Home > Positioning > Persons > Mumford

Lewis Mumford (1895–1990)

Mumford wrote the history of technology as a history of human purposes. In Technics and Civilization (1934) machines are the products of a culture that wanted them before it could build them, and in The Myth of the Machine (1967–70) the first great machine was made of people, the organised labour of the ancient kingdoms that built the pyramids. Across four decades he argued that technics are shaped by choices, that the choices had increasingly gone one way, toward centralised power and mechanical order, and that they could still go another. His histories of the city made the same argument about the place where technics and human life meet.

Lewis Mumford was born on 19 October 1895 in Flushing, New York. He studied at the City College of New York and the New School for Social Research but took no degree, his studies interrupted by tuberculosis, and he served as a radio electrician in the Navy in 1918–19. The Scottish biologist and town planner Patrick Geddes was his formative influence. He was an editor at The Dial, a founder with Clarence Stein and others of the Regional Planning Association of America in the 1920s, and for more than three decades the architecture critic of The New Yorker, writing its “Sky Line” column. The City in History (1961) won the National Book Award. He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1964 and the National Medal of Arts in 1986, and died at his home in Amenia, New York, on 26 January 1990.

Key concepts

The clock and the three phases. Technics and Civilization opened with the claim that “the clock, not the steam-engine, is the key-machine of the modern industrial age”. Mumford traced the mechanical ordering of time to the Benedictine monasteries, whose rule gave human activity “the regular collective beat and rhythm of the machine”, and argued that a culture had to become mechanical in its habits before it produced its machines. Geddes had named the paleotechnic and neotechnic phases; Mumford added an eotechnic phase before them and divided the history of technics into three overlapping phases, each a complex of materials and energy: the eotechnic, of water, wind and wood; the paleotechnic, of coal and iron, the phase of the early industrial town; and the neotechnic, of electricity and alloys, which he hoped would allow a more decentralised and humane order.

The city. The Culture of Cities (1938) and The City in History (1961) followed the city from its origins as a meeting place and shrine to the metropolis, which Mumford saw as swollen past any human scale. He argued for regional planning, garden cities and cities organised around the needs of life rather than of traffic, trade or display, and he opposed the urban highways and renewal schemes of the post-war decades.

Authoritarian and democratic technics. In a short essay of 1964 in Technology and Culture he set out two traditions running side by side since the neolithic: democratic technics, small in scale, under the control of those who use them, relatively weak but durable; and authoritarian technics, system-centred, immensely powerful and inherently unstable. The irony he drew was that as political life moved toward democracy, technology was moving the other way.

The megamachine. The Myth of the Machine argued that the first complex machine was the organisation of human beings under the kings of the Bronze Age, labour armies and bureaucracies directed from a centre, which he called the megamachine. Its modern form, in The Pentagon of Power (1970), joined the old organisation of people to modern science, the military and the state. The first volume, Technics and Human Development (1967), also rejected the picture of humans as tool-makers first: “man is pre-eminently a mind-making, self-mastering, and self-designing animal”, and language, ritual and symbol came before and shaped the tool.

Where Mumford stops

The history he built on did not all hold. Gerhard Dohrn-van Rossum’s History of the Hour (1992; English 1996) rejected the reading of monastic timekeeping as mechanical: the monks ordered a sequence of observances beginning at set moments, not a measure of time in equal units, and he disengaged monastic practice from the equal hours on which Mumford’s line from the Benedictine rule to the clock depends.

From 1934 Mumford held that technics are shaped by human purposes and could be reshaped by them; by 1970 he described the megamachine as a system with its own momentum, drawing science, state and industry together, that no one in it controlled. His remedy remained a change of values, an organic view of life in place of the mechanical.

Key works

See also: Evolution · Technology · Arthur