In Context: History and the History of Technology—Essays in Honor of Melvin Kranzberg ed. by Stephen H. Cutcliffe, Robert C. Post

Abstract

Book Reviews In Context: History and the History of Technology—Essays in Honor of Melvin Kranzberg. Edited by Stephen H. Cutcliffe and Robert C. Post. Bethlehem, Pa.: Lehigh University Press; Cranbury, N.J.: Associated University Presses, 1988. Pp. 278; illustrations, notes, bibliography. $38.50. This collection of essays is a testimonial to Melvin Kranzberg, the prime mover in founding the Society for the History ofTechnology in 1958, and a tribute to the coming-of-age of this new field of specialized research and teaching. The book contains a summarizing introduction by the editors, a select bibliography of Kranzberg’s work, his “last word” as eminence of an expanding academic domain, and thirteen essays on a wide range of topics. The essays include Bruce Sinclair’s amusing account of a popular Victorian ballet in celebration of technological progress; Arthur Molella’s tribute to three gifted precursors of the professionalized history of technology (Abbott Payson Usher, Sigfried Giedion, and Lewis Mumford), who regarded the field not as a new specialty but as a synthesizing enterprise, based—in the case of Giedion and Mumford—on holistic assump­ tions; and Brooke Hindle’s baldly tendentious plea for a “positive” outlook on technology to offset the pessimism, negativity, or “darksidedness ” that derives, he claims, from (astonishingly) Marxism and (more tellingly) 1960s New Left activism. Many of the essays are insightful and enlightening, yet their cumulative effect is to cast doubt on the rationale for making “technology,” with its unusually obscure boundaries, the focus of a discrete field of specialized historical scholarship. Over the years that rationale has taken two forms, each associated with a distinct conception of the history of technology. In the beginning, when many practitioners adopted an internalist, or “nutsand -bolts,” approach to the subject, their rationale was not unlike that adopted by historians of music or mathematics. Their tacit premise was that technology, conceived in predominantly artifactual terms, also constitutes a discrete body of knowledge, skills, and practices. Aspiring historians of technology need a specialized education be­ cause they are compelled to acquire, in addition to the knowledge and skill of the general historian, another demanding, often highly technical, even esoteric body of knowledge. Permission to reprint a review printed in this section may be obtained only from the reviewer. 394 TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 395 But that rationale has since lost much of its cogency. That is because, for one thing, the highly generalized, abstracted, historically unmoored category “technology” has proved to be even more vacu­ ous, for purposes of historical research and analysis, than its older cousin, “science.” It is evident that “technology” does not embody as coherent a discourse, or as distinct a body of common, incremental knowledge as music or mathematics. Historians studying the devel­ opment of, say, the steam engine, the camera, nuclear power, or the computer need to master four largely unrelated bodies of technical knowledge. Their situation is more like that of historians of “science” studying the development of, say, relativity theory, molecular biology, or plate tectonics. The accelerating specialization of knowledge has eroded the usefulness of both science and technology as rubrics for historical scholarship. The cogency of that initial, knowledge-based rationale also has been diminished by the triumph of contextualism. As the title, In Context, announces, and as John Staudenmaier’s persuasive work has demon­ strated, the history of technology now is dominated by those histori­ ans, represented by Kranzberg, who are less interested in the sequen­ tial development of particular technologies than in the interactions between “technology,” however conceived, and the larger societal and cultural context. It should be noted that the triumph of the contextualists has been accompanied by the steady expansion of the concept of “technology,” sometimes conceived as an entity endowed with in­ dependent historical agency, to embrace more and more elements of the context—the larger framework of institutions and belief systems. “Context” is the key word here, and these essayists repeatedly urge a broadening of the scope of the history of technology. David Hounshell calls for an international comparative approach; Judith McGaw and Joan Rothschild for an analysis of gender and the role of women; Thomas Hughes for more emphasis on the determinant power of...