ABSTRACT
The conjecture that automation might ease a transition to socialism was, however, quite alien to the spirit in which the forecasts had been made. The study of automation gradually became more of an incidental feature in the field investigations of Pierre Naville's collaborators; and even when it was retained as the central object of study, the material produced was valuable mostly for its contribution to more conventional topics. Drawing heavily on Marx's Grundrisse, Naville invoked the goal of a harmonic relationship between man and nature, between society and the machine, a feasible reconciliation which lay beyond contemporary misapplications of technology. The scholarly quality of Naville's marxism is apparent in some of the work which he produced as a professional psychologist up to the late forties. Whilst noting Marx's distaste for the sociology of Comte, Naville recalled that Marx's economics was firstly a critique of political economy, of society as a whole.
