The Broken Machine: Histories of Technology, Social Order, and the Self

Name: The Broken Machine: Histories of Technology, Social Order, and the Self
Brand: MIT Press
SKU: 9780262553346
Price: 3825.0 INR
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by Edward Jones-Imhotep

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ISBN13: 9780262553346
Binding: Paperback
Subject: N/A
Publisher: MIT Press
Publisher Imprint: MIT Press
Publication Date: May 19, 2026
Pages: 264
Original Price: GBP 38.0
Language: English
Edition: N/A
Item Weight: 308 grams
BISAC Subject(s): History

About The Book

A cultural history of technological breakdown, social order, and the self in the modern Atlantic World.

The Broken Machine explores the intertwined histories of breaking machines, social order, and the self in the modern Atlantic World. Edward Jones-Imhotep reveals how breakdowns are not the kinds of objects we imagine. More than just material failures or social disruptions, since the 18th century, breakdowns served as moments for defining a modern technological self and the core values of social order in Western democracies: what kinds of people belonged to it, what virtues they should possess, and who stood outside it.

Tracing this politics of breakdown and belonging across two centuries and two continents, the book rewrites five well-known episodes in the history of technology, influential histories that we thought we knew: the politics of the guillotine during the French Revolution, the causes of railway accidents and the rise of "systems" as a tool of self-responsibility and self-governance in Victorian Britain, the surprising antebellum history of breakdown in American slave cultures, the Gantt chart's origins as a Progressive Era tool for linking failure as a condition of industrial machinery to failure as a kind of person in the US, and, finally, the electronic malfunctions during the Cold War that helped define the rational selves underpinning Western democracy.

About The Author

Edward Jones-Imhotep is Professor at Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology at University of Toronto.

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