“The more ideas have become automatic, instrumentalized, the less does anybody see in them thoughts with a meaning of their own. They are considered things, machines. Language has been reduced to just another tool in the gigantic apparatus of production in modern society.”

— Max Horkheimer , book Eclipse of Reason

Source: Eclipse of Reason (1947), pp. 21-22.

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Max Horkheimer 61

German philosopher and sociologist 1895–1973

James Mirrlees (1936–2018) Scottish economist

Source: An exploration in the theory of optimum income taxation, 1971, p. 208

“The major cause [of the software crisis] is that the machines have become several orders of magnitude more powerful! To put it quite bluntly: as long as there were no machines, programming was no problem at all; when we had a few weak computers, programming became a mild problem, and now we have gigantic computers, programming has become an equally gigantic problem. In this sense the electronic industry has not solved a single problem, it has only created them, it has created the problem of using its products.”

Edsger W. Dijkstra (1930–2002) Dutch computer scientist

1970s, The Humble Programmer (1972)

“Tools arm the man. One can well say that man is capable of bringing forth a world; he lacks only the necessary apparatus, the corresponding armature of his sensory tools. The beginning is there. Thus the principle of a warship lies in the idea of the shipbuilder, who is able to incorporate this thought by making himself into a gigantic machine, as it were, through a mass of men and appropriate tools and materials. Thus the idea of a moment often required monstrous organs, monstrous masses of materials, and man is therefore a potential, if not an actual creator.”

Novalis book Blüthenstaub

Fragment No. 88
Blüthenstaub (1798)

“By bourgeoisie is meant the class of modern capitalists, owners of the means of social production and employers of wage labor. By proletariat, the class of modern wage laborers who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labor power in order to live.”

Friedrich Engels book The Communist Manifesto

The Communist Manifesto, footnote (1888 edition)

“The previous regime — armed with its arrogant and intolerant ideology — reduced man to a force of production, and nature to a tool of production. In this it attacked both their very substance and their mutual relationship. It reduced gifted and autonomous people, skillfully working in their own country, to the nuts and bolts of some monstrously huge, noisy and stinking machine, whose real meaning was not clear to anyone.”

Václav Havel (1936–2011) playwright, essayist, poet, dissident and 1st President of the Czech Republic

New Year's Address to the Nation (1990)

“Questions about the influence of socialism are increasingly more difficult to answer as the word socialism has so many meanings. The idea that the inequalities of incomes can be greatly reduced has come to be recognized as largely impractical. Practically all endeavours at just distribution express more or less arbitrary conceptions of what is just and the central idea of Marxian socialism of a rationalisation of the means of production has been largely abandoned as technically impracticable. I believe that in general the idea of justice is more closely met by a freely competitive market than by any deliberate allocation of income to some imagined ideal of the kind.”

Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992) Austrian and British economist and Nobel Prize for Economics laureate

December 13, 1991, quoted in Friedrich Hayek: A Biography (2001) by Alan O. Ebenstein
1980s and later

“The reformer Yeltsin represents the tendency which wants to reduce the gigantic state apparatus. Consequently he follows in Trotsky's footsteps.”

Ernest Mandel (1923–1995) Belgian economist and Marxist philosopher

New Times, 21 March 1990. Quote from Harpal Brar's Trotskyism or Leninism?, pp. 56.

“Until now a culture has been a mechanical fate for societies, the automatic interiorization of their own technologies.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 86

“I have endeavoured to attain this end (viz. the production of a vacuum in the cylinder) in another way. As water has the property of elasticity, when converted into steam by heat, and afterwards of being so completely recondensed by cold, that there does not remain the least appearance of this elasticity, I have thought that it would not be difficult to work machines in which, by means of a moderate heat and at a small cost, water might produce that perfect vacuum which has vainly been sought by means of gunpowder.”

Denis Papin (1647–1713) French physicist, mathematician and inventor

Denis Papin, Recueil de diverses Pièces touchant quelques nouvelles Machines (1695) p. 53 as quoted by Dionysius Lardner, The Steam Engine Explained and Illustrated (1840) pp. 45-46

“It is an altogether wrong idea that the modern product of civilization is less susceptible to love.”

Henryk Sienkiewicz book Without Dogma

10 November
Without Dogma (1891)
Context: It is an altogether wrong idea that the modern product of civilization is less susceptible to love. I sometimes think it is the other way.

“The more ideas have become automatic, instrumentalized, the less does anybody see in them thoughts with a meaning of their own. They are considered things, machines. Language has been reduced to just another tool in the gigantic apparatus of production in modern society.”

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Max Horkheimer 61

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