deep freedom 325soon overridden, in its economic signifi cance, by the capacity to inno-
vate in both the technological instruments of work and the institutional
arrangements of cooperation. Karl Marx exaggerated in his account of
the history of the social division of labor when he explained class soci-
ety functionally, as necessitated by the indispensable coercive extrac-
tion of a surplus. Adam Smith exaggerated in his analysis of the tech-
nical division of labor when he described the hyper- specialization of
labor and the consequent brutalization of the worker in the pin factory
as a consequence of the need, under the then- available technology, to
realize economies of scale.
In a second stage of the development of productive capabilities,
production comes to be supported by science, embodied in technol-
ogy. Industrial mass production, of the kind that came to prevail in
most advanced economies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, is
the characteristic example. Under this regime, the worker works with
the machine as if he were a machine. Th e formulation and supervision
of productive tasks are rigidly distinguished from their execution, and
every job from every other.
In a third stage of the history of production, production rather than
being just supported by science becomes a materialization of science: a
continuing experiment, a practice of permanent innovation, a turning
of our cooperative activities into an expression of the analytic and syn-
thetic operations of the mind. At this stage, the worker uses machines
the better not to act as if he were a machine: that is to say, he works,
non- formulaically, continuously revising the productive plan in the
course of implementing it.
Such is the promise of what today is oft en described as the new, cre-
ative, or post- Fordist economy. At the time when this book was written,
t his st yle of produc t ion rema i ned la rgely con fi ned to vanguards, weakly
linked to other sectors of each national economy. Most of the labor
force, in the richer countries as well as in the major developing econo-
mies, remained excluded from this economic vanguardism. Its practices
were, nevertheless, applicable, in principle, to every sector.
If we look back at this history of production from the perspective of
its third and last stage, we can see that the overriding principle in this
evolution has been the relation between experiments about nature, in-
formed by science and enacted in technology, and experiments about