Technology assumes a remarkable importance in contemporary political life. Today, politicians and intellectuals extol the virtues of networking, interactivity and feedback, and stress the importance of new media and biotechnologies for economic development and political innovation. Measures of intellectual productivity and property play an increasingly critical part in assessments of the competitiveness of firms, universities and nation-states. At the same time, contemporary radical politics has come to raise questions about the political prcoccupation with technical progress, while also developing a certain degree of technical sophistication itself. In a series of in-depth analyses of topics ranging from direct action to intellectual property law, and from interactive science centres to the European Union, this book interrogates the politics of the technological society. Critical of the form and intensity of the contemporary preoccupation with new technology, Political Machines opens up a space for thinking the relation between technical innovation and political inventiveness.

"Political Machines presents a remarkable tour of the imbroglios of science, technology and politics in contemporary Europe. Locating Europe's political soul in Europe's technology, Political Machines at last gives substance, method and political relevance to the vague and ubiquitous notion of 'technical culture'." Bruno Latour; "This book argues for a radical rethinking of the relationship between politics and technology. Andrew Barry demonstrates the way in which technology is increasingly written into the conduct of politics, providing new assumptions about how the world is and can be governed. He poses a new and exciting set of questions about the nature of politics and the political of a kind that presage the beginning of a new subdiscipline: the book is that significant." Nigel Thrift"

Andrew Barry is Lecturer in Sociology at Goldsmiths College, University of London. He has published widely on technology, politics and social theory.