Wildavsky on the Luddites

The Luddite chapter is the single clearest case study in the application of cultural theory to technological transitions. Wildavsky would have read the Nottinghamshire framework knitters as egalitarians whose distributional risk perception was remarkably accurate: they predicted, correctly, that the power loom would concentrate gains with factory owners while impoverishing skilled craftsmen. Where they failed was not in diagnosis but in response. Machine-breaking did not build the institutional structures that eventually distributed industrial gains more broadly; it produced criminalization, the deployment of soldiers, and the collapse of the movement. The distributive settlement, when it came, came through labor movements, voting rights, and welfare states — institutional construction, not technological refusal.