The cult of technology at the heart of “reactionary modernism”

“National Socialism has never rejected or fought against modern technology.”

- Joseph Goebbels

We have reproduced François Jarrige's postface to the excellent work Reactionary Modernism: Hatred of Reason and the Cult of Technology at the Sources of Nazism (1984) recently translated by L'Éditions L'Échappée. Considered worldwide as one of the greatest historians of the Nazi period, Jeffrey Herf demonstrates, after a rigorous study of the texts of conservative intellectuals and German engineers of the first half of the 20th century, that Nazism is not a total rejection of modernity, much less a traditionalist movement. It is an ideology that rejects only certain aspects of modernity — parliamentary regime, Enlightenment rationality, financial capitalism (opposed to productive capitalism), multiculturalism, etc. — but embraces others — the cult for the power of machines, the gigantism of modern technologies and industry. Herf calls this ideology “reactionary modernism.”

The postface by the historian François Jarrige summarizes Jeffrey Herf's point well and draws enlightening parallels with the 21st century. At a time when the social crisis is reaching unprecedented proportions, at a time when the natural world is collapsing under the repeated onslaught of machines, at a time when identity tensions are reaching new heights, a number of emerging political and religious groups are embodying new forms of “reactionary modernism.” The latter do not question never in a radical way modern technology, no more than its social and ecological implications; at most, they criticize some superficial aspects of it. Let's learn to distinguish these reactionary modernists to avoid falling into their traps and prevent the Nazi disaster from being repeated.

The text is long, we have highlighted some passages in bold for those who want to skim over it.

On the cult of technology (by François Jarrige)

Since the beginning of the Industrial Age, the relentless onslaught and growing gigantism of technologies have led to numerous debates and quarrels about their risks, their potentials and their effects. While the hostility and fascination with new technologies are obviously nothing new, they were expressed with particular intensity in the first half of the 20th century. During this “age of extremes”, which saw the ravages of the two world wars as well as the acceleration of industrialization and the rise of mass consumption, the question of techniques was caught up in a set of opposing and conflicting discourses. In the intellectual field, it gave rise to innumerable quarrels and controversies that took place in subtle nuances depending on the country. In parallel with the development of capitalism and colonization and the major social and cultural crises that shook the time, industrialized nations indeed experienced an unprecedented surge of new technologies — think of electricity, aviation, chemistry. All over the world, the question of techniques then emerged as a decisive issue, pitting pessimistic and worried critics against modern and enthusiastic entrepreneurs, while laudatory discourses on technology were incorporated into triumphant nationalisms.

But beyond these debates, the consensus that seems a posteriori having come out in favor of technical “progress” has prompted several thinkers to diagnose a transfer of sacredness from traditional religions to contemporary technologies. The British historian Arnold J. Toynbee noted in the middle of the last century how “technology has taken the place of religion as the supreme interest and object of aspiration.” Jacques Ellul explored the same idea by affirming in the 1970s, when many doubts about the industrial technical system were growing, that “it is not technology that enslaves us but the sacred transferred to technology”. In fact, starting in the 19th century, in parallel with industrialization and the multiplication of technical objects, a whole range of speeches, celebrations and tributes were in fact paid to technology, adorned with new and almost demiurgical qualities. A real cult was gradually devoted to it, as well as to its promoters, until it became a characteristic manifestation of contemporary societies and their imaginations.

In no other industrialized country as Germany has this cult of technology reached such a magnitude. The thesis of Jeffrey Herf's book, finally translated into French, is that in the tormented intellectual landscape of the interwar period, this country had a unique position because of the unbridled cult of technology that developed there, and which prepared the ground for Nazism and its destructive follies. Unlike the analyses and interpretations of Nazism, in the continuity of conservative ideology Völkisch, a purely reactionary and antimodern movement hostile to all forms of progress, Herf's study opened the way to a finer understanding of the intellectual genealogy of Nazism thought of as a coherent whole, very far from the irrational madness in which some wanted to confine it. Herf was thus one of the first to attempt to rebuild this Nazi ideology by making the cult of technology a privileged way to shed light on its fundamental antinomies and its deadly dimension.

