Summary Of 'The Emergence Of Hazardous Concept' By Leo Marx

In “ ‘Technology:’ The Emergence of a Hazardous Concept”, Leo Marx describes the numerous meanings that the word “technology” embodies in certain timeframes. There is no concrete definition of the term as it referred to a “kind of learning, discourse, or treatise, concerned with the mechanic arts” (Marx 966) in the 17th century, a kind of book in the Industrial Revolution, and starting in the 1840s relating to new inventions, advancements in the sciences, current ideas and the mechanical arts.
The tension regarding the semantics of technology stemmed from one word: progress. Many Republican thinkers such as Paine and Jefferson thought that innovation should not be considered as progress, but progress was “the means of attaining it… progress