Thomas P. Hughes, Mellon Professor Emeritus, Penn, and Distinguished Visiting Professor at MIT, is surely a doyen of the technology and culture intellectual history movement. Human-Built World is a short and culminating reflection upon the role of technologies in the late modern world. The book is derived from the Page Barbour Lectures at the University of Virginia of 1995 and begins by noting that ‘technology’ is a recent terminological arrival for thinking intellectual history. As a term, it is distinctly twentieth-century; earlier engineering and the practical arts more distinctly applied to the wide and diverse range of artifacts and activities today recognized as ‘technology’.

Hughes’ thesis is one in which he frames technology as a productive activity, which while yielding artifacts, is an exercise of human creativity. Technology produces a human-built dimension of the world. Chronologically, he begins roughly with 1900 as a benchmark, and brings us to the opening of the twenty-first century. His territories are primarily America and Germany as two highly technologically active cultures. He notes from the beginning, and carries this subtheme through the entire book, that technology is viewed and embedded in a primarily optimistic and positive light for most of American history, whereas it is taken more critically and sometimes more pessimistically in its German (and European) context.

The nineteenth century, for the Americans, was still partially a frontier phenomenon and the use and expansion of technologies (railways, steam power, heavy machine power) were part of that expansion. And, for both the Americans and the Germans, there was a romantic background that colored the interpretation of technological development. Hughes argues that the Americans tended to take technology in the late frontier context as a ‘second creation’, a human-built creation, sometimes in a garden, added to the first layer of nature. He illustrates this with a painting of a steam engine rail road running through an idyllic landscape. Yet, Hughes acknowledges, this early development did not lead to a new Eden, but it did lead to a ‘machine for production’. This machine primarily increased the material well-being of the people. However, no mention is made of the simultaneous rise of the labor movement, of strikes, mining catastrophes, or other phenomena accompanying this industrialization process. The implied progressivism Hughes notes for the American context was taken more darkly by the Germans, particularly Oswald Spengler, who saw in technology a cause for the decline of civilization. For Spengler and subsequent detractors, technology clearly threatened high culture.

The World Wars sparked yet another characterization for technological development, one which Hughes characterizes as “Systems, Controls, and Information.” These were distinctly twentieth-century phenomena and were often embodied in military technologies. Here one recognizes much of the intellectual history surrounding the rise of Big Science, cybernetics, and systems approaches surrounding and following the Wars. In this case, Hughes recognizes the beginnings of disillusionment, particularly from many intellectual sources, associated with systems failures, war technologies and industrial catastrophes. But, he quickly repairs this by noting that the later, information phase, restored a more optimistic cast to technologies during the twentieth- and twenty-first-century transitions.

He then turns to another dimension of technology and culture, the second technological revolution (information revolution) and the adaptation by artists and architects of an International Style arising from inspiration by technologies in function, power, and efficiency. He ends with a plea for an ecotechnological development in which the human-built technological world takes up responsibilities for sustainable and improvable environments.

I have cast my summary in such a way that Hughes’ persistent and dominant optimism shows up, but my qualifications concerning this lack of balance are not recommendations for its opposite, dystopianism. They are, rather, a note that draws attention to two significant dimensions to this intellectual history, which simply do not appear therein: in his introduction, Hughes claims that he draws upon ideas of “public intellectuals, historians, social scientists, engineers, natural scientists, artist and architects” (1). Then, in the ending biographic essay, he adds “philosophers, theologians” (175) to the earlier list. He need not have since they remain notably absent throughout. He seems to take philosophers and theologians as interchangeable and pays no note whatsoever to the rise of philosophy of technology as a twentieth-century intellectual historical phenomenon. Had he taken John Dewey on the American side, and Martin Heidegger on the German, he might have even had more grist for his American optimism/German pessimism subthesis. On the other hand, I find it strange to read an intellectual history so totally void of the role of philosophers, including those who became public intellectuals. He also does not deal with social-political thought or events. In tracing the rise of industrialism, while noting some romantic objections to industrialization and mechanization, there is a total absence of notice of social-political movements such as the rise of unions, the history of strikes, and other conflicts that accompanied and modified both American and German technological histories. A human-built world is necessarily a complex and multidimensional process and the humans who labor and do the building surely must belong to it as well as the engineers and architects who do the designing. I agree with Hughes that technology is a part of human-building and can be a creative process; but the builders—and users and modifiers—extend beyond technology, beyond the world of inventors and initiators favored in traditional accounts.