For a number of years I have not had any time to undertake book reviews but I feel so keenly the importance and excitement of Mumford\u27s work, and my own personal debt to that work, that I wanted to contribute to this symposium even if I could not begin to do justice to the task. What follows are my only slightly modified notes made on reading selected chapters of the book-notes which I had hoped to have time to sift and revise for a review. I hope I can give some flavor of the book and of its author and invite readers into the corpus of Mumford’s work on their own

Riesman, David

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Washington University Law Review Volume 1962 Issue 3 Symposium: The City in History by Lewis Mumford January 1962 Some Observations on Lewis Mumford’s “The City in History” David Riesman Harvard University Follow this and additional works at: https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/law_lawreview  Part of the Land Use Law Commons Recommended Citation David Riesman, Some Observations on Lewis Mumford’s “The City in History”, 1962 WASH. U. L. Q. 288 (1962). Available at: https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/law_lawreview/vol1962/iss3/2 This Symposium is brought to you for free and open access by the Law School at Washington University Open Scholarship. It has been accepted for inclusion in Washington University Law Review by an authorized administrator of Washington University Open Scholarship. For more information, please contact digital@wumail.wustl.edu. SOME OBSERVATIONS ON LEWIS MUMFORD'S'THE CITY IN HISTORY'DAVID RIESMAN*For a number of years I have not had any time to undertake bookreviews but I feel so keenly the importance and excitement of Mum-ford's work, and my own personal debt to that work, that I wanted tocontribute to this symposium even if I could not begin to do justice tothe task. What follows are my only slightly modified notes made onreading selected chapters of the book-notes which I had hoped tohave time to sift and revise for a review. I hope I can give some flavorof the book and of its author and invite readers into the corpus ofMumford's work on their own.1. Lewis Mumford correctly says in the book that he is a generalist,not a specialist; indeed until recently he has not had (or perhapswanted to have) a full-time academic position. There are generalistsfaute de mieux, who cannot make the grade in a specialty; there areother generalists, of whom Mumford is one, who transcend the spe-cialties-indeed whose legacy is often one of more specialties. Mum-ford was one of the early rediscoverers of Herman Melville; one of thefirst to write critically and thoughtfully about founders of Americancity planning; one of the revivers of utopian thought, not yet a spe-cialty (just as there are no professors of the future, a category Mum-ford has helped pioneer) ; a synthesiser in urban ecology; and now aprophet of arms and the man-warning that the combination ofnuclear techniques and civilized deracinations may change not only theface of the earth but its very course and possibilities. Mumford is oneof those rare men of letters who is not, in C. P. Snow's sense, confinedto the literary culture; one of those not so rare social scientists whois a humanist; and one of those rare humanists who knows a good dealabout man as a biological and tool-using species and not only aboutman as a symbol-making and record-keeping one.2. The early sections of The City in History give a wonderfullyevocative sense of the shift away from masculine pursuits of huntingand killing, in which the tools were blunt or sharp chipped instruments,to the more feminine techniques of neolithic village agriculture, wherethe tools took shape as containers: as houses and ditches, jars andcisterns, and villages themselves (with old men the containers of oralwisdom). With encyclopedic knowledge, Mumford shows the growthof nurturance and cooperation as devices of survival for family and* Henry Ford II Professor of Social Sciences, Harvard University.Washington University Open ScholarshipOBSERVATIONSgroup. In his preferences here and elsewhere in the book, I am re-minded of Thorstein Veblen. The latter also admired what he calledthe epoch of savagery, when peaceable men and women lived in har-monious settlements close to nature. Forty years ago as an editor ofThe Dial, Mumford was succoring and defending Veblen, and thelatter's work has some of the same historical sweep and grandeurthat Mumford's has. But Veblen, as we would say today, identifiedwith the aggressor: he threw in his moral lot with the engineer andtechnologist, with the city as against the village, the dynamic (one ofthe "plus" words of science and society today) against the static, the"hard" fact against the "soft" wish. Mumford, a more resilient manand thinker, has not done that. He can value the past even while herecords its overthrow; indeed he sees to how large a degree it has sur-vived-in