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

Anson Rabinbach (Author)

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Product Details

Paperback: 432 pages
Publisher: University of California Press (Jan 8 1992)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0520078276
ISBN-13: 978-0520078277
Product Dimensions: 2.3 x 1.5 x 0.3 cm
Shipping Weight: 658 g
Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #322,989 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Product Description

From Publishers Weekly

Drawing analogies from the 19th-century discovery of the laws of thermodynamics, European social scientists envisioned the toiling worker's body as a "human motor," a living machine; maximizing work-force efficiency and eradicating the "disease" of fatigue seemed within reach. Psychologists and physiologists subjected the body's rhythms and movements to laboratory study. The psychiatric complaint of neurasthenia, or nervous exhaustion, was epidemic, and German scientists in the early 1900s sought a vaccine to cure fatigue. In a dense, rewarding study, Rabinbach ( The Crisis of Austrian Socialism ) shows how the "science of work," spreading beyond such areas as industrial management, physical education and accident prevention, pervaded the language of technocrats, Marxists and fascists who viewed the worker as a machine. He pinpoints a source of modern spiritual malaise: the transformation from a strictly work-centered society to one in which work has been abandoned as a source of self-fulfillment.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review

"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

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Amazon.com: 4.0 out of 5 stars (1 customer review)

0 of 4 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Good amount of historical human thermodynamic trivia., Nov 17 2009

By Libb Thims - Published on Amazon.com

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This review is from: The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity (Paperback)

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.

› Go to Amazon.com to see the review 4.0 out of 5 stars