Lewis Mumford And Patrick Geddes

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 All that exists of those letters, and much previously unpublished material besides, has been meticulously collected and edited by Frank G. Novak Jnr..

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..

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.

This book follows the evolution of the very large city across the world from its origins in Ancient times to its current dominant position in both the industrialised world and the Third World. In-depth studies are devoted to the key giant cities of human history at decisive points in their growth. The case-studies include Rome, London, Saint-Petersburg, Moscow, Bangkok and Berlin. Additional studies deal with the general characteristics of the megalopolis, stressing its implications for cultural life.

This early work is the first book written by the American historian, philosopher, literary critic and humanist, Lewis Mumford. In The Story of Utopias, Mumford deals with The New Age, socialism, social sciences, mysticism and utopia. Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

The "Young American" critics -- Randolph Bourne, Van Wyck Brooks, Waldo Frank, and Lewis Mumford -- are well known as central figures in the Greenwich Village "Little Renaissance" of the 1910s and in the postwar debates about American culture and politics. In Beloved Community, Casey Blake considers these intellectuals as a coherant group and assesses the connection between thier cultural criticisms and their attempts to forge a communitarian alternative to liberal and socialist poitics. Blake draws on biography to emphasize the intersection of questions of self, culture, and society in their calls for a culture of "personality" and "self-fulfillment." In contrast to the tendency of previous analyses to separate these critics' cultural and autobiographical writings from their politics, Blake argues that their cultural criticism grew out of a radical vision of self-realization through participation in a democratic culture and polity. He also examines the Young American writers' interpretations of such turn-of-the-century radicals as William Morris, Henry George, John Dewey, and Patrick Geddes and shows that this adversary tradition still offers important insights into contemporary issues in American politics and culture. Beloved Community reestablishes the democratic content of the Young Americans' ideal of "personality" and argues against viewing a monolithic therapeutic culture as the sole successor to a Victorian "culture of character." The politics of selfhood that was so critical to the Young Americans' project has remained a contested terrain throughout the twentieth century.