The Machine Age

In Seeing Like A State, James C. Scott has written that if you were to look for a moment and a man to mark the “birth” of high modernism in the twentieth century, it would be German mobilization in World War I and the person most responsible for it, the German-Jewish industrialist Walther Rathenau (Scott Reference Scott1998, 97–98). As we shall see, Rathenau also offers a suggestive key to conceptual perspectives on mechanism. Trained in physics, philosophy, and chemistry in Berlin and Strassburg, as well as in machine construction in the Technische Hochshule in Munich, from the 1890s Rathenau accepted increasing responsibility in AEG, the electrotechnical firm that his father Emil had founded. Walther helped pioneer the formation of cartels and syndicates to decrease competition amidst economic difficulties, and while AEG collaborated with Peter Behrens to develop industrial design in the early 1900s, Rathenau's pen brought him widespread notice. His Reference Rathenau1912 book Zur Kritik der Zeit met the promise of its title with a diagnosis of the present that was comprehensive and capacious, yet discriminating (Rathenau [Reference Rathenau1912] Reference Rathenau1925; Volkov Reference Volkov2012). Joining a long tradition, Rathenau pointed to a pervasive condition or form of expression that he described as “mechanization.” Having noted that mechanization had first been felt in the production of goods, but had necessarily ramified dramatically given the centrality of production to all material life, Rathenau carefully picked out a long series of its present characteristics:

Yet Rathenau went on to point to a singular spirit that he thought was common to all these diverse characterizations, distinguishing them from earlier forms of life. They betrayed, he wrote,

Of course machines and mechanization have long and vital histories, with historians of science tracing their investigations of mechanical philosophies at least as far back as the early modern period (Bertoloni Meli Reference Bertoloni Meli2006; Riskin Reference Riskin2015). Recently, historians of literature and science have argued that we should recognize important precedents to post World War II treatments of cybernetics and cyborgs in the prosthetic engagement of Victorians with machines as living forces, diverse treatments of mechanism in biological thought in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and new forms of automata such as the robots that Karel Čapek introduced to the stage in 1920 (Ketabgian Reference Ketabgian2011, 1–6; McLaren Reference McLaren2012; Riskin Reference Riskin2015; see also Ruse Reference Ruse2005) The varied and above all practically realized forms of mechanization that Rathenau identifies usefully complement this focus on biological mechanism and bodily hybridity. Note in particular that Rathenau links the physical machines of industrialization and its products to a diverse array of social practices and disciplinary engagements, each approached somewhat differently, yet complexly uniform. We might think of these as the sinews of a new material and social hybridity. The capaciousness of this list, its careful distinctions between interrelated facets and Rathenau's critical perspective all point to significant features of what mechanization was beginning to mean in Germany. His list also reflects the organizational qualities Rathenau brought first to his firm and industry, and later to Germany through his role in the War Raw Materials Department, and subsequent ministerial appointments.

That along with industrialists, Rathenau could include academic roles such as geographers and sociologists and point to so many different perspectives surely reflects the Streit über Technik that had emerged around the claim of engineers for cultural and professional recognition, formalized in the right that Technische Hochschulen gained in 1899 to award doctorates. Along with measures to reform secondary schooling and mathematics teaching, the Kaiser's decree opened debate on the role of technology to diverse scholarly audiences, with a flurry of contributions from historians, engineers, scientists, and sociologists, and repeated recourse to the title that put everything on the line: “Technik und Kultur” (which the elite association of academically trained engineers adopted when renaming their journal in 1922). Together with Rathenau's colleague the engineer Wichard von Moellendorf (who drew on the work of the historian Karl Lamprecht and the sociologist Georg Simmel to discuss the economic role of the engineer), such culturally renowned and academically powerful figures as the economic historian Werner Sombart, the physical chemist Wilhelm Ostwald and the historical sociologist Max Weber took part. Their contributions explored long-term historical origins for the central roles at issue – such as capitalist and entrepreneur – as often as they set out critical relationships between different disciplines and sectors of society (Mayer Reference Mayer1906; Sombart Reference Sombart1911; Ostwald Reference Ostwald1909; Moellendorff Reference Moellendorff1912 and Reference Moellendorff1913). Sombart provides an important example. In Der moderne Kapitalismus (1902) and Der Bourgeois; zur Geistesgeschichte des modernen Wirtschaftsmenschen (Sombart Reference Sombart1913, 426–27), he offers an account of the importance of technical inventions and all the industries involved in machine manufacture as a nursery of the capitalist spirit; Karl Hall has argued that he wrapped a stereotypical image in the individuality of the master artisan (Hall Reference Hall2015). In this context Rathenau's discussions represent something of a literary flowering with a distinctly emotive and affective cast, but the call he uttered for a new birth of the soul was far from rare. Historians have most often been concerned with the changing understandings of technology at issue, and with discussions of the cultural role and social identity of engineers (see, for example, the fine comparative studies presented in Hård and Jamison Reference Hård and Jamison1998; Hård Reference Hård, Hård and Jamison1998). Rathenau was perhaps the most prominent example of the increasing extent to which engineers, technical physicists, and industrialists now claimed cultural significance with a place interpreting the tenor of the times (as well as making it).

For many, World War I came to represent a particularly strong example of the characteristics that Rathenau had discerned, especially as its conflicts extended from weeks to months to years – and this decisively changed the valence of mechanism as a metaphorical diagnosis of the system or the spirit of the age. If Rathenau had sold thousands of copies of Zur Kritik der Zeit, Oswald Spengler's Reference Spengler1918 Der Untergang des Abendlandes created a sensation and was still more enveloping in its often bitter discussion of the ills of mechanization. Drawing out the peculiar role of physics in Spengler's thought will show how his commentary shifted between physics and mechanics as an image of the intellectual world and source of social analogies, to the machine and the engineer (not entrepreneur) as key to the future of technology. Spengler thought he could pick out an understanding of the world as history from the world of nature in a way that others had only been able to glimpse dimly; and he described himself as separating the two possible ways of possessing and experiencing the environment: “the organic from the mechanistic world impression.” Spengler's study of world history would distinguish:

Thus Spengler offered a new, morphological kind of history built on analogy and symbol, arguing that until now history had taken its model from the physical sciences.

