20
PARTISAN REVIEW
and expresses contempt for those who do not see the immediate
realities: "Plans that do not rise out of real situations, plans that
ignore existing institutions, are of course futile: mere utopias of
escape." What then shall we say of his own vagueness about the
problems of the moment? In one place, excited by the obstacles pri–
vate ownership of the land puts before sound urbanism, he writes
that "public control of land ... is the outstanding problem of modem
statesmanship"
j
elsewhere, "regional rebuilding is ... the grand task
of politics for the opening generation." But finally, "perhaps the most
critical problem for human society to-day is that of diminishing the
rOle of the power state and undermining both its pretensions and its
ultimately militaristic forms of authority." Yet he deals politically
with none of these outstanding, critical problems and grand tasks,
and fails altogether to evaluate the difficulties or to throw light on the
means of transition. The belligerent talk of revolution in this book is
mere bluster in view of his neglect of the cold facts of class power.
Mumford does recommend a practical measure: he uprefers," he tells
us, "outright expropriation with drastically limited compensation" in
the form of pensions to the owners of the land. This "preference" is
the sum of his revolutionary political meditations.
The Power and Service States.
The key to Mumford's political
ideas may be found in his concept of the state, which is based on the
writings of Geddes and Branford. In general, Mumford, who is so
lyrical about the objectiveness of modem technics, evades names which
help to illuminate their objects. He calls feudal absolutism "the bar–
oque state," capitalism "the power state," and democracy "the service
state." The power state is that "creation of the baroque imagination"
out of which has grown the service state through democratic pressure
to "reapportion the existing balance of power within the nation, to
equalize the privileges of different regions and groups and to distribute
the benefits of human culture." From this account, which seems to
substantialize certain functions of the state as an independent state
within the state, it would follow that by gradually expanding the ser–
vice state, one could finally crowd out and eliminate the power state.
This is an historically false view of political liberalism, disregarding
its bourgeois roots and aims, the close relations between power, interest
and service, and the ultimate dependence of the modem state upon
the economically dominant class. In the United States, he says, "the
activities of the Department of the Interior, the Department of Agri–
culture and the Department of Commerce, the Forest Service, the
Parks Service, the Children's Bureau, are examples of the service
state." The service state is thus simply a branch of the power state
j
when the government builds roads, or promotes commerce, it is a