Techno-nationalism and the “machine age”

Jeffrey Herf's book is a major contribution to the historical study and analysis of the “age of machines” that took place during the 19th century before it really triumphed in the interwar period. For the historian David Edgerton, this period indeed represents the golden age of “techno-nationalism”, with the “celebration of the inventive citizen” even becoming one of the essential elements of nationalist discourses. Indeed, each country intended to attribute the merits of innovations against its competitors, and by so doing to prove its superiority and impose itself in the vast international competition. In this context, doubting the benefits of large-scale industry and modern technical equipment was akin to treason, and questioning the beneficial nature of industrialism was increasingly considered irrational and even dangerous. For modernising liberals as well as for the fascists and Stalinists of the first half of the 20th century, distrust in technical modernity was indeed becoming the enemy to be defeated insofar as it risked hampering economic expansion and the triumph of the great powers. The so-called currents of “cultural pessimism”, inherited from 19th century romanticism, as well as doubts about “machinism”, nevertheless remained numerous after 1918. But they were increasingly overwhelmed by the exaltation of technology presented as the condition for the progress of nations, progress that could obviously be understood very differently depending on cultural traditions.

The exaltation of machines was also expressed through changing political and aesthetic categories, even if there were numerous discourses between countries. In the United States, the enthusiasm for new technologies, of which Henry Ford became the prophet, extended to become a central element of the country's national identity. Numerous works have described this “machine age” which was manifested in objects such as TSF and consumer goods, in skyscrapers and factories, but also in speeches and attitudes that “extravagantly idealized the machine” and its ability to create a fairer or more efficient society. The “idolatry of the machine” was then found in a multitude of cultural productions, such as the commercial photographs of Charles Sheeler photographing factories and their technical equipment for Ford. In architecture, cinema, photography, emerging industrial design, everywhere an aesthetic adapted to the cult of machines triumphed. In Europe, the Futurism manifesto Italian (1909), which made the latter the symbol of modernity in art, was one illustration among others of this new exaltation. Moreover, European journalists rushed to the American continent to observe the changes taking place: the cult of efficiency, rationalization, mass production, but also the new modernist aesthetic seemed to reveal the secret of prosperity.

In the USSR as well, the cult of technology developed in the interwar period in parallel with the rise of Stalinism. This cult gave birth to huge projects such as highway networks, skyscrapers, weapons of mass destruction, large giant dams, all achievements that were supposed to tame nature and men. The first half of the 20th century created what the anthropologist James Scott called “high modernism,” which is an unprecedented blend of state volunteerism, technological myths, and a fascination with big projects that were supposed to transform complex physical and social realities into standardized and simplified elements, made abstract and detached from reality. Nazism and its history represent one of the manifestations of this destructive “high modernism” in the unique context of interwar Germany.

At the end of the 19th century, however, many expressed their fears about a technical change perceived as threatening, and this across a very broad political spectrum. The ideal of returning to nature and the land against sprawling cities and the artificial world of mechanics was certainly an important aspect of traditionalist ideologies, but it was never the monopoly of the nationalist and conservative right alone. Thus, while the writings of Leo Tolstoy or the theorist Peter Kropotkin began to exert a great influence in anarchist circles, many libertarian activists tried to flee the pollution of cities by creating communities or garden cities that could establish a new harmony with the world. Discourses and practices seeking to redefine relationships between humans and nature multiplied in England and France. In the German Empire engaged in a particularly brutal, rapid and destructive industrialization process, this phenomenon was undoubtedly even more powerful. It was structured at the end of the 19th century around the Life Reform movement (Lebensreform), which attracted artists but also followers of vegetarianism, naturism or natural medicines. On the heights of Lake Maggiore, in Switzerland, a small group of vegetarians — including the German Gustav-Arthur Gräser — thus created the community of Monte Verità in 1900 in order to experiment with an alternative way of life, growing and building with their own hands while dreaming of a future made of simplicity and rediscovered contact with nature.

