MAKING LIBERAL OBJECTS

Abstract

Nineteenth-century Britain is often seen as being the great age of liberalism. It was also a great age of engineering and building. This paper explores the interconnections between liberalism and technology, using Samuel Smiles as its point of departure. Smiles eulogised liberal individualism in Self-Help (1859), and engineers in his multi-volume Lives of the Engineers (1862). In the first part of the paper, I produce a typology of ‘liberal objects’ – the machine, the network, and the device – paying particular attention to the kinds of human agency such artifacts made possible. In the second part, I connect this typology to the theory of liberalism and its historical practice. Liberalism, I argue, often functioned by using technology to materialise a mode of indirect rule. Machines, networks and devices encouraged a set of practices – productive labour, mobility, health, cleanliness, attention, independence – essential to liberal subjectivity, and were promoted and imagined as such. Considering liberalism as a government of, by and through technology explains why such a supposedly reticent and inactive mode of government became so involved in the regulation of material life. It also explains the origins of the ‘technological fix’ – the belief that technology is the solution to any social problem – which has become predominant in the West in the twentieth century.