A history of a failing civilisation. Promedia, Vienna 2015 (English edition: Zero Books 2020). How a five-hundred-year-old machine of state, market, military, and apocalyptic thought has brought the planet to its ultimate limit.
Fabian Scheidler, born in 1968 in Bochum, studied history and philosophy at the Free University of Berlin and theatre direction at the Hochschule für Musik und Darstellende Kunst in Frankfurt am Main. Since 2001 he has worked as a freelance author; in 2009 he co-founded, together with David Goeßmann, the independent television magazine Kontext TV, which has since broadcast on questions of global justice and ecology. The same year he received the Otto Brenner Media Prize for critical journalism for his work with Attac. The End of the Megamachine appeared in 2015 with the Promedia publishing house in Vienna, was translated into four further languages, and has gone through ten editions in the German edition by 2019 — a notable trajectory for a book of civilisational diagnosis.
The term Megamachine, to which the book is devoted, originates with Lewis Mumford, who coined it in his two-volume late work The Myth of the Machine (1967, 1970). Where Mumford describes the Megamachine as an anthropological constant across five thousand years of human high cultures, Scheidler concentrates on the specifically modern form: the world system emerging in the early modern period out of economic accumulation, military violence, ideological power, and linear philosophy of history. What Mumford described as a tendency, Scheidler describes as a historically concrete event that can be traced.
For Scheidler, modern Western civilisation is not the result of human reason, technical progress, or democratic achievements, but the result of a five-hundred-year economic, military, and cultural machine that took shape in Europe from the late Middle Ages and, in the course of globalisation, subjected the planet to itself. This machine produces — structurally, not through ill intent — the radical exploitation of human beings, of ecosystems, and of forms of cultural self-determination outside the Western centre.
The term Megamachine, in Scheidler's usage, denotes the interplay of four components: state, market, military, and linear-apocalyptic thought. These four are not separate from one another; they have produced one another and mutually sustain one another.
Whoever wants to understand the system must look at all four simultaneously — because each individual aspect remains incomprehensible on its own, as long as the other three are blocked out.
The central diagnosis: the Megamachine is heading towards an ultimate limit. Unlike earlier civilisational crises, today's cannot be evaded by displacing the problems in space or in time. The planet itself is the limit. The ecological catastrophe, the social polarisation, the exhaustion of political steering are not separate crises but symptoms of a single structural exhaustion.
Scheidler's methodological resources are broad. He draws on Mumford, Marx, Polanyi, Wallerstein's world-systems theory, Foucault, anthropologists such as David Graeber, chaos theory, and occasionally on popular culture. The argumentative strategy is not linear proof but historical cross-section: Scheidler connects phenomena from various epochs, spaces, and disciplines in order to show that they are manifestations of the same logic.
This makes the book readable. Whoever expects to read a specialist study on the history of the early modern period will perceive the compression as truncation. Whoever expects to read an accessible synthesis of the civilisation-critical tradition will perceive the cross-connections as enrichment. Scheidler writes for the second group of readers.
The first part of the book deals in five chapters with the emergence of the forms of power from which the Megamachine will later draw.
Chapter 1: Power — The four tyrannies and the roots of domination. Scheidler begins not in the early modern period but with the archaic question: How does domination arise? How do a few people come to subjugate many? He identifies three classical tyrannies — physical violence, structural violence, ideological power — and adds a fourth: linear, apocalyptic thinking, which deploys future redemption as the justification of present sacrifices. The invention of the ruling god as a monotheistic figure of domination — a shift in relation to older polytheistic conceptions — is evaluated as a key event.
Chapter 2: Metal — Mining, armament, and power over nature. Here Scheidler makes an empirical turn that shapes the book: he identifies mining as the origin of the military-industrial complex. Where metal is extracted, armament arises. Where armament arises, power over others and over nature arises. The mother of all environmental disasters, Scheidler writes, is ancient metallurgy. The forging of swords and the smelting of ores are, in his view, not incidental technical phenomena but causes of a particular relationship of human beings to themselves and to the world.