Spengler's understanding of the physical sciences was idiosyncratic, but based on the 1904 doctoral dissertation he wrote on Heraclitus under the neo-Kantian philosopher Alois Riehl. Spengler offered parallels between Heraclitus's views and the energetics of Ostwald and Mach, celebrating what he saw as Heraclitus's rare insight into the inner relationship between culture and nature, with all cultural forms – the state, society, customs, intuitions – depending on nature. As a product of nature, they too were subject to the necessity of change. Spengler regarded the role of resistance and the equilibrium of opposing tensions in energetic considerations as analogous to the significance of war in man's existence (Spengler Reference Spengler1904, 30). He also articulated a concept of form based on the mathematical laws of nature, writing of the possibility of determining natural phenomena purely numerically without postulating an “essence,” using Hertz's electromagnetic theory of light as an example; and distinguishing between the way that materialistic science treated matter and energy and the rather different distinction between substance and form drawn by Heraclitus and the energeticists (Spengler Reference Spengler1904, 39–40). Spengler's early work thus indicates close familiarity with significant aspects of the physics of his period. One corollary is that Spengler's concepts of science and society drew on a heritage that he shared with many of the scientists who commented on his later work. In turn, their complex responses to Spengler's writings reflected this common ground in what John Heilbron has described as fin de siècle descriptionism, as much as it does any capitulation to external social forces, in the way that Forman depicted the phenomena in the 1970s (Staley Reference Staley2008; Carson et al. Reference Carson, Kojevnikov and Trischler2011; Wise Reference Wise, Carson, Kojevnikov and Trischler2011).

By Reference Spengler1918, Spengler offered a symbolic understanding of form and had inverted his perspective on nature and culture to present a determinedly historical understanding of both, while offering a stark portrait of the Faustian power expressed in what he called “the machine.” Now Spengler argued “no science is only system, only law, number and order.” Rather the science of each era, the Greek period or his own, was a historical phenomenon, an organism determined by fate and culture: “In modern physics there lies not only a logical but also a historical necessity. It is not only a matter of intelligence but also of race” (Spengler [Reference Spengler1918] Reference Spengler1919, 531).

Spengler began his discussion of physics by recalling Helmholtz's famous 1869 account of the mechanical goals of science, and then contrasting the perspective that a physicist would take on mechanics with that of a sceptic aware of the psychology of the scientific conviction in mechanical explanation, writing “To the one, present-day mechanics is a logical system of clear, unambiguous concepts and of relations as simple as they are necessary; while to the other it is an illusion characteristic of the structure of the Western-European spirit” (ibid., 528). If Spengler thought the physicists’ view of mechanics was illusory, Jeffrey Herf has shown that in 1922 Spengler pronounced the machine to be the devil – but also argued that technology expressed the Faustian will to power over nature. Exuding a primordial violence and steely energy, Spengler thought western technology was much more active than previously – the machine had now taken on a life of its own (Spengler [Reference Spengler1922] 1923, 1 and 187, as cited in Herf Reference Herf1984, 60–61 on 61). Herf argues persuasively that nevertheless Spengler was much more worried by finance and the role of the merchant than machine technology itself. For Spengler, both industry and agriculture were rooted in the soil and blood and involved in a pitched battle with finance- and the money-thinking of banks and the stock exchange, which reflected the primordial struggle between creative production and economic plunder. Thus for Spengler both the entrepreneur and the industrial proletariat were enslaved to technology, and hopes for technology must instead rest in the guidance that could be provided by the engineer, “the erudite priest of the machine” (ibid., as cited in Herf Reference Herf1984, 62).

Both Rathenau and Spengler focused on Germanic culture and the German state in their descriptions of the cast of characters involved in the industrial life of the present. They were in part engaged in showing how despite the war and the recognized economic strengths of the “American system of manufacture,” the German state was uniquely fit to create the conditions for a true industrial life (Hård Reference Hård, Hård and Jamison1998; see also Jakobsen et al. Reference Jakobsen, Andersen, Halvorson, Myklebust, Hård and Jamison1998). Rathenau reassessed his earlier emphasis on industry groups and disdain of the cultural impact of excessive production; the war showed him the need for increased production but also rationalization and national endeavor. As it concluded he first embarked on a writing program, arguing in a pamphlet on the Kaiser that long before war broke out the conditions for it had been created by a “dehumanised, over-mechanized” and selfish Europe, carving up the map with cynical economic and armament policies (Rathenau Reference Rathenau1919, 47; Volkov Reference Volkov2012, 181–82). Despite the contradictions inherent in his position he moved into the Weimar government. As Foreign Minister negotiating to manage Versailles reparations with Western powers and, controversially, the Soviets, in 1922 he was murdered by members of the ultra-right nationalist Organisation Consul, who hoped to incite a civil war; Falk Müller's contribution to this issue explores the further development of his company (Müller 2018 in this issue).

The academic culture of Germany had clearly devoted unusually sharp attention to questions surrounding technology, and the costs of controversial stances could be especially extreme when coming up against diverse assessments of national needs in the political and economic crisis of the early Weimar republic. But similar issues were faced in many different countries and the work of a group of American social theorists, writers, and commentators will demonstrate an increasingly international discourse. Most prominent amongst them were the economist and sociologist Thorstein Veblen, the economist Stuart Chase, and the literary critic and historian Lewis Mumford. Veblen and Mumford have attracted far more attention than Chase, largely because of the importance of Veblen's Reference Veblen1921 book The Engineers and the Price System for the technocracy movement and the reputation Mumford's monumental Reference Mumford1934 Technics and Civilization won, often described as the most influential twentieth century history of technology (Veblen [Reference Veblen1921] Reference Veblen1963; Chase Reference Chase1929; Mumford Reference Mumford1934 and Reference Mumford2011). Most commentary has explored these figures’ understandings of technology, but as we shall see their thoughts were often framed in the language of the machine and Chase's Reference Chase1929 book Men and Machines did more than any other to make this explicit.