The recent development of environmental history has shown the extent of the disturbances introduced by forced industrialization, the fumes that contaminate the environment, the misery caused by urban concentrations, the imposition of a culture of fatalism in people's minds. While there were still many doubts about machinery and large-scale industry in some sectors of the population, the protests were difficult to be heard. “Luddism” and “anti-technological sensitivities”, to use the formulas used by J. Herf, seemed to spread under the Weimar Republic, but they remained marginal and above all confined to the order of speech. In the wake of the Great War, doubts about large-scale industry and its technical achievements circulated in European intellectual and political debate, particularly in Germany, but they also increasingly appeared as a threat and danger to the power and greatness of the nation. Moreover, these doubts were not universally shared. In the Ruhr, where the working population was largely composed of recent migrants, no mass protest movement developed against an evil that seemed necessary and fatal. As one resident recalled in 1919: “We were totally fascinated by the scale of large-scale industry and by the gigantism and genius of human efforts [...]. We accepted the poisonous fumes from the steel factories as something inevitable, and almost no one complained.”

Faced with the fears that arose from industrial upheavals, the cult of technology that developed in the interwar period should reassure skeptics and frame oppositions. It was a major phenomenon of the 20th century, which was far too neglected by historians of this period. It played an essential role in acclimatizing upheavals and disturbances perceived with concern by populations, in naturalizing developments that were increasingly described as inevitable and necessary for the greatness of the nation. But in Germany this cult took the very singular form of a reconciliation of “German interiority” [Innerlichkeit] with technical modernity. As Herf shows, it took the form of an aesthetic vision made up of new and stable forms, considered reassuring in relation to the chaos of the bourgeois order, but also in accordance with the will to power of the Aryan people. Technology gradually became the material and physical embodiment of the soul and of inner qualities, much more than the result of a rational and positivist approach.

“Reactionary modernism” and the question of the origins of Nazism

Originally published in 1984 by Cambridge University Press, Jeffrey Herf's book is in fact the result of a thesis that was defended in the United States in 1980, when he was still a young historian and sociologist. Entitled in its original version Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich, the book is an important milestone in understanding the Nazi worldview and its ambivalent relationship to modernity. Both the thesis and the form of the book are obviously a reflection of the historiographical debates of that time, while the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s were marked by intense questions about the writing of German history and the origins of Nazism. The history of Nazism then developed internationally by arousing controversies and debates. Even before the famous “quarrel between historians” of 1986, which pitted Ernst Nolte and Jürgen Habermas against each other on the question of the degree of guilt of the German people, the problem of the origins and identity of Nazism then emerged as a central issue. Ancient theses identifying National Socialism and its achievements solely with Hitler and his obsidional obsessions and delusions are replaced by more complex approaches seeking to re-register the Nazi disaster in its historicity. Some have thus sought the specificity of Nazism in the history of state and social structures, engaged in a destructive process of modernization. For others, Nazism is explained less by the personality, ideas and actions of Hitler than by the way in which the National Socialist movement and the Hitler State worked, by the reactions of German society and by the changes in the international context. In the 1970s, for example, Martin Broszat showed in his classical study on the National Socialist State how the coherence shown did not really exist in the practice of the exercise of power.

Among the decisive questions, constantly asked since then, there is of course that of the links between Nazism and modernity. Can Nazism be explained by Germany's particularly difficult and paradoxical march towards the modern world? More than in any other Western nation, the history of this country has in fact been marked by disproportionate aristocratic and traditionalist forces. The “failed bourgeois revolution” of 1848 allowed Prussia to unify Germany and it was the reactionary junker Bismarck who implemented the bourgeois modernization program and even established a form of “state socialism.” Herf participates in the huge debate on Sonderweg German and on the ambiguous and singular relationships between Germany and modernity. Many studies and historians have in fact tried to explain this singular trend towards political and economic modernity in order to find the causes of the Nazi disaster, or at least elements that could shed light on it. Moreover, as early as the 19th century, Marx observed, unlike France and England, the German bourgeoisie had chosen the path of compromise with the aristocracy rather than allying with the people in order to emancipate the nation from the fetters inherited from the Old Regime; in the Germanic region, industrialization was both particularly late and rapid, and the traditional elites remained in power for a long time. According to the classical thesis of the historian Hans-Ulrich Wehler, enunciated as early as 1973, Germany would then have become modern economically while remaining feudal in political terms.

