Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface and acknowledgments
- Prologue: two moments of the republic
- PART 1 LAW AND THE FACTS OF AMERICAN LIFE
- PART 2 LAW, LABOR, AND STATE
- PART 3 LAW, AUTHORITY, AND THE EMPLOYMENT RELATIONSHIP
- An interlude: on law and economy
- PART 4 THE NEW INDUSTRIAL ORDER
- Introduction: a sign of the times
- 9 Mechanism
- 10 The law of industrial accidents
- Epilogue: “free Ameriky”
- Index
9 - Mechanism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface and acknowledgments
- Prologue: two moments of the republic
- PART 1 LAW AND THE FACTS OF AMERICAN LIFE
- PART 2 LAW, LABOR, AND STATE
- PART 3 LAW, AUTHORITY, AND THE EMPLOYMENT RELATIONSHIP
- An interlude: on law and economy
- PART 4 THE NEW INDUSTRIAL ORDER
- Introduction: a sign of the times
- 9 Mechanism
- 10 The law of industrial accidents
- Epilogue: “free Ameriky”
- Index
Summary
Were we required to characterise this age of ours by any single epithet, we should be tempted to call it, not an Heroical, Devotional, Philosophical, or Moral Age, but, above all others, the Mechanical Age. It is the Age of Machinery, in every outward and inward sense of that word; the age which, with its whole undivided might, forwards, teaches and practises the great art of adapting means to ends. Nothing is now done directly or by hand; all is by rule and calculated contrivance.
Thomas Carlyle, “Signs of the Times”In Thomas Carlyle's remarkable “Signs of the Times,” Leo Marx argued nearly thirty years ago, one sees encapsulated the philosophical consequences of the vast industrial sea change sweeping through the society and culture of the first half of the nineteenth century. Carlyle's essay acknowledged and traversed the new and apparently beneficial technological artifacts that were revolutionizing everyday life. “Our old modes of exertion are all discredited, and thrown aside.… For all earthly and for some unearthly purposes, we have machines and mechanic furtherances; for mincing our cabbages; for casting us into magnetic sleep. We remove mountains and make seas our smooth highway; nothing can resist us. We war with rude Nature; and, by our resistless engines, come off always victorious, and loaded with spoils.
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- Law, Labor, and Ideology in the Early American Republic , pp. 306 - 330Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1993