In her study of changing perspectives on technology in the U.S., Ruth Oldenziel shows that the rather mixed and inclusive nineteenth century understandings of the nature of the industrial arts and participation in them were narrowed significantly in Veblen's Reference Veblen1921 treatment of technology as the preserve of engineers. Veblen gendered machines male while offering an encompassing metaphorical understanding of the industrial system as a self-generative, self-contained machine, writing “The industrial system is notably different from anything that has gone before. It is eminently a system, self-balanced and comprehensive, and it is a system of interlocking mechanical processes, rather than of skillful manipulation. It is mechanical, rather than manual” (Veblen [Reference Veblen1921] Reference Veblen1963, as cited in Oldenziel Reference Oldenziel1999, 45–46). More recently, Eric Schatzberg has explored Veblen's reading of Sombart, Simmel, and others, and charted the subtle transformation of understandings of technology reflected in Veblen's use of specific concepts of “technology” as a translation of the German term “Technik.” Schatzberg notes Veblen's sophisticated discussion of social dimensions of technology and subtle account of the relations between science and technology, arguing that few could follow the latter. Veblen thought industrial operations had to be understood as a “machine process” that interrelated multiple mechanical operations in one whole. Technology was not the system itself but its physical principles understood as the collective and cumulative knowledge of the industrial arts. That it could effectively be monopolized when ownership controlled the material means of utilizing this knowledge was central to a critique of capitalism. First articulated in articles published in 1906, by 1921 Veblen had conjoined his critique with an argument for a new “Soviet of technicians” or “production engineers.” By being free of pecuniary interest, Veblen argued they could direct industrial development appropriately, a stance that proved controversial and might have seemed particularly utopian in post-war America. Schatzberg laments the conceptual elisions that occurred when later authors conflated the sense of technology as the study of a field, with technology as the object of study. Having limited his focus to the scholarly uses of “technology,” primarily in the social sciences, Schatzberg notes that a more complete account of the cultural dimensions of technology would have to follow Oldenziel's lead in examining “the full range of terms – such as the machine and science – that were used to discuss the material culture of modernity” (Schatzberg Reference Schatzberg2006, 488; idem Reference Schatzberg2012; see also Jamison Reference Jamison, Hård and Jamison1998).

Chase was an associate of Veblen's who joined him as a member of the Technical Alliance from 1919 to 1921. In 1927 he published on money and advertising, before visiting Soviet Russia as a member of the First American Trade Union Delegation and co-authoring a report on the nation's second decade. This experience gave him the trope of imagining what it would be like to transpose a Russian urchin to New York, supposing for a moment he became a talented scientist, “a generic figure for the scientist and engineer, familiar with the main aspects of modern technology and capable of operating its mechanical devices.” This was how the opening chapter of Men and Machines framed its study of the way machines had banished past biological limitations. Chase described the great extension of physical and mental capacities in telescope, microphone, radio, the electron tube micrometer and the MIT integrating machine, and contrasted what a man's back could carry with the power of a crane and steam hammer; yet also noted that one “would take no peasant from his village in the certainty of making him happier in New York” (Chase Reference Chase1929, 7 and 9).

Raising the question whether we are enslaved by our machines, Chase ran through representative groups of writers who railed against machines, celebrated them, or sat on the fence, helpfully giving some measure of the field of discourse. As well as Spengler, amongst those indicting the machine, Chase described the views of a group of American and British authors with several scientists amongst them: Samuel Butler, Austin Freeman, Henry P. Frost, Frederick Soddy, J.B.S. Haldane, Bertrand Russell, Philip Gibbs, Benjamin Disraeli, and H.G. Wells. That group was larger than those he listed as in favor or undecided combined. Although Chase thought he could have multiplied each list endlessly (in the same proportions), he also commented that all of these views had been given in summary form, with the possible exception of Freeman's (ibid., 9–19). Indeed Freeman's Reference Freeman1921 book Social Decay and Regeneration had offered lengthy descriptions and detailed analysis. He regarded machines as concrete expressions of knowledge, and thought their evolution showed mechanism had a life of its own, “as an independent entity governed by its own laws and having no necessary connection with human needs or human welfare” (Freeman Reference Freeman1921, 84). Freeman characterized the effects of mechanism on itself, on the human environment, the social organism collectively, and on the individual, before outlining a set of consequent social anti-bodies and offering a eugenic solution. But his analytic care was exceptional: few had written fully enough to give Chase a satisfactory understanding of why they thought as they did.

So Chase offered an anatomy of machines as well as a historical perspective on their development. Drawing on the international success of Karel Čapek's 1920 play depicting synthetic organic automatons rebelling against humanity (discussed in Riskin Reference Riskin2015, chap. 9)), Chase wrote on robots, but also on skills, saving labor, the flood of goods, skyscrapers, and playgrounds, to list just some of his chapters. He thought power machinery had its place in the making of other machines and glass and bottle making, for example, but not in fine bread making or ornamental metal work. A judicious recognition of the limitations of technology was necessary and machines should not be blamed for the cheap and nasty stuff they were used to produce (Chase Reference Chase1929, 238–39). As the U.S. moved into depression, Chase brought his analysis to bear on public policy, noting in the preface to his 1932 book A New Deal that progressively advancing towards “an all-inclusive mechanical balance,” the industrial system was approaching a critical tipping point, and the “mechanical state of the industrial arts” could no longer be served by the control of production in the hands of vested interests. Like Veblen before him, Chase's solution was technocratic: to entrust control to production engineers without commercial interests. Linking a sharp analysis of industrial and economic problems to such general ideas as the machine and technology in addressing critical unemployment issues won him favor, but also proved problematic. While Franklin D. Roosevelt adopted Chase's title in his acceptance of the Democratic nomination for president in the summer of 1932 and Chase became part of his inner circle, the technocracy movement that Chase represented was attacked by physicists, engineers, and business leaders like Karl T. Compton, Arthur Sheridan, and Arthur D. Little, who belittled the novelty of the analysis and sought to break the links that Veblen and Chase had made between technocracy and engineering as a profession and between technocracy and technology (or machines) as the product of engineers’ work (Oldenziel Reference Oldenziel1999, 47–48; see also Bix Reference Bix2000). Yet David Hart's account of the varieties of liberalism in play in U.S. science and technology policy highlights the role of metaphors of the machine and the ideal of developing an administrative state “as precise and powerful as an automobile engine,” in the words of Roosevelt's Secretary of Agriculture, Henry Wallace (Hart Reference Hart1998, 62–71 and 78, quoted on 62). Thus many shared language of this kind while disagreeing on where control should be vested; notably in the early phases of Roosevelt's administration the MIT president Compton sought to enlarge the understanding of “public works” to include science even if he resisted ceding control to engineers.

Soon the encompassing nature of Chase's concern with the machine had been matched and then exceeded by Lewis Mumford, who toured American and European museums of science and industry and wrote drafts of what would later be published as Technics and Civilization in 1930 and 1931. Mumford saw the key to an ability to “transvalue” the machine to lie in the observation that many of the most important new developments in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century had come in part from the study of physiology and anatomy and intimate work with the human voice, eye, and ear. The telephone, phonograph and motion picture represented machine technique approaching the organic, and indeed recovering elements that Mumford thought had been repressed in earlier phases of the development of the machine, which had failed to recognize or turned away from the moral and social problems involved in their development. Thus Mumford set the machine in a matrix in which understanding it was a critical means to understanding both society and self (Mumford Reference Mumford1934, 4–7).

