The appropriate technology movement in American political cultur

This is a study of the Appropriate Technology (AT) movement as it unfolded in American political culture from the late 1960s to the present. It focuses on the efforts of AT organizations in the U.S. to provide their own country with a more sustainable mode of technological practice, a more equitable distribution of wealth and economic opportunity, and a more democratic polity. During the 1960s and early seventies, the movement resonated strongly among communards and homesteaders of the counterculture. It also contributed significantly to the internal debates shaping the modern environmental movement. In subsequent decades, appropriate technologists focused increasingly on developing regional economies that would integrate sustainable agriculture in the countryside with ecologically designed cities. In an effort to reverse the concentration of economic power in the hands of large corporations and a centralized banking system, the movement has attempted to reshape public policy while promoting an array of "appropriate institutions," including small businesses, cooperatives, community development banks and credit unions, microenterprise loan circles, local currencies, and community land trusts.;While the few brief scholarly accounts of the AT movement have noted its effort to develop new "hardware," they have failed to grasp the movement's broader strategy of coupling appropriate technologies with institutional innovation and public policy. This study addresses these shortcomings in three ways: (1) by grounding our understanding of the movement: in empirical evidence derived from extensive oral histories and from archival materials, periodicals, and books generated by over thirty AT organizations across the nation; (2) by using this evidence to evaluate the effectiveness of the movement's organizations in articulating and implementing their social vision; and (3) by placing this social vision in the historical context of American political culture. This dissertation offers the first comprehensive analysis of the AT movement's historical development, institutional complexity, and internal ideological tensions. In doing so, it demonstrates that appropriate technologists are neither technophilic nor technophobic, and that their social vision meshes tightly with an abiding decentralist tradition rooted in Jeffersonian republicanism, populism, and, to a lesser degree, anarchism.