Industrial revolution

Summary

Dominique Pagani takes up the Industrial Revolution mainly in the cycle "Nature or Landscape?". He thinks of it together with the French Revolution, as a double event: nature becomes an object of contemplation and worship only once it stops being threatening and gives way to technology. According to him, this explains why Romanticism is born in England and Germany. To the question of how the English Industrial Revolution relates to the French political revolution, he answers with Marx's 1859 preface: when the productive forces change, the relations of production change too. He illustrates French backwardness with Voltaire's Letter on Trade. He reads Rimbaud's "Mouvement" as an industrial landscape, a hymn to science in which the old wildness remains, and recalls that Verlaine also saw this revolution being born, in "Charleroi"1. Finally, he draws on Hegel's 1803 text describing an English pin manufactory: the division of labour, the stupefaction of the worker, and money. He sees in it a denunciation of alienation that one would attribute to Marx2.

1. 1#5.4 Introduction: nature or landscape?25 Jan 2019
2. 2A chapter of Marx written by Hegel22 May 2021

Introduction produced automatically from the 3 sessions on this theme, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the sessions.