Technological change hardly figures in modern political thought. It may not seem relevant to the questions of justice or equality that dominate normative theory. I want to argue that it is, and in fact always has been, relevant. It has been relevant mostly in the way that unexamined assumptions are often relevant: they prop up the particular visions of reality within which normative edifices are built.
The present is a good time to think more seriously about technological change. We are in a moment when future technological possibilities are preoccupying the world about as much as at any other point in history. Where ought we to focus though? Perhaps on power: firstly, as Foucault might have advised, with the power produced by particular ideas of technological change, which are deployed to sustain particular environmental discourses. Secondly, as Freeden tells us, with the broader competition between ideologies over political power in societies. The utopian visions that technological change can conjure up are key components of this competition.
We thus have two key aims in this article. The first is to establish generally the significance of conceptions of technological change to political theory: their role in sustaining normative visions. The second, drawing on the first, is to begin the process of building critical conceptions of technological change from the material uncovered in the analysis of Marxist and Feminist political thought. The end I have in mind here is to fortify critical perspectives against the technologically optimistic liberal approach to environmental degradation.
We should go no further without defining our key term. Technological change is the process by which technologies and technological infrastructures emerge, develop, and grow more pervasive. Further, the concepts key to models of technological change in political theory are exogeneity and endogeneity. In ecologism, technological change is understood as significantly exogenous: that is, random and uncontrollable. This is not the same as technological determinism; indeed, greens have long argued that the process of technological change can and should be under democratic control, guided by an ecological rationality (see e.g., this and this).
Instead, it means that political actors cannot will a particular technological future into being. Many problems we might wish technological solutions for, many trade-offs we might wish to be resolved by technological means, must simply be accepted as reality and dealt with politically. This is really what separates ecologism from liberal environmentalism: the former believes that economic growth and environmental protection cannot be reconciled and that we must depart from capitalism if the environment is to be safeguarded; the latter believes that these two can be reconciled, with future technologies bridging the gap.
Mainstream liberal thought treats technological change as an endogenous and largely positive force. I argue that such a view is not neutral, but is instead constructed to serve a particular purpose.
From these starting points, this article asks why technological change is so absent from political theory, and what happens when we recognize its conceptual significance. While mainstream liberal thought treats technological change as an endogenous and largely positive force—one that ensures prosperity, freedom, and now environmental salvation—this article argues that such a view is not neutral, but is instead constructed to serve a particular purpose. The article explores how different political traditions (liberal, Marxist, and feminist) have embedded particular, significantly unexamined, ideas of technological change into their visions of justice, equality, and emancipation. The article pays particular attention to feminist and Marxist thought as resources for contesting liberal environmentalism, highlighting both their limitations and their potential. It argues that the promises made by liberal climate policy rely on an overconfident model of how technologies emerge—one that critical theory has insufficiently addressed. In exposing the political work that ideas of technological change perform, the article opens space for more grounded, less hubristic approaches to environmental justice.
Method
As noted elsewhere, there are really only two routes of inquiry regarding technological change, leading to two questions: what is it doing? And how does it work? It is to the first question that most of the famed research on technological change is addressed, by the likes of Ellul, Marcuse, Mumford, Postman, Stiegler, and others. Scholars try to understand how changes in technology have altered humans’ relationships: with themselves and each other, with work and the natural world.
This article is focused on the second question. It is much more neglected in critical thought, albeit thoroughly explored by economists like Warsh, Romer, and Simon, historians like Mokyr and Rosenberg, and sociologists like Bijker, Hughes, and MacKenzie. For political theory, a key sub-question emerges: is technological change controllable? That is, “can the pace and direction of technological change fall under the will of a political program?”
To explore this, I employ Michael Freeden’s method of analysis, which I’ve discussed in more detail elsewhere (see also this). Put simply, Freeden sees political theories as assemblages of particular concepts in a particular morphology. A version of liberalism—say, Rawls’ “justice as fairness”—will involve much the same concepts as any other version of liberalism. These concepts will, however, be “decontested” differently. That is, the understanding of liberty in Rawls will be somewhat different from how it is understood in, say, Sen’s work.
