LOOKING FORWARD TO LOOKING BACKWARD
23
indecision: it is not capitalism which stands in the way of housing,
but "unregulated private capitalism."
Mumford's Tradition.
He repudiates the charge of reformism,
but has not tried to indicate how his position differs from what is
currently called reformism, or to come to grips with Marxist criticism
of views like
his
own. He has often acknowledged without critical
reservation a deep indebtedness to Patrick Geddes who was undoubt–
edly a reformist, opposed to revolutionary change. The enterprise of
Mumford in writing
Technics and Civilization
and
The Culture of
Cities
recalls the series edited by Geddes and Branford after 1917-
The Making of the Future.
Reading their volumes in this series, one
is surprised to see how little Mumford has advanced beyond them
after the events of these twenty years. He shares not only their reform–
ist views, but even their tum of phrase, their style of thought–
although he is more passionate and blustering, more emphatically re–
sponsive to the aesthetics of the environment. No doubt their optimistic
ideas of reform through good will are still Mumford's. They are
regionalists, city-planners and nature-lovers who call upon all men of
good will to build a new civilization. Like Mumford, they hold up
the middle ages as a period of democracy and organic society. Their
reference to de Maistre and Bonald as sources indicates the 'narrow
distance which sometimes separates them from contemporary reac–
tionaries who also speak of regional culture, the unified community
and the decentralization of the big cities. And when we read their
remarks on the war, with their hopes of a new civilization arising
from the defeat of Prussianism, we seem to be reading Mumford's
call to war against the fascist states. They link Prussian Militarism and
Competitive Big Business in the way people now link Fascism and the
Two Hundred Families. Their anti-profiteering and anti-monopoly
views were readily turned against the German enemy of the native
monopolists. "Prussianism and profiteering are thus twin evils. His–
torically they have risen together. Is it not possible that they are
destined to fall together before the rising tide of a new vitalism? The
reversal of all these tendencies, mechanistic and venal, would be the
preoccupation of a more vital era than that from which we are escap–
ing. Its educational aim would be to think out and prepare the needed
transition from a machine and a money economy towards one of Life,
Personality and Citizenship." They even welcomed the war as "a
spiritual protest and rebound against the mammon of materialism,"
the "vastest of social experiments in the problem of coordinating com–
munitary and private interests." We seem to be listening to Mr. Mum–
ford, when we read these lines from a series dedicated to "the Philoso–
pher-Statesman," Woodrow Wilson. It is not simply their acceptance
of the war that we recall here, but the way in which their human-
