A Brief History of Pin-Making
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 6214389 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Imraan Coovadia (corresponding author) |
| Year | 2008 |
| Volume | 35 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 87-105 |
| Publication date | 2008-04-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Politikon (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0258-9346 • E-ISSN: 1470-1014 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/02589340802113097 |
| OpenAlex | W2036729946 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 14 |
Reduced to journalistic cliché in our own time, Adam Smith's writing made up an important part of the cultural competence of a late eighteenth or early nineteenth-century intellectual. The article follows the most important of the illustrations Smith used. It studies the variants of the pin factory, the key image of mass production, from Chamber's Cyclopaedia (1728) to its definitive incarnation in The Wealth of Nations and then as it saturates nineteenth-century representations of labour, in Godwin, Hegel, de Tocqueville, Robert Owen, Charles Babbage, and Charlotte Tonna, amongst others. It suggests that the fine variations in the image (for instance, the number of operations it is supposed to require to manufacture a pin) correspond with, and reveal, each author's specific polemical and historical contexts. Moreover, it argues that the revisions of the image in the hands of so many readers of Smith constitute a process of ideological self-reflection through which the meanings of modernity were comprehended
Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Epistemology · Hegelianism · Ideology · Incarnation · Key (lock · Literature · Making-of · Management · Modernity · Political science · Sociology · Theology · Computer Science · Historical Art and Culture Studies · History · Law · Philosophy
An inquiry into the principles of political oeconomy
Culture and Anarchy and other writings
On the economy of machinery and manufactures
What Do Bosses Do?
From The Economy of Machinery and Manufactures
The Young Hegel, Studies in the Relations between Dialectics and Economics
Nations and Nationalism
Capital
The Young Hegel
Philosophy of Manufactures
The Order of Things
The Rise of Professional Society
The Theory of Political Economy
| Highly cited | No |
|---|