Herf's book is nourished by these very lively debates and controversies in the years 1970-1980; he extends and deepens them by coming out of analyses that are too rapid, and by proceeding with a return to sources and texts. Herf thus clearly shows how “far-right ideology, and then Nazi ideology, were much more closely linked to modern technology than what had been said until then” (p.33). George L. Mosse, who exerted a great influence on the young historian Herf, and whose family was the victim of the first antisemitic measures, insisted on the fact that Nazism was born in the trenches of the First World War. It was this founding experience of industrial warfare that then led to the sanctification of death and a growing indifference to the value of human life, preparing for the “brutalization” of political life that could be observed at the time. Nazism would thus have been the result of resentments against modernity, but carried by the most modern technique.

Herf's study is original in that it offers both an intellectual history of the emergence of Nazism — it is a question of presenting the authors and main currents of ideas that prepared the ground for the triumph of the Weltanschauung Nazi — and a social history of the ideas of groups such as engineers who supported the regime and helped entrench it. The book is first and foremost part of an effort to rebuild an intellectual genealogy by revisiting famous thinkers such as Oswald Spengler, Werner Sombart, Carl Schmitt, Ernst Jünger or Martin Heidegger, but also a multitude of lesser-known, forgotten authors who also laid the groundwork for a Nazi interpretation of technical progress. One of the major interests of the book is to unearth the extent of debates on technique and the large number of writings pertaining to a conservative philosophy of technique that emerged during the interwar period. Numerous journals and publications, such as those by the ideologous engineers of Technik und Kultur, which appeared from 1922 to 1937, were then put into circulation to reconcile the culture of engineers and production with German history. In Nazi Germany, progress was gradually brought back to technology, and part of the power of attraction of Nazism on the world of engineers and technicians came from its promise to silence critics while freeing modern technology from the constraints that liberals and social democrats were supposed to impose on it.

Unlike those who see Nazism as a simple extension of conservative currents and Völkisch rejecting L'Aufklärung and all the dimensions of modernity, Herf therefore insists on the original synthesis that Nazism represented, between rejection of certain aspects of the modern world and powerful adherence to others. This point is important in order to get out of the binary and simplistic visions that often still exist, opposing modernity and tradition, progress and reaction, for example. The central thesis of Herf's book is that in Germany, the acclimatization of modern technology took the singular form of “reactionary modernism.” With this provocative phrase, often repeated ever since, he seeks to describe the mixture of “enthusiasm for modern technology and rejection of the Enlightenment and the institutions of liberal democracy” that characterizes German conservative movements. Contrary to what we still sometimes read, the reactionary political criticism of the Enlightenment was perfectly accommodated by an enthusiasm and an unwavering faith in the powers of technology, which was put at the service of the expansionist and murderous project of the National Socialist regime.

Herf's book analyzes a process already glimpsed as early as the interwar period by thinkers such as Walter Benjamin or Thomas Mann, who sought to understand the spectacular and hitherto inexplicable success of National Socialism in German society. Moreover, Herf clearly follows in the footsteps of Benjamin, the first to really understand that “technical and industrial modernization did not necessarily involve a more global political, social and cultural modernization”, and that in Germany more than elsewhere the revolt against modernity took “the form of a cult of technology, rather than that of a return to the land and the past” (p. 16). In short, the romantic and critical traditions of the Enlightenment specific to German nationalism did not result in a rejection of modern techniques, but on the contrary in their overvaluation as the basis for the greatness of the Reich and the racial supremacy of the Aryan people. “Reactionary modernism” would therefore be this cultural project characteristic of “the German path to modernity”, which leaves “all the room for technical progress” and none for democracy. The Nazis adhered to the conservative and nationalist tradition of “reactionary modernism,” adding their fierce antisemitism and their biological interpretation of historical evolution.

Herf's book also accompanied, even initiated and in any case stimulated work on the relationships between modernity, various fascisms and techniques. While fascist rhetoric certainly calls for a return to the past, fascist ideologies were never traditionalist movements. As the historian Eric Hobsbawm summed up in his large fresco devoted to the “age of extremes,” the past to which these regimes referred was at first an “artifact of discourse,” and their traditions were largely “invented.” While the fascists apparently rejected “modernity” and “progress”, which were extolled in liberal democracies, in practice they formulated a “set of delusional beliefs in technical modernity.” Continuing on previous technological fundamentalisms, the various fascisms have finally created an original blend of “conservative values” and faith in the “assured mastery of contemporary high technology.”

