The industrial era settled the machinery among humans, but the Social Sciences of the early twentieth century did little to deal with the machinery, often allocating itas a corollary of the development of human societies. But are not machines objective producers of material conditions for the collective life of countless societies? Could not machines thus occupy a point of distinction in the history of Social Sciences? The bet of Jaques Lafitte, in the first half of the twentieth century, was that a social science of machines was not just possible, but was indeed needed for thefuture history of Social Sciences viability. In this gap,mechanology was formulated: an effort in the direction of a social science of machines. Lafitte’s mechanology advanced on French sociology and radicalized one of its expressions: if Sociology is able to found its Technology, it must be properly treated as a social incursion into the realm of mechanical beings.
Mechanology; Social Sciences; Machinery; Technology