Mumford linked science and technics closely, writing that the concept of a neutral world, a new objectivity, had relied upon the combination of the scientific method and the machine technique, emerging only in the nineteenth century, and he was particularly interested in what this meant for man's character. In this respect, Mumford argued:

Historians discussing these authors have commonly picked out a handful of their contributions for closer analysis. On the one hand these have often been pursued with an overarching concern for two rather general themes. They have been linked to modernity (and anti-, reactionary- or more recently post-modernity); or they have been pursued with the boundary work of science studies in mind, considering the relations or distinctions between “science” and “technology” and between “pure” and “applied” endeavors, chasing terms still at work in our analysis today (Herf Reference Herf1984; Hård and Jamison Reference Hård and Jamison1998; Schatzberg Reference Schatzberg2006 and Reference Schatzberg2012; Forman Reference Forman2007). And on the other hand historians have often resolved the work of these authors into quite local cultural environments, with Jeffrey Herf tying his account of reactionary modernism strongly to the specificities of the political and cultural situation of the Weimar Republic, for example.

Taking them up in this paper with the explicitly comparative perspectives explored fruitfully by the contributions to Hård and Jamison's edited volume on the appropriation of technology – but approaching them instead through the differently resonant concept of the machine – has shown that this term changed valence in the period before and after World War I, but also that for several thinkers in the interwar period “the machine” became an overarching concept encompassing significantly interrelated elements of the technical and social dimensions of the industrial economy. As Rathenau's comments suggest, it was multiply realized in a rich range of different forms of “mechanization.” The machines and industries concerned were often electromechanical, reflecting the increasingly wide reach of electricity, and distinctions in types of power or locomotion were rarely emphasized. The boundary between the organic and the mechanical was often crossed – and sometimes this was regarded as critical to the proper rapprochement with the machine.

Considering even this relatively small group of German and American authors we have also seen the possibility of tracing concepts of the machine and mechanization across diverse international contexts. Both the bibliographies and many of the central historical arguments of books like Rathenau's, Spengler's, and Mumford's aimed at characterizations of the centrality of machines to western culture. In taking up the relations between technical and cultural achievement, the role of engineers and the state, and the possibility of the machine taking jobs, they addressed current political needs and also raised questions of vital interest in many other nations – which in turn often engaged them by drawing on their writings. A brief discussion of British and Soviet treatments of mechanization will demonstrate this point, while also preparing ground for my analysis of artistic and economic work with the concept of mechanism in following sections. Daniel Wilson has recently traced a similar discursive context in Britain to J.A. Hobson's ground-breaking discussions of industrialization in the late nineteenth century (Wilson Reference Wilson2015). In the 1920s, just as Chase noted the writings of many British commentators, the literary scholar F.R. Leavis and his colleagues in the Scrutiny movement drew on Chase when articulating an account of the changing nature of work. Hilliard describes them as using the machine as “a governing metaphor for modernity,” and Ketabgian has suggested that Leavis's anti-industrialism has strongly shaped received views of the industrial psyche as stunted and dehumanized (Hilliard Reference Hilliard2012, 57, 61–66 on 61; Ketabgian Reference Ketabgian2011, 7).

Addressing the bureaucratic roots of computing in Britain, Jon Agar has shown that the governing metaphor for government was likewise mechanization. In the 1920s and 30s in particular, Agar argues an “expert movement of mechanizers” helped secure Treasury control over the Civil Service through an Investigating section that promoted mechanization in the treatment of records, tasks, and files. Their aims were articulated in a memorandum that Major Sydney George Partridge sent to the Adjutant General in 1916, arguing “It is the aim of every alert organisation seeking efficiency and economy in office administration to strike the balance between the ‘human’ and the ‘mechanical,’ and the more efficiently a Department is organised the greater will be the tendency for the ‘mechanical’ to encroach on ‘human’ territory” (Agar Reference Agar2003, chap. 6, on 162).

Vladimir Lenin's organizational aims were still broader, while his methods were sharper. James C. Scott describes how his understanding of the vanguard party as the “machinery of revolution” went together with Lenin's readiness to see the template for social change in electrification. Stephen Kotkin has developed a similar approach more comprehensively. In a brilliant comparative study of Soviet forms of modernity he argues that distinctive engagements with mass production, mass culture, mass politics – even mass consumption – served as integrating mechanisms in the Soviet Union, as they did amongst western nations (Scott Reference Scott1998, chap. 5; Kotkin Reference Kotkin2001, 112–14). But closely engaged with important political aims as they were, such mechanisms – and even attitudes to the concepts of mechanics – were also advanced by contrast and threat as well as by persuasion and cooperation. Although celebrating the machine, like Spengler Lenin had engaged closely with physics in critiquing Mach for the supposed solipsism of his epistemology in 1909. This stance (and later Stalin's views) strongly shaped the direction of ideological and philosophical critiques of physics in the Soviet Union through the 1920s and 30s, where a prominent member of a “mechanist” faction claimed the imprimatur of reductionist science and dialectical materialism in arguing against Einstein's relativity for its idealism (Joravsky Reference Joravsky1961, chaps. 2 and 10). This will help suggest the need to relate Soviet contributions to the International Congress in History of Science to international debates on mechanism and the machine question as well as to more immediate social and economic roots in factional Soviet politics. Boris Hessen and Nikolai Bukharin engaged Sombart, Spengler, and Chase as well as Marx in developing their treatments of past and present relations between machines and the social fabric of science and industrialization, and they offered radically new accounts of scientific practice in doing so (Bukharin Reference Bukharin1931; Hessen Reference Hessen1931; Joffe Reference Joffe1931; Zavadovsky Reference Zavadovsky1931; Werskey Reference Werskey1971; Kojevnikov Reference Kojevnikov2008).

