Rifle Theory

Engels and the History of Technology

Bibliographic Data

ID6350968
AuthorsMtc Shafer (0000-0002-0305-9505, Florida International University, corresponding author)
Year2023
Volume51
Issue4
Pages597-617
Publication date2023-08-01
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenuePolitical Theory (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0090-5917 • E-ISSN: 1552-7476
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/00905917231155277
OpenAlexW4327744673
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited13

Friedrich Engels’s “History of the Rifle” was among the longest and most detailed studies of technological development that either he or Marx produced. Yet the piece has been almost entirely forgotten. I recover Engels’s essay as a model for the historiography of technology and for the study of the politics of the technical object today, demonstrating its continuity with the larger critical project he was engaged in with Marx in these years. In a famous footnote to Capital, Marx suggested that the method appropriate to a “critical history of technology” in society should be developed by analogy to Darwin’s revolutionary history of organic life. I show that Engels’s study of the rifle works out such a method in practice, recasting technological development as a nondeterministic interplay between the successive mutations of the artifact and the pressures of its social environment. Moreover, Engels’s technological materialism has a socially engaged and emancipatory end, for it is here directed against a particularly pernicious form of the commodity fetish: the fetishism of weapons

Analogy · Artifact (error · Critical theory · Economics · Epistemology · Fetishism · Historical materialism · Historiography · Marxist philosophy · Materialism · Neoclassical economics · Object (grammar · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Anthropology · Law · Philosophical and Theoretical Analysis · Philosophy · Political Economy and Marxism

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