fact, for instance, that man with all his inventiveness hasnot domesticated any new species since neolithic times (includinghimself) and virtually no new plants. And yet it is quite wrong tosay, as many now do (Jane Jacobs in her brilliant polemic, The Deathand Life of Great American Cities, being among the latest) thatMumford is a romantic, opposed to cities and to their vital disorder.Mumford's work is protean: it cannot be summed up by saying he is"for" or "against" cities. Mumford does not regard his hopes and hisfears as any less real than the world that exists physically (and whichmay be destroyed at any moment) ; unlike Veblen, he does not concealhis aspirations nor turn his criticisms into veiled mocking irony.3. To continue the comparison of Veblen and Mumford, the former'smechanistic view led him to regard ritual and ceremonial as merewaste, and indeed to look with a jaundiced eye on all human institu-tions other than those geared directly to production and distribution(he made an exception for the academy and for pure research). Mum-ford is more catholic: he is not, like some modern writers, a lover ofirrationality and waste, but he regards institutions in a more am-bivalent and complicated way than Veblen did, seeing always man'sneed for mediation, for consensually shared meanings and mythicunderstandings, and drawing the distinction between rationality andirrationality in terms of what is life-enhancing in historical and cross-cultural perspective, rather than in terms of parochial American andWestern canons of efficiency; he sees efficiency itself as a myth and avery dangerous one.4. Among other things, this is a book of history: a history of thecity, and I want to indicate something of Mumford's qualities as anhistorian. Most historians, like some anthropologists, are nationalists,though not always bounded by their own nation; they divide theirsubject matter by space and time. Mumford's boundaries are moreuniversal, less localistic; moreover, in studying the city, he studies nothttps://openscholarship.wustl.edu/law_lawreview/vol1962/iss3/2WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY LAW QUARTERLYonly its artifacts and layout, but its moral and religious qualities-unlike many evolutionists, he does not undervalue the role of religionin human affairs. But unlike Toynbee with whose boundary-crossingfreedom and interest in religion Mumford can be compared, the latterseems to me to do less violence to the biological and ecological aspectsof existence; Mumford's gift of metaphor and categorization seldomgets out of control, seldom works sadism on the materials of his craftas an historian, and yet provides fresh re-examination of what wasthought to be familiar ground.Like Toynbee, Mumford writes always with an eye on our presentpredicament, interpreting the past to widen our consciousness butalso our conscience and responsibility for continuing the human story.He stresses, for example, what we might learn from reflecting on theperiod around 3000 B.C. when cities on the plain "invented" the possi-bilities of man as a machine guided and organized in huge masses bypriests and kings and overseers as an aspect of the new technologiesmade possible by agricultural fertility and the man-power and powerover man this made possible. The result was an enormous incrementof human achievement and at the same time of the dangers of exploita-tion, cruelty and hubris-all too minatory of the opportunities and dan-gers we confront today: "The totalitarian states that seek ruthlessly toimpose control are as much the victim of their clumsy brakes as theseemingly freer economies coasting downhill are at the mercy of theirrunaway vehicles."' With many modern worshippers of the past, themonuments, including the social organizations, erected by kings andpriests are impressive in the way that modern big powers are impres-sive: to the historical victor belong the records and the plaudits. Mum-ford differs. No narrow functionalist of the simple life, he is preparedto recognize the achievements of kings and hunters. But he can dis-tinguish grandeur from grandiosity and he sees history as cumulative,not requiring us to evaluate in the same way an early Pharaoh andStalin, the inventors of the fortified castle and Edward Teller. Like amagnet, Mumford's moral and metaphorical vision organizes the fil-ings and fragments as well as the larger schemes of other investi-gators, but unlike empire builders, early and late, he does not mistreatthe parts for the sake of the monumental whole.5. In showing how the explosive combination of kingship, maledominance, and priestly ideology led cities repeatedly throughouthistory into aggressive war (or defense against other cities or peasantsseeking revenge), Mumford suggests that a process of selective breed-ing has tended to promote an aggressive social character and to createa collective unconscious which believes that "only by wholesale human1. P. 34. [References are to pages of THE CITY IN HISTORY.]Washington University Open ScholarshipOBSERVATIONSsacrifice can a community be saved." 