da Vinci Medal:1969
Even in death, Lewis Mumford managed to escape the grasp of technological society. To die in one’s sleep, in one’s home, at the age of 94 requires more than good luck and good health; it also requires a community of family and friends close at hand committed to the care of the old and frail. Mumford did not die as many of us probably will-surrounded by strangers in an anonymous hospital, hooked up to elaborate machinery. Nor did he die as his son Geddes did, a victim of the total warfare that burned a hole in the 20th century and terrified Mumford with the possibility of nuclear suicide. Despite the sadness of his final years, when his mental powers faded and his wife Sophia Mumford struggled to care for him, one takes heart in reports of a death that Mumford would have seen as an organic part of the natural order.
Such comfort coexists, nonetheless, with a real sense of what has been lost with Mumford’s passing. It is not just that he was one of the last of our “public intellectuals,” although this independent critic was certainly that. Our greater loss lies in the hopes that animated Mumford’s thirty-odd books and hundreds of essays, and that form a crucial link in the chain that connects us to the best of the American and European radical traditions. With Mumford’s death on January 26, 1990, we lose one of the last survivors of the left-liberal culture of early-20th-century New York: the New York of Randolph Bourne, John Dewey, Thorstein Veblen, Malcolm Cowley, Dorothy Day, and many others. Mumford’s symbolic self-exile after World War II to the rural village of Amenia, a two-hours’ drive northeast of the city, now appears a prescient recognition of the collapse of an urban culture that welcomed and exhilarated young intellectuals at the start of the century but which has since met its match in the progress of highway construction, overbuilding, and real estate speculation.
Behind that New York culture lies another, to which Mumford was no less connected: the populist and romantic radicalism of John Ruskin, William Morris, Henry George, Peter Kropotkin, and Mumford’s mentor Patrick Geddes. And behind that, another set of visions articulated by such romantic prophets of personal liberation and community as William Blake, Richard Cobbett, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman. How many others, in the late 20th century, could clear a path from Blake and Emerson to Ruskin and Morris, and then on to Bourne and Dewey and their successors in the New Left and the ecological movement, as Mumford did? The only comparable figures in recent years were Raymond Williams and C. L. R. James, who shared Mumford’s belief that history could serve as a “usable past” by prying open spaces in the present for future innovation. The deaths of these three men mark an important break in the radical tradition. There are few surviving voices trying to translate the prophetic and utopian languages of the 19th century into a modern radicalism.
As Mumford’s friend Van Wyck Brooks put it, Mumford was “one of the few men who have not iduis but an idea and he was to spend his life working this out.” His idea, simply put, was that the goal of human life should be the creation of communities in which individuals achieve personal fulfillment through participation in a common culture and a democratic civic life. “I believe in a rounded, symmetrical development of both the human personality and the community itself,” Mumford wrote in 1930. That belief rested in turn on an almost religious faith in the power of life to renew itself, and in the ability of the human personality to act as an insurgent force remaking the given social and natural environments. Such insurgence could take two forms, in Mumford’s view. It could lead to the creation of a shared culture that gave men and women a sense of place in the world, or it could promote the Promethean demand to increase state power and individual comfort at the expense of nature and of mutual aid.
Mumford spent his entire life trying to convince Americans to give up the Promethean will to power for an ethic of self-transcendence through civic participation and artistic creation. In the 1920s and
1930s, he hoped-as did so many young progressives-that social science and the innovations of the Second Industrial Revolution would embody such an ethic in new forms of technology, organization, and communication. By the late 1940s, in the wake of totalitarianism and Hiroshima, Mumford came to see that confidence in industrial technology and large-scale institutions was the chief obstacle to his generous vision of communal self-realization and a threat to the very future of life itself. This shift led some to describe Mumford in the postwar period as a gloomy technological determinist, who despaired of any challenge to “the Megamachine.” Yet Mumford’s courageous opposition to nuclear weapons in the late 1940s, his criticisms of Robert Moses’s megalopolitan planning in the 1950s, and his early condemnation of the Vietnam war all testify to his continuing faith in the power of the critical imagination. “For those of us who have thrown off the myth of the machine, the next move is ours,” he wrote in 1970, “for the gates of the technocratic prison will open automatically, despite their rusty ancient hinges, as soon as we choose to walk out.”
Today, in academic left circles, such arguments stand accused of a “pastoral nostalgia” or, worse, of a naive humanistic “essentialism.” Maybe so, but it’s hard to see how any equally inspiring vision of radical change has replaced the promise of self-fulfillment and democratic community that Mumford passed on to us from Blake, Morris, George, and others. That promise still remains the only compelling and humane ideal of the otherwise moribund socialist and progressive traditions. Its power as a source of critical insight into modern life is evident in the West German Greens, many of whom have been influenced by Mumford’s writings, and in other decentralist, “green” alternatives to conventional politics.
Those new radicals who turn to Mumford for guidance will probably give up specific tenets of his social theory and criticism, just as he revised the ideas of his romantic and populist predecessors. That is all to the good. The translation of Mumford’s work into new terms is the only way to remain true to his view of culture as a means to personal fulfillment and civic renewal. Mumford would have hated seeing his many volumes on architecture, urban culture, technology, literature, and moral philosophy turned into a new canon, or locked behind glass doors as documents good only for future historical scholarship. Those books were his attempts to transcend the limits of self by contributing to a contentious, collective culture lasting beyond a single lifetime. The “effort of culture,” Mumford once wrote, was “the effort to make Life significant and durable.” If Mumford taught us anything, it was that such effort is always an act of renewal, always an act of insurgence.
Casey Blake
Originally published as Casey Blake, “Lewis Mumford (1895–1990),” Technology and Culture 32, no. 1 (1991): 187–90, https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/tech.1991.0183.
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