Lewis Mumford: Public Intellectual ed. by Thomas P. Hughes and Agatha C. Hughes

Abstract

388 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Lewis Mumford: Public Intellectual. Edited by Thomas P. Hughes and Agatha C. Hughes. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. Pp. xii + 450; illustrations, notes, index. $39.95. Lewis Mumford was a pioneer in the study of technology as cultural history; he was also one of the most notable of America’s 20th-century intellectuals. Lewis Mumford: Public Intellectual is the result of a con­ ference organized by Thomas P. Hughes and Agatha C. Hughes at the University of Pennsylvania, where the bulk of the Mumford papers have been deposited. Some, but not all, of the essays in this volume draw on those papers to explore various dimensions of Mumford’s work and influence. The quality and style of the essays vary. Some are academic in a way that would not have won Mumford’s praise. Too many of them are bound too tightly to a single body of material—a book or a series of books. It is ironic, though not at all surprising, that in our highly specialized academic culture that Mumford challenged in words and career, Mumford should be memorialized in our style and not in his. If we are to take the subtitle of the book seriously, it would be fair to expect its theme to be Mumford as a “public intellectual.” Such expectations are not fulfilled. Nor is the awkward term “public intellectual” adequately justified. Indeed, the phrase, which has recently been popularized, possibly by Russell Jacoby’s book, The Last Intellectual (1987), literally makes no sense. The adjective is redun­ dant, if the historical meaning of “intellectual” as a social type deserves consideration. “Intellectual” has always been associated with a public legitimacy and a public audience since it was embraced by the Dreyfusards nearly a century ago to claim public significance and moral legitimacy outside of tbe established political, intellectual, and moral institutions of France. If one is going to use the term, especially in the title of the book, it ought to have more than descriptive significance. The concept does not grow with these essays, and Mumford’s status is assumed rather than explored. The book de­ scribes his manifold activities as a writer in public life. A subtheme is promised in the introduction: Mumford as a philosopher of the modern, technological age. Like the notion of Mumford as a public intellectual, this one pops up in several essays but is systematically pursued in only one, and that essay, by Eugene Rochberg-Halton, is almost embarrassing in its extravagance. Perhaps it reveals the error in making more of Mumford than he was: he was a critic, an outstanding critic. He was not a major “social theorist” of modernism, nor of technology, nor of cities. Nor was he a historian of these fields. He was a critic who grounded his criticism in history, as Charles Molesworth indicates in calling Mumford an axiological writer. There are several essays that deserve close attention. Stanislaus Von Moos raises interesting questions about the deployment of visual 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...