The Triumph of Technique isn't an ordinary account of the industrialization of agriculture. It is a wake-up call, a warning, and a call to action. And it isn't just about the structure of agriculture but about the potential collapse of civilization and the need to restore human-scale to human enterprise and to emphasize cooperation over competition.The book's premise is that the rural crisis is a manifestation of the larger crisis in our civilization. The immediate cause is modernism, but the roots of modernism go deep into the history of European thought and economics, and into the multitude of techniques that Western Man adopted over the centuries. The result has been that humanity has allowed itself to be transformed from an actor into a viewer, and unless steps are imeediately taken, he will find himself transformed entirely into a servant of machines. The book's chapters include: The Jeffersonian Ideal, The Rise of the Merchant Class, Farming as a "Scientific Business," The Law and Agriculture, and The Triumph of Technique.