The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.52 (822 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 0520078276 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 432 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2018-02-16 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
. Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Publishers Weekly Drawing analogies from the 19th-century discovery of the laws of thermodynamics, European social scientists envisioned the toiling worker's body as a "human motor," a living machine; maximizing work-force efficiency and eradicating the "disease" of fatigue seemed within reach. Psychologists and physiologists subjected the body's rhythms and movements to laboratory study. He pinpoints a source of modern spiritual malaise: the transformation from a strictly work-centered society to one in which work has been abandoned as a source of self-fulfillment. In a dense, rewarding study, Rabinbach ( The Crisis of Austrian Socialism ) shows how the "science of work," spreading beyond such areas as industrial management, physical edu
Terrific Analysis of Labor and Fatigue Pundit Provides a detailed historical perspective with documentation, of western Europe's fixation with the study of fatigue, productivity. For work physiologists, this is a must read as it provides the foundational basis for present day laboratory procedures and research directions.
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.. Science once had an unshakable faith in its ability to bring the forces of nature—even human nature—under control