Mechanical Art and Film: The City as Machine

Having gained a detailed understanding of how mechanization was discussed by those writers and commentators most directly responsible for depicting the interwar period as a machine age, we now turn to two different contexts in which highly creative treatments of mechanism were offered, considering mechanical art and film, and then economics. In both cases, I will argue, the profusion and pervasive nature of material mechanisms and forms of mechanization helped promote the articulation of new and interrelated perspectives on the city and markets, in which forms of social mechanism were given new weight. The machine had long been the subject of artistic elaboration, and many amongst the avant-garde movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century worked with mechanomorphic images – Neue Sachlichkeit, Surrealism, Expressionism, Futurism – but they were taken up particularly strongly by those artists who joined the Dada Club in Berlin in the midst of World War I. Celebrating the language of their nation's enemy they followed the lead of Cabaret Voltaire in Zürich in producing vibrant, confrontational performances and artwork of ab√surd_!troub|ing juxtapositions to critique artistic and social assumptions (Kuenzli Reference Kuenzli2011). Helmut Herzfeld took the name John Heartfield and described himself as the “Monteur” or engineer of Dada. Adopting collage and montage to make art of current news and improve on old and new masters, as the war ended Berlin Dadaists strewed their images with machine fragments, wheels and gears, and cast both political leaders and the age in mechanical terms – yet themselves embraced the possibilities of mechanical art and machine-life hybridity. In 1920 Raoul Hausmann alternately critiqued and claimed the mechanical in evocatively symbolic works. In “Der eiserne Hindenburg,” the military leader is drawn in ink with mechanical limbs and body – but a human face and hands – and with a megaphone hanging from his hairy buttocks. Yet in “Selbstporträt des Dadasophen,” the photo-montaged image of the suited Dada protagonist has a pressure gauge and film projector for its head, and a diagrammatic lung, while the polished wooden tailor's head of “Mechanischer Kopf (Der Geist unsere Zeit),” incorporates measuring tape, watch gears and wallet. These hybrid human forms combine elements more often associated with the cybernetics and cyborgs of the post-World War II era (Biro Reference Biro2009, 117–20), but Dada images of the social are as revealing.

Consider the chaotic exuberance of George Grosz and Heartfield's “Leben und Treiben in Universal-City, 12 Uhr 5 mittags,” which sets fragments of advertising and newsprint evoking American cinema into a tangled heap of drawing and caricature, together with a car wheel, a pocket watch, a strip of film, feet, and faces: it is lunchtime in the film city (and Charlie Chaplin was a Dada hero). Hannah Höch rendered the social in more thoroughly political terms. Her monumental collage “Schnitt mit dem Küchenmesser, Dada durch die letzte Weimarer Bierbauchkulturepoche Deutschlands 1919/20,” offers deliberately profuse juxtapositions of politicians, soldiers, artists, and others for and against Dada, with Einstein flanked by a gear and ball bearings, surmounted by an insect and train with the phrase “dada” (Henderson Reference Henderson, Galison, Holton and Schweber2008, 106–08; Makela Reference Makela and von Ankum1997). Einstein's opponents such as Paul Weyland eagerly noted such references and were inclined to interpret his success as merely popular mass suggestion, fueled by newspapers (Wazeck Reference Wazeck2009, Reference Wazeck and Koby2014, 219–26; van Dongen Reference van Dongen2007). Ironically, like Dada artists those arguing against Einstein often celebrated mechanics, but in a traditional understanding that could be held against Einstein's theory of relativity.

The theatre of war had given a sense of the vulnerability of the body and led to art re-appropriating media images to fracture a discredited leader and show the newly famous in the broken masses of a volatile Republic. Film likewise could build commentary from collation, and it too was used to offer distinctive interpretations of mechanization and machines, especially in a number of highly suggestive accounts of the city from the late 1920s. Two decades earlier the sociologist Georg Simmel had closely tied the metropolis to money and a new form of mental life, as expressions of the peculiarly abstract relations occasioned by the division of labor – which also afforded unusual individual freedom. Yet for Spengler the inorganic city was a symbol of the desiccation of the modern era. Similarly, filmmakers offered both celebratory exploration and starkly difficult images of the metropolis. Because Simmel's perspective engages issues significant for later understandings of the economy and markets it will be helpful to outline it before considering several ground-breaking films. Bringing conceptual and artistic treatments of the city into contact can help us understand cultural grounds for newly general understandings of economic mechanisms.

In Reference Simmel, Wolff and Whitworth1903, Simmel described the central problems of modern life to stem from the need of the individual to preserve autonomy in the face of now overwhelming social forces, heritage, culture, and technology (which his 2007 translator rendered as “the technique of life”). If in the eighteenth century freedom from the historical bonds of state, religion, morality, and economic life had been highlighted, the nineteenth century had demanded a functional specialization of life and work that made individuals incomparable, indispensable to one another, but also directly dependent on each other's activities. Nietzsche's response had emphasized individual struggle, while socialism sought to suppress competition; both responses pointed to the individual's need to resist being levelled and worn out by what Simmel called “a social-technological mechanism” (Simmel [Reference Simmel, Wolff and Whitworth1903] Reference Simmel, Wolff and Whitworth2007, 182–83). Simmel associated this phenomenon most strongly with the city, and what he described as “a money economy,” for the multiplicity and concentration of economic activity in the city had given the means of exchange an importance quite foreign to commerce in rural environments. Under primitive conditions production was bound in intimate personal relations. In contrast, the modern metropolis was largely supplied by production for the market, and Simmel thought this enhanced the abstract intellectualistic mentality that was the ideal of natural science. He also linked the distances and aversions, the rhythms of emergence and disappearance in city sociability with the extent to which the city granted individuals a kind and amount of personal freedom that had no analogy in other circumstances: the division of labor in this extended group both occasioned and necessitated a new, specific individuality (ibid., 184–85, 88–89).

In the late 1920s a range of extraordinary documentary and narrative films portrayed and examined many of these themes in ways that highlight the shifting scales on which the city could be imagined as a machine. Walther Ruttmann's documentary film of the course of a day in Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Grossstadt made art of the ordinary. Its opening scenes depict a steam train and electrical power lines leading into/out of the city, and then near empty streets that gradually stir with people, before the factory machines start up, with glass, metal, milk, and bread production all mechanized. The camera moves between diverse comings and goings on foot or by streetcar and bus, showing the factory at work, street scenes and construction sites, and cutting between fashionable Kurfürstendamm and the slum district. Ruttmann juxtaposes workers, horses, the wealthy, business men, and a lion all eating as if to emphasize a common need, without settling into a strong reading of their relations – and this is followed by images of mechanized washing up and a cat feeding on scraps. Newspapers are produced, wrapped, stacked, and sent to delivery with a series of words lifted from the rapid blur of newsprint pages: Krise (crisis), Mord (murder), Börse (stock-exchange), Heirat (marriage), and Geld (money, seven times) and then we are on a rollercoaster, in a revolving door, subject to vertiginous visual illusion amidst the solitude of a suicide attempt witnessed by masses. The film ends with Berlin's streets lit by electric light, fireworks, and a searchlight. Ruttmann thought of his task as musical, but the way he writes about the problems of editing leaves unclear whether he is referring to his subject matter or the artistic medium: “While preoccupied with the cutting of the film, I realised how difficult it was to achieve a symphonic ‘curve’ or form in the film. Many beautiful individual scenes had to be cut out to avoid the effect of a series of static pictures. The structure of such a complicated machine, in creating the desired movement and to make the heterogeneous episodes an organic whole, had to consist of related incidents fitted to each other which would grip one by their intensity” (Ruttmann Reference Ruttmann1928). In contrast to the delicate realization of Ruttmann's vision of the machine, the intense narrative drama of Fritz Lang's Metropolis rendered a city doubly fantastic, both myth-infused and birthing the modern post-human – or rather revealing its caricature in the machined mimicry of the human. Yet in Lang's expressionist idiom the city dwarfs its divided peoples and is clearly dominated by the machine wrought into its center. Bitter struggles between the head and hand see the destruction of the heart-machine, which has feasted on the bodies of the laborers that served it, but the promise of mediating hearts at least halts the wreckage of the city torn apart by its people.

