Lewis Mumford was born in Flushing, Queens, New York, on 19 October 1895, and died in Amenia, New York, on 26 January 1990. He studied at the City College of New York and at the New School for Social Research but never completed a formal degree — tuberculosis contracted in his youth interrupted his studies, and he later served as a radio electrician in the United States Navy during the First World War. A largely self-taught polymath, Mumford produced one of the twentieth century’s most influential bodies of work on the history of technics, the city, and architecture, while also serving as associate editor of The Dial and, for more than three decades, as architecture critic for The New Yorker. His intellectual formation owed more to Patrick Geddes — the Scottish urbanist and biologist whom Mumford called his “avowed master” — than to any academic institution; from Geddes he inherited a periodization of the phases of technics and a holistic approach integrating biology, sociology, and technology. He also absorbed from Thorstein Veblen a critique of absentee ownership and wasteful production, and from Peter Kropotkin and Ebenezer Howard the ideal of a cooperative, regionalist urbanism.
In Technics and Civilization (1934), his foundational work on the social history of technics, Mumford proposed a periodization in three phases: the eotechnic (predominant until roughly 1750, based on wood, water, and wind), the paleotechnic (1750–1900, based on coal and steam, marked by exploitation and pollution), and the neotechnic (from 1900 onward, based on electricity and precision alloys, with an as-yet-unrealized potential for efficiency without waste). Decades later, in The Myth of the Machine, published in two volumes — Technics and Human Development (1967) and The Pentagon of Power (1970) — Mumford radicalized his critique by proposing the concept of the megamachine: large hierarchical organizations that treat human beings as interchangeable mechanical components, from the pyramids of Egypt and the ancient empires to the contemporary nuclear-military state. Between these two works he published The City in History (1961), which won the National Book Award and stands as a monumental synthesis of Western urban history; he was also a fierce critic of the urban-renewal and highway-building policies championed by Robert Moses in New York.
Key Concepts
- Eotechnic, paleotechnic, neotechnic — the periodization of the history of technics proposed in Technics and Civilization (1934), inherited and developed from Patrick Geddes’s scheme.
- Megamachine — in The Myth of the Machine (1967–1970), large hierarchical and coercive social systems (from pharaonic Egypt to the modern nuclear state) that function as a single machine composed of human beings.
- Authoritarian technics vs. democratic technics — the distinction between centralized, hierarchical, power-oriented technologies (authoritarian) and decentralized technologies oriented toward human and communal needs (democratic).
- Biotechnics vs. megatechnics — a critique of modern technology aimed at unlimited expansion and planned obsolescence (megatechnics), in favor of technologies that respect ecological balance and human scale (biotechnics).
- The city as civilizational record — in The City in History (1961), the city is analyzed as the chief cumulative artifact of human civilization, capable of both containing and amplifying the pathologies of power.
Influenced by
- Patrick Geddes — his “avowed master”; the periodization of technics and the holistic treatment of technology as a biological and social phenomenon
- Thorstein Veblen — critique of absentee ownership and the economics of waste
- Peter Kropotkin and Ebenezer Howard — cooperative regionalism and garden-city urbanism
- Oswald Spengler — the morphological method of writing moral philosophy in the guise of history, adapted by Mumford in his technical phases
Influenced
- Jacques Ellul — whose The Technological Society (1954) discusses and critically responds to the theses of Technics and Civilization
- E. F. Schumacher and the idea of human-scale technology (Small Is Beautiful, 1973)
- Murray Bookchin and social ecology
- The environmental movement and the critique of highway-oriented urban planning, especially the opposition to Robert Moses in New York
Works
The Story of Utopias (1922); Technics and Civilization (1934); The Culture of Cities (1938); The City in History (1961); The Myth of the Machine, Vol. I: Technics and Human Development (1967); The Myth of the Machine, Vol. II: The Pentagon of Power (1970).
See also
Jacques Ellul, Günther Anders, Philosophy of Technology