Has politics a future? This question lies behind Herminio Martins' discriminating and perceptive account of the recent history of those thinkers who read their societies through the optic of technology as well as progress. Against the background of Francis Fukuyama's Hegelian end of history story, development and change have been perceived as enmeshed with those human products that are both science and technology, but particularly technology, the application of science to human well-being. Although as Martins cautions, well-being is not always the conscious goal of these thinkers. Here, resonating with Bauman's The Holocaust and Modern Social Theory, Martins brings out the Faustian side of Third Reich philosophies of technology where power and domination take pre-eminence over any bland bourgeois notions of do-gooding and improvement.

Martins follows the Saint-Simonian vision of the supercession of the political by the technological (‘from the government of men to the administration of things’) and its reception in Marxist, socialist and anarchist traditions, through its Promethean shape in the conquest of nature under state socialism and in its mid-twentieth-century version, ‘Bernalism’. Eventually this vision embodies itself in Haraway's Cyborg, a feminist Gnosticism where flesh is restructured via the prosthetic. Martins contrasts this with the Faustian vision of the domination of nature, the idea of ‘technology as destiny’, a Weltanschauung which culminates in Heidegger's political ontology.

Martins sees the implications of information technologies for civil society and the public sphere as raising questions for the libertarian and communitarian options in political philosophy and their possible technological correlates.