Download e-book for iPad: The Romantic Machine: Utopian Science and Technology after by John Tresch

In the years instantly following Napoleon’s defeat, French thinkers in all fields set their minds to the matter of the way to get over the lengthy upheavals that were set into movement by means of the French Revolution. Many challenged the Enlightenment’s emphasis on mechanics and puzzled the emerging energy of machines, looking a go back to the natural cohesion of an previous age and triggering the creative and philosophical circulation of romanticism. past students have considered romanticism and industrialization in competition, yet during this groundbreaking quantity John Tresch finds how completely entwined technological know-how and the humanities have been in early nineteenth-century France and the way they labored jointly to unite a fractured society.

Focusing on a collection of celebrated applied sciences, together with steam engines, electromagnetic and geophysical tools, early images, and mass-scale printing, Tresch seems to be at how new conceptions of power, instrumentality, and organization fueled such various advancements as outstanding literature, well known astronomy, grand opera, positivism, utopian socialism, and the Revolution of 1848. He indicates that those that tried to fuse organicism and mechanism in numerous methods, together with Alexander von Humboldt and Auguste Comte, charted a street now not taken that resonates today.

Essential examining for historians of technology, highbrow and cultural historians of Europe, and literary and paintings historians, The Romantic laptop is poised to profoundly adjust our knowing of the medical and cultural panorama of the early 19th century.