Engineering the Revolution: Arms and Enlightenment in France, 1763-1815

by Ken Alder

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226012643
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	04/15/2010
Pages:	496
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

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.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations ix

Preface xi

Acknowledgments xv

Introduction: A Revolution of Engineers? 3

Part 1 Engineering Design: Capital into Coercion, 1763-1793

Chapter 1 The Last Argument of the King 23

Chapter 2 A Social Epistemology of Enlightenment Engineering 56

Chapter 3 Design and Deployment 87

Part 2 Engineering Production: Coercion into Capital, 1763-1793

Chapter 4 The Tools of Practical Reason 127

Chapter 5 The Saint-Etienne Armory: Musket-Making and the End of the Ancien Régime 163

Chapter 6 Inventing Interchangeability: Mechanical Ideals, Political Realities 221

Part 3 Engineering Society: Technocracy and Revolution, 1794-1815

Chapter 7 The Machine in the Revolution 253

Chapter 8 Terror, Technocracy, Thermidor 292

Chapter 9 Technological Amnesia and the Entrepreneurial Order 319

Conclusion 344

Abbreviations 353

Notes 355

Bibliography 421

Index 457

Editorial Reviews

1997 Dexter Prize from the Society for the History of Technology

1997 Dexter Prize

"This is a fine work, grounded in research in French archives and a plethora of other sources. Alder has forcefully demonstrated the role of engineers in fostering social change in the eighteenth-century and revolutionary eras."

Owen Connellyn Historical Review

"Alder's work is one of the first in the history of technology to offer a sophisticated historical treatment of skills. By arguing that skills are historically contingent, Alder's contribution offers a valuable cultural study of the relationship between the rational knowledge of enlightened philosophers and engineers and the artisanal knowledge of skilled craftsmen."

Journal of Modern History - Myles W. Jackson

"This richly textured, heavily documented, and fluently written study centers on the attmept by French military engineers to apply engineering rationality—through the use of mass-produced interchangeable parts—to the reorganization of mass warfare. . . . Anyone interested in such topics as the social role of engineers, the politics of artifacts, and the military sources of social change will . . . benefit from a careful study of this remarkable book."

Isis - Barton C. Hacker

"This is a fine work, grounded in research in French archives and a plethora of other sources. Alder has forcefully demonstrated the role of engineers in fostering social change in the eighteenth-century and revolutionary eras."

American Historical Review - Owen Connelly

"This is a fine work, grounded in research in French archives and a plethora of other sources. Alder has forcefully demonstrated the role of engineers in fostering social change in the eighteenth-century and revolutionary eras."—Owen Connelly, American Historical Review

— Owen Connelly

American Historical Review

"This richly textured, heavily documented, and fluently written study centers on the attmept by French military engineers to apply engineering rationality--through the use of mass-produced interchangeable parts--to the reorganization of mass warfare. . . . Anyone interested in such topics as the social role of engineers, the politics of artifacts, and the military sources of social change will . . . benefit from a careful study of this remarkable book."

— Barton C. Hacker

Isis

"Alder''s work is one of the first in the history of technology to offer a sophisticated historical treatment of skills. By arguing that skills are historically contingent, Alder''s contribution offers a valuable cultural study of the relationship between the rational knowledge of enlightened philosophers and engineers and the artisanal knowledge of skilled craftsmen."

— Myles W. Jackson

Journal of Modern History

"Winner of the 1998 Dexter Prize, Society for the History of Technology"

"Engineering the Revolution is a triumph. It deserves to be read widely, and not just as an inquiry into the origins of modern France."—-Donald MacKenzie, London Review of Books

"Ken Alder has written an ambitious book.... His description of work in the weapons industry and his analysis of the effects of standard measures, such as jigs and gauges, is both fascinating and enlightening. His treatment of the arms manufacturing during the Year II furnishes useful data on this extraordinary phase of the Revolution."—-Sam Scott, The Journal of Military History

From the Publisher