Technics and Civilization

Mumford, Lewis. Technics and Civilization. New York: Harcourt, 1934.

Mumford divides his analysis of the machine age into three overlapping periods: eotechnic (1000-1750), paleotechnic (1750-1900) and neotechnic (1900-2000). The date markers of these periods seem a little too neat, but if one considers that Mumford stresses the lack of decisive breaks between these periods and their important interpenetrations, such neatness becomes less objectionable. Also, it should be noted that Mumford is writing at a very different time with different standards for academic writing. The book lacks careful citation, footnotes and endnotes. Its main concern is not so much to function as a reference guide to the field of technological history, which Mumford was laying the foundation for, but instead to illuminate a part of history hitherto ignored: the relationships between society, culture, and technology. In order to draw out these relationships, Mumford draws on a number of different fields ancillary to technology, including art and aesthetics, psychology and philosophy, ecology, ethics, and economics. Through this holistic approach Mumford makes the claim that the seeds of the industrial revolution can be seen as early as the Middle Ages, and specifically in the monastic ordering of time.

Mumford begins with an extensive consideration of the ordering of time in medieval monasteries and the implications that it had on the organization of society. As he notes, “the clock is not merely a means of keeping track of the hours, but of synchronizing the actions of men” (14). For Mumford, seconds and minutes are not a priori units of time but instead given by the clock, the products of a mechanical function. The clock gave society seconds and minutes. It ripped time out of the hold of Eternity and introduced “time keeping” as an independent variable. The notion of “time keeping” should be considered literally. What the clock introduced was a way to keep time—to possess it as a quantity to be ordered and manipulated. Time was no longer something lived. It was separate and measurable, of the order of mathematics and science rather than religion. The far-reaching implications of this severing of time from natural human activity lead Mumford to claim, "The clock, not the steam-engine, is the key-machine of the modern industrial age" (14).

Other characteristics of the eotechnic age beyond the introduction of mathematical time include the predominance of handicraft and the manufacturing of tools. Mumford describes the eotechnic age as a “water-and-wood complex” (11) characterized by water mills and windmills as sources of power and the use of wood as a primary building resource. (Schivelbusch cites the division between eotechnic and paleotechnic phases at the beginning of his work on the railroad and similarly concentrates on sources of power and building resources.) The paleotechnic age is characterized by the introduction of coal as a source of power and iron as a new building material. Machine tools and mass production come to replace tool manufacturing and handicraft, and new practices of standardization replace uniqueness and difference in manufacturing. Finally, the neotechnic phase is characterized as an “electricity-and-alloy complex” (110).