These 1927 films were followed in 1929 by Dziga Vertov's brilliantly innovative documentary Man with a Movie Camera. This was shot for the Ukraine State Studio shortly after Vertov had finished The Eleventh Year (1928), a study of Soviet electrification that John Mackay describes as an “energetic montage” focused above all on process in “documenting humans and machines collectively overcoming nature's stony inertia” (Mackay Reference Mackay2007, 41). In his 1922 “We: Variant on a Manifesto” Vertov had described his task:

Using the mechanical eye and the machine art of film to depict the life of a city and its people, Vertov fought for the complete separation of film from literary and theatrical languages, developing a sharply edited study with rapid shifts of perspective and interwoven rhythms, that deliberately constructed a series of analogies between audience and subject, camera and eye, people waking and an awakening city. Vertov switches between city bench and home, motor and factory, transport and rest, and builds and dissolves a set of contrasts, layering human, animal, and mechanical motion into the same screen. This was an experiment in new kinds of cinematic communication without the help of subtitles, scenario, or theatre; and Vertov's radically reflexive authorial stance also dramatically highlighted the agency of the audience, left to experience a vision of the city without story. Later commentators have debated whether the city is portrayed as mechanical or organic, but the deep analogies that Vertov's film vision capture and illuminate so self-consciously are surely more important than resolving this tension. His medium itself provides a machined enhancement, revealing illusions like split scenes of passing trains that mechanically enhance on the speed and intervals of physiological vision – and can be trusted because the viewer is shown how they are made (Cook Reference Cook2007; Feldman [Reference Feldman, Grant and Sloniowski1998] Reference Feldman, Grant and Sloniowski2013; Turvey Reference Turvey2007).

In 1936, Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times joined the genre of film commentary on the city and factory machine with a clear political perspective rendered sharply comedic. Reportedly, the film owed its genesis and factory motif to the worldwide success of the lyrical City Lights in 1931, with its social inversions between the Millionaire and the Tramp (whose feet had briefly appeared on screen in Ruttmann's movie) and a set echoing London, Paris, and Naples as well as Los Angeles. Soon after its Los Angeles premiere (with Albert and Elsa Einstein guests of honor), Chaplin toured depressed European cities to promote City Lights; discussing Mahatma Gandhi's grim perspective on industrialization prompted him to take on the machine. Fittingly, this backstory illustrates the international dimensions of the industrial modernism of Western cities.

The shifting analytic perspectives of the documentary films Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Grossstadt and The Man with the Movie Camera seem to highlight the scale and pervasiveness of different forms of mechanization, while Metropolis and Modern Times emphasize the breath-taking dominance and relentlessness of the machine. Each delivers a strikingly innovative vision of the machine in the city, but it was the artist, architect, and urban planner Le Corbusier who sought to offer the epitome of the machine age city. Indeed, in 1927 Le Corbusier titled an early article “Toward a Machine Age Paris,” and he developed manifestos and plans dominated by the right angle, straight lines, and strict functional segregation to allow single purpose planning and standardization in cities that might inspire the future. Scott's Seeing Like a State offers a brilliant exposition of the influential extreme that Le Corbusier presents, sketching visions of the same radiant city to thoroughly transcend present day Moscow, then Paris, noting that when Le Corbusier did get the chance to build Chandigarh from Jawaharlal Nehru, residents had to build an unplanned periphery on the outskirts of the austere and monumental center he constructed (Scott Reference Scott1998, chap. 4). Collectively the diverse renderings of the city we have considered echo the wide span and heterogeneity of Rathenau's diverse forms of mechanization. But in suggesting that the city is an appropriate symbol of the machine age in the interwar period I do not mean to argue that contemporaries took the city as a central metaphor for the machine, or that the period was defined by Le Corbusier's singular projective visions, though these were important. Rather it is the fact that some saw the city as already a machine, its life pervasively run through by heterogeneous forms of mechanization that is most revealing, for this offers a new and importantly ambiguous image of the social life of the machine (and this is characteristic of the age).

Mechanisms and the Economy

Having explored the development of a very general concept of “the machine” as a system in the previous sections, I wish to conclude by considering the origins of the sense in which we now speak of the economy in terms of market mechanisms. Recalling Rathenau's Reference Rathenau1912 treatment of mechanization, it is worth emphasizing that he described “the economist” as seeing mechanization in mass production and the distribution of goods, without referring to markets. So when did economists or others first start to write of markets, mechanisms, and the economy in the same breath, and what does it mean to think of market prices as a mechanism? This section contributes towards answering these questions by first outlining the pertinence of discourse on machines to a general concept of the economy, and then showing that the wide scope of this discourse was important for the economist Friedrich Hayek's influential account of the roles of prices and markets in the economy; but that he also undertook a deliberate attempt to reshape its metaphorical, connotative dimensions.

In his study of the practices and concepts of capitalism as these were engaged in Egypt, Timothy Mitchell develops a view not unlike the perspective that Oldenziel and Schatzberg have taken to subtly changing concepts of technology, arguing that the general concept “the economy” only emerged in the English language in the late 1930s, with the contraction of empires and increasing isolation of countries feeling the effects of the Great Depression. Before this period the term referred to household stewardship or, as “political economy,” to management or public administration. While Simmel's analysis of the city points to historical factors that could be significant for the emergence of a general concept of economy, it is telling that there Simmel himself always refers specifically to a money economy (sometimes in contrast to barter), and is equally specific in referring to metropolitan markets. Yet, as Mitchell shows, it has been easy for later authors to read back into Simmel's writing broader concepts that were actually developed only somewhat later. While Edward Shils's 1936 translation of the essay followed Simmel in using the indefinite article to refer to a money economy, in 1950 Gerth and Miller inserted the definite article in their translation, writing “The metropolis has always been the seat of the money economy” (Mitchell Reference Mitchell2002, 80–81; emphasis in the original).

