Reading The Birth of Energy

Johnson (2019): "The case Daggett makes for thermodynamics as an epistemological grounding of modern empire is suggestive and exciting, but it still requires the type of careful archival documentation that we have for understanding how certain actors and institutions turned that other science, the science of evolutionism, into the disciplinary rationale of Social Darwinism during this same period."

Johnson (2020): "Daggett calls for a world in which universal basic income and shorter working hours will diffuse the "asceticism" of the capitalist project and open the way for genuine, transformative change."

Cedelröf (2020): "By eliminating the energy idea, we risk losing a vocabulary for a scarcely offered, materially grounded political analysis and, indeed, progressive change. The Birth of Energy calls on us to think that this is a risk mainstream society needs to take and that energy itself is the problem."