Trust in Numbers

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 259 world of small farms, shops, and manufactories. The first chapter, “The Modern American folk hero,” uses a description of the village as a springboard to a discussion of Henry Ford as a paradoxical mythic figure. Ford appears both as the larger-than-life perfecter of a mass production system which powerfully transforms the America of his youth, and as the larger-than-life exemplar and lamenter of a bygone age which depended not upon vast, intricate manufactur­ ing and control systems, but upon the pluck and brains of men like Henry himself. The final chapter, “Mass production, design, and us,” closes with a return to Greenfield Village. The Village nowjoins other efforts to undermine the standardizations imposed from so many sources upon citizens of late-20th-century industrialized soci­ ety. “In the Modern World,” argues Batchelor, “we must create, to define some aspects ofwho we think we are” (p. 142). In asurprising turn, Greenfield Village has become not a pastiche assembled by Henry Ford, the cranky mourner after the world he destroyed, but an environment providing a sense of identity for Henry Ford, the proto-postmodernist celebrator of an alternative worldview. This summary of Batchelor’s use of Greenfield Village scarcely does justice to the subtlety of his analyses, but it does indicate the passionate concern for the dignity and liberty of individual humans which underlies his arguments. He rejects not only the dehumaniz­ ing practices of mass production regimes, but also modernist and postmodernist theoreticians lumping millions of real, live people into categories such as “the masses” or “consumers.” He has lim­ ited patience with notions that changes in design of products mod­ ifies conditions for the workers, or that altering lifestyles does much to aid those truly in want: “Making shopping moral is an act of the self-obsessed and solves little” (p. 4). What is needed, Batchelor con­ stantly implies, is structural change in the society Ford helped make. Perhaps future forays into historical analysis and cultural criticism will enable Batchelor to specify the changes needed. For now, he is to be commended on this slim volume packed with careful investiga­ tion and thought-provoking discussion. Brian O’Donnell, S.J. Dr. O’Donnell teaches history of technology at the University of Detroit Mercy. Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit ofObjectivity in Science and Public Life. By Theodore M. Porter. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995. Pp. xiv+310; notes, bibliography, index. $24.95 (cloth). The Values of Precision. Edited by M. Norton Wise. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995. Pp. viii+372; illustrations, notes, index. $49.50 (cloth). Since Robert Merton, historians of science and technology have been finishing what Max Weber started a century ago when he in­ 260 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE quired into the origins and contours ofmodern society. First Merton extended to 17th-century technological change Weber’s suggestion of a Puritan-imbued “spirit” of modern capitalism. Now, in the two books under review (and in the several ongoing research programs they embody), comes a series of nuanced improvements on Weber’s axiom that modern democratic society is best described by the ideal type of “rational legal authority.” Both Theodore Porter and the contributors to The Values ofPrecision make much ofthe paradox that the liberal states of 20th-century Europe and America, so famous for their celebration of individual freedoms, are also ideal environs for quantification, which erodes the values of local tradition, personal trust, and manual skill. Like Weber, they emerge from this discovery with mixed feelings: they recognize quantification’s impressive social power, the varied manifestations of which they carefully catalog, while simultaneously recovering (and implicitly celebrating) what Porter calls “the unique, located, interested individual” (p. 77) who resists quantification at every turn. Trust in Numbers is two parts manifesto, one part monograph. In the first and third sections of the book, Porter takes the reader through a series of brief illustrations that support the claim that modernization, including modern natural science, is what happens when elites perfect impersonal techniques of management. One could not ask for a more erudite or good-humored guide for such a tour, which ranges from the standardization ofinsulin doses to

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