Determinism and Indeterminacy in the History of Technology
Philip B. Scranton · Technology and Culture · 1995
Determinism and Indeterminacy in the History of Technology PHILIP SCRANTON In a society committed rhetorically and mythically to the signifi cance of the individual, voluntarism, and agency, determinism is a discomfiting notion. In their strong forms, be they Calvinist or crude Marxist, determinisms call forth images of universal structures and dynamics that deny or sharply delimit the capacities of individuals and institutions to alter history's trajectory on the personal, the social, or the global plane. People or nations become featured or bit players in transcendent dramas, thereby gaining stable meanings and roles, rules for practice, and confidence in outcomes. If Puritan anxiety, flashes of antinomianism, or waves of proletarian optimism materi alize along the way, incurring human costs, they are easily enough slotted into the master narrative. The externality and otherness of such a governing framework ill suited self-made men dedicated to conquering nature and natives in order to design and erect the political economy of the United States. Here agency ruled, theocracy was rejected (and scaled down to a market democracy of sects), and universals were recalibrated spa tially, recoded nationally, and adjusted periodically across the span from manifest destiny to the era of global policing. If liberty was the core organizing value, its meaning was far from fixed, and its endur ance far from certain. Fragile and beset by contingencies, it had to be defended actively, extended cautiously and aggressively by turns, and revitalized repeatedly. National vitality flowed from appreciating this vulnerability and translating that understanding into action. It was not guaranteed by a cosmic or historical logic. Yet underneath this dismissal of strong determinisms lay accep tance of a softer assurance. American greatness (not human perfect ibility) would arise from the mobilization of boundless resources and the application of technical ingenuity, creating a continent-wide variDr . Scranton is professor of history at Rutgers University—Camden and director of the Center for the History of Business, Technology and Society at the Hagley Museum and Library. A version of this article appears in Does Technology Drive History1 ?: The Dilemma of Technological Determinism, ed. Merritt Roe Smith and Leo Marx (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994). S31 S32 Philip Scranton ant of cumulative progress through practical rationality. Despite their differences over the ideal path and its political implications, Jefferson and Hamilton shared such a sensibility—one that was welded to in commensurate notions of liberty and to common worries for liberty's future. Divergent regional practices led Jefferson's commercial hus bandry to root in the Middle West, whereas Hamilton's manufactur ing vision was realized in the North, with the South an isolate, ex tending westward yet conserving the "land-killer" strategies that propelled such movement.1 The Civil War confirmed both the South's error and the larger faith that technical advances at farm and factory undergirded the defense and elaboration of American liberty. That this line of deter mination was neither universalized nor naturalized is evident from the long devotion to tariff protection for industry and importmenaced agriculturalists (e.g., wool producers), stretching from Mor rill to Smoot-Hawley. The reigning "general theory" in political econ omy, free trade, sprouted often in national debates but never in policy.2 Incremental and breakthrough innovations, together with an array of transatlantic borrowings, built prodigious American techni cal capacity and confidence across the half-century following the na tion's centennial. From a nationally bounded and politically informed expectation, technical progress arguably emerged as the symbolic en gine propelling American eminence, then preeminence. If half the world's cars were Fords in 1920,3 if American industrial might had turned the tide of the Great War, if its second-industrialrevolution giants were surging toward global leadership, it took little effort to shun an earlier sense of contingency. Technological momen tum seemed inexorable, firing the imaginations of Thomas Hughes's system builders, rendering the Great Depression an unfortunate mis step on the road to the American Century, and solidifying what John Staudenmaier has termed a "confidence in the gradual triumph of Western rationality and the incremental advance of scientific and technical progress."4 If public intellectuals like Lewis Mumford and Stuart Chase made cautionary noises about complexity, risks, and downsides...