Lewis Mumford

Lewis Mumford

'Internationally renowned for his writing on cities, architecture, technology, literature, and modern life, Lewis Mumford was called by Malcolm Cowley "the last of the great humanists." His conributions to literary criticism, archtectural criticism, American studies, the history of cities, civilisation and technology, as well as to regional planning, environmentalism, and public life in America, mark him as oneof the most original voices of the twentieth century.' (Eugene Halton)

Sketches from Life The Autobiography of Lewis Mumford: The Early Years

This was another book just sitting quietly and unnoticed on my book-shelves. As soon as I picked it up I began remembering the books by Lewis Mumford (1895-1990) which I'd read in the 60s: Technics and Civilisation (1934) and The Culture of Cities (1938). He was, in his time, one of the most influential architects, designers and thinkers about ways in which people could live in cities and how urban planning could influence societies. In the dear, dead 60s, Mumford was embraced as one of the gurus of many far left Utopian thinkers, but his ideas and writings far exceeded what most of those sincere but often confused dreamers ever understood.

I don't think, on reflection, that I made much of those books at the time, but re-visiting Mumford now I'm struck by the fact that many of his ideas were so prescient but yet seem, now, to have sunk without trace.

From Values for Survival. 1964:

“If we are to create balanced human beings, capable of entering into world-wide co-operation with all other men of good will--and that is the supreme task of our generation, and the foundation of all its other potential achievements--we must give as much weight to the arousal of the emotions and to the expression of moral and esthetic values as we now give to science, to invention, to practical organization. One without the other is impotent. And values do not come ready-made: they are achieved by a resolute attempt to square the facts of one's own experience with the historic patterns formed in the past by those who devoted their whole lives to achieving and expressing values. If we are to express the love in our own hearts, we must also understand what love meant to Socrates and Saint Francis, to Dante and Shakespeare, to Emily Dickinson and Christina Rossetti, to the explorer Shackleton and to the intrepid physicians who deliberately exposed themselves to yellow fever. These historic manifestations of love are not recorded in the day's newspaper or the current radio program: they are hidden to people who possess only fashionable minds. Virtue is not a chemical product, as Taine once described it: it is a historic product, like language and literature; and this means that if we cease to care about it, cease to cultivate it, cease to transmit its funded values, a large part of it will become meaningless, like a dead language to which we have lost the key. That, I submit, is what has happened in our own lifetime.”