Mumford, Lewis

MUMFORD, LEWIS (1895–1990). Long known as a towering figure in American architectural criticism and the history of urbanism and technology, Lewis Mumford is only now receiving recognition as a radical thinker whose commitment to local democracy and environmental values foreshadows much contemporary thinking among Greens and communitarians. During his long career as an independent writer and public intellectual, Mumford denounced capitalist industrialization for promoting a Promethean will-to-power at the expense of the natural and built environments. In dozens of books and hundreds of articles, Mumford sought to promote an alternative ethic that defined “self-fulfillment” in terms of civic participation, aesthetic experience, and the creation of human-scale settlements. Such interests made Mumford skeptical of Marxism, despite the parallels between his own romantic radicalism and the Hegelian currents in the Marxist tradition; instead, he turned to John Ruskin, William Morris, Ebenezer Howard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Herman Melville, William James, Thorstein Veblen, and—above all—the Scottish regionalist Patrick Geddes for inspiration, as he sought to identify the prospects for a holistic “neo-technic” culture emerging out of the ashes of “paleo-technic” industrialism. After World War II, Mumford became an intransigent critic of the nuclear arms race and the centralized wartime state, whose roots he traced to the rise of an “authoritarian” technics that gutted human fellowship in the pursuit of limitless power and control. His last major books of social criticism, The City in History (1962) and the two-volume Myth of the Machine (1967, 1970), represent the culmination of his life’s work and a resounding defense of the creative personality in the face of an authoritarian “Megamachine.”

Mumford was born in New York as the illegitimate child of a German American housekeeper and grew up in a lower-middle-class millieu on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. He attended City College and other New York universities part-time between 1912 and 1919, although he never obtained a degree. After completing military service in World War I, he joined the editorial board of the Dial and promoted, with Veblen and John Dewey, its program for postwar “social reconstruction.” During the twenties, he emerged as a leading successor to the group of “Young Intellectuals” who had been associated with the Seven Arts in 1916–1917. In his earliest writings, Mumford adopted Van Wyck Brooks’s view of American culture as divided between “highbrow” moralism and “lowbrow” commercial practice and, with it, the Ruskin-Morris critique of the factory system and the industrial division of art and labor. Mumford likewise condemned the rise of “metropolitan” sprawl for the destruction of civic spaces and small-scale cities and championed regional planning as an alternative model of settlement. The geographical segregation of work and residence into far-flung, separate locations was, for Mumford, the urban equivalent of the industrial dissolution of craft knowledge into assembly-line drudgery and managerial science. The Story of Utopias (1922) and The Golden Day (1926) are notable for their exploration of the Utopian tradition in Europe and the United States and their attempt to locate historical precedents for a holistic reintegration of art and social practice.

During the mid-1930s, Mumford moved briefly into the orbit of the Popular Front as a member of the League of American Writers and the Congress of American Artists, quitting both over the Hitler-Stalin Pact. During most of that decade, he stressed how his vision of “basic communism” differed from Marxism. His pathbreaking Technics and Civilization (1934) and The Culture of Cities (1938) brilliantly demonstrated how commercial and military motives had shaped the development of the city and modern technology since the demise of the “medieval synthesis.” But these books substituted for political activism an emerging “neo-technic synthesis” grounded in social-scientific planning, biology, and human-relations techniques that seemed as elitist and sterile as the industrial civilization he condemned.

