The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity

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University of California Press, Jan 8, 1992 - Business & Economics - 402 pages
"Masterfully integrating Europe-wide debates in science, philosophy, technology, economics, and social policy, Rabinbach has provided us with a profoundly original understanding of the productivist obsessions from which we are still painfully freeing ourselves. . . . A splendid example of the mutual enrichment of intellectual and social history. It goes well beyond its central concern with the 'science of work' to illuminate everything it discusses, from Marxism to the social uses of photography, from cultural decadence to the impact of the First World War."—Martin Jay, University of California, Berkeley
 

Contents

The Primacy
45
The Political Economy of Labor Power 69 CONT
69
EtienneJules Marey and
84
xi
101
E J Marey Portable Odograph and cart ca 1887
116
The Laws of the Human Motor
120
35
128
Mental Fatigue Neurasthenia and Civilization 146 55
146
Science Between the Classes
228
Taylorism in France 19131914
244
German Taylorism and the Science of Work
253
Psychotechnics and the Great
259
Ergonomics at the Front
265
The Science of Work Between the Wars
271
The End of the Workcentered Society?
289
NOTES
301

The European Science of Work
179
RAW
182
The Science of Work and the Social Question
206
CONTENTS
310
INDEX
385
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About the author (1992)

Anson Rabinbach is Professor in the Department of the Council of the Humanities at Princeton University and author of The Crisis of Austrian Socialism (Chicago, 1983).

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