Seidenberg, Roderick
Entry updated 29 September 2025. Tagged: Author.
(1889-1973) German-born architect and author, in USA from 1910 or earlier; imprisoned 1918-1920 as a World War One conscientious objector, an experience he describes in "I Refuse to Serve" (1932 Mercury). Also in the 1930s, while designing several buildings in New York, he published essays on the fragile culture of the urban world. In the 1930s, while designing several buildings in New York, he also contributed essays to various journals. His first book, Posthistoric Man: An Inquiry (1950), incisively if adamantly argues that human history in the large scale is essentially predetermined, and can be graphed as a three-part sequence: prehistory, a long plateau, with instinct dominant over Intelligence (his definitions of these two terms are sophisticated); history, a brief period during which intelligence vies against and conquers instinct, with Genetic Engineering (see also Eugenics) increasingly co-ordinating the human race; and finally, but in fact imminent, posthistory, with Ant-like Homo sapiens "lost in the icy fixity of his final state in a posthistoric age" under the universal control of "intelligence", at points almost synonymous with Technology (see AI; Far Future; Singularity). Seidenberg's manifestly Dystopian sense of things to come is buttressed by citations from authors like Aldous Huxley and Yevgeny Zamiatin, and prefigures the arguments elaborated in La technique oul l'enje du siècle (1954; trans John Wilkinson as The Technological Society 1964) by Jacques Ellul (1912-1994). Anatomy of the Future (1961) argues for the legitimacy of the kind of speculations that shape the earlier book (see End of the World; Futures Studies; Prediction). [JC]
Roderick Seidenberg
born Heidelberg, Germany: 20 October 1889
died Doylestown, Pennsylvania: 27 August 1973
works
- Posthistoric Man: An Inquiry (Chapel Hill, North Carolina: The University of North Carolina Press, 1950) [nonfiction: dust jacket gives "post-historic": hb/nonpictorial]
- Anatomy of the Future (Chapel Hill, North Carolina: The University of North Carolina Press, 1961) [nonfiction: hb/]
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