During the late 1930s, Mumford became an outspoken advocate of American military involvement in the war against European fascism. His reflections on that war led to a profound reorientaion in his thinking. With Reinhold Niebuhr and Jacques Maritain, Mumford insisted that the rise of fascism exposed the moral shallowness of much of the Enlightenment tradition, including the social-scientific progressivism that had shaped much of his work in the thirties. Returning to the “tragic sense of life” that preoccupied him in his 1929 biography of Herman Melville, Mumford now argued in Faith for Living (1940) and The Condition of Man (1944) that a religiously grounded respect for human limits and frailty, and the solidaristic values he associated with the family and rural life, offered the best safeguards against the dreams of scientific mastery that had culminated in dictatorship and genocidal war. The death of Mumford’s son, Geddes, in the war, and the American military’s use of nuclear weapons against Japanse civilians, deepened Mumford’s despair about the destructive consequences of the West’s Promethean impulses. While Neibuhr and other pro-war liberals subsequently became critical supporters of American postwar foreign policy, Mumford denounced his country’s reliance on nuclear weapons as proof that Hitler’s morality had survived the defeat of Nazism to become the universal ethic of the twentieth century. For the rest of his life, he would remain a vocal opponent of US foreign policy, writing essays and public letters to condemn the nuclear arms race and Lyndon Johnson’s escalation of the war in Vietnam.

Despite their continuity with earlier themes in his work, Mumford’s writings after the war constituted a form of self-criticism. Values for Survival (1946), The Conduct of Life (1951), and The Transformations of Man (1956) were works of moral philosophy that rejected much of the progressive tradition in which he was raised and advocated a “personalist” ethic closer to Dorothy Day and Jacques Ellul than to Dewey and Veblen. He repudiated much of the architectural modernism he once championed in his widely read columns for the New Yorker and savaged Robert Moses and other planners for sacrificing city neighborhoods to the automobile, urban renewal, and suburban tract housing. The City in History depicted the modern megalopolis as a “necropolis,” with a tangle of highways replacing the urban public square. Despite his distance from the ascendant modernism of the postwar era, he continued to be read in architectural and planning circles. Communitas (1947), a major work of utopian urban planning by Paul and Percival Goodman, registered Mumford’s influence, as did the anarchist urbanism of Colin Ward.

Mumford was also seeking in his later work to understand the age-old historical forces that had led to the creation of weapons of mass destruction and inhuman bureaucratic systems of power in his own day. The Myth of the Machine ranged across the centuries to reconstruct a historic conflict between “democratic” and “authoritarian” technics, arguing that the roots of the military-industrial complex lay in the human “machines” of slave laborers commanded by Egyptian and Mesopotamian potentates in the ancient world. The bleak pessimism of Mumford’s portrayal of “the Pentagon of power” led some readers to miss his effort to identify alternative technics, including women’s handicrafts, that transformed the will-to-power into a will-to-creation and suppressed destructive aspirations to limitless mastery.

Always suspicious of a politics that aimed to capture the nation-state, Mumford moved from his early fantasies of expert planning by humanist-regionalists to a strategy of withdrawal into alternative communities. The latter perspective echoed his own removal, after 1939, from New York City to rural Amenia, New York, where he and his family lived a deliberately modest life. Before his death in 1990, Mumford began to attract the attention of German Greens and other environmentalists. Mumford’s moral philosophy and critique of the modern state have likewise made him an inspiration to many anarchist and romantic anti-capitalist thinkers.

Blake, Casey Nelson. Beloved Community: The Cultural Criticism of Randolph Bourne, Van Wyck Brooks, Waldo Frank, and Lewis Mumford. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990.

Hughes, Agatha C, and Thomas P. Hughes, eds. Lewis Mumford: Public Intellectual. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.

Hutchinson, George. Facing the Abyss: American Literature and Culture in the 1940s. New York: Columbia University Press, 2018.

Lasch, Christopher. “Lewis Mumford and the Myth of the Machine.” Salmagundi 49 (summer 1980).

McCarraher, Eugene. The Enchantments of Mammon: How Capitalism Became the Religion of Modernity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2019.

Miller, Donald L. Lewis Mumford: A Life. New York: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1989.

Scott, James C. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998.

Wojtowicz, Robert. Lewis Mumford and American Modernism: Eutopian Theories for Architecture and Urban Planning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Lewis Mumford Papers. Finding Aid. University of Pennsylvania Libraries. http://dla.library.upenn.edu/dla/ead/detail.html?id=EAD_upenn_rbml_MsColl2