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John Tresch, “The Romantic Machine: Utopian Science and Technology after Napoleon” (U Chicago Press, 2014)
Currently unavailable
John Tresch, “The Romantic Machine: Utopian Science and Technology after Napoleon” (U Chicago Press, 2014)
ratings:
Length:
73 minutes
Released:
Oct 30, 2014
Format:
Podcast episode
Description
After the Second World War, the Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukacs described National Socialism as a triumph of irrationalism and a “destruction of reason.” It has since become commonplace to interpret modern European intellectual history as a prolonged struggle between the Enlightenment and Romanticism. The Enlightenment is generally valorized as identical with rationality, mechanism, cosmopolitanism, liberalism, progress, optimism, and secularism, while Romanticism is often connected to holism, irrationality, conservatism, nationalism, myth, pessimism and, eventually, fascism.
John Tresch (University of Pennsylvania) questions these dichotomies in his new book The Romantic Machine: Utopian Science and Technology after Napoleon (University of Chicago Press, 2012). In our interview we discuss what made steam engines Romantic, which technical illusions awaited early nineteenth-century Parisian theatergoers and how Saint-Simonians could envisage future society as a Romantic machine.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
John Tresch (University of Pennsylvania) questions these dichotomies in his new book The Romantic Machine: Utopian Science and Technology after Napoleon (University of Chicago Press, 2012). In our interview we discuss what made steam engines Romantic, which technical illusions awaited early nineteenth-century Parisian theatergoers and how Saint-Simonians could envisage future society as a Romantic machine.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Released:
Oct 30, 2014
Format:
Podcast episode
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