''Technics and Civilization'' is a 1934 book by American philosopher and historian of technology

Lewis Mumford Lewis Mumford (October 19, 1895 – January 26, 1990) was an American historian, sociologist, philosopher of technology, and literary critic. Particularly noted for his study of cities and urban architecture, he had a broad career as a ...

. The book presents the history of technology and its role in shaping and being shaped by civilizations. According to Mumford, modern

technology Technology is the application of Conceptual model, conceptual knowledge to achieve practical goals, especially in a reproducible way. The word ''technology'' can also mean the products resulting from such efforts, including both tangible too ...

has its roots in the

Middle Ages In the history of Europe, the Middle Ages or medieval period lasted approximately from the 5th to the late 15th centuries, similarly to the post-classical period of global history. It began with the fall of the Western Roman Empire and ...

rather than in the

Industrial Revolution The Industrial Revolution, sometimes divided into the First Industrial Revolution and Second Industrial Revolution, was a transitional period of the global economy toward more widespread, efficient and stable manufacturing processes, succee ...

. It is the moral, economic, and political choices we make, not the machines we use, Mumford argues, that have produced a capitalist industrialized machine-oriented economy, whose imperfect fruits serve the majority so imperfectly.

Background

Apart from its significance as a monumental work of scholarship in several disciplines, Mumford explicitly positioned the book as a call-to-action for the human race to consider its options in the face of the threats to its survival posed by possible ecological catastrophe or industrialised warfare. ''Technics and Civilization'' is the first book in Mumford's four-volume ''Renewal of Life'' series, followed by ''The Culture of Cities'' (1938), ''The Condition of Man'' (1944), and ''The Conduct of Life'' (1951).

Synopsis

Mumford divides the development of technology into three overlapping phases: eotechnic (Greek, ''

eos In ancient Greek mythology and Ancient Greek religion, religion, Eos (; Ionic Greek, Ionic and Homeric Greek ''Ēṓs'', Attic Greek, Attic ''Héōs'', "dawn", or ; Aeolic Greek, Aeolic ''Aúōs'', Doric Greek, Doric ''Āṓs'') is the go ...

'' meaning "

dawn Dawn is the time that marks the beginning of twilight before sunrise. It is recognized by the diffuse sky radiation, appearance of indirect sunlight being Rayleigh scattering, scattered in Earth's atmosphere, when the centre of the Sun's disc ha ...

"), paleotechnic and neotechnic. The first phase of technically civilized life (AD 1000 to 1800) begins with the

clock A clock or chronometer is a device that measures and displays time. The clock is one of the oldest Invention, human inventions, meeting the need to measure intervals of time shorter than the natural units such as the day, the lunar month, a ...

, to Mumford the most important basis for the development of capitalism because time thereby becomes

fungible In economics and law, fungibility is the property of something whose individual units are considered fundamentally interchangeable with each other. For example, the fungibility of money means that a $100 bill (note) is considered entirely equ ...

(thus transferable). The clock is the most important prototype for all other machines. He contrasts the development and use of glass, wood, wind and water with the inhumanly horrific work that goes into mining and smelting metal. The use of all of these materials, and the development of

science Science is a systematic discipline that builds and organises knowledge in the form of testable hypotheses and predictions about the universe. Modern science is typically divided into twoor threemajor branches: the natural sciences, which stu ...

during the eotechnic phase, is based on the abstraction from life of the elements that could be measured. He approves those people, cities and cultures who strove for a harmonious balance between the senses and the freedom from labor provided by science. The second phase, the paleotechnic (roughly 1700 to 1900), is "an upthrust into barbarism, aided by the very forces and interests which originally had been directed toward the conquest of the environment and the perfection of human nature." Inventions of the paleotechnic are made by men trying to solve specific problems rather than hunting for general scientific principles; in fact, scientific learning is devalued by men of business. The invention of coal-fired steam powered factories and the installation of capital-intensive machinery leads to a necessarily gigantic round-the-clock scale of production supported by unskilled machine tenders. Labour becomes a commodity, rather than an inalienable set of skills, while the labourer who tended machines, lived in slums, and was paid starvation wages became physically stunted and socially and spiritually stultified. Mumford notes that the death rate of urban slums compares unfavorably to the agricultural worker of the same time period, and furthermore that life in the nineteenth century compares unfavorably to cleanliness and standards of living available to workers in thirteenth century cities. He also identifies iron as the primary building material of the paleotechnic, and

skyscraper A skyscraper is a tall continuously habitable building having multiple floors. Most modern sources define skyscrapers as being at least or in height, though there is no universally accepted definition, other than being very tall high-rise bui ...

s, bridges, and steamships as première accomplishments of the age. War and mass sport he saw as social releases from mechanized life, and the hysteric duties of wartime production (or even the hysteria of a baseball team's victory) is a natural outgrowth of the tensions and structures of such paleotechnic life. In describing the neotechnic age (from about 1900 to Mumford's present, 1930), he focuses on the invention of electricity, freeing the factory production line from the restrictions of coal through the addition of small electric motors to individual machines, and freeing the laborer to create small but competitive factories. Mumford presciently notes that a small producer can deliver what is needed when it is needed more efficiently than paleotechnic assembly lines. The neotechnic phase he saw was dominated by men of science, rather than mechanically apt machinists. Rather than pursuing accomplishments on the scale of the trains, it is concerned with the invisible, the rare, the atomic level of change and innovation. Compact and lightweight aluminum is the metal of the neotechnic, and communication and information—even inflated amounts—he claimed was the coin.

References

{{Authority control 1934 non-fiction books Books by Lewis Mumford Books in philosophy of technology History books about civilization History books about technology Works about the theory of history