Word: mumford
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Over the years, Mumford has become known as a specialist in many fields--a tribute both to his vast learning and his stubborn refusal to confine himself to one discipline. Among the twenty-three volumes he's produced since 1922 are texts on Herman Melville, on the history of art and literature, on design and architecture and on moral philosophy. But perhaps his most famous and important work has been in urban affairs. Mumford was among the first Americans to study the problems of the cities systemically, and the ideas he formulated in the 1920's have, if anything, gained...
...TYPICAL of Mumford that he should have been most ahead of his time in urban affairs--an area where his thinking seems most at odds with the trends of modern scholarship. At a time when social scientists were carving up the urban field into fiefdoms--sociology, education, economics, politics--Mumford insisted on considering all the approaches together, and pioneered the study of man's "total" urban environment. Mumford became interested in the cities because he thought they were being ruined by a dangerous trend in human affairs: he uncontrolled spread of technology. In the Culture of the Cities, he cautioned...
...Mumford's critics have since portrayed him as an implacable foe of technology, a relic of the Victorian age who prattles mindlessly about how automobiles and jet-planes will be the doom of us all. Mumford himself finds it "hilariously funny that people think I despise technology." He doesn't: he wanted to be an electrical engineer before he set off on his writing career. It is just that while most people uncritically accept applied science for the wealth it creates, Mumford has remained an unswerving humanist, asking where man fits...
Only now are we beginning to see the implications of the insight Mumford had 30 years ago. It now appears that the Victorians are not Mumford and his following but the defenders of unhindered technology and its corporate and military offspring in this country. In any case, Mumford has now picked up allies both in the establishment--mayors who are fighting pollution and Galbraith who warns of corporate control in the New Industrial State--and on the Left...
...UNWITTING alliance between Mumford and student radicals seems particularly unlikely, but fits into the pattern of Mumford's blend of eras. Mumford, the crusty scholar born in 1895, considers it a stroke of luck that he waited until the student revolt had matured to start writing his twenty-fourth volume, the second part of The Myth of the Machine (the first part appeared last year). "I'm entirely sympathetic with the students," he says bluntly. "Everything they're asking is long over...