"Catastrophic Technology in Cold War Political Thought"

New from Edingurgh University Press: Catastrophic Technology in Cold War Political Thought by Caroline Ashcroft.

About the book, from the publisher:

Explores a Cold War concept of technology as a catastrophic influence on modern politics

• Explores the intellectual history of a ‘catastrophic’ concept of technology in the work of some of the twentieth century’s most important political thinkers
• Reveals the centrality of this narrative in the work of what is otherwise generally considered to be an ideologically and philosophically diverse group of theorists
• Contextualises this concept of technology in the Cold War period to reveal the fundamentally political character of the critique as a rejection of liberalism
• Studies both ‘technology’ as an overarching concept as well as particular realisations of technology in these theorists’ work: technologies of war, production, media and biotechnology
• Reveals the way in which this concept of technology produces a specific critique of the relationship between humans, world and nature in modernity, which brings the critics of technology into discourse with early environmentalism

In the mid-twentieth century, a certain idea of technology emerged in the work of many influential political theorists: a critical, catastrophic concept of technology, entangled with the apocalyptic fears fuelled by two all-consuming world wars and the looming nuclear threat. Drawing on the work of theorists such as Hannah Arendt, Jacques Ellul, Martin Heidegger and Herbert Marcuse, Catastrophic Technology in Cold War Political Thought explores the critical idea of technology as both a response to a dramatically changing world, and a radical political critique of Cold War liberalism.

--Marshal Zeringue