the front in the Great War) were given the most cursory treatment.
Still, there is quite a bit of grist here for those interested in the 19th and early 20th century debates concerning questions of human exhaustion, and the more fundamental human role or purpose in an increasingly industrialized world. It's important to remember that our current discourse about post-humanism/trans-humanism is not likely to be the cybernetic eschaton our apocalyptic intellectuals are predicting, but is rather another stage in a process or cycle whose antecedents are documented well in this book. You've just got to rummage through some slag to find the gold.
There are a lot of cool devices and plucky inventors whose lives and works are described in this book (including, I was shocked to discover, the father of the French writer Marcel Proust), and lot of the apparatus has a whimsy Victorian futurist/steampunk aesthetic to it that makes for inspiring reading and viewing (think of how determined someone had to be to rig a harness to a bird that would capture the creature's motion in flight while not breaking or constraining the wee animal).
That said, too much of the book's interdisciplinary pretensions create a jumbled style that makes certain sections read like actuary tables or death by PowerPoint. After slogging through sections on Taylorism and efficiency and rationalization, I felt like I'd been trapped on a transatlantic flight with someone from the human resources department of a Midwest shipping concern. A little less Marx and a bit more Faust could have made the book much better. Conversely, the sections I found most fascinating (like those conducted with soldiers near the front in the Great War) were given the most cursory treatment.
Still, there is quite a bit of grist here for those interested in the 19th and early 20th century debates concerning questions of human exhaustion, and the more fundamental human role or purpose in an increasingly industrialized world. It's important to remember that our current discourse about post-humanism/trans-humanism is not likely to be the cybernetic eschaton our apocalyptic intellectuals are predicting, but is rather another stage in a process or cycle whose antecedents are documented well in this book. You've just got to rummage through some slag to find the gold.
October 5, 2012
The introduction is not as bright as the author might think. He uses more Foucault than he quotes it, but the info is quite relevant.
July 30, 2022
It is frankly the best piece of academic work I have ever read in years! It'd be an understatement to say that this book brought the issue of labor back on the table. It rewrote the history of materialism.
January 27, 2019
Loved it! Fascinating study of labor cultural history
June 9, 2023
very interesting, certainly a seminal text, BUT very repetitive.. there's certainly an interesting core argument that rabinbach advances in all of the chapters, but it's like each subsection is a different essay with a different perspective/lens but the same thesis repeated every 10 pages. makes it very difficult to review or read—past the midpoint, i'm not sure rabinbach is really saying anything new
February 1, 2009
huge research on the body physiologic and its representation in the late 19th Europe
the burden of repre imposed on early survey photo
the burden of repre imposed on early survey photo
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews