Tech Utopias Then and Now - ZOOM

The mechanical arts and their capacity for shaping natural materials were at the heart of numerous utopian plans and projects in early modern Europe. This lecture will survey some of those projects and consider the historical developments that led to the central role played by the mechanical arts in utopian plans. Over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, attitudes to the mechanical arts shifted in tandem with large scale political and economic forces. The lecture will conclude by comparing early modern European tech utopias to their counterparts as articulated by prominent tech entrepreneurs today.

Pamela H. Smith, Seth Low Professor of History at Columbia University, is the founding Director of the Center for Science and Society and its cluster project, the Making and Knowing Project. Her books The Business of Alchemy (1994), The Body of the Artisan (2004), and From Lived Experience to the Written Word (2022) explore craft and practice as forms of knowledge. She has co-edited volumes on the history of practice, embodied knowledge, and material culture, and led the Making and Knowing Project’s multiyear creation of Secrets of Craft and Nature in Renaissance France (2020). She is currently researching longue durée histories of socio-natural sites of pre-industrial industry.

The lecture is part of a GHIL workshop on Christianopolis: Re-Reading a Seventeenth Century German Utopia convened by Mirjam Hähnle (GHIL) and Ulinka Rublack (University of Cambridge).