This “techno-fascist” synthesis had its roots in the experience of the Great War, in the defeat and intellectual crisis of the 1920s. In Germany, the Conservative Revolution was accompanied by an acceptance of industrial society and the most modern techniques, perceived as solutions to the crisis much more than its causes. For conservative thinkers, Germans were a people of technicians and organizers who needed to impose their supremacy in the coming industrial civilization. Hitler himself, far from being a traditionalist who completely rejected the industrial world in favor of a return to peasant agrarian simplicity, constantly extolled modernization and large-scale technical equipment. Faced with democratic regimes that he considered weak and decadent, modern technologies, in his opinion, required the establishment of a state strong enough to lead them in favor of the power of the “Aryan race”. In Mein Kampf, he also defined the Weltanschauung Nazi Germany as “based on the Greek spirit and German technique.”

Techniques, ideologies and politics

Of course, I will let the experts on Germany and Nazism—including me not—discuss the relevance of Herf's analyses. But while the book contributed a great deal to the understanding of Nazism and its intellectual history, it should also be viewed in the context of the growing interest that emerged during the years 1970-1980 for a renewed history of techniques and technologies. The translator Frédéric Joly logically chose to rename the English word “technology” by “technology”, but it should be remembered how long and complex this concept — which Herf asks very little — has a long and complex history. The word first appeared in Germany at the end of the 18th century to designate a project for the systematic codification of arts and crafts; it was primarily a theoretical discourse and an attempt to systematize the analysis of techniques. Subsequently, the meaning evolves and the word comes to designate all the techniques available at a given time, then more and more the artifacts of the modern world, the set of material devices identified with modernity: the most powerful techniques, those that result from the growing alliance with science. For Herf, “technology” thus refers to both the great artifacts — aviation and motorization, synthetic chemistry, gigantic steel mills — and the speeches and attempts to theorize these material artifacts by various thinkers.

Beyond its contributions to the understanding of Nazism itself, the book seems essential to me because it offers an intellectual and cultural history of techniques at a time when heroic and naively progressive narratives still dominated. The book is also contemporary with the emergence of Science studies and various trends of analysis showing how the world of technology shapes and is shaped by cultural representations and imaginaries, as well as by political and social choices. Herf's work on the cult of technology in the Nazi imaginary thus has points in common with that of another North American historian, David Noble, who is eager to understand the political imaginaries and practices of technology in North America after 1945. In his books America by Design: Science, Technology and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism (1977) then Forces of Production: A Social History of Industrial Automation (1984), Noble studied the discourses and practices of American engineers, their fascination and worship of technology, their systematic enthusiasm for the most powerful machines at the expense of efficiency. For Noble, in the wake of Lewis Mumford's analyses of “machine myths”, technique is not a process without a subject, the fruit of determinism and an inevitable future that should simply be adapted to: it is a historical process shaped by ideologies and power relationships.

Subsequently, other North American historians tried to think of political ideologies and discourses in the light of their fascination with technology, like Paul Josephson for the Stalinist USSR. Relying explicitly on Herf's research, Josephson analyzed what he calls the “totalitarian machine”, characterized by the central role granted to the State as an actor in the development and diffusion of technologies and by a marked tendency to gigantism, which is embodied, for example, in the buildings of Albert Speer, the architect of the Nazi regime, or in the “Seven Sisters of Moscow”, those skyscrapers wanted by Stalin in the 1950s. Nature as well as humans must be enslaved, controlled and put at the service of power.

The intellectual history of technological discourses in Germany belongs to a set of currents that try to show the many threads that connect ideology and the world of technology. Herf himself also says he is indebted to the critical theorists of the Frankfurt School, in particular to the conceptualization of technology by Herbert Marcuse, while seeking to overcome their shortcomings. His archaeology of reactionary modernism thus led him to question their thesis that Nazism was the paradigmatic expression of a generalized evil inherent in modern societies. It also extends philosophical investigations such as the one that Habermas devoted some fifteen years earlier to “science and technology as an ideology”. Herf's study is also contemporary with Langdon Winner's famous and rich essay, “Do Artifacts Make Politics? ”, such as the rise in Europe and North America of numerous currents interested in the philosophy of technology. After the intense decade of conflict in the 1970s, during which technologies were discussed at length, the 1980s ushered in a renewal of technological promises around computing, which was beginning to colonize the world. The political and economic authorities then intended to repel any criticism or opposition in favor of celebrating the new technological revolution to which societies had to adapt.

