Martin Wiener - WikiHQ

Martin Joel Wiener (born 1941) is an American academic and author. He is currently a research professor at Rice University.

Keith Joseph gave a copy of Wiener's book English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit: 1850–1980 to every cabinet minister.

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English Culture has been attacked as selective in its use of evidence and partial in its conclusions; the historians David Edgerton and W. D. Rubinstein have been leading critics of the Wiener thesis. In Edgerton's case, Wiener is simply wrong; the British state and society more generally was remarkably consistent in its technocratic aims and objectives, and in the case of Rubinstein, Wiener is prone to "industrial fetishism", ignoring the true nature of the British economy during the period in which he writes, which is that of a consistently growing service-based economy. A standard criticism of the impressionistic nature of Wiener's work is that it relies heavily on quotations from literary sources and is barren of any quantitative analysis. -->

Selected bibliography

Between Two Worlds: The Political Thought of Graham Wallas, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971.
English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit: 1850–1980. Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 1981; paperback edition. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1985; new edition. Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 2004.
Review article "Treating 'Historical' Sources as Literary Texts: Literary Historicism and Modern British History," The Journal of Modern History Vol. 70, No. 3, September 1998
Reconstructing the Criminal: Culture, Law and Policy in England, 1830–1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
Men of Blood: Violence, Manliness and Criminal Justice in Victorian England, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
An Empire on Trial: Race, Murder and Justice under British Rule 1870–1835, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
Edgerton, D. (2006) Warfare State: Britain, 1920 – 1970. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Edgerton, D. (1991) England and the Aeroplane – An Essay on a Militant and Technological Nation.

References