2 No doubt, cities accumulate asufficient "critical mass" for many human potentialties to becomeactualities, including the most maniacal, power-mad, and vindictiveones. These qualities may then be transmitted, culturally though notbiologically, in particular strata-and then only ordinarily to the men-folk. Hence, I regard the concept of a collective unconscious as un-necessary to explain what we find, just as Mumford correctly insiststhat the concept of natal or instinctive aggression is unnecessary toexplain the historical record, and actually is incapable of explainingthe relatively peaceable quality of village life throughout history. Atthe present time, peoples, including urban peoples, who have sufferedfrom modern total wars do not seem eager for collective human sacri-fice: the Russian people do not appear eager, nor the Japanese, northe British, nor the metropolitan French. The tough talk of manyAmericans who want a military show-down with Communism reflects,among many other factors, a history of relatively successful wars;but even in this country, wars such as the Civil War lasted longer andturned out more miserably than the provocative entrepreneurs en-visaged, most of whom would have been satisfied with sacrifice atretail, but in the event could only get it wholesale. I think it wouldbe more just and more in consonance with Mumford's own material tosuggest that modern urban communities have become more peaceableand civil at the same time that the nations which enclose them havebecome more menacing. It does not take many people, often in tacitcooperation across national boundaries, to prepare modern war andto give it justification, appealing to the conformist in man rather thanto the sadist or the sacrificial, to the need for belonging and not theneed for blood. The very fact that modern wars in general must allbe sold as defensive indicates that war has been democratized and insome respects gelded.6. Through Mumford's vivid, empathic account of what it was liketo live in the cities of the Fertile Crescent three or four thousandyears ago and of what is the same, similar, and different in city lifetoday, we recapture "the uses of the past" of which Professor Mullerhas spoken so feelingly, succumbing neither to the brilliant determin-ism of Spengler nor yet escaping a feeling of tragic kinship with thelot of city dwellers everywhere.7. When, however, we jump over millennia and come down to thepresent American scene, I am inclined to think that Mumford's fellowfeeling with the average American suburbanite is replaced by under-standable frustration that these men, so near the gates of affluent andcivilized ease, despoil the quality of life and landscape in so many2. P. 45.https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/law_lawreview/vol1962/iss3/2WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY LAW QUARTERLYobviously stultifying ways. Mumford shares -with the present re-viewer a view of the private car, the truck, the bus, and the bulldozeras the weapon of the city's self-destruction. In the city where thisReview is published, a magnificent railroad station testifies to a van-ishing age of varied and efficient transport-and a modern air termi-nal, miles from anywhere on a boring highway, is a supplement but nosubstitute3 Even so, I believe that Mumford tends to undervalue thefreedom that the automobile has brought many previously imprisonedindividuals: consider the young to whom the car has brought a greatermobility and freedom (and all the accompanying hazards) ; the Negro,especially in the South, who is freed by the car from Jim Crow or fromvestiges of racist attitudes; or the housewife who is no longer socooped up. The freedom of the driver has been bought at an excessiveand for many Americans still invisible price, but Mumford, like manycritics of mass culture, underestimates the importance of this freedomfor the previously deprived.So, too, I cannot entirely share Mumford's position that today'ssuburbia, typified by Los Angeles in its dispersion, is a more impover-ished environment than the denser city that preceded it. UndoubtedlyMumford is right that the well-to-do railroad suburbs of the Victorianera protected their privileged inhabitants against both the dirty cityand the dreary suburbs of our own time, but I am less sure that theworking-class and lower-middle-class families who have chosen tolive in the suburbs today are worse off than they once were. Recentinvestigations by the sociologist, Herbert Gans, who has lived succes-sively in Park Forest, Illinois, the West End of Boston (now under-going what is euphemistically called redevelopment), and Levittown,New Jersey, strengthen my doubts about such comparisons, suggestingthat the move to the suburb-and the car-has for many familiesbrought greater freedom of choice, more opportunity for friendshipand