Science once had an unshakable faith in its ability to bring the forces of nature—even human nature—under control. In this wide-ranging book Anson Rabinbach examines how developments in physics, biology, medicine, psychology, politics, and art employed the metaphor of the working body as a human motor. From nineteenth-century theories of thermodynamics and political economy to the twentieth-century ideals of Taylorism and Fordism, Rabinbach demonstrates how the utopian obsession with energy and fatigue shaped social thought across the ideological spectrum.

In the latter part of the nineteenth century, diverse sciences grounded in natural history made a virtue of field research that somehow tested scientists' endurance; disciplinary change derived from the premise that witnesses were made reliable by character-molding trials. The turn to the field was a function of structural transformations in various quarters, including (but hardly limited to) global politics, communications systems, and scientific institutions, and it conduced to biogeographical explanations, taxonomic schemes that admitted of heterogeneity, and affective research styles. (...) Sociocultural anthropology, which took specialized shape at the beginning of the twentieth century, shared many properties with other field sciences, but its method—participant observation—was distinctive. Critical to the method's definition were the efforts of the British experimental psychologist-anthropologist W. H. R. Rivers, who relied on notions then widespread in Europe and the United States. The discipline's future mythic hero, Bronislaw Malinowski, embraced Rivers's model. For both men, proper fieldwork meant using the researcher's body as an instrument and entailed understanding both the anthropologist's body and the research subject's body as energy systems; this symmetry facilitated a relativist perspective. Participant observation remains central to sociocultural anthropology, but the discipline's pedagogic habits contributed to loss of memory of its energetic conceptualization. -/- . (shrink)

ArgumentThe discovery of the Alps in the second half of the eighteenth century spawned an aesthetics of sublimity that enabled overwhelmed beholders of mountains to overcome their confusion symbolically by transforming initial speechlessness into pictures and words. When travelers ceased to be content with beholding mountains, however, and began climbing them, the sublime shudder turned into something else. In the snowy heights, all attempts to master symbolically the challenging landscape was thwarted by vertigo, somnolence, and fatigue. After 1850, physiologists intervened, (...) using the Alpine terrain as a laboratory landscape that was ideally suited to examine one of the most threatening concerns offin de siècleindustrial societies: fatigue. This essay examines how the picturesque voyage turned into an experimental physiology of fatigue, and how the “wordless subjectivity” of romantic travelers turned into the “wordless objectivity” of life scientists. (shrink)

In A Social History of Truth, Shapin engages these universal questions through an elegant recreation of a crucial period in the history of early modern science: ...