Catastrophic Technology in Cold War Political Thought

Caroline Ashcroft is a Lecturer in Politics at Lady Margaret Hall, University of Oxford. She works in twentieth century political theory and history of political thought, particularly German and Anglo-American. She has previously published widely on Arendt’s political ideas, including Violence and Power in the Thought of Hannah Arendt (2021). Her current research focuses primarily on the intersection of science and technology with politics in the twentieth century, particularly in the work of radical critics of technology and within environmental political theory and movements.

Questions of technology, and its catastrophic potential, are pivotal to modern social and political life. This book brilliantly reconstructs a series of pressing debates among a cohort of highly original thinkers who explored the nature and causes of the modern technological mindset. Through a sequence of cogent and compelling analyses of major figures including Martin Heidegger, Theodor Adorno and Hannah Arendt, Caroline Ashcroft excavates the intellectual origins of one of the most challenging issues to impinge on the politics of our time.

• Introduction: Catastrophic Technology in ModernityCold War Critics of TechnologyHistorical Narratives of Technological DevelopmentTechnologies of Destruction: The Shadow of the BombTechnologies of Production and the Rise of the MachineThe Veil of Technology: Media, Propaganda, and IdeologyTechnologies of the Body: Man as Raw MaterialTechnology and Worldliness: Nature and the Technological ArtificeConclusion: The Lasting Influence of ‘Catastrophic Technology‘?BibliographyAcknowledgments