The Eclipse of the Utopias of Labor traces the shift from the eighteenth-century concept of man as machine to the late twentieth-century notion of digital organisms. Step by step―from Jacques de Vaucanson and his Digesting Duck, through Karl Marx’s Capital, Hermann von Helmholtz’s social thermodynamics, Albert Speer’s Beauty of Labor program in Nazi Germany, and on to the post-Fordist workplace, Rabinbach shows how society, the body, and labor utopias dreamt up future societies and worked to bring them about.
This masterful follow-up to The Human Motor, Rabinbach’s brilliant study of the European science of work, bridges intellectual history, labor history, and the history of the body. It shows the intellectual and policy reasons as to how a utopia of the body as motor won wide acceptance and moved beyond the “man as machine” model before tracing its steep decline after 1945―and along with it the eclipse of the great hopes that a more efficient workplace could provide the basis of a new, more socially satisfactory society.
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Rabinbach, Anson

Forms of living, First edition, New York, NY, 2018

United States, United States of America

First edition., 2018-02-06

producers:
Adobe PDF Library 15.0

Memory of the World Librarian: Slowrotation

The Eclipse of the Utopias of Labor traces the shift from the eighteenth-century concept of man as machine to the late-twentieth-century notion of digital organisms. Step by step - from Jacques de Vaucanson and his Digesting Duck, through Karl Marx's Capital, Hermann von Helmholtz's social thermodynamics, Albert Speer's Beauty of Labor program in Nazi Germany, and on to the post-Fordist workplace - Rabinbach shows how society, the body, and labor utopias dreamt up future societies and worked to bring them about. This masterful follow-up to The Human Motor, Rabinbach's brilliant study of the European science of work, bridges intellectual history, labor history, and the history of the body. It shows the intellectual and policy reasons as to how a utopia of the body as motor won wide acceptance and moved beyond the "man as machine" model before tracing its steep decline after 1945 - and along with it the eclipse of the great hopes that a more efficient workplace could provide the basis of a new, more socially satisfactory society. -- From back cover

Cover 1
The Eclipse of the Utopias of Labor 2
Title 4
Copyright 5
CONTENTS 6
Preface 8
1. From Mimetic Machines to Digital Organisms 16
2. Social Energeticism in Fin-de-Siècle Europe 43
3. Social Knowledge and the Politics of Industrial Accidents 68
4. Neurasthenia and Modernity 106
5. Psychotechnics and Politics in Weimar Germany 115
6. The Aesthetics of Production in the Third Reich 140
7. Metaphors of the Machine in the Post-Fordist Era 168
Notes 190
Index 232

The Eclipse of the Utopias of Labor brings together a series of essays bridging intellectual history and the history of the body tracing the shift from the eighteenth-century concept of man as machine to the late twentieth-century concept of digital organisms. The book looks at the rise and decline of “the great utopias of labor” in the first half of the twentieth century.

2025-10-27