The Interwar Period as a Machine Age

Mechanics, the Machine, Mechanisms, and the Market in Discourse

Bibliographic Data

ID4516611
AuthorsRichard Staley (0000-0002-8200-7446, University of Cambridge, corresponding author)
Year2018
Volume31
Issue3
Pages263-292
Publication date2018-09-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueScience in Context (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0269-8897 • E-ISSN: 1474-0664
PublisherCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/s0269889718000236
PMID30182867
OpenAlexW2890772311
LanguageEN
References cited61

ArgumentThis paper examines some of the ways that machines, mechanisms, and the new mechanics were treated in post-World War I discourse. Spengler's 1919Decline of the Westand 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 mechanization. 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 realization (and sometimes symbol) of the significance but also ambiguities and tensions of mechanical life; and concepts of mechanization were extended to encompass the economy and market mechanisms

Acoustics · Interwar period · Period (music · Physics · World War II · History · History of Computing Technologies · Philosophy, History, and Historiography

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