Catastrophic Technology in Cold War Political Thought
Explores a Cold War concept of technology as a catastrophic influence on modern politics
- Explores the intellectual history of a ‘catastrophic’ concept of technology in the work of some of the twentieth century’s most important political thinkers
- Reveals the centrality of this narrative in the work of what is otherwise generally considered to be an ideologically and philosophically diverse group of theorists
- Contextualises this concept of technology in the Cold War period to reveal the fundamentally political character of the critique as a rejection of liberalism
- Studies both ‘technology’ as an overarching concept as well as particular realisations of technology in these theorists’ work: technologies of war, production, media and biotechnology
- Reveals the way in which this concept of technology produces a specific critique of the relationship between humans, world and nature in modernity, which brings the critics of technology into discourse with early environmentalism
In the mid-twentieth century, a certain idea of technology emerged in the work of many influential political theorists: a critical, catastrophic concept of technology, entangled with the apocalyptic fears fuelled by two all-consuming world wars and the looming nuclear threat. Drawing on the work of theorists such as Hannah Arendt, Jacques Ellul, Martin Heidegger and Herbert Marcuse, Catastrophic Technology in Cold War Political Thought explores the critical idea of technology as both a response to a dramatically changing world, and a radical political critique of Cold War liberalism.
Introduction: Catastrophic Technology in Modernity
- Cold War Critics of Technology
- Historical Narratives of Technological Development
- Technologies of Destruction: The Shadow of the Bomb
- Technologies of Production and the Rise of the Machine
- The Veil of Technology: Media, Propaganda, and Ideology
- Technologies of the Body: Man as Raw Material
- Technology and Worldliness: Nature and the Technological Artifice
Conclusion: The Lasting Influence of ‘Catastrophic Technology‘?
Bibliography
Acknowledgments
Questions of technology, and its catastrophic potential, are pivotal to modern social and political life. This book brilliantly reconstructs a series of pressing debates among a cohort of highly original thinkers who explored the nature and causes of the modern technological mindset. Through a sequence of cogent and compelling analyses of major figures including Martin Heidegger, Theodor Adorno and Hannah Arendt, Caroline Ashcroft excavates the intellectual origins of one of the most challenging issues to impinge on the politics of our time.
Highly readable, presenting difficult thinkers in an accessible way, thus making it a useful introduction to the often difficult thinkers it engages. In addition to well-known thinkers like Arendt and Marcuse, the book highlights less prominent thinkers like Jacques Ellul and Hans Jonas—another important contribution. The book's conclusion is particularly interesting, demonstrating how the critique of technology influenced environmental thinking.
A reliable guide to an influential mode of thought that continues to inform academic and cultural critiques of techno-utopianism and warnings of technocratic totalitarianism that seem especially urgent at the present moment.