Liberty is a “core concept” in these versions of liberalism. Core concepts are those that are ineliminable from the theory. Adjacent concepts are not, but drive the core concept towards particular decontestations. That is, the meaning of a core concept depends on the meaning of adjacent concepts. Both the selection and decontestation of adjacent concepts alters the overall thrust of the theory. We will see below how decontestations of technological change in political theories support particular meanings of core concepts.
The Liberal Conception of Technological Change and Environmentalism
There is a direct line between Adam Smith’s model of technological change and contemporary liberalism, as I’ve discussed here and here. Smith’s argument was with the aristocratic political economy of his time, where state intervention in the free market was carried out in the interests of the landowning class (the Corn Laws being the prime example). Consequently, he argued, scarcity was unnecessarily maintained.
Freeing the market from political interference allowed the division of labor to fully emerge. Crucially, it is the labor saving inventions that flow from allowing each worker to concentrate on as small a task as possible that leads to the prosperity Smith imagined: “(it) is the great multiplication of the productions of all the different arts, in consequence of the division of labour, which occasions, in a well-governed society, that universal opulence which extends itself to the lowest ranks of the people.”
As told by McClelland or Xenos, with this prosperity comes also the annulment of scarcity, the great cause of wickedness. Market freedom enables political freedom because material well-being takes the place of Hobbesian coercion and fear in keeping people well behaved. With this move, the economic sphere becomes separate from politics in liberalism, much as it remains in Rawls, for example.
The decontestation of technological change as endogenous, merely needing freedom to be unleashed, enables the placement of liberty as a core concept, and thus really the very liberalism of Smith’s theory. The model of invention involved here is vital: it is not the “genius” notion of creativity that we see elsewhere, especially later, but rather a very democratized notion of mechanical ingenuity, localized particularly by Smith in the regular worker: an “ingenious subject” (I addressed this in my PhD thesis, for those interested). The latter will continually overcome constraints on progress using ingenuity, as long the necessary incentives remain; that is, less labor or more money. This is still the backbone of modern, mainstream climate change mitigation policy. Price constraints are deployed in autonomous markets, generating ingenuity and thereby solving the problem of the earth’s scarce capacity to absorb environmental degradation. This mechanism, and the reliably ingenious response to constraints that is at the heart of it, is precisely what Simon, Solow, and others use to deflect calls for state interventions into unsustainable lifestyles, thereby protecting the liberal core. It is thus powerful in the Foucauldian sense and is ultimately what preserves even Rawlsian liberalism in the face of the environmental crisis.
This is still the backbone of modern, mainstream climate change mitigation policy. Price constraints are deployed in autonomous markets, generating ingenuity and thereby solving the problem of the earth’s scarce capacity to absorb environmental degradation. This mechanism, and the reliably ingenious response to constraints that is at the heart of it, is precisely what Simon, Solow, and others use to deflect calls for state interventions into unsustainable lifestyles, thereby protecting the liberal core. It is thus powerful in the Foucauldian sense and is ultimately what preserves even Rawlsian liberalism in the face of the environmental crisis.
The backbone of modern, mainstream climate change mitigation policy is indebted to Adam Smith.
Technology in Marx and Marxian Thought
As with so much of classical economics, Marx adapts this endogenous picture of technological change. It plays a crucial role in his utopian vision as one of the three key elements of the transition from capitalism to socialism: “the innovation of a new pattern of technological progress leading to an end to the sharp division of mental and manual labour characteristic of capitalism and a requalification of the labour force.” The result is a quite Smithian “undreamt material wealth.”
What is missing from Marx is a replacement for liberalism’s incentive model of technological change.
What is missing from Marx is a replacement for liberalism’s incentive model of technological change. Moreover, he is promising no less than an end to the division of labor, which would necessitate an entirely new technological ecosystem. What we are seeing, then, is human ingenuity imbued with the power to will into being bespoke technologies able to accomplish even very general aims. Yet, absent a model of technological change, we must take it as a matter of faith that, under a different mode of production, this degree of fecundity becomes possible. There is no equivalent in other political theories to such technological optimism: it is a deus ex machina, crucial to the end of domination. In Freeden’s terms, Marx’s decontestation of technological change is what enables his specific decontestation of equality. This maintenance of a limitless ingenuity weakens Marxism’s critical power in contemporary environmental debates.