community activity, greater space and amenity, closer family ties.Even the omnipresent television, against which Mumford like manyintellectuals contends, may arguably be slightly less vacuous than theidle sitting or bar room brawling that it has replaced. I'm not sug-gesting a rosy view of the new suburbanites (here I differ somewhatfrom Gans who takes a more relativistic view). But my criticism isnot based on the view that we have fallen away from higher or moreappropriate styles of life, but rather that, with so much greater ca-3. See particularly Mumford's section, "Railroad Line, Greenbelt, MotorSprawl," THE CITY IN HISTORY, pp. 503 et seq.; and see for the reviewer's sugges-tions as to why the auto has attained such hegemony, Riesman and Eric Larrabee,"Autos in America: Manifest and Latent Destinies," in Consumer Behavior: Re-search on Consumer Reactions, Lincoln H. Clark, Ed., New York, Harper andBrothers, 1958, pp. 69-92.Washington University Open ScholarshipOBSERVATIONSpacity and so much greater knowledge of what could be done, we haveused our resources so calamitously and with such little foresight interms of the general quality of life in America. If one can make suchoverall judgments-and Mumford and this reviewer both try to dothis-and I do not think we are worse off in any absolute sense.But the fact that we have made such a mess of our cities and ourcountryside, turning both increasingly into low density chaos de-pendent on the private auto, may heighten the sense of anarchy thatwe also feel in our international relations: in both cases our instru-ments of destruction-the gasoline engine in the one case, and themissile or the vanishing bomber in the other-have outrun our politi-cal instruments of control. Thus I fully share Mumford's despairabout the gap between what we might be doing and what we are doing.Where I differ is in a possibly slightly kindlier judgment of the lifethe average person leads in comparison with what he once led.8. What I've been dealing with is a marginal difference, a questionof emphasis. To illustrate it further, I can see a value to the urbanheterogeneity and crowding and even neon signs of Tokyo whereasMumford might consider these features out of human scale, ugly andharmful. And even here I would want to know what these featuresmean to the residents of Tokyo before I passed a judgment from out-side-though I wouldn't be bound by their judgment either. Mumfordis not a Puritan in any conventional sense: he is alive to the sensuous,the latent, the juicy; but he cannot see these qualities at all in massculture, and he tends to assume, as do such British writers as RichardHoggart and Raymond Williams, that mass culture replaced some-thing that was better and less sterile and alienated. To repeat: mydifference from him is that I would prefer to judge mass culture fromthe point of view of the potential future we both see rather than fromthe point of view of the somewhat romanticized past.9. America has not had much use for prophets who have not alsobeen politicians-as Henry George and even Bellamy tried to be poli-ticians. Mumford is primarily a prophet: he points the way, withlessons from the spacious past and the inventive present, to the futurewe might all inhabit. But he does not suggest the actual political group-ings that might accomplish the renewal that seems so near and yet sofar, so hopelessly far. His weapons are not a call to the working classnor cagey counsels to adept city planners, nor yet hope in the reformof realtors. His weapons are as old as the story he tells: reason, ex-hortation, imagination and faith. Reflecting on all the massed irra-tionalities and inertias, and the massed rationalizations that havebeen built up on their behalf, that stand in Mumford's way and inman's way, I was reminded of the passage in Spinoza where he dis-https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/law_lawreview/vol1962/iss3/2294 WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY LAW QUARTERLYcusses how the Biblical prophets attempted to assure themselves ofcertainty:For instance, Jeremiah's prophecy of the destruction of Jerusalemwas confirmed by the prophecies of other prophets, and by thethreats in the law, and therefore it needed no sign; whereasHananiah, who, contrary to all the prophets, foretold the speedyrestoration of the state, stood in need of a sign, or he would havebeen in doubt as to the truth of his prophecy, until it was con-firmed by facts. 'The prophet which prophesieth of peace, whenthe word of the prophet shall come to pass, then shall the prophetbe known that the Lord hath truly sent him.'44. THE PHILOSOPHY OF SPINOZA, edited by Joseph Ratner, Modern Library,1927. P. 51.Washington University Open Scholarship

Some Observations on Lewis Mumford’s “The City in History”

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Some Observations on Lewis Mumford’s “The City in History”

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