Mitchell goes on to argue that a new, more general concept was developed by economists like John Maynard Keynes, in part as a result of their work managing the circulation of money in the enclosed geographical space of colonial India, which he writes led them to refer to the economy as “a self-contained mechanism whose internal parts are imagined to move in a dynamic and regular interaction, separate from the irregular interaction of the mechanism as a whole with what could now be called its exterior” (Mitchell Reference Mitchell2002, 82; idem Reference Mitchell and Steinmetz2005). If Mitchell is right about this, his argument points to a further significant dimension of the cultural history of concepts of mechanism I have been developing here. Mitchell never analyses mechanism in detail, but two revealing moments in his careful histories of colonization and economics underline this possibility. In Colonizing Egypt, Mitchell offers a telling account of the terms in which the Earl of Cromer described what he called the state machinery and political machinery of Egypt in the 1907 book Modern Egypt. There Mitchell argues that at the point at which Cromer described his own power as Consul General as mechanical, he resorted also to images of the body politic (Mitchell Reference Mitchell1988, 159–60). Similarly, more recently Mitchell has shown that when supervising the cadastral survey of Egypt in the same period, Captain Henry Lyons described the survey as depending on “an almost mechanical system of work . . . carrying the principle of the division of labour to its extreme possible development” (Mitchell Reference Mitchell2002, 89 and 119). After returning to Britain in 1907, Lyons served as director of the Science Museum in the period from 1920 to 1933 when it first won substantial audiences, in part by reorienting its displays and labels to address first the ordinary visitor and second the technical visitor, as well as students and specialists (like Mumford, who visited in preparation for his book) (Follett Reference Follett1978, 98).

The earliest sustained empirical discussion of market mechanisms that I know of is the University of Chicago PhD dissertation that Edwin G. Nourse published in 1918. Attempting to understand the mechanisms and forces operating between farmers and city consumers to form prices, Nourse examined the Chicago Produce Market and drew attention to the unusual value of focusing on a market city in contrast to earlier studies of markets in specific goods or classes of goods (Nourse Reference Nourse, Schaffner and Essays1918). Then worried by monopolies, Nourse soon addressed the relations between American agriculture and the European market (Grether Reference Grether1958). While there had been occasional references to the price mechanism in the nineteenth century, it became increasingly common for economists to write of price and market mechanisms after World War I. Sometimes looking back to Adam Smith's discussion of the “higgling of the market,” their main aim was to articulate the role that prices play in the equilibrium of supply and demand in the subjective or marginalist approach to economics that had emerged from the 1870s onwards, and they were often occasioned by postwar debates on planned economies and socialism. Together with Nourse's care in navigating the distinction between specific markets, these debates (and later, responses to the stock market crash of 1929) explain why such references to mechanisms amongst economic experts commonly raised critical questions about the generality of economic concepts. As we shall see, they also often turned on the awkward status of economic theories and their simplification in lay circles. Collectively these circumstances make it difficult to evaluate the accuracy of Mitchell's subtle point about “the economy,” but they also highlight its significance.

Considering two very different accounts from 1921 will illustrate tensions of this kind between specific and general concepts amongst diverse audiences. The London School of Economics anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski began a paper for The Economic Journal by noting that for the Melanesian islanders he had studied “national economy does not exist,” if one means by that “a system of free competitive exchange of goods and services, with the interplay of supply and demand determining value and regulating all economic life.” But he went on to argue against following the Leipzig professor of economic history Karl Bücher in assuming the only alternative was a pre-economic stage based on a single household satisfying their wants “without any more elaborate mechanism than division of labour according to sex, and an occasional spasmodic bit of barter.” Rather, Trobriand production, consumption and exchange were “socially organized and regulated by custom,” and governed by “a special system of traditional values.” Malinowski coined the term tribal economy to describe the new concept he had developed as a result of his fieldwork, and urged that comparative studies might elucidate “the nature of the economic mechanism of savage life” (Malinowski Reference Malinowski1921, 12, 15). His writing illustrates an easy association between social mechanisms and economics, and a readiness to speak of a national economy – while arguing for a different form of economy. By contrast, in an account of risk and uncertainty later reprinted in an LSE series in 1933, the University of Iowa economist Frank Knight defined his discipline in terms of free enterprise, while also admitting this was a highly idealized conception. Writing that economics was the study of a particular form of wants-satisfying activity called free enterprise, which was prevalent in the western nations and “spread over the greater part of conduct,” he acknowledged immediately that it was “obviously not at all completely or perfectly competitive,” but asserted that just as clearly its general principles “are those of free competition” (Knight [Reference Knight1921] Reference Knight1933, 9). Knight went on to stress the significance of recognizing the assumptions underlying the application of the general principles of economics to complex facts, writing that neglecting this had led economic theorists to untenable and often vicious deductions that naturally harmed the credibility of the science. Revealingly, Knight articulated this problem and its solution by developing at some length a comparison between theoretical economics and theoretical mechanics. Pointing to public appreciation of the limits of mechanics, he argued it was necessary that “the contrast between these simplified [economic] assumptions and the complex facts of life be made as conspicuous and as familiar as has been done in mechanics” (ibid., 9, 11).

Knight's work shows that analogies with theoretical mechanics could be productive in clarifying the nature of economic knowledge; a study of Friedrich Hayek's distinctive understanding of markets will show that he referred to the rhetorical dimensions of mechanical discourse even as he asserted a stronger basis for his views. Postwar debates about economic planning, the rise of the Soviet Union and later World War II were all central to the development of Hayek's thought. Combatting the strong distinctions often assumed in post-World War II histories of economics and common understandings of the emergence of neoliberalism, Johanna Bockman and Ben Jackson have insisted on the significance of constructive dialogue throughout the interwar period. Models of socialism and of markets were often used hand in hand methodologically, and sometimes, as in the earlier work of Leon Walras, Vilfredo Pareto, and Enrico Barone, they were combined. Far from being regarded as essentially antagonistic, under certain assumptions and conditions, socialism and markets were even regarded as equivalent. Whole economies were modelled mathematically but they were rarely thought to represent the heterogeneous conditions of political economy in any full sense (Pareto, for example, turned to sociology towards the end of his life in order to understand why abstract mathematical theories did not work out in practice). As Bockman notes, early Soviet thinkers like Bukharin were also deeply familiar with neoclassical thought, because it provided important models and tools for socialist approaches and had to be critiqued. Jackson's close-grained study of the 1930s helpfully shows that leading neoliberal figures like Hayek at the London School of Economics, Walter Lippmann in New York, and Herbert Simons in Chicago all reflected a similarly open perspective. Suspicious of the moral failures of nineteenth-century capitalism and liberalism, they emphasized value commitments shared with socialists, and also endorsed significant state regulation and redistribution (Jackson Reference Jackson2010). Collectively this research therefore highlights still more strongly the importance of the transition that Hayek's biographer Bruce Caldwell has charted, most evident in Hayek's well-known papers of 1937 on “Economics and Knowledge,” and of Reference Hayek1945 on “The Use of Knowledge in Society” (Caldwell Reference Caldwell2004).