We see this key role for technological change repeated in recent Marxian work ranging from Bastani, to Mackay and Avanessianeds, to Negri. The most notable exception is Dialectic of Enlightenment, where Adorno and Horkheimer subordinate technological change to an instrumental rationality proceeding from humanity’s originary psychological turmoil—a sort of rebooted Fall, read through Freud.
For a more critically powerful treatment of technological change in the Marxian tradition, we might look to Walter Benjamin. Fragments of Benjamin tease at a more developed conception, but they do no more than tease. Much like Marcuse, Benjamin retains Marx’s view of the role of technological change in emancipation: “it was upon the transforming mediation of matter that the hope of utopia ultimately depended: technology’s capacity to create the not-yet known.”
What Benjamin develops is a sense of humanity’s current limitations with regard to bringing this about. Benjamin understands technology as natural, containing an essence humans have yet to grasp. Presently, though, humans are “held back by conventional imagination” from doing so and need to adapt their “whole constitution” to the productive forces of capitalism before “technology will release them from their enslavement to the powers of the apparatus.”Benjamin is concerned, much like Marx, with the end of “drudgery,” identifying the absence of grim human labour as part of the yet-unknown essence of modern technology. Discovering this essence, and developing utopian technology, is a learning process in which a revolution is essential.
There is an interesting ecological aspect to this, which we do not find in Marx. Benjamin somewhat foreshadows Haraway (see below) with the sense that nature, the human, and the technical are not opposed, but interrelated through their transformation by technology, becoming together “new nature.” Humans must “learn to master, not this nature itself, but humanity’s relationship to it. Such mastery demands being receptive to the expressive power of matter, a mimetic, not an instrumental skill; and it is the central intellectual task of the modern era.” We see this again in Benjamin’s comments on Fourier, where under a system of cooperative labor, a technology can emerge that compliments nature, rather than dominates it.
Still, these are no more than fragments and, as with Marx, they only gesture towards a model of technological change. The latter is still endogenous and the fulfilment of technological promise awaits human awakening. Benjamin is dismissive of notions of rare human genius or intrinsic mystery within technological development, which are typical routes to a more unpredictable or exogenous model. Where Benjamin contests the liberal model, though, is in his insistence that the present human mastery of nature is enslaving both, and that humans must strive for greater understanding of their modern relationship with technology and nature in order to escape drudgery. In this, he again echoes Haraway and ecological thought like that of Bookchin or Illich.
Technology and Gender in Feminist Thought
We find more promising material in feminist thought, even if mostly outside political theory. There is no canonical reading of technological change in feminist political thought comparable to that in liberalism or Marxism. However, important feminist political thinkers have engaged deeply with technological change and feminist thought more broadly contains a sophisticated tradition upon which future scholarship can draw. Of political thinkers, Firestone and Haraway have the most detailed conceptions.
Feminist political thinkers have engaged deeply with technological change and in their works we find promising material.
Firestone’s is familiar because it draws heavily on Marx. Lab-based insemination and gestation will liberate women from reproduction, the necessity of which she sees as the root cause of the patriarchal structures that oppress women. Similarly, then, her decontestation of equality is also crucially supported by technological change. Firestone, much like Benjamin, sees in technological change an essential tendency towards ending drudgery but in a non-dominating form that is waiting to emerge. This is the theme that runs through positive feminist readings of technology: reconciling the technological liberation of humans with the non-domination of nature.
Again, there is no clear model of technological change, but there are hints. With her emphasis on quite concrete, existing technology as liberatory, Firestone departs from the Marxist tradition, where liberatory technological change requires liberatory political change. Marx had pondered the form liberatory technology might take; Firestone does not. She sees it in the present. This suggests a degree of exogeneity in technological change that is absent from Marxism: there is something in technological development that is not driven by a capitalist/patriarchal base, allowing potentially liberatory technologies to emerge. Developing a theory of technological change as, at least partly, exogenous is one clear route to contesting the liberal model, since it disrupts the reliability of invention.
