Autonomy and Mastery : chapter 1
Mastery and Its Loss
Autonomy and Animism
Engines of Change : chapter 2
Momentum and Motive
Technological Evolution
Technological Determinism
Technological Drift : Uncertainty and Unintention
The Technological Imperative
The Flaw and Its Origins : chapter 3
Nature and Western Civilization
The Victory of Technique
The Search for a "New Ethic"
Technocracy : chapter 4
Classical Technocracy
Technocracy and Liberalism
Artifice and Order : chapter 5
The Technological Society : Groundwork
Technological Politics : Master and Slave Revisited
Order, Discipline, and Pace
Transformation and Incorporation
Reverse Adaptation
Technological Politics : chapter 6
Reverse Adaptation and Control
The Technological Imperative and the State
The Revolution and Its Tools
Complexity and the Loss of Agency : chapter 7
Complexity : Manifest and Concealed
The Loss of Agency in Technological Systems
Frankenstein's Problem : chapter 8
Technology as Legislation
Luddism as Epistemology

What does it mean to say "technology is out of control"? The expression sounds like a warning, but in what way, precisely, has technology slipped from human direction? Or is this merely an exaggerated statement of technology’s role in our lives? What is the relationship between technology and contemporary society? Can the use of technology be separated from its political implications? In the midtwentieth century, observers from several vantage points of the ideological spectrum have begun to voice serious misgivings about the unchosen consequences of rapid, pervasive technological development. With Paul Valery they ask: "Can the human mind master what the human mind has made?" In this important and persuasive new evaluation of technology’s effect on society, Langdon Winner examines the idea that technology has gotten out of hand. Under such categories as technological evolution, determinism, historical drift, and technological imperative, he discusses problems in modern conceptions of choice and decision. Maintaining that technologies are indeed political structures, the author scrutinizes the problems of governance engendered by the technological order. He looks at Bacon’s and Veblen’s ideas, as well as the dilemmas that technocracy poses for modern liberalism, as illustrated in Price’s notion of the "scientific estate" and Galbraith’s of the American "technostructure". Professor Winner, who views autonomous technology as the aggregate of human dilemmas rather than as univocal, uniform phenomenon, develops his own distinct perspective after pointing out the strengths and inadequacies in the theories of Marx, Ellul, Marcuse, Mumford, and others. His conceptual framework for a systematic view introduces the notion of reverse adaptation, in which ends are them selves altered in order to adjust to technical means. This, the author contends, has become a dominant pattern in modern political life. When people accept the norms and standards dictated by technology as central to their lives as a whole, comprehensive alteration takes place in their thinking and conduct. Moreover, the increasing complexity of technical structures fosters greater impediments for individuals or groups seeking to control those structures. This in turn makes the direction of means toward consciously chosen, positive objectives more and more difficult. Examples of this phenomenon are cited from instances of military systems out-of-control in three wars of the twentieth century. There are no simple solutions to any of the dilemmas. Winner offers a reinterpretation of the myths of Prometheus and Frankenstein pointing to long overlooked questions of the responsibility human beings have for their creations. He also proposes a method of "epistemological Luddism" as a way of dismantling certain technological systems and thereby opening them to new scrutiny as to their meaning for modern man. A rigorous, trenchant critique of the technology-society relationship in broad philosophical terms within the context of political theory. Professor Winner’s work fills a gap in the current discussions. This is a brilliant argument, forcefully delivered and unusually well-written, a significant contribution to the philosophy of technology, which is just now becoming recognized as a separate and vital branch of intellectual inquiry. Langdon Winner, who received his doctorate from the University of California at Berkeley, is Assistant Professor of Political Science and Technology Studies at MIT