Romantic Machine
Utopian Science and Technology after Napoleon
In the years immediately following Napoleon's defeat, French thinkers in all fields set their minds to the problem of how to recover from the long upheavals that had been set into motion by the French Revolution. Many challenged the Enlightenment's emphasis on mechanics and questioned the rising power of machines, seeking a return to the organic unity of an earlier age and triggering the artistic and philosophical movement of romanticism. Previous scholars have viewed romanticism and industrialization in opposition, but in this groundbreaking volume John Tresch reveals how thoroughly entwined science and the arts were in early nineteenth-century France and how they worked together to unite a fractured society.
Focusing on a set of celebrated technologies, including steam engines, electromagnetic and geophysical instruments, early photography, and mass-scale printing, Tresch looks at how new conceptions of energy, instrumentality, and association fueled such diverse developments as fantastic literature, popular astronomy, grand opera, positivism, utopian socialism, and the Revolution of 1848. He shows that those who attempted to fuse organicism and mechanism in various ways, including Alexander von Humboldt and Auguste Comte, charted a road not taken that resonates today.
Essential reading for historians of science, intellectual and cultural historians of Europe, and literary and art historians, "The Romantic Machine" is poised to profoundly alter our understanding of the scientific and cultural landscape of the early nineteenth century.
Reviews
"In this fascinating and philosophically rich tale, Tresch re-invokes a world in which machines are not unnatural, dead mechanisms but vessels, affordances, 'organs' even, of nature's expansive self-expression. These romantic machines and charismatic technologies could – and still do – draw forth invisible powers within materialities human and not. Tresch's account of the 'alchemical conjunction of romanticism and mechanism' is itself a brilliant admixture of the history of science, nature-philosophy, and political theory. A wonderful and rewarding book" – Jane Bennett, Johns Hopkins University
"'The Romantic Machine' is a boldly original and riotously interdisciplinary essay in the history of science that reinterprets romanticism for our own era. Situated within a dense fabric of political, moral, aesthetic, and epistemological concerns, Tresch's early nineteenth-century 'mechanical romantics' reject human mastery over nature as the goal of science, opting instead for limited regulation and sustainable coexistence" – Jan Goldstein, University of Chicago
"With 'The Romantic Machine', John Tresch fulfills the goal of most recent history of science: to show that when you follow scientific achievements you end up describing a whole culture, including its literature and arts. By proposing a new interpretation of post-Napoleonic Paris's material culture, Tresch shows the fecundity of his notion of cosmogram as the foundation of a different historical anthropology, one that includes science and technology and is not led by any teleology toward 'modernity'. On the contrary, by reinterpreting romanticism, he shows how much we could learn from this early nineteenth century period for understanding our own contradictory cosmograms today" – Bruno Latour, Sciences Po Paris
