The story is set in the Marche region of central Italy of the 1950s and '60s and is narrated by Anteo Crocioni, a young self-taught rustic philosopher, who lives in the hamlet of San Savino, near Frontone, in the province of Pesaro.
He has begun to write down his techno-utopian vision of the world in a treatise entitled For the Constitution of a New Academy of Friendship of Qualified People which he hopes to publish and present to university professors in Rome and abroad.
His wife Massimina, whom he meets at the local market in Pergola, remains loyal to him despite his ill treatment of her, but finally leaves when he mortgages the house in a reckless investment on farm machinery that exposes them to financial ruin.
He finds odd jobs, working as an animal keeper in a circus, on a nougat stall, then selling lupini beans on the streets.
Anteo obtains a quantity of dynamite from the local sulphur mine at Bellisio, locks the doors of his house, and prepares to blow himself up.
The English translation of La macchina mondiale, by Belén Sevareid, appeared under the title The Worldwide Machine (Grossman, New York 1967; Calder and Boyars, London 1969).
Giuliano Manacorda felt the central character was less convincing than the protagonist in his previous novel Memoriale, while Romano Luperini found Crocioni's madness to be an effective tool for social condemnation and Walter Pedullà considered Anteo to be "the rightful heir of all rebels who in every age have rashly opposed established order".
The first person narrator here exists in the closed world of his own mind, coolly spinning an abstract meditation on the evolutionary drive of the future and the bourgeois [f]olly of the present.