theory and history of political thought, particularly German and Anglo-American. She has previously published widely on Arendt’s political ideas, including Violence and Power in the Thought of Hannah Arendt (2021).
Ashcroft applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Catastrophic Technology in Cold War Political Thought, and reported the following:
Page 99 comes towards the beginning of the book's chapter on technologies of destruction; the way in which the political theorists that this book focusses on saw the technologies of modern war as embodying the essential destructiveness of contemporary technology itself. On page 99, I observe how the destructive capacity of modern warfare is linked by these thinkers to the inherently destructive tendencies of modern technology: "the ‘total’ character of modern technologies of war makes irrational the act of war itself; the scope of environmental degradation and catastrophe goes beyond anything earlier technologies might have been responsible for; and while wars have inevitably stoked and utilised the aggression of its soldiers, the extent of technology’s drive to aggression reaches into every corner of peacetime society." This is exemplified by the atom bomb, but even this is viewed as a somewhat inevitable development in the inexorable march of technological advancement.Learn more about Catastrophic Technology in Cold War Political Thought at the Edinburgh University Press website.
Page 99 gets to the heart of Catastrophic Technology. The book analyses the critique of technology offered by a number of influential political theorists in the post WWII and Cold War era, including Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger and Theodor Adorno, and their claims that technology is catastrophically reshaping contemporary politics and society, and opening humanity up to unacceptable risks. Many of the thinkers whose work I explore were Jewish exiles from Germany, one (Jacques Ellul) was a member of the French Resistance, many (Lewis Mumford, Hans Jonas) lost parents or children in the fighting or the death camps. In different ways, their lives were shattered and reshaped by the experience of German totalitarianism and total war. Their view of politics - and the influence of technology on politics - was through the lens of these experiences. They came to see, I argue, an inherent relationship between totalitarianism and modern technology as such; the increasing destructive power of technology, its inescapable progression, they argued, led with some inevitability to deeply pernicious political outcomes.
But the fact that these theorists associate technology itself with totalitarian politics also meant their understanding of totalitarianism, and its threat to the modern world, took on a particular political hue. In the Western world, during the early Cold War era, a self-understanding of liberal democratic freedom as something that stood in opposition to the threat of totalitarianism (then identified with the communist East) became a central component of Western political identity: the West stood for freedom, against totalitarianism. The critics of technology challenged this. Although they occupied diverse political positions, from left to right, they agreed - challenging the predominant ideological claims of the period - that liberal states also exhibited at least some of the totalitarian tendencies of technological modernity. What characterised modernity, in the East and the West, was its technological character, they claimed. Liberal political states should not be too self-congratulatory, they suggested, but rather must be aware of the dangers inherent in their increasingly technologized politics and society. One of the problems of liberal politics identified here was the failure of liberalism to identify this threat. Another was the emphasis by liberal ideology on 'progressive' politics and an enduring faith in progress itself - now, frequently identified with technological progress. Liberalism was thus structurally favourable to the continuing advancement of technology, with all its flaws, threats and risk to freedom.
--Marshal Zeringue
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