Technics and Civilization

Technics and Civilization is a 1934 book by the American sociologist and thinker Lewis Mumford. He began writing it in 1930 and finished it in 1932. It sets out to trace the evolution of technology, of the machine and of its fullest expression in the Industrial Revolution, with the ambition of offering a broad account of how technology has shaped civilizations and has itself been shaped by them.

Its central thesis is that technical development did not begin with the Industrial Revolution but was being prepared for roughly a thousand years earlier. Mumford distinguishes three overlapping phases: eotechnic, paleotechnic and neotechnic. The first, spanning roughly 1000 to 1800, has the clock as its emblem, since measured and divisible time is, in his view, the foundation of capitalism and the prototype of all later machines. The paleotechnic phase, roughly 1700 to 1900, corresponds to the coal-fired steam factory, with its mass production, unskilled wage labour and the harsh urban conditions he describes. The neotechnic phase, from about 1900 up to the time of writing, is marked by electricity, small and flexible producers, aluminium and the growing weight of science and information.

Beyond its value as a work of scholarship across several disciplines, Mumford presented it as a call to humanity to weigh its options in the face of threats such as ecological catastrophe or industrialised war. It is the first volume of his series The Renewal of Life, followed by The Culture of Cities (1938), The Condition of Man (1944) and The Conduct of Life (1951). Its influence extends to the history of technology and to ecological thought.