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08258_Field_TCGG T23.txt
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1996-04-10
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the adoption of new instruments.”
Had we meditated on such a basic fact as that long ago,
we might easily have mastered the nature and effects of all our
technologies, instead of being pushed around by them. At any
rate, The Gutenberg Galaxy is a prolonged meditation on that
theme of J. Z. Young.
Nobody has been more conscious of the futility of our
closed systems of historical writing than Abbott Payson Usher.
His classic, A History of Mechanical Inventions , is an
explanation of why such closed systems cannot make contact
with the facts of historical change: “The cultures of antiquity
do not fit the patterns of the linear sequences of social and
economic evolution developed by the German Historical
Schools. . . . If linear concepts of development are abandoned