How The Technological Society Became More Important in the United States than in France

Abstract

La Technique ou L’enjeu du siècle has an unusual history. The original French was published in 1954 and made scarcely a ripple in a cultural world dominated by Jean-Paul Sartre (L’être et le néant, 1943; Saint Genet, comédien et martyr, 1952; Question de méthode, 1957) and Albert Camus (La peste, 1947; La chute, 1956). Although La Technique received ten reviews, most were in periodicals associated with French Protestant intellectual life; only one appeared outside France, in Germany. Somewhat surprisingly, the following decades witnessed translations into Spanish (1960), English (1964), Portuguese (1968), Italian (1969), and Japanese (1975). But most publishing houses were second tier and all non-English translations received little notice.