A Companion to the Philosophy of Technology

American Liberalism

The US is at root a liberal society. Americans tend to value the individual over the collective interest and to privilege negative freedom over positive freedom – “freedom from,” as Isaiah Berlin would have it, over “freedom to.” Premodern status distinctions eroded more quickly in the US than in Europe and other European colonies; political rights and entrepreneurship trumped aristocracy and guild.

To be sure, these ideals were often abridged, nowhere more so than in the slave-holding South of the pre-Civil War era. None the less, in the context of abundant natural resources and a shortage of labor, they helped to animate a relatively high level of popular engagement in what the patent clause of the US Constitution labeled the “useful arts.” “The annals of American invention,” writes B. Zorina Khan of the nineteenth century, “were not limited to the wealthy, corporate entities, or other privileged classes, but reflected a broad spectrum of society.”²

The objective of such invention was usually to get rich quick. Machines that could do something new or better than before provided platforms for enterprises that could bank on a taste for novelty among buyers. As the pace of immigration quickened after the Civil War, newly arrived Americans reinforced the receiving culture’s openness to novelty, shedding their traditional ways and adopting with alacrity the means supplied by the emerging mass-production sector.

The giant corporations that arose in the late nineteenth ...