Haraway offers a different route, built on the idea that the meaning of technology is constructed: “Who cyborgs will be is a radical question.” This is quite different from the ecofeminist/ecologist critique: that a patriarchal/capitalist rationality produces inherently dominating technology. Haraway is explicitly critical of this reading of technology, rejecting the idea that there are strict rationalities built into machines that necessitate the oppression of machines themselves. Contrary to Marx also, domination is a cultural phenomenon for Haraway, which allows machines to be re-imagined otherwise.
This exogeneity is key to her decontestation of gender as constructed and eliminable. It thus powers the emancipatory vision she outlines. Had technology not traversed the particular, contingent path that it has—towards genetic engineering or microchip-based implants—the specific reimagining of gender relations she provides may have been impossible. There is no malleability in a technology entirely shaped by the base: it is what it was made to be.
This is promising, but it is not immediately clear how it helps critique the liberal model; that is, how it refutes the notion of reconciling, through future technologies, the environment with economic growth. Ultimately, such a critique must include a sense of how technological change occurs. The most obvious route, as with Firestone, is leaning into exogeneity. Again, liberal environmentalism depends on constraints leading reliably to solutions; this is undermined by the identification of random elements in the process of technological change. This route can be crucially supplemented by empirical research, which tends to contradict the naïve “social shaping” understanding that Marx began.
A more unique approach, though, lies in Haraway’s refusal to admit to causally connected unities like nature, technology, and the human: “It is not clear who makes and who is made in the relation between human and machine.” Since utopian models of technological change depend ontologically on a specifically human ingenuity, which acts upon technology and nature, refusing this tripartite, causal division suggests a different route to the emergence of technological novelties, problematizing the confidence of socialism or liberalism. However, this route is inchoate in Haraway. It could also be fruitfully brought into dialogue with the history and sociology of technological change and the wealth of feminist scholarship on technology from without political thought, like that found in Åsberg and Braidotti, Bijker et al., and Wajcman.
A key strength of Haraway’s approach is her rejection of technological pessimism. The latter is probably a hindrance in the public contest of ideas. There are, though, passages in Haraway that wax too lyrical about the capacity of specific technologies. In ideas, but particularly in style and language, Haraway concedes too much. More recently, some posthumanist feminists—perhaps especially Braidotti—have similarly embraced a “technophilic” position. In cautioning against this, Roberts cites Science and Technology Studies (STS) approaches—usually more empirically informed—which support greater technological scepticism. Roberts sensibly suggests a more ambivalent attitude to technology for critical scholarship. Again, a more thoroughgoing engagement with the messy reality of technological change would help these abstract accounts avoid concessions to the liberal environmental worldview.
Beyond the Liberal Paradigm
The idea of technological change is powerful because it promises futures without the constraints of the present. It raises the anchor of material reality and allows normative visions to set sail. This is also its danger: we pay in both the present and the future if its promises go unfulfilled. Contemporary climate change policy rests significantly on such promises. It is able to do so because a particular conception of technological change—traceable to Smith’s liberalism—dominates mainstream environmental discourse. It is this same idea that preserves the liberal political ideal against the sorts of lifestyle interventions no liberal theory can permit.
The idea of technological change is powerful because it promises futures without the constraints of the present. It raises the anchor of material reality and allows normative visions to set sail. This is also its danger: we pay in both the present and the future if its promises go unfulfilled.
From its beginnings, a specific model of technological change has been a key buttress to liberalism and yet this has hardly been noticed. We have also seen how similarly optimistic, if less clear, conceptions of technological change are crucial to prominent Marxist and feminist political theories. In all three cases, the particular meanings and arrangements of the theories’ core concepts are made possible by an obscured, yet ultimately powerful model of how technologies come to be. Recognizing this need not weaken critical theories: instead, it can power critical engagement with liberalism in general and its gamble on the future habitability of the planet in particular. By uncovering these inchoate readings of technological change, this article hopes to contribute to that much-needed work.
Dr. Michael Keary is an Affiliate Scholar at the Research Institute for Sustainability (RIFS) in Potsdam, Germany and co-director of NovaAura Research, an environmental research consultancy. He is currently working on two projects: the first explores what digitalisation means for green political theory; the second is a book forthcoming with Bristol University Press entitled Political Hatred and Political Order, which theorises the significance of contemporary political emotions for the stability of democratic states. He has also conducted environmental research studies for a number of NGOs, most recently the European Environmental Bureau.
