The Myth of Inevitable Progress by Franco Ferrarotti

Abstract

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 709 Why? Because the LM was assembled in the same manner: piece by meticulous piece. Or that Houbolt, who advocated the accepted idea of the Lunar Orbit Rendezvous, found the records of Russian Kondratyrek , who advocated the same approach fifty years before and was ignored. The authors avoid the tedium of technical history with interesting tidbits—points in the process part of the interior structure were to be edible in case the astronauts were stranded, and the as­ tronauts were going to have “patches” to slap over micrometeorite holes. At the end, we note that LM engineers were selling hot dogs on Manhattan streets, von Braun was selling helicopters, Americans were spending more on “space invaders” than the space shuttle, the Russians were building a space station, and the Japanese unveiled plans for a space city. The human drama and suffering of “fire in the spacecraft” and the agony of using the LM as a “lifeboat in space” are brought much closer to the reader by this book than by other studies. Pellegrino and Stoff successfully employ oral history to sup­ plement the traditional documentation. Subthemes cover important NASA history such as management, the moon race with the Russians, and the decline of NASA in the 1970s and 1980s; one cannot help seeing the seeds of the shuttle disaster in these pages. This book is not a humdrum nuts-and-bolts story but an important segment of the human quest for knowledge. Here are two authors who do that quest justice. William L. Ziglar Dr. Ziglar, dean of academic affairs and Kea Professor of American History at Eastern College, won the Goddard Prize in Space History in 1979. Currently he is researching the Mississippi Test Facility story and aspects of the management program of James Webb. The Myth of Inevitable Progress. By Franco Ferrarotti. Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 1985. Pp. viii + 208; notes, bibliography, index. $35.00. This is a book on the theory of technology; more specifically, it gives a theoretical overview of the sociology of industrialization. Franco Ferrarotti develops the position that “notwithstanding profound dif­ ferences of political ideology and institutional character” among coun­ tries, the social process of industrialization has become virtually the “defining characteristic” of the modern state, whatever type of capi­ talism or socialism and whatever stage of economic development may prevail. And yet, he believes that to see technological change and industrialization as a global social process it is necessary to impose a tendential unity and coherence on diverse structures, cultures, per­ 710 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE sonalities, and values, coins—we are reminded by Schumpeter—that do not readily melt. Thus, the social system of technology and industrialization may indeed be analyzed scientifically but “only on the basis of an ordering principle, or a group of premises linked in various ways to the inter­ ests—in the widest sense—of the researcher and the historical context to which he belongs.” The author points this out not so much to introduce a methodological discussion ofexplanation in terms ofsocial interests but rather to establish as unsound the ingenuously positivist assumption that concrete social realities (given, invariable, and wholly knowable) are reflected in posited social systems and theoretical frameworks. More important, he notes that such positivist errors lead history and sociology to become handmaidens ofestablished interests, mere instruments “for the rationalization andjustification of the status quo.” It is no surprise, then, that the book should open with a warning against the dangers of technocracy “in its refined present day form,” which is seen as far more insidious than traditional notions of technocracy. In­ sidious, Ferrarotti says, because its structure and theoretical assump­ tions are invisible: “self-evident and self-justified and therefore not in need of either a historical dimension or a democratic legitimation.” Ferrarotti sees the process of industrialization as a fundamental cultural break—not just technical and economic, but transformative of traditional ideas and values, relating, for example, to time, to work, to class, to power, to the relationship between work and thought, and to the relationship between public and private. This analysis is strengthened by the attention he gives to the actors in the historical process (workers...