Lewis Mumford (1895 - 1990) is a American Historien, specialized in the history of the Technologie and the Science, as in the history of town planning where he excels.
Life and work
Philosopher and eminent historian of the techniques , Lewis Mumford attempted to describe the genesis and the consequences of the industrial society. Writing before the second world war, it develops an extremely critical modern vision of the world, in particular towards the military techniques and technologies.At the time of the " drive out with the sorcières" McCarthysme, its critical positions are worth to him on several occasions to be marked of sympathy towards Communism and thus professionally worried; it does not fail to specify that the communist system did not have anything to envy the other economic systems. In other words, its positions were beyond this doctrinal cleavage.
Supporting its demonstration of information and very precise facts historical, it analyzes what constitutes the roots of the industrial lifestyle. These roots would go up thus, according to him, with the very first arms factories (where work was already split up, or " rationnalisé") as of the end of the 17th century; i.e. well before what one names the " first revolution industrielle".
The recent events, out of climatic or strategic matter, brought a renewal of topicality to its writings.
Influence and posterity
The interest carried by Mumford with the history of technology, like its philosophical considerations, had an unquestionable influence on a certain number of thinkers younger than him. Some of these authors - as Jacques Ellul, Witold Rybczynski, Amory Lovins, J. Baldwin, E.F. Schumacher, Herbert Marcuse, Murray Bookchin or Marshall McLuhan - at the same time made work of thinkers but were also implied in technological developments and the questionings on the use which in is made.In order to pay homage to the international significance of work of Mumford, the Library of the Congress to Washington, D.C, an impressive auditorium named the Lewis Mumford Room . Conferences open to any public are organized in this space on the sixth floor of the most recent building of the library, the James Madison Memorial Building . Its work also influenced many landscape designers as John Nolen who considers that the cities must be under consideration like all organics with the image of the natural world.
List the works translated into French
- the myth of the Machine (1967-1970) (2 vol.)
- the city through the History (1961), its most famous work, received the National Book Award
- Technique and Civilization (1934)
- the History of the Utopias , (1922)
- Hermann Melville , (1929, rééd. 1962), with the editions Sulliver, Arles, 2006.
See too
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