The Romantic Machine

"The Romantic Machine is a boldly original and riotously interdisciplinary essay in the history of science that reinterprets romanticism for our own era. Situated within a dense fabric of political, moral, aesthetic, and epistemological concerns, Tresch's early nineteenth-century 'mechanical romantics' reject human mastery over nature as the goal of science, opting instead for limited regulation and sustainable coexistence."--Jan Goldstein, University of Chicago
"With The Romantic Machine, John Tresch fulfills the goal of most recent history of science: to show that when you follow scientific achievements you end up describing a whole culture, including its literature and arts. By proposing a new interpretation of post-Napoleonic Paris's material culture, Tresch shows the fecundity of his notion of cosmogram as the foundation of a different historical anthropology, one that includes science and technology and is not led by any teleology toward 'modernity.' On the contrary, by reinterpreting romanticism, he shows how much we could learn from this early nineteenth century period for understanding our own contradictory cosmograms today."--Bruno Latour, Sciences Po Paris
"A work which brings into glittering relief the materials of scientific exploration in the early nineteenth century and reveals how scientists were, beyond the ostensible field of enquiry, profoundly engaged with the emotive, social and spiritual dimensions of their discoveries. . . . Of certain appeal to historians of science and scholars in popular culture The Romantic Machine . . . makes a distinct contribution to the study of technological thought, and gestures frequently towards the work of figures as diverse as Bergson, Deleuze, and Simondon."--Greg Kerr, University of Glasgow "Nineteenth-Century French Studies"
"Tresch's book restores to machines the dignity of wonder, of experimentation, openness, and beauty. It does so without neglecting the inexorable logic of material components, of thermodynamic laws, and of scientific axioms, and without blindness for the social and economic forces to which industrial machines will be subjected. The Romantic Machine not only describes utopian science and technology, but is itself a messenger from a utopia where technical objects regain their language and become agents in the complex history of nineteenth-century culture."--Helmut Muller-Sievers "Centaurus"