Industry and Reflection: Engineers’ Class Struggle and Philosophy of Technology around 1900

My contribution investigates social upward mobility and philosophical reflection as engineering practices in the industrial age. I rely on a case study about German engineers who, during the so-called Second Industrial Revolution, were involved in a complex process of social emancipation: they tried to constitute themselves as a new social group and elite in the strict social order of the Wilhelminian society. They found themselves in fierce competition with existing elites, in particular from the nobility, the military, and the humanistically trained civil servant corps of the state administration. The latter were prominent leaders of German political and cultural life and called engineers “parvenus.” During that same period, engineers became interested in philosophy: metaphysics, ethics, and political theory of technology. For the roundtable, I will bring out details of the engineers’ philosophical work - the philosophers they read, the texts they wrote, the topics they chose - and their resulting conception of themselves and of technological systems in industrial society.

I use this as a platform to formulate larger questions about professionalization of engineers in industrial modernity as well as scientific, technological, and intellectual expertise in general. I also ask about the ubiquitous worries of the seemingly incompatible intellectual traditions of the humanities and (engineering and natural) sciences and their relevance on contemporary university campuses. The interwoven-ness of problems of social status and the problem of philosophy suggests that intellectual contents and commitments are always part of questions about how to classify knowledge types and knowledge communities, and that that pertains even to such seemingly far-away fields as philosophy and engineering. Finally, I will raise questions about the role of philosophical, historical, and cultural criticism of industrial and post-industrial societies.