Technics And Civilization

Technics and Civilization first presented its compelling history of the machine and critical study of its effects on civilization in 1934—before television, the personal computer, and the Internet even appeared on our periphery. Drawing upon art, science, philosophy, and the history of culture, Lewis Mumford explained the origin of the machine age and traced its social results, asserting that the development of modern technology had its roots in the Middle Ages rather than the Industrial Revolution. Mumford sagely argued that it was the moral, economic, and political choices we made, not the machines that we used, that determined our then industrially driven economy. Equal parts powerful history and polemic criticism, Technics and Civilization was the first comprehensive attempt in English to portray the development of the machine age over the last thousand years—and to predict the pull the technological still holds over us today. “The questions posed in the first paragraph of Technics and Civilization still deserve our attention, nearly three quarters of a century after they were written.”—Journal of Technology and Culture

This is a history of the machine and a critical study of its effects on civilization. Mumford has drawn on every aspect of life to explain the machine and to trace its social results. "An extraordinarily wide-ranging, sensitive, and provocative book about a subject upon which philosophers have so far shed but little light" (Journal of Philosophy). Index; illustrations.

Lewis Mumford was the author of more than thirty influential books, many of which expounded his views on the perils of urban sprawl and a society obsessed with technics. This text provides the essence of Mumford's views on the distinct yet interpenetrating roles of technology and the arts in modern culture.

First published in 1932, this book, based on an address delivered in 1931, presents a concise and lucid summary of the philosophy of the author of The Decline of the West, Oswald Spengler. It was his conviction that the technical age — the culture of the machine age — which man had created in virtue of his unique capacity for individual as well as racial technique, had already reached its peak, and that the future held only catastrophe. He argued it lacked progressive cultural life and instead was dominated by a lust for power and possession. The triumph of the machine led to mass regimentation rather than fewer workers and less work — spelling the doom of Western civilization.

The city's development from ancient times to the modern age. Winner of the National Book Award. "One of the major works of scholarship of the twentieth century" (Christian Science Monitor). Index; illustrations.

A brilliant survey of our response to changing technology, which sets out the prerequisites for a rational use of our discoveries and inventions as a means of human liberation rather than enslavement.

Spengler's work describes how we have entered into a centuries-long "world-historical" phase comparable to late antiquity, and his controversial ideas spark debate over the meaning of historiography.

From a leader in the field of religion and science come these reflections on the role of technology in human life and culture. Philip Hefner sees the human spirit at issue in our assessment of and attitude toward technology and the many technological creations that humans spawn. Technology, he argues, tells us much about ourselves-especially our innate drive toward exploration of possibilities-and poses questions about the final meaning of creating, of human cultural evolution, and even the being of God.

Real and imagined undergrounds in the late nineteenth century viewed as offering a prophetic look at life in today's technology-dominated world. The underground has always played a prominent role in human imaginings, both as a place of refuge and as a source of fear. The late nineteenth century saw a new fascination with the underground as Western societies tried to cope with the pervasive changes of a new social and technological order. In Notes on the Underground, Rosalind Williams takes us inside that critical historical moment, giving equal coverage to actual and imaginary undergrounds. She looks at the real-life invasions of the underground that occurred as modern urban infrastructures of sewers and subways were laid, and at the simultaneous archaeological excavations that were unearthing both human history and the planet's deep past. She also examines the subterranean stories of Verne, Wells, Forster, Hugo, Bulwer-Lytton, and other writers who proposed alternative visions of the coming technological civilization. Williams argues that these imagined and real underground environments provide models of human life in a world dominated by human presence and offer a prophetic look at today's technology-dominated society. In a new essay written for this edition, Williams points out that her book traces the emergence in the nineteenth century of what we would now call an environmental consciousness—an awareness that there will be consequences when humans live in a sealed, finite environment. Today we are more aware than ever of our limited biosphere and how vulnerable it is. Notes on the Underground, now even more than when it first appeared, offers a guide to the human, cultural, and technical consequences of what Williams calls “the human empire on earth.”

I am a disciple of Patrick Geddes, and I am an abject admirer of everything he has said and done. The tantalising nearness of everything we most want; were it not for some fatal, stubborn grain in both of us, Geddes and I, linked together, intellectual and emotional, might still conquer the world. For lack of this, he will be imperfectly articulate and I, perhaps, will have nothing to say. These two comments by Lewis Mumford, written at either end of his largely epistolary relationship with Patrick Geddes, frame an astonishing correspondence between two of our century's greatest thinkers on Western civilisation. Mumford was the versatile New York cultural critic, famous for his writings on architecture, the city and technology. His master, Geddes, was the Scots biologist, sociologist and planner, the professor of things in general. The letters reveal much about the intellectual culture of the first half of the Twentieth Century as they chart an extraordinary Anglo-American relationship between very different men; this friendship, initially of master and disciple, even father/son, was based on a shared intellectual quest, and inspired the work of both. All that exists of those letters, and much previously unpublished material besides, has been meticulously collected and edited by Frank G. Novak Jnr..