Quotes from Ch. 6: The Dilemma of Development

According to the ancient tradition of Western political theory, societies cannot achieve both civic virtue and material prosperity. (117)

There is a flaw in human nature: released by riches from a common struggle with nature, people grow soft and lost the spirit of self-sacrifice required for life in a free society. (117)

New reasons are advanced to show that in industrial societies the satisfaction of material needs is fundamentally incompatible with the progress of human freedom. (117)

The reconciliation of legitimacy and efficiency in the democratic state is the modern utopia par excellence, nowhere so far fully realized. The reason for this difficulty lies in the contradiction of participation and expertise, the two foundations of the system. They are supposed to be reconciled in the subordination of administration to democratically established policies, but in fact the unequal distribution of administrative power turns out to be increasingly subversive of equal participation. (118)

The idea that industrial technology is irredeemable is essentially determinist. To claim that society must choose between industry and craft is to concede that the existing industrial system is the only possible one. Clearly, this is entirely different from arguing for the reconstruction of the system through the incorporation of new values into industrial design. (125)

Critical theory of technology generalizes from such cases to a position that contradicts determinism on each of its two these, first, the notion that technological development occurs along a single fixed track according to immanent criteria of progress, and second, that social institutions must adapt to technological developments. In contrast, the nondeterministic position asserts that:

1. Technological development is overdetermined by both technical and social criteria of progress, and can therefore branch in any of several different directions depending on the prevailing hegemony.
2. While social institutions adapt to technological development, the process of adaptation is reciprocal, and technology changes in response to the conditions in which it finds itself as much as it influences them. (130)

Fleron argues that technology is not neutral but like any artifact embodies the cultural values of the society in which it was first created. Technology transfer is therefore more than an economic exchange; it is also a process of cultural diffusion in which machines serve as vectors for the spread of values of the more advanced societies to the less advanced. (131)

A transition to socialism can come out of an alliance of professional and technical elites with the underlying population to revise technical codes. (139)