Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity

Author/Contributor(s):	Rabinbach, Anson
Publisher:	University of California Press
Date:	01/08/1992
Binding:	Paperback
Condition:	NEW

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, 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.