Soon after moving from Vienna to London, in 1933 Hayek offered a historical portrait of the fortunes of the economist that tied the poor reputation of the science to the difficulty of recognizing the proper nature of its subject matter – which he called a “highly complicated mechanism,” but, following Ludwig von Mises, described more often as an “organism” (von Hayek Reference von Hayek1933, 123 [for mechanism] and 123, 130–131 [for organism]). In the 1937 paper in which he moved from thinking of markets in terms of the flow of goods, to knowledge, Hayek identified the problem that the perfect market that had to be assumed in equilibrium theories “must not be confined to the markets of all the individual commodities; the whole economic system must be assumed to be one perfect market in which everybody knows everything” (von Hayek Reference von Hayek1937, 44–45). He then focused on explaining how individuals would acquire this knowledge, allowing that it was extremely difficult to say what assumptions were required to establish a tendency towards equilibrium and claim the analysis applied to the real world (ibid., 47). Still more important was dealing with a division of knowledge, which was analogous to and as significant a problem as the division of labor; it was the really central problem of economics as a social science. Hayek was identifying the point he thought needed to be resolved in the gulf between perfect knowledge and planning, and spontaneous individuals, asking how fragmentary knowledge in different minds could bring about a result that would otherwise require a knowledge that no single person can possess.

It was in 1945 that Hayek found a solution in the “price system” and wrote concretely and explicitly in terms of a general economic mechanism. The key elements of his view had in fact already been assembled a year earlier in his surprisingly influential argument against socialist planning, The Road to Serfdom, where they bore the explicitly moral perspective of that book's political aims. There, Hayek described the price mechanism as impersonal and established an evocative contrast between on the one hand the price mechanism and impersonal forces of a competitive society, and on the other hand direct regulation by authority, the war machine, the state machine, or the totalitarian machine. He argued that while people may submit to a suffering that could hit anyone (such as “the impersonal mechanism known by us as the price system”), it is much harder to submit to one resulting from the decision of an authority. “It may be bad to be just a cog in an impersonal machine,” he wrote, “but it is infinitely worse if we can no longer leave it, if we are tied to our place and to the superiors who have been chosen for us” (Hayek Reference Hayek1944, v, 27–29, 86, 112, on 36–37, 80) Hayek's language shows that he too associates mechanism generally with many of the negative connotations we have seen in earlier discussions, while also ascribing a distinctive moral advantage to “impersonal” mechanisms.

In his paper on knowledge a year later, Hayek was able to explicitly treat the coordination of information on the scale of the entire economy. Giving a rich example of how consumers react to the increasing price of tin to save and direct resources elsewhere even without knowing what has made the metal scarce, Hayek described the effects shifting through the economic system and wrote “the whole acts as one market,” because limited individual fields of vision overlap sufficiently to pass on the relevant information. Now he wrote:

The argument that you can reconcile imperfect individual knowledges to an economic system through prices allowed Hayek to proclaim the whole as one market – at the same time that he described the role of prices as a comprehensive information mechanism. Hayek's changing perspective nicely confirms Mitchell's argument about the gradual rise of general concepts of the economy. With its delicate negotiation of tensions between merely metaphorical and material instances of mechanism, his discussion also indicates the creative role of the heterogeneous and multiplying concepts of mechanization that I have traced here. By 1944 and Reference Hayek1945, Hayek had artfully absorbed the 1930s technocratic engineer into his vision of the individual watching prices, finding a way to reconcile disparate economic systems and incorporate the idea of general planning within the concept of the market itself.

Hayek's next paragraph takes up the problem of formal generality, only to dismiss it. He allows that the adjustments probably never meet the perfection of knowledge required of equilibrium analysis, but suggests economists should not be blinded to the true function of the price mechanism by applying the misleading standard of the assumption of perfection. Then he goes on to perform the conceptual feat of deliberately leading his readers to re-evaluate their understanding of the price mechanism. Remarkably, the linguistic foundation for this work was to strip his account of the explicitly moral and evocative language he had used in 1944 – there is no specter of either the impersonal or grim machinery of The Road to Serfdom – and then to reinvest the price mechanism with his own understanding of it as “marvel.” Hayek uses this term explicitly to shock people out of the complacency of typical understandings of prices, to now regard as marvelous the way the information of a rise in price alone leads thousands to respond appropriately to scarcity.

It is revealing that one of our most significant historians of economics began his work investigating the relations between physics and economics with a book entitled Against Mechanisms (Mirowski Reference Mirowski1988). Like Caldwell, Mirowski describes Hayek as naturalizing the market in terms of information flow from 1945 onwards, drawing attention to the role of the Mont Pèlerin Society and other institutions to further Hayek's political and intellectual aims (Mirowski Reference Mirowski2002, 232–41; idem Reference Mirowski2007). In recent years extraordinary historical attention has been devoted to Hayek, and a new field of economic engineering has arisen around the idea of identifying desired outcomes and then constructing mechanisms (or institutions) to achieve them (Ashworth Reference Ashworth2014; Caldwell Reference Caldwell2004, idem Reference Caldwell2016; Hodgson Reference Hodgson and Mirowski1994; Lewis Reference Lewis2016; Mirowski Reference Mirowski2007; Tuerck Reference Tuerck1995; Maskin Reference Maskin2015). Yet at least in our studies of technology, historians of science have usually focused far more on the issues of identity raised on the borders of science and technology and pure and applied science, than on the engagement of industrial physics with its markets; something that the contributions to this issue will go some way towards addressing. Historians and sociologists have recently begun to explore the performative work that economists have achieved in creating markets, mostly considering financial institutions developed in recent decades (Callon Reference Callon1998; MacKenzie et al. Reference MacKenzie, Muniesa and Siu2007). I hope the present paper can clarify respects in which the interwar period may have been significant for changing understandings of markets and the free economy. Responding equally to profuse forms of mechanization brought together in city streets and goods at the market, the valence of the machine, and the attraction of mechanisms, Hayek, for one, found a new accommodation to overcome the burden of perfection and find a general mechanism in prices. Exploring the extent to which understandings of mechanism are more or less than metaphor thus helps demonstrate the ways that mechanisms and the economy must be understood culturally, in order to modulate the diverse senses in which they are impersonal and marvelous or might express quite other relations.