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Yet even for a current English word ‘technology ’ has come to embrace usually conflicting meanings. First, I will supply a abstract of Eric Schatzberg’s important new opus Technology, which untangles and clarifies the history of ‘technology’ and its cognates as actors’ classes. So ‘technology’ entered the 20 th century because the science of the economic arts, a term of art for the German cameralists and a brand-like placeholder time period within the United States. Yet in the end the German idea of Technik would have much higher influence. After 1850 German engineers embraced the time period Technik in a broad sense, not restricted to a means-to-ends rationality however a coherent and culturally significant category masking the arts of fabric production. ‘Technology’ is probably certainly one of the keywords of our world, but it is also one of the confused. As an analytical class it seems needed for our understanding of all of humanity’s history, and indeed past. We are in all prob