i suspect that what this is about was the concern over the imposition of time orientation v. task orientation: a kind of nostalgia characteristic of social theorists--conservative and radical alike--during the 19thc. who saw the factory system and specialization as unnatural as opposed to the organic naturalness of life oriented toward accomplishing tasks. Marx was ambivalent, particularly in his early writings, sure that the factory sys. and division of labor was necessary and produced a wealth of goods that would liberate people from the vagaries of nature. but he was also concerned about the effects of time-orientation and monotonous specialization. indeed, not unlike Adam Smith who worried about this in _The Wealth of Nations_ no? and, he went on to elaborate his concern in _Theory of Moral Sentiments_ that rational calculation and specialization in the sphere of the market was to be confined to that sphere, whereas civil society ought to develop other capacities and relieve workers' from the deadeningly dull monotony of a specialized division of labor.
"Two final themes, equally alive, equally freighted with ideological passion in nineteenth-century thought: technology and the factory system. Under the impact of the former and within the confines of the latter, conservatives and radicals alike could see changes occurring that affected the historic relation between man and woman, that threatened to make the traditional family obsolete, that would abolish the cultural separation between town and countryside, and that would make possible, for the first time in history, a liberation of man's productive energies from the restraints that both nature and traditional society had imposed.
Each theme, technology and factory, is the subject of countless tracts, sermons, and orations as well as scholarly works in the nineteenth century.
Among the radicals there is a kind of ambivalence toward both. The worker's subjection to the machine, his anonymous incorporation into the regimentation enforced by factory bell and overseer, his proletarianization of status are, plainly, rich themes in radical writing. But here too the conservative response is the more fundamental. For while Marx could see a form of enslavement in the machine, and a manifestation of alienation of labor, he came increasingly to identify this enslavement and alienation with private property rather than with the machine as such.....
The conservatives distrusted the factory and its mechanical division of labor as they did any system that seemed, by its nature, calculated to destroy the peasant, the artisan, as well as family and local community. It was easy to see in the workings of the steam engine, the flying shuttle, or the spinning jenny a form of tyranny over the mind of man and an instrument in his moral degradation...In exactly the same way that the factory (which to Bentham had appeared the very model of what all human relationships should be) became to such men as Coleridge, Bonald, and Haller the archetype of an economic regimentation hitherto known only in barracks and prisons, so the machine became in their minds the perfect symbol of what was happening to men's minds and culture.
Carlyle spoke for conservatives and for humanists alike when he wrote: "...They have lost faith in individual endeavor, and in natural force of any kind. Not for internal perfection, but for external combinations and arrangements, for institutions, constitutions--for Mechanism of one sort or other, do they hope and struggle. Their whole efforts, attachments opinions, turn on mechanism, and are of a mechanical character." In the same spirits, Carlyle wrote: "Mechanism has struck its roots down into man's most intimate, primary sources of conviction; and is thence sending up, over his whole life and activity, innumerable stems--fruit-bearing and poison-bearing." And Tocqueville saw in the machine and in the division of labor that accompanied it instruments of a degradation of man more awful than any that had befallen him under ancient tyrannies. All that was given to the machine in the way of skill and direction was taken out of man's essence, leaving him weak, narrow-minded, and dependent. "The art advances, the artisan recedes."
robert nisbet