The broken machine histories of technology, social order, and the self Edward Jones-Imhotep

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Jones-Imhotep, Edward, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Inventions--History.

Inventions.

New products--History.

New products.

System failures (Engineering)--History.

System failures (Engineering).

Business failures--History.

Business failures.

Genre:

History

Physical Description:

1 online resource

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Massachusetts The MIT Press [2026]

Summary:

"A cultural history of technological breakdown, social order, and the self in the modern Atlantic World. The Broken Machine explores the intertwined histories of breaking machines, social order, and the self in the modern Atlantic World. Edward Jones-Imhotep reveals how breakdowns are not the kinds of objects we imagine. More than just material failures or social disruptions, since the 18th century, breakdowns served as moments for defining a modern technological self and the core values of social order in Western democracies: what kinds of people belonged to it, what virtues they should possess, and who stood outside it. Tracing this politics of breakdown and belonging across two centuries and two continents, the book rewrites five well-known episodes in the history of technology, influential histories that we thought we knew: the politics of the guillotine during the French Revolution, the causes of railway accidents and the rise of “systems” as a tool of self-responsibility and self-governance in Victorian Britain, the surprising antebellum history of breakdown in American slave cultures, the Gantt chart’s origins as a Progressive Era tool for linking failure as a condition of industrial machinery to failure as a kind of person in the US, and, finally, the electronic malfunctions during the Cold War that helped define the rational selves underpinning Western democracy"-- MIT Press Direct

Contents:

The unfailing machine : a sentimental history of the guillotine

The danger of systems : Victorian railways and the limits of responsibility

The breakdown

Birth of a notation : charting human and machine failures in the Progressive Era

Minds and machines : Cold War electronics and the crises of complexity

Epilogue : beyond Heidegger’s hut

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index

Online resource; title from PDF title page (MIT Press Direct, viewed June 3, 2026)

Other Format:

Print version Jones-Imhotep, Edward Broken machine

ISBN:

9780262384711

026238471X

9780262384704

0262384701

OCLC:

1592833421

Access Restriction:

Some versions Open access versions available from some providers open access