Daniel Wilson
The Machine, Past & Future: the enigma of technology in British political thought c.1900

British attempts to theorise the impact of machines during the nineteenth century are usually seen within the context of the “Machinery Question” and thus taken to have ended around 1848. The second half of the nineteenth century – indeed, the period until 1914 – is marked, on the one hand, by an enormous acceleration of technological development and, on the other, by the dissipation of critical discourse into diffuse and unrelated channels : from those of aesthetics, art and architecture, to that of the specialist sciences and engineering, to political economy, historical writing and literary criticism. Given the enormous diversity of this intellectual field, one might even ask whether it is possible to discern a coherent body of thought, or even a consistent concern with the question of machinery in fin-de-siècle Britain?
In seeking traces of any such concern, can one perhaps be guided by a political grouping, for example, that of socialism? Such a principle of selection faces immediate difficulty since the very notion of “socialism” – during this period – was as diffuse and capacious as the British notion of “liberal” — against which it was usually, but not always successfully, defined. To discern the politics of machinery requires a broad canvas and, so, the efflorescence of British socialisms – from the 1880s through to 1914 – provides the backdrop to this paper, which will focus on the ways in which machinery was figured by different writers on the political scene, from those followers of William Morris through the Fabianism of the Webbs, to HG Wells, GK Chesterton and, finally, the radical, conservative anti-mechanist, Arthur Penty, for whom any answer to the question of machinery required returning (unexpectedly) to a reading of Karl Marx.