Description
Book SynopsisThe Eclipse of the Utopias of Labor brings together a series of essays bridging intellectual history and the history of the body tracing the shift from the eighteenth-century concept of man as machine to the late twentieth-century concept of digital organisms. The book looks at the rise and decline of “the great utopias of labor” in the first half of the twentieth century.
Trade Review"Widely regarded as a classic of cultural studies, Anson Rabinbach's The Human Motor revealed for the first time the importance of the late-19th-century European obsession with the laboring body and its vicissitudes. Scholars from many different fields who have drawn on it over the years, as well as those eager to join the discussion, will warmly welcome the remarkable essays collected in The Eclipse of the Utopias of Labor, which will enrich their understanding of previous as well as on-going efforts to create a productive, efficient and just society." -- --Martin Jay University of California, Berkeley "Rabinbach provides a sweeping account of the history of the modern working body. From industrialization to de-industrialization, he traces the rise and fall of three regimes of the biopolitics of labor, corresponding to three ways of analogizing bodies to machines. A must-read for anyone interested in the decline of the 'work-centered society' and the ongoing search for meaningful work." -- -Deborah Coen Barnard College