Chapter 3: Market — Economic power, money, and property. Scheidler dispels the myth of the market as a spontaneous order. Markets, he writes, do not historically emerge out of free exchange but out of war. The mercenary armies of classical Greece were paid with coins from the silver mines of Laurion — coins that flowed back into the markets. The Roman silver empire, the first corporations, the invention of property as total power of disposition: this is not the result of spontaneous exchange behaviour but of the fusion of military and economic power.
Chapter 4: Powerlessness — The trauma of power and the emergence of apocalyptic thinking. Here the book makes a psychological turn. Scheidler describes how the tyranny of power produces a trauma — in those subjected to it, but also in those who exercise it. Out of this trauma arise apocalyptic ideas: the world as a directed narrative with an endpoint at which justice will be established. The Heavenly Jerusalem and the lake of fire are the two poles of this narrative. The Jesus movement is read as an originally system-critical response to the Roman Empire — a movement that later, with its takeover by the empire itself, lost its critical substance.
Chapter 5: Mission — The origins of Western universalism. With the Christianisation of the empire a universalistic logic emerges that later, secularised, becomes the ideological justification of European expansion. Mission and power become coupled; the annihilation of the other is reinterpreted as his redemption. Whoever is converted is saved from destruction. Whoever does not allow himself to be converted has deserved his destruction. Scheidler reads the later Conquista, colonialism, and today's humanitarian intervention rhetoric as variations of this motif.
The second, longer part deals with the specific history of the modern Megamachine — from its formation in the late Middle Ages to the present and to a possible turn.
Chapter 6: Monster — The reformation of power and the emergence of the modern world system (1348–1648). The period begins with the plague, which halves the population of Europe and shakes existing power relations, and ends with the Peace of Westphalia, which establishes state sovereignty as the ordering principle. Scheidler calls the phase the Age of Fear. Out of the crisis new mechanisms emerge: the Arsenal of Venice as the first industrial large-scale organisation, the reinvention of war as a capital requirement, the resurrection of the metallurgical complex through gunpowder, the role of banks as financiers of war, the unleashing of the Monster through the Conquista in the Americas, the invention of the joint-stock company as a means of bundling capital for colonial enterprises. Egalitarian movements, which appear in great numbers during the late Middle Ages — peasant wars, Anabaptists, early movements for democracy — are systematically crushed. What remains is the architecture of the Megamachine in its first form.
Chapter 7: Machine — Mechanistic sciences, state apparatuses, and the disciplining of the human being (1600–1800). With the seventeenth century a new natural philosophy emerges: the world is thought of mechanically, as clockwork, as a system of mutually independent parts. This view is not only epistemological; it has political consequences. If the world is a machine, it must be steered. If the human being is a machine, he can be drilled. Urban planning becomes counter-insurgency; school becomes a disciplinary institution; the invention of work as a bourgeois virtue is the invention of a form in which the human body can be systematically delivered to the Megamachine. Here Scheidler openly follows Foucault without naming him.
Chapter 8: Moloch — Coal power, total market, and total war (1712–1918). With the Industrial Revolution coal enters the picture — the third revolution of the metallurgical complex after bronze and iron. Coal power scales the Megamachine on an order of magnitude that exceeds all previous phases. The total market emerges: everything becomes a commodity, including human labour power itself. The invention of the nation as imagined community mobilises the masses for state purposes. The great expansion into Africa and Asia, the devastation of the African continent, the invention of the Third World through British India policy — all of this finally culminates in the total war of 1914–18, in which the industrial apparatuses of Europe annihilate each other in a way unprecedented in history.
Chapter 9: Masks — The steering of the Great Machine and the struggle for democracy (1787–1945). The nominal democratisation of the West, beginning with the American and French Revolutions, is for Scheidler a veiling. The actual steering of the Megamachine remains in the hands of an economic and military elite. Four filters keep the formally democratic institutions away from actual democratic steering: the filter of representation (republic instead of democracy), the filter of money (campaign financing, lobbying), the filter of debt (indebtedness as instrument of discipline), the filter of public opinion (media as educators of the population). The Russian Revolution of 1917 and the German revolution of 1918/19 are read as attempts to overcome these filters — both ending in different forms of restoration. The fascist option of the twentieth century is interpreted as the other form in which the crisis of bourgeois democracy is resolved: not by being overcome, but by being openly liquidated.
Chapter 10: Metamorphoses — Post-war boom, resistance movements, and the limits of the system (1945–2014). The post-war period is divided into several phases. The trente glorieuses are the last high phase of the Megamachine, in which social pacification in the West becomes possible through unrestrained expansion into the Global South. The independence movements of the 1950s and 1960s are partly brutally suppressed, partly absorbed economically; development becomes the inner colonisation of newly independent states. The world revolution of 1968 is for Scheidler a, for the time being, final attempt to transcend the Megamachine — and the Great Rollback of the 1970s and 1980s is the reaction to it. The neoliberal era is for him not the triumph of the market but the reorganisation of the Megamachine under conditions of dwindling possibilities for expansion. The power of debt replaces the power of growth. The ecological limit — the ultimate limit, the planet — is recognised but does not become action-guiding.
Chapter 11: Possibilities — Exit from the Megamachine. The last chapter is the only one that is not historical-diagnostic but programmatic. Scheidler sketches possible paths out of the Megamachine: the end of capital accumulation as an economic form, the shrinkage of the metallurgical-fossil complex, the rediscovery of the commons as a form of property beyond private and state ownership, the search for a genuine democracy beyond the four filters, the demilitarisation of society, the farewell to the domination of nature. It is the weakest chapter of the book — Scheidler knows this and says so himself. There is no master plan. What there is are movements, experiments, search processes whose success is not guaranteed and whose failure is part of their form.
The strength of the book lies in its synthesis. Scheidler brings material from about ten different disciplines into a coherent narrative that without this book would remain scattered. Whoever has read Mumford but has not worked through the early modern period; whoever knows Wallerstein but does not have the anthropological foundation of the question of power; whoever has appreciated Polanyi but has not systematically placed the ecological dimension — they will find in Scheidler a synthesis that closes these gaps.
The weakness lies in the straight-line nature of the narrative. Scheidler knows only one direction of movement: that of the Megamachine, which becomes ever larger and more destructive. Dialectical turns, counter-movements, breaks in the system are presented only as failed attempts. Marxism would object at this point that history is a history of contradictions in which counter-movements have substance even when they do not win. In Scheidler the counter-movements — the peasant wars, the Russian Revolution, the events of 1968 — appear almost as confirmations of the Megamachine, because they all fail.
This straight-line quality is methodologically understandable: whoever wants to deliver a synthesis on 270 pages cannot afford ramifications. But it leads to the book, despite its critical thrust, developing a certain form of determinism against which the reader can rebel.
For the readers of this book series, Scheidler's work is relevant in two respects. On the one hand, it gives them the historical depth that is presupposed but not unfolded in the three volumes of The Metamorphosis of the Leviathan. Whoever wants to know where the Megamachine of which we speak historically comes from — whoever wants to follow its genesis in plague, Conquista, joint-stock company, school, colonialism, and world war — finds in Scheidler the material basis. On the other hand, Scheidler's book marks a different position from the one this series takes. Scheidler is an exit theorist; for him, the Megamachine is a form to be overcome. This series, by contrast, is more diagnostic: it describes how the Megamachine works in specific contexts — the German, the American — without making the question of exit so central. Both perspectives belong together; but they are not identical.
Whoever has read Scheidler in the historical cross-section of the past five hundred years will miss the anthropological depth out of which this cross-section has emerged. This is where Lewis Mumford's Myth of the Machine begins, to whom Scheidler owes the term. With Mumford the arc reaches further back — into the Egyptian dynasties — and the concepts are framed differently. Whoever has read Scheidler can read Mumford as anthropological deepening; whoever has read Mumford can read Scheidler as historical concretisation. Both together produce the picture that carries the present-day Megamachine discussion across the decades.