A SOCIOLOGICAL FAIRY-TALE
TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION,
by
Lewis Mumford, Harcourt, Brace
&
Co. $4.50.
Even the most critical reader must admit that from several aspects
Mr. Mumford's book is impressive. It is a very big book. It has excellent
photographs. There is a very fair bibliography. The style is elegant.
But on the whole it is a disappointing book. Strip Mr. Mumford of his
habitual announcements that such and such is the law of things (and
no questions allowed), and we get a lot of typical after-dinner conversa–
tion in intellectual suburbia-interesting but false "syntheses" (and does
Mr. Murford loves to synthesize!) ; a host of big names; and a leathery
taste in one's mouth.
The book is a bad introduction to the field of technics. It cannot be
compared to Usher's
History of Mechmlicnl Invention.
Mr. Mumford
does not introduce new concepts, as was done by Matare' in his important
study of several aspects of modern technics,
Die Arbeitslllittel, Maschine,
A
pp.~rat,
Werkzeug.
For all his impressive compilation of inventions and
discoveries, Mr. Mumford does not seem to possess an adequate knowledge
of technics or modern science. His passing referen'ces to modern physics,
for example, are gathered from botched-up simplifications or from idealistic
interpretations. He never attempts an analysis of what a machine is, or
what are the elements of a motor. When he discusses scientific method or
law, he rehashes Whitehead very badly, or makes such stupid statements
as that the experimental method in science was "invented" in the seven
teenth century.
Mr. Mumford has little understanding of the relation ' of tochnology
to social processes. He presents a patch-quilt of concepts and statements
taken from people as diverse as Sombart, Veblen, Spengler, and Max
Weber. He buries his reader in a barbarous terminology (technical
syncretism, carboniferous capitalism, biotechnics, the "bitch-goddess,"
organic ideology, social energetics, "basic communism" as distinguished from
the Communism of Marx and Lenin), but the net result is a lot of what
New York intellectuals call "rich writing" and nothing more.
Mr. Mumford alternately patronizes and refutes Marx, as when
he notes "the defects of (his) abstract economic analysis," or when he
speaks of Marx's "description of price and value" as "unscientific," and
as being "in fact mythological constructions." Nevertheless, it is to Marx
and his followers that we owe our understanding of the role of technics
in capitalistic civilization. In the first volume of
Capital
Marx made his
classic analysis of the place of technics under capitalism and its relation
to social processes. One can only hope that 1\1r. Mumford will reread
the section of the first volume which deals with this subject. He will find
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