712 Book Reviews

were predominant in the second foundation of the academy and in its work in this century. But the final chapter, in which Carl Gustaf Bernhard summarises his monographs on the rather large number of research institutes started by the academy, is very informative. Given the small size of the book, it is an excellent introduction to a whole body of science that many in Western Europe are unaware of; to those who know Sweden a little at first hand it is a good read.

King’s Colfege London C.W. Kilmister

Erfindergeist. und Technikkritik; der Beitrag Amerikas zur Modernisierung und die Technikdebatte seit 1900, Andreas Schiiler (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1990), 299 pp., DM 78.00 P.B.

The first part of this book is a ‘history of American technology, 1850-1970’ with some attention to German industrial development too. Considerable stress is placed on the two world wars as catalysts of technological innovation. Far from an expert in this area, I will comment only that the author has mined assiduously the relevant secondary literature, including articles in the journal History and Technology, to produce a sound if somewhat condensed account, written in a most accessible German. It may seem a bit strange that he largely ignores other countries, though certainly he is aware of the vital contributions of British, French, Italians etc. The technological society is a product of Western civilisation as a whole, maybe of World civilisation. It is a pity too that he stops with 1970 since so much has happened since then, and this proliferation of gadgets has featured a victory for the market economy which his account tends to relegate to a position behind the State as a means of technological innovation. In certain respects the latest round in this competition seems to have gone resoundingly. just short of a knockout, to the free-market David against his leviathan opponent. Schiiler does have a good account of the transistor and computer chip revolutions of the 1950s (pp. 116-123).

The second half switches to the more congenial field (for this reviewer) of intellectual history. Titled, as well as I can render it into English, ‘Origins and characteristics of history of ideas models in technology criticism in the German Federal Republic’, it again may strike us as arbitrarily selective. While no one doubts the importance of Nietzsche, Spengler, Heidegger, Jaspers, Jiinger, and the Frankfurt School theorists in formulating a cultural critique of the technological society, Anglo-Americans would probably think first of Aldous Huxley, D. H. Lawrence, George Orwell, behind whom stand Carlyle, Emerson, Ruskin, Tolstoy. Those who reacted against ‘America the Menace’ in the 1920s included the European but non-German visitors Andre Siegfried, Bertrand Russell, and Johan Huizinga, not to speak of a flock of home-grown critics led by the redoubtable Henry Mencken. These find no place, or very little place, in Schtiler’s index. He is of course entitled to select his subjects, but the plan which holds the parts of his book somewhat precariously together is a presumed dialectical opposition between American technology and German cultural criticism of it.

Indeed the cast of mind that waxes indignant at scenes ‘where wealth accumulates and men decay’ (an eighteenth century thought), where things are in the saddle and ride mankind, is a pervasive motif in the modern world. Schuler notes that hostility to machine production and mass consumer culture is a link between Left and Right, otherwise in total disagreement. That is why we do not know quite where to place Nietzsche and Lawrence

Book Reviews 713

and Adorn0 in this classification. Anais Nin found it curious that a Spanish friend ‘hates science, the machine, yet he embraces communism’ (Diary, 1934-939, New York: Harcourt, Brace & World 1967, p.217). The Party has been forced to deal with the Luddites in its midst as much as with the machine-loving capitalist supposed enemy. English ‘ethical socialists’ (see Norman Dennis and A. H. Halsey, eds. English Ethical Socialism, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989) embraced the simple, frugal life, as did the French tradition from Rousseau to Proudhon. A recent example of an endless genre, Michael Shallis’ The Silicon Idol (Oxford University Press, 1984), assails the micro revolution itself as dehumanising, following in the wake of that instrument of alienation the telephone. (The poor man did not know he would soon be confronted with the fax.) We may smile at such quixotic attitudes while secretly sympathising. That is why Schiiler’s theme is so interesting. His treatment in this portion of the book is marked by the same outstanding awareness of the relevant secondary literature, in English as well as German.

The author introduces this second section of the book with a quotation from Max Weber but gives only part of it: to the statement ‘Interests (material and ideal), not ideas, govern the affairs of men directly’ Weber added that nevertheless ‘ideas like switchmen have frequently determined the tracks along which action has been pushed by the dynamics of interest’. This is one of very few lapses I found, another being that an index of names only is hardly adequate in a book so rich in processes and concepts.

University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee Roland Stromberg