BOOKS
453
The only hope of reversing these ominous trends lies in a demo–
cratic political movement which will impose social- and aesthetic - pur–
poses upon government policies. For if the new freedom is not used
wittingly, then it will simply serve the old inequities and Washington will
continue to promote the urban crisis which it supposedly deplores. In
this setting, the questions about the future of city life raised in these
books by Mumford, Le Corbusier and Gans are extraordinarily urgent.
The Myth of the Machine
is the work of a brilliant generalist.
And
if
I lack the scholarly competence to assess, say, the specific read–
ings of prehistory, a comment on the over-all approach is in order. It
takes the form of a compliment which Mumford, who identifies with
the anarchism of Kropotkin rather than with the Marxist tradition, will
probably dislike. This book reminds me of Frederick Engels.
Mumford is a partisan of garden cities, of the organic, and non–
rational, values which are to be found in community life and therefore
a critic of a skyscraper advocate like Corbusier. He then turns to his–
tory and discovers in the farthest reaches of unrecorded time evidence
which supports his own proposals for the twenty-first century. In much
the same way, Engels seized upon Morgan's anthropology and pro–
claimed primitive communism a dialectical moment in the struggle
for the classless society of the future. Indeed, I believe that every social
commentator thus views the past from the vantage point of present preju–
dices and I would honor Mumford - and Engels - for being so ex–
uberantly candid about what they are doing.
If
it were not for such
avowedly partisan geniuses the scholarly study of mankind would hardly
reveal anything significant about man.
It is Mumford's thesis that one must give "equal weight to dreams,
ritual, speech, social intercourse, and social organization rather than to
tools alone as the prime agents of man's development. . . ." This idea
is, of course, completely at odds with the prehistory which the Marxian
popularizers derived from Engels' gloss on Morgan and which was also
put forward by some academics.
1
It is also a useful scholarly weapon in
Mumford's struggle with the rationalistic city planners who like to reduce
human life to abstractions about economic man. He documents his
position with copious references to the specialist literature which, to this
layman, are both fascinating and compelling.
But when Mumford makes a poetic analogy, from the past which he
Engels' enthusiasm often led
him
into sloppy scholat'Ship but in this case
he was much more careful than his disciples. In
The Origin of the Family
and Private Property,
he wrote that the emergence of articulated speech was
the most important single event of prehistory and he specified that, in the
very earliest period of man's life, the organization of the family was a much
