The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity

By Anson Rabinbach

Book Overview

Science once had an unshakable faith in its ability to bring the forces of nature-even human nature-under control. In this wide-ranging book Anson Rabinbach examines how developments in physics, biology, medicine, psychology, politics, and art employed the metaphor of the working body as a human motor.

From nineteenth-century theories of thermodynamics and political economy to the twentieth-century ideals of Taylorism and Fordism, Rabinbach demonstrates how the utopian obsession with energy and fatigue shaped social thought across the ideological spectrum.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0520078276
• ISBN13: 9780520078277
• Release Date: January 1992
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Length: 432 Pages
• Weight: 1.49 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 6.1" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Good amount of historical human thermodynamic trivia.

The book is similar in theme and content to Mirowski's 1989 More Heat than Light (albeit less technically rigorous), containing interesting trivia tidbits, e.g. that German mathematician Carl Neumann, the first to introduce the d-hat derivative symbol for inexact differentials (1875), had views on how economic life related to energetic components of energy exchanges between people. Here's a short bio on Rabinbach: [...] He states that the book originated from a 1993 paper he wrote.