Abstract
Despite various proclamations about the ‘death of the author’, the historian, critic and public intellectual Lewis Mumford (1895–1990) rather looks like a thinker whose time has come. Mumford is chiefly remembered for his literary and architectural criticism and his historical writings on cities. He won the National Book Award in 1962 for The City in History and was awarded the Presidential Award of Freedom in 1964 (which was swiftly followed by Mumford’s strongly worded attack on the President’s Vietnam policy in 1965).1 But Mumford’s reflections on technological modernity, nuclear weapons and global ecology also deserve a wide audience in the twenty-first century – an age that has reached its own cul-de-sac in dealing with issues of technology and global security. We staged a meeting with Mumford in an effort to recover his ideas for contemporary IR theory. What follows is the edited transcript of how the interview took place in our heads.
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Notes
See Donald F. Miller, Lewis Mumford: A Life (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1989), 512–13 and
Lewis Mumford, ‘Open Letter to President Johnson’, 3 March 1965, reprinted in Mumford, My Works and Days (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979), 461–2.
This is a fictional interview. In composing it we have relied on the published writings of our ‘interviewee’ as well as biographical and other writings about Mumford (including Miller, Lewis Mumford; Thomas P. Hughes & Agatha C. Hughes [eds] Lewis Mumford: Public Intellectual [New York: Oxford University Press, 1990]). At key points – particularly in relation to the concept of the Machine, his critique of nuclear weapons and the national security state, his proto-ecological understanding of the planet and his call for renewed (political) imagination – we have paraphrased or closely followed formulations that occur in Mumford’s work. For a more elaborate (and thoroughly referenced) discussion of Mumford’s views on technology, nuclear weapons and ecology in the post-war decades, see our forthcoming book Nuclear Realism: Global Political Thought during the Thermonuclear Revolution (Abingdon: Routledge).
The phrase ‘the road to Necropolis’ is taken from Gregory Morgan Swer, ‘The Road to Necropolis: Technics and Death in the Philosophy of Lewis Mumford’, History of the Human Sciences, 16:4 (2003), 39–59.
Lewis Mumford, ‘The Automation of Knowledge’, AV Communication Review, 12:3 (1964), 261–76.
Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1934).
Lewis Mumford, ‘Authoritarian and Democratic Technics’, Technology and Culture, 5 (1964), 1–8.
Lewis Mumford, The Myth of the Machine: The Pentagon of Power (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970).
Henry Adams (1838–1918), American writer and historian. The Degradation of the American Dogma (New York: Macmillan, 1919) contains many of Adams’ pessimistic forecasts on technology and historical development. See also
Lewis Mumford, ‘Apology to Henry Adams’, Virginia Quarterly Review, 38:2 (1962), 196–217.
Lewis Mumford, ‘Gentlemen: You Are Mad!’, Saturday Review of Literature (2 March 1946), 5–6; Lewis Mumford, In the Name of Sanity (New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1954), 63–99.
Lewis Mumford, Faith for Living (New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1940), 331.
Lewis Mumford, ‘The Moral Challenge to Democracy’, Virginia Quarterly Review, 35 (1959), 560–76;
Lewis Mumford, ‘The Human Way Out’, Manas, XIV (1961), 1–4.
See Lewis Mumford, ‘Technics and the Future of Western Civilization’ (1948), reprinted in Mumford, In the Name of Insanity, 34–62.
Lewis Mumford, ‘Closing Statement’, in F. Fraser Darling and John P. Milton (eds) Future Environments of North America (Garden City: The Natural History Press, 1966), 718–29, at 725.
George Perkins Marsh (1801–1882), naturalist, conservationist and author of Man and Nature (New York: Schribner, 1867 [1864]; a revised edition was published as The Earth as Modified by Human Action: Man and Nature in 1874). See also
Lewis Mumford, ‘Prospect’, in William L. Thomas, Jr (ed.) Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956), 1141–1152;
Lewis Mumford, ‘Marsh’s Naturalist-Moralist-Humanist Approach’, The Living Wilderness 71 (1959–1960), 11–13.
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© 2016 Rens van Munster and Casper Sylvest
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van Munster, R., Sylvest, C. (2016). Modernity, Technology and Global Security: A Conversation with Lewis Mumford (1895–1990). In: Lebow, R.N., Schouten, P., Suganami, H. (eds) The Return of the Theorists. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137516459_26
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137516459_26
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