Description:
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.
Review Quotes: "Rabinbach has performed a major feat of historical reconstruction. "The Human Motor is a skillful and theoretically informed synthesis of social and intellectual history."--Jackson Lears, "The New Republic