LOOKING FORWARD TO LOOKING BACKWARD
13
civilization, the creation of which is the chief social and political
problem of our time.
This summary gives no more than the large outlines and ten–
dency of the book. Actually, together with
Technics and Civilization
(and a third volume
cin
ethics and religion yet to come), it is an am–
bitious effort to write a history of modern culture and to set down the
principles of a new society. It is conceived also as a work of public
education, and is full of informative matter, often curious and delight–
ful, touching on many more aspects of history than are ordinarily
treated in books on architecture and planning. Mumford submits to
the reader in a vivid, but often pompous, turgid, manner, the notions
of advanced architects, city-planners and regionalists, as well as some–
thing of new historical research on the past solutions of similar prob–
lems.
Society as Style.
Although his cultural history and social program
are not really distinct, it is convenient for purpose of analysis to con–
sider them separately. The first is especially interesting in its frequent
appeal to styles of art as symptoms and data of social life. These styles,
for Mumford, are not simply indications of how people thought and
felt, they are also clues to the causes and value of the culture and are
even regarded as pervasive habits of mind, governing science, economy,
social relations and the state. Thus Mumford gives a paramount
importance to the concept of "baroque," by which he designates
practically the whole of post-mediaeva1society from the 15th century
to the 19th. There emerges from his d cription the somewhat vague
and shapeless image of the baroque man who eats, drinks, loves,
trades, builds and reasons in a baroque style. For the analysis of the
changing historical situations of building, trading and reasoning,
Mumford substitutes the appreciation of the common baroque flavor
of the builder, trader and scientist. Now this is also what he often does
with our own society; its evils and virtues are made to flow from the
special psychologies of the predatory and the "organic" man. On
the whole, he tends to psychologize causes and to moralize effects.
Of analysis of social structure or historical events or of the more in–
timate effect of city life on the arts, there is very little. Yet this writer,
who accepts the "baroque man" as a fundamental fact and who
appeals to a "resurgence of the organic" as the ground of revolution,
rejects the capitalist class and the proletariat as "bare economic ab- ,
stractions."
Now while there is a value in isolating relatively widespread
habits of thought in a culture or period, Mumford's baroque as a
stylistic concept is confused and inadequate. In the first place, it is
applied to a lengthy period of time which is culturally so varied that
