The human motor

Anson Rabinbach
University of California Press
9780520078277
0-520-07827-6

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,.

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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.