Mechanical Being

Abstract

So Thomas Carlyle, in the early nineteenth century, described the times in which he lived. Carlyle, being a conservative, lamented the dominance of the machine and what he called ‘Mechanism’. He especially criticized the dominance of ‘Mechanism’ in the newly emerging politics of his time. This was a politics expounded by theorists such as Adam Smith and Jeremy Bentham, who, so Carlyle argued, saw politics as being about the arrangement of mechanisms that would work toward improving people’s physical and economic condition, rather than people’s spiritual and moral condition (Carlyle 1984, 40–1). Indeed, Carlyle criticized these theorists for believing that people’s happiness, strength and dignity of mind were a product of mechanisms such as the structure of legislation, checks upon the executive, and a ‘wise arrangement of the judiciary’. What Carlyle lamented most of all was not simply the change in people’s modes of action but the change in their mode of thought; in short, the change in their entire mode of existence (1984, 37).¹

Were we required to characterize this age of ours by any single epithet, we should be tempted to call it, not an Heroical, Devotional, Philosophical, or Moral Age, but, above all others, the Mechanical Age.

(Carlyle 1984, 32)