Authority, Liberty, and Automatic Machinery in Early Modern Europe

This book is an essay about the character of technology. It tries to argue two points: -Technology as a fundamental human activity is intimately related to all other human activities and thus is an integral, indispensable part of all human culture and is not, as one often hears, an alien, inhuman force unleashed upon mankind by some external agent. -The interactive relationship between technology and all the other manifestations of human life and culture can be proven, even interactions as intractable and elusive as that between the political, social, economic, or religious ideas dominant in a given society and contemporary preferences and designs of technological hardware.

About the author

Ottor Mayr is director of the Deutsches Museum in Munich and former curator and acting director of the National Museum of History and Technology at the Smithsonian Institution. He is the author of Origins of Feedback Control and Feedback Mechanism and the editor of Philosophers and Machines, The Clockwork Universe, and Yankee Enterprise.

Product details

• Authors: Otto Mayr
• Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 26.09.1989
• EAN: 9780801839399
• ISBN: 978-0-8018-3939-9
• No. of pages: 288
• Series: Johns Hopkins Studies in the H; Johns Hopkins Studies in the H
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > History; Natural sciences, medicine, IT, technology > Natural sciences (general); Non-fiction book > Politics, society, business > Politics