Engineering the Revolution

Engineering the Revolution documents the forging of a new relationship between technology and politics in Revolutionary France, and the inauguration of a distinctively modern form of the "technological life." Ken Alder rewrites the history of the eighteenth century as the total history of one particular artifact-the gun-by offering a novel historical account of how material artifacts emerge as the outcome of political struggle. By expanding the "political" to include conflict over material objects, this volume rethinks the advent of engineering rationality, the origins of mass production, the rise of meritocracy, and our interpretation of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. Book jacket.

Ken Alder is the Milton H. Wilson Professor of the Humanities and professor of history at Northwestern University. He is the author of The Measure of All Things: The Seven-Year Odyssey and Hidden Error that Transformed the World and The Lie Detectors: The History of an American Obsession.

List of Illustrations	p. ix
Preface	p. xi
Acknowledgments	p. xv
Introduction: A Revolution of Engineers?	p. 3
Engineering Design: Capital into Coercion, 1763-1793
The Last Argument of the King	p. 23
A Social Epistemology of Enlightenment Engineering	p. 56
Design and Deployment	p. 87
Engineering Production: Coercion into Capital, 1763-1793
The Tools of Practical Reason	p. 127
The Saint-Etienne Armory: Musket-Making and the End of the Ancien Régime	p. 163
Inventing Interchangeability: Mechanical Ideals, Political Realities	p. 221
Engineering Society: Technocracy and Revolution, 1794-1815
The Machine in the Revolution	p. 253
Terror, Technocracy, Thermidor	p. 292
Technological Amnesia and the Entrepreneurial Order	p. 319
Conclusion	p. 344
Abbreviations	p. 353
Notes	p. 355
Bibliography	p. 421
Index	p. 457
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

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Engineering the Revolution

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Table of Contents

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