Book review: Karl Marx on technology and alienation

For Marx, technology exemplifies the interaction between human beings and nature. Marx’s description of this interaction is in transition throughout his works. An older, humanist and vitalist paradigm sets the human being against nature as a qualitatively different type of force. A newer, thermodynamic paradigm sets the human being and nature in continuity. Amy E. Wendling offers a conceptual history of alienation as it developed in modern thought and in Marx’s own work. Reviewer Richard Cotter is impressed by the author’s style which he finds acts as a steady hand through this fairly complex theoretical territory.