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The Interwar Period as a Machine Age: Mechanics, The Machine, Mechanisms and The Market in Discourse

Accepted version
Peer-reviewed

Type

Article

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Authors

Staley, RAW 

Abstract

This paper examines some of the ways that machines, mechanisms and the new mechanics were treated in post World War I discourse. Spengler’s 1919 Decline of the West and Hessen’s 1931 study of Newton have usually been tied closely to Weimar culture in Germany, and Soviet politics. Linking them also to the writings of Rathenau, Simmel, Chase, Mumford, Hayek and others, as well as to Dada and film studies of the city will indicate central features of a wide-ranging, international discourse on the machine and mechanisation. I argue that machines were so thoroughly integrated into social and economic experience that we can treat this as a distinctive new phase in the cultural history of mechanics, what some contemporaries called the “machine age”: a period in which rather than the hand mill or steam engine, the city stands as an appropriate realisation (and sometimes symbol) of the significance but also ambiguities and tensions of mechanical life; and concepts of mechanisation were extended to encompass the economy and market mechanisms.

Description

Keywords

Mechanisastion, history of, Mechanics, history of, Machine Age, Walther Rathenau, Oswald Spengler, Thorstein Veblen, Stuart Chase, Lewis Mumford, Georg Simmel, Dada, Friedrich A. Hayek, Timothy Mitchell

Journal Title

Science in Context

Conference Name

Journal ISSN

1474-0664
1474-0664

Volume Title

31

Publisher

Cambridge University Press