Modernism and the Culture of Efficiency: Ideology and Fiction

Evelyn Cobley. Modernism and the Culture of Efficiency: Ideology and Fiction. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2009. ix + 344 pp.

In Modernism and the Culture of Efficiency, Evelyn Cobley sets out to examine "our cultural commitment to efficiency" (5), a commitment that encompasses the cultural attitudes, economic practices, social engineering projects, and individual, internalized beliefs in ascendancy since the invention of the steam engine in 1794. Cobley reviews the philosophical roots of the culture of efficiency in Rousseau and Hobbes, surveys its early-twentieth-century prominence in industry and bureaucracy, and analyzes its impact on canonical British fiction. She argues that the logic of efficiency reverberates widely and deeply in Western society, implicated in shifts from free to regulated markets and from democratic to totalitarian political systems, as well as in evidence that "free" individuals may in fact be "socially constrained" (5). Her study thus aims to trace the evolution of efficiency from an "instrumental function . . . to an ideological investment" (20).

To explicate the industrial history of the ideology of efficiency, Cobley draws largely on previously published studies. Focusing on Henry Ford's and Winslow Taylor's distinct contributions to what would become a broad cultural valuing of efficiency, these chapters offer a clear and compelling summary of their legacies. While Ford's assembly line epitomized a commitment to technical efficiency, Taylor's The Principles of Scientific Management (1911) advanced a concept of social efficiency: wasteful class conflict could be eliminated in workplaces if both management and labor could be made to see the mutual advantages of cooperation. Taylor thus proposed an efficiency expert: "a narrow specialist in the study of speed and motion" (49).

The significance of Ford's efficient assembly line, suggests Cobley, is not merely its subordination of human beings...