Written at the end of the “conflictual decade” of 1968, and published at the beginning of the 1980s, which largely depoliticized the technological issue, Reactionary Modernism is therefore a pivotal work, in which Jeffrey Herf pursues and deepens an important reflection on the links that are constantly being woven between discourses on technology and politics. In his book, the reader will not find a usual history of techniques that would follow, for example, the rise of the automobile, the chemical industry, TSF, etc. On the other hand, he will delve into the writings of many famous or obscure technical thinkers. Following right-wing intellectuals such as Spengler, Jünger, and many others less well known than the book, the Nazi Party mobilized engineers and technicians into its ranks. The new communication techniques were thus widely used by propaganda. Shortly after the Nazis took power in 1933, Adolf Hitler launched a vast plan to build highways — reserved for cars — that were supposed to symbolize the supremacy of the regime. These Autobahnen were to embody the superiority of German technology, its ability to improve and exceed culture. Hermann Göring, responsible for coordinating and implementing the 1936 quadrennial plan that was to make the country self-sufficient, decreed a 150% increase in wood production for 1937, and required the cultivation of 2 million additional hectares. To achieve these goals, it was necessary to combine the massive use of the most recent techniques, such as pesticides, motor vehicles and chemical fertilizers. Far removed from the supposed ecological thinking of the Nazis, exaggerated by some liberal ideologists in order to disqualify the attempts to regulate capitalism, Nazism was at first a frenzied attempt to dominate nature by means of heavy technologies. The final chapter on the Nazi period and the Second World War is particularly illuminating the irrational technological fanaticism that was then at work: increasingly cut off from reality, the leaders were convinced that technological discoveries would save them from collapse, this fanaticism contributing to their blindness and their final fall.

From one cult to another

Times have changed, Nazism as well as Fascism and Stalinism have been defeated, and the society that emerged in the West after 1989 has made parliamentary democracy an unsurpassable ideal. But one thing may have remained, beyond the irreducible differences that characterize our time: are we not too victims of an irrational cult of technology that sometimes borders on blinding fanaticism? In 2012, the president of Google, Eric Schmidt, proclaimed at a conference: “If we do it right, I think we can fix all the problems in the world.” This type of prophecy is frequently found among entrepreneurs and engineers at the Silicon Valley, as with the prophets of transhumanism who continue to multiply promises and extol new technologies described as “revolutionary” or “disruptive”. Behind the “digital revolution”, there is now a political project and an ideology based on the control and control of all aspects of our lives. The innumerable Start-up that are proliferating promise — to attract attention and funding — technological solutions to all problems: the combination of cell culture and 3D printing must solve world hunger by making it possible to produce artificial meat; so-called autonomous cars must eliminate both traffic jams and road deaths; Big Data will make it possible to prevent epidemics; online courses (MOOCs) must democratize knowledge. Evegeny Morozov explored and denounced this “technological solutionism” of companies in Silicon Valley who want us to believe that thanks to the Internet and new technologies, every aspect of our lives will be improved and that most of the world's problems will disappear. Despite their language cool, connected and open to globalization, the actors of the world High-tech Aren't they immersed in the same type of fascination with technology, the same unbridled and irrational faith, as those unearthed by Jeffrey Herf in his book? Certainly, this cult of technology is put at the service of a significantly different political project, but does it not produce the same type of blindness?

