Comment: The Interaction of Technology and Society

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COMMENT: THE INTERACTION OF TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY EDWIN LAYTON Professor Daniels’s paper demonstrates the originality, vigor of presentation, and willingness to challenge traditional views that his previous works have led us to expect. Its greatest contribution is that it poses fundamental questions. What is the relation of technology to society? What do we really know about our field? That we ask such questions at all is itself significant, for they suggest that the history of technology has reached a certain level of self-awareness, a new maturity. The time is now ripe for a critical examination of the foundations of our discipline. If Daniels forces us to think about the “big questions,” he will have rendered an important service to all of us, whether we agree with his conclusions or not. Daniels begins his paper with a critique of Roger Burlingame’s work. He notes, correctly,, that Burlingame adopted a rather naive technological determinism.(But Daniels further assumes that subsequent historians of technology have adopted Burlingame’s pattern of his­ torical explanation?)! simply do not think this is the case. Burlingame deserves our highest praise as a pioneer and for calling attention to the importance of technology for the understanding of American history. But he was not a professional historian, and at the time he wrote there were no professional historians in this field. If Bur­ lingame has been accepted as an authority, it is because no one has as yet attempted a grand synthesis of the history of technology and society in America. But a number of partial syntheses have appeared —by people like Brooke Hindle, Carl Condit, Eugene Ferguson, Louis C. Hunter, W. Paul Strassman, Carroll Pursell, Melvin Kranzberg, and John Kouwenhoven.1 None of these men and, indeed, virtually Dr. Layton teaches the history of American technology in the graduate program in the history of science and technology at Case Western Reserve University. He is the author of a forthcoming book on engineers and social responsibility in modem America. 1 Brooke Hindle, Technology in Early America (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1966); Carl W. Condit, American Building Art: The Nineteenth Century (New York, 1960); Carl W. Condit, American Building Art: The Twentieth Century (New York, 1961); Eugene S. Ferguson, Bibliography of the History of Technology (Cam27 28 Edwin Layton no other professional historians of American technology have adopted Burlingame’s technological determinism. But professional historians of American technology do assume that technology can and has influenced American society. In the present paper Daniels argues, on the contrary, that technology does not cause social change, but that social change causes technological inno­ vation. “What I do believe,” he savs, “is that no single technological innovation—and no group of them taken together in isolation from nontechnological elements—ever changed the direction in which a society was going before the innovation.” “And I further believe,” he continues, “that the direction in which the society is going deter­ mines the nature of its technological innovations.” For American history, specifically, he maintains that “the real effect of technical innovation was to help Americans do better what they had already shown a marked inclination to do.” The relation of technology to society is indeed a very big question. But I would like to suggest that there is a prior question which may be even bigger. To what extent does the history of technology share the same patterns of explanation employed by political history? Putting it another way, is the history of technology simply another branch of history—like the history of Russia or ancient history? Or does it have methods, problems, and modes of explanation which distinguish it from traditional history? A good place to begin would be to consider the sort of causal explanations employed. Daniels recognizes this when he says that “the biggest question of all has to do with the nature and direction of causation,” but he says that “at present we know very little about it.” While I agree, it might be observed that historians do make implicit assumptions on this matter in order to write history at all. Both Burlingame and Daniels assume, for example, that “cause” in history is unidirectional. That is, that it operates in...

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