Engineering the Revolution: Arms and Enlightenment in France, 1763-1815 - Softcover

Alder, Ken

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0226012646 ISBN 13: 9780226012643

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2010

Synopsis

Engineering the Revolution documents the forging of a new relationship between technology and politics in Revolutionary France, and the inauguration of a distinctively modern form of the “technological life.” Here, Ken Alder rewrites the history of the eighteenth century as the total history of one particular artifact—the gun—by offering a novel and historical account of how material artifacts emerge as the outcome of political struggle. By expanding the “political” to include conflict over material objects, this volume rethinks the nature of engineering rationality, the origins of mass production, the rise of meritocracy, and our interpretation of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution.

About this title

About the Author

Ken Alder is the Milton H. Wilson Professor of the Humanities and professor of history at Northwestern University. He is the author of The Measure of All Things: The Seven-Year Odyssey and Hidden Error that Transformed the World and The Lie Detectors: The History of an American Obsession.

Review

1997 Dexter Prize from the Society for the History of Technology (1997 Dexter Prize)

"Alder's work is one of the first in the history of technology to offer a sophisticated historical treatment of skills. By arguing that skills are historically contingent, Alder's contribution offers a valuable cultural study of the relationship between the rational knowledge of enlightened philosophers and engineers and the artisanal knowledge of skilled craftsmen." (Myles W. Jackson Journal of Modern History)

"This richly textured, heavily documented, and fluently written study centers on the attmept by French military engineers to apply engineering rationality--through the use of mass-produced interchangeable parts--to the reorganization of mass warfare. . . . Anyone interested in such topics as the social role of engineers, the politics of artifacts, and the military sources of social change will . . . benefit from a careful study of this remarkable book." (Barton C. Hacker Isis)

"This is a fine work, grounded in research in French archives and a plethora of other sources. Alder has forcefully demonstrated the role of engineers in fostering social change in the eighteenth-century and revolutionary eras." (Owen Connelly American Historical Review)

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0226012646
• ISBN 13: 9780226012643
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 496