At a time when our world is going through a triple social, ecological and political crisis, the emergency — as in the 1930s — would be to accelerate technical progress that is broken, or threatened, to prevent us from falling behind in the inevitable global competition, to save the planet or to relaunch our power to act in the world. On the left, “accelerationists” thus reject the distrust, which they consider to be dominant, in technology. For them, it is first necessary to liberate the technologies of capitalist private property in order to create a society of leisure and abundance. On the right, the cult for technology is also doing very well. The extreme identity and religious right has now integrated and even theorized the intensive use of information and communication technologies to virally increase the reach of its propaganda. As Herf himself has pointed out several times, the concept of “reactionary modernism” also makes it possible to analyze the specificity of contemporary radical Islam: Al-Qaeda is constantly using the Internet to spread its fundamentalist messages, while Iran strives to master nuclear technology to challenge Western modernity. The caricatural opposition between the supposed reactionary technophobes and the progressive entrepreneurs of new technologies does not hold up, even if it constantly reappears, saturating the imaginary, to the point of making us myopic with regard to what is at stake. The current cult of high-tech, the increasingly fierce celebration of artificial intelligence and major geoengineering programs that are supposed to solve climate challenges, the confrontation between a supposedly dangerous anti-technological discourse and positive technological advances, all this recalls the exalted imaginations of technological progress that so marked the beginning of the 20th century, and that Jeffrey Herf's book contributed to analyze in a new and original way.

Even though it was widely discussed and quickly considered a classic, with translations having appeared in Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Greek and Japanese, J. Herf's work has so far received only limited attention in France. No review of the book seems to have been published in French, the journal Twentieth century simply reporting it in 1985 in its “Books Received” section. However, it circulated and nourished the historiography of Nazism as well as that of techniques, and as far as I am concerned, it was particularly valuable for me in clarifying and analyzing the quarrels, debates and oppositions around techniques in Europe at the beginning of the 20th century. Even if it has not been discussed much in France — the links between technology and politics have received less attention here than across the Atlantic — it has nevertheless made its way through footnotes in specialist books. This complete version of the book, finally available in French, will hopefully open up a wider audience for him. Moreover, it is not surprising that it was Éditions L'Échappée, an independent, committed and critical publisher, who took the initiative to translate this work when the academic and university field was not very interested in it. Over the past ten years, this publishing house has acquired a completely original position in contemporary French political and intellectual debate, by fighting against technoliberalism in all its forms, by opposing the elimination of the social question and to wild artificialism, by resisting the fascination for technoscience and contemporary technologies, by also bringing back forgotten authors and critical traditions. Herf's book offers numerous elements to clarify certain features of contemporary discourses on technology, and also to oppose those who simplistically identify any doubts expressed against this or that technological promise with an irretrievably reactionary position.

In the 30 years following the publication of his book, Herf turned somewhat away from the history of techniques proper to delve into the history of Nazism and its weight in contemporary Germany. He thus examined the question of Nazi propaganda and that of the memory of the Holocaust, he also broadened his fields of investigation to the cultural policies of West Germany, to rivalries between Israel and Germany, or to German unification in the context of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Several of his books have recently been translated into French. The remarkable translation of Reactionary modernism that Frédéric Joly offers us therefore gives the French public, specialists in Nazism, technologies, as well as the general public, the opportunity to discover or rediscover a major work. Even if over the past 30 years there has obviously been an increasing number of studies on the authors and the questions discussed in this book, it remains of great interest and relevance. While it can be considered outdated on some minor points, it remains extremely useful because the thesis is clear and enlightening. In the unpublished preface that J. Herf agreed to write, as well as in the useful “Translator's Note” that ends the volume, the reader will also find bibliographical supplements to deepen the question.

Far from being neutral or innocent, technologies shape the world, and they do not exist without the imaginations and social relationships that accompany them and give them meaning. The unbridled exaltation of technology, the irresponsible promises it elicits, remain, as in the 1930s, threats that must be recognized and eliminated. History never covers anything, and each era is unique, but there are also recurrences, common points that can help us orient ourselves and put mystifications away. Jeffrey Herf himself remarks this in his preface by observing how many forms of “reactionary modernism” are emerging at the beginning of the 21st century as fundamentalisms of all stripes fervently adopt the latest technological innovations to promote their cause. This is why the translation of this book into French seems so important and enlightening to me today: it offers an essential milestone in considering the intellectual history of techniques as well as that of the links between techniques and politics. The conclusions that emerge from Herf's book ultimately confirm that what we call modernity is not a homogeneous phenomenon that should be refused or accepted en masse, they also confirm that adherence to the latest innovations and innumerable technological promises is not in itself a source of emancipation. At a time of supposed technological “revolutions” and “disruptions”, the lesson is worth learning.

François Jarrige