This is a review of Alf Hornborg's The Power of the Machine, a book by a professional anthropologist offering a wide-ranging, interdisciplinary critique of our global society.

The review is in four parts: the first part is an introduction to critical theory, the second part will detail Hornborg's main concern, which is that we are trapped in a "fetish" of economic "machines," and that this is why we keep offering "technological" and "capitalist" solutions to problems like abrupt climate change.  The third part is a short critique of his central concept, "machine fetishism," and the conclusion will summarize the book chapter by chapter.

(crossposted at Docudharma)

Precis
In a recent diary, I was encouraged to perform a literary critique of Barack Obama's public addresses. At the time, I'd sardonically remarked that Obama owed his political genius, his muse, to Stephen Carter, author of Confessions of an Affirmative Action Baby and other post-black meditations on bourgeois society.  Prior to that, I've alluded cryptically to his capacity for political victory being a function of his status as a "Harvard-educated striver." He is erudite, even clever, and financially creditable. But this certification of his success is in turn indebted to the multivalent culture of suspended disbelief that is quotidian Americana -- the perennial tabla rasa, illiteracy, economic and societal disintegration, and the biennial historicism manufactured by MSM, wherein one discovers national identity in a particular persona.