Technics and Civilization

Mumford, Lewis. Technics and Civilization. New York City: Harcourt, Brace and Company / London, UK: Routledge, 1934. Rpt. in paperback with new Introduction (and Corrigenda [notice of errors] — and possibly some additional illustrations) San Diego and other cities: Harcourt Brace & Company-Harvest, 1963.

From Wikipedia entry:

Technics and Civilization is a 1934 book by American philosopher and historian of technology Lewis Mumford. The book presents the history of technology and its role in shaping and being shaped by civilizations. According to Mumford, modern technology has its roots in the Middle Ages rather than in the Industrial Revolution. It is the moral, economic, and political choices we make, not the machines we use, Mumford argues, that have produced a capitalist industrialized machine-oriented economy, whose imperfect fruits serve the majority so imperfectly. [...]

The first phase of technically civilized life (AD 1000 to 1800) begins with the clock, to Mumford the most important basis for the development of capitalism because time thereby becomes fungible (thus transferable). The clock is the most important prototype for all other machines. [1]

For an elegant statement of Mumford's thesis on clock's, see N. Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death, I.1, pp. 11-12 in 1985 paperback edition.

From the opening of Technics, "Objectives":

During the last thousand years the material basis and the cultural forms of Western Civilization have been profoundly modified by the development of the machine. How did this come about? Where did it take place? What were the chief motives that encouraged this radical transformation of the environment and the routine of life [...]? These are some of the questions that the present study seeks to answer.

While people often call our period the "Machine Age," very few have any perspective on modern technics or any clear notion as to its origins. Popular historians usually date the great transformation in modern industry from Watt's supposed invention of the steam engine; and in the conventional economics textbook the application of automatic machinery to spinning and weaving is often treated as an equally critical turning point. But the fact is that in Western Europe the machine had been developing steadily for at least seven centuries before the dramatic changes that accompanied the "industrial revolution" took place. Men had become mechanical before they perfected complicated machines [...]; and the will-to-order had appeared once more in the monastery and the army and the counting-house before it finally manifested itself in the factory. (p. 3)

Important not just for a history (and sociology) of technology but for a strict accounting of the human costs of, especially, "The Paleotechnic Phase" and "The Neo-Technic Phase" (chs. IV and V) of the early and later Industrial Revolution.

RDE, finishing, 1Dec22, 9Mