The history of measurement and the engineers of space

For the social theorists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, measurement, quantification and calculation were of particular social and political significance. Karl Marx, in Capital , based his critique of classical political economy on an analysis of the quantification of labour as a commodity. Max Weber, in Economy and Society , emphasized the importance of rational calculation in the conduct of modern bureaucratic organizations. And in his major work, The Philosophy of Money , Georg Simmel highlighted what he called ‘the calculating character of modern times'.