Industrial society: the emergence of the human problems of automation

Since THE BEGINNING of the century the human mind has been increasingly conscience-stricken in the face of its own
activity and its own creations. And with good reason. The destiny
of machine civilization, born of the application of science to society,
everywhere provokes uneasy speculation, exacerbated by the ma-
terial and moral chaos into which humanity has been plunged by
two world wars. Philosophers, writers, journalists and poets express
and disseminate this uneasiness. Such subjects of discussion as the fol-
lowing are boldly announced on the walls of our city buildings: "What
are we to think of mechanization?” “Is the machine for man or against
him?” Sensitive essayists devise variations on the theme of the
present and the future. At the same time we hear much of humanism.
It is certainly desirable that literature, interrupting the egoistic trifling
in which it has so long indulged, should wish, today, to divert all its
resources to the service of man. But general views, fine sentiments,
intuitions, personal affirmations—however elegantly expressed-make
no solid contribution toward the construction or advance of a well-
founded humanism. The problems of mechanization must be grasped
where they arise, observed and even experienced in their true nature.
The various sciences from which they derive must be studied in order
to judge the evils, and to define the remedies (if such exist) and the
conditions under which the latter may operate.
This work constitutes the second part of a trilogy to which I hava
given the general title of The Machine and Humanism. The subiect
of the first part (La Crise du Progrès) was a study of the crisis in th
ideologies of progress in western thought from the end of the 19
century to the eve of World War ll. Starting with the period of enthusi
astic confidence in the application of science and industry to the welfare
of individuals and societies, it reached, with Taylor and Ford, the great
doctrinaires of technical progress at the beginning Ot the second Indus-
trial Revolution, and gave an account of the tremendous crisis between
the two world wars and the new hopefulness aroused by the immense
Soviet experiment. It was, therefore, concerned primarily with the
history of ideas and studied the intellectual and moral repercussions
(varying with social structures and milieux) of the adventure in
mechanization into which humanity has plunged and in which it
risks disaster.1
The second volume attacks the problems of mechanization them-
selves, restricting itself to the industrial aspect which in itself is a
vast and varied field. The investigation and analysis are restricted
to the workshops of large-scale industry, that is, to the mutual
relations between man and the machines of production, leaving to a
third volume? the task of studying as a whole the milieu of develop-
ment of technical civilization, which also includes the technology of
transportation, communication and leisure (such as railroads, the
automobile and the airplane, the telegraph and telephone, phono-
graphs, talking pictures, radio and television) . Moreover, this study
is necessarily limited to a certain period of time, since it seeks to
grasp the human problems of mechanization produced by the "second
industrial revolution," which was distinguished and defined in the
preceding volume: the period of transition from the craft workshop or
small-scale production, still dominated by the steam engine, to a
complex whole, a veritable octopus of techniques, centering about
the mass application of electricity to industry, and inseparable from
the financial and economic factors characterizing the present phase of
world capitalism. Finally, given the great structural differences be-
tween the societies ot western Europe and the United States, on the
one hand, and the Soviet Union on the other, I considered that it
would be methodologically inadvisable to make use of facts derived
from both. In any case,