ABSTRACT
Do machines make history? In an article that takes this question as its title, Heilbroner (1967) identifies it as ‘the problem of technological determinism’. That technology has to do with the construction and application of machinery may seem obvious to people in industrial societies. But what are we to make of history prior to the machine age? Were there machines about, shaping the course of history, in the days when virtually all tools were operated by hand, and when virtually all the power to operate them came from human muscles? What is the difference between tool use and machine performance, and how does it affect the involvement of the human subject in the act of making? Reflecting on these questions, one is bound to inquire into the nature of the machine, and into the broader applicability of the relatively modern concept of technology, particularly in analyses of pre-industrial or non-Western societies. Such an inquiry touches on important issues in the philosophy of technology, and has considerable historical and anthropological implications. In our own age the concept of technology has become such an established part of thinking on humanity and the ‘human condition’ that we are inclined to use it as a window through which to view tool-assisted practices of all kinds, past and present, Western and non-Western, human and animal. Thus we imagine that where tools are being used there must exist a technology. But what, exactly, is entailed in this assumption? How does it affect our understanding of what it means to make things? And how might this understanding be changed if we were to regard the use of tools not as the operation of a technology but as an instance of skilled practice?
