Catastrophic Technology in Cold War Political Thought

by Caroline Ashcroft

Overview

In the mid-twentieth century, a certain idea of technology emerged in the work of many influential political theorists: a critical, catastrophic concept of technology, entangled with the apocalyptic fears fuelled by two all-consuming world wars and the looming nuclear threat. Drawing on the work of theorists such as Hannah Arendt, Jacques Ellul, Martin Heidegger and Herbert Marcuse, Catastrophic Technology in Cold War Political Thought explores the critical idea of technology as both a response to a dramatically changing world, and a radical political critique of Cold War liberalism.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781399535014
Publisher:	Edinburgh University Press
Publication date:	11/30/2024
Pages:	264
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.00(d)

About the Author

Caroline Ashcroft is a Lecturer in Politics at Lady Margaret Hall, University of Oxford. She works in twentieth century political theory and history of political thought, particularly German and Anglo-American. She has previously published widely on Arendt’s political ideas, including Violence and Power in the Thought of Hannah Arendt (2021). Her current research focuses primarily on the intersection of science and technology with politics in the twentieth century, particularly in the work of radical critics of technology and within environmental political theory and movements.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Catastrophic Technology in Modernity

1. Cold War Critics of Technology
2. Historical Narratives of Technological Development
3. Technologies of Destruction: The Shadow of the Bomb
4. Technologies of Production and the Rise of the Machine
5. The Veil of Technology: Media, Propaganda, and Ideology
6. Technologies of the Body: Man as Raw Material
7. Technology and Worldliness: Nature and the Technological Artifice

Conclusion: The Lasting Influence of ‘Catastrophic Technology‘?

Bibliography

Acknowledgments

Editorial Reviews

Questions of technology, and its catastrophic potential, are pivotal to modern social and political life. This book brilliantly reconstructs a series of pressing debates among a cohort of highly original thinkers who explored the nature and causes of the modern technological mindset. Through a sequence of cogent and compelling analyses of major figures including Martin Heidegger, Theodor Adorno and Hannah Arendt, Caroline Ashcroft excavates the intellectual origins of one of the most challenging issues to impinge on the politics of our time.

Richard Bourke