CRCS Lunch Seminar

Date: Monday, February 27, 2012
Time: 12:00pm – 1:30pm
Place: Maxwell Dworkin 119

Speaker: Adelheid Voskuhl, Department of History of Science at Harvard University

Title: Engineering and crisis: technical and social elites in Germany and the US during the “Second Industrial Revolution,” 1890-1925

Abstract: German engineers constituted themselves as a newly emerging professional group in the two decades before the First World War and aimed to establish themselves also as a new social elite. They encountered intense competition with existing elites, however, that were trained in philosophy, history, theology, and law, and that had emerged in Germany as a distinguished civil-servant class earlier in the 19th century. One strategy for engineers to “catch up” with these existing elites was to mimic their social and intellectual behaviors and engage in “philosophy of technology,” that is, to start reading and writing philosophical texts in associations and periodicals that they established specifically for this purpose. They pondered questions about the relationship between industrialism and government, technocratic and democratic political systems, and ethical obligations of technological experts in fast-growing industrial societies. German engineers also turned across the Atlantic Ocean, to their American colleagues and peers, to seek advice and institutional and intellectual support on matters of gaining social respect as a new professional group. This German-American engineering cooperation was also formally constituted in associations and periodicals, and started out during the big world’s fairs in Philadephia and Chicago (in 1888 and 1893). My talk traces this cross-Atlantic exchange between 2 distinct engineering cultures, and corresponding philosophical cultures, and their understandings of the political, military, and social crises of the emerging industrial nation-states in the first decades of the twentieth century.

Short bio:
Adelheid Voskuhl is an associate professor in the Department of History of Science at Harvard University. Her teaching and research interests include the History and Philosophy of Technology from the early modern to the modern period, Modern European History, and History and Ethics of Engineering. She received her PhD in Science and Technology Studies from Cornell University in 2007, and holds graduate degrees in History and Philosophy of Science from Cambridge University and in Physics from Carl-von-Ossietzky-Universität Oldenburg. Her first book _Mechanics of Sentiment: Androids, Industrialism, and Selfhood in Eighteenth-Century Europe_ is slated for release in early 2013 with Chicago University Press.