Divided We Stand: Re-defining Politics, Technology and Social Choice by Michiel Schwarz and Michael Thompson

Abstract

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 389 images by Mumford, Le Corbusier, Erich Mendelsohn, and Sigfried Giedion during the interwar years when the visual representation of the modern in architectural discourse was a terribly important issue. Essays by Casey Blake, Robert Westbrook, and Richard Fox place Mumford in the larger context of American Left intellectuals, thus establishing Mumford’s relations with the Seven Arts critics, John Dewey, and Reinhold Niebuhr, among others. Rosalind Williams uses the Mumford archives with great effect, revealing in important ways how Technics and Civilization took the form that was published. Lawrence Vale undertakes what should be done more often with architectural critics: He reconsiders Mumford’s judgment of a par­ ticular building (the United Nations) from the perspective of a later generation and after the building has either worked or not worked. The best essay is by Leo Marx, who inquires into Mumford’s principle of synthesis. The essay is itself the most synthetic in the volume. Marx begins with the quite suggestive observation that Mumford’s success as a generalist may be at least partly explained by the fields he worked. During the interwar years Mumford wrote in areas in which academic specialization was very little advanced: history of technology, urban design, American literature and art, and American studies. After thus addressing the question of Mumford’s success as a “public intellectual,” he seeks the core idea embedded in all of Mumford’s work. He finds it in what he calls Mumford’s “romantic reaction.” The dialectic of organic and mechanical, Marx argues, organizes the vast terrain of Mumford’s scholarship. It gives the criticism its power and range, but it also accounts for the sense of tedium one too often feels in reading Mumford. Thomas Bender Dr. Bender teaches American history at New York University. His books include Toward an Urban Vision (1975) and New York Intellect (1987); most recently, he edited The University and the City (1988). Divided We Stand: Re-defining Politics, Technology and Social Choice. By Michiel Schwarz and Michael Thompson. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990. Pp. viii-f-176; bibliography, index. $29.95 (cloth); $14.95 (paper). In Divided We Stand: Re-defining Politics, Technology and Social Choice, Michiel Schwarz and Michael Thompson offer an intriguing and persuasive argument for a redefinition of the very terms of techno­ logical assessment as well as a theoretical basis for this redefinition. They claim their book is ambitious regarding technology and culture and indeed it is, for it challenges fundamental understandings and attempts to reorient an entire held. Schwarz and Thompson begin with a thoroughly sociological understanding of technology: viewing it as a social process, impossible 390 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE to disentangle from values and politics. Rather than attempt to divorce technology from its social embeddedness, they propose a “new synthesis” that recognizes and utilizes political diversity. Their analysis puts culture on center stage since it is the locus of all the connections among technology, values, and politics, and they turn to “cultural theory” for their framework. After identifying four “myths of nature,” four distinctly different political views of the world (nature benign, nature ephemeral, nature perverse/tolerant, and nature capricious), Schwarz and Thompson map these views onto anthropologist Mary Douglas’s typology of social relationships: the individualist, the egalitarian, the hierarchist, and the fatalist. They conclude that each myth is intimately connected with a certain type of institutional relationship and rationality. Those who view nature as ephemeral, for example, tend to be egalitarian groups (such as the German Greens) who have a communal and critical rationality and stress the importance of cooperation and voluntaristic relationships. Each has its own definition of the good, and each necessarily contradicts the others. Schwarz and Thompson do not aim to determine the “right” position. More interestingly, they argue that cultural pluralism is not only essential but beneficial. By acknowledging and utilizing diversity, distinctive approaches comple­ ment one another: divided we stand. Schwarz and Thompson claim that the dominant assumption of most theoretical models of public decision making is the pursuit of interest. They regard this approach as totally unsatisfactory: it fails to concern itself with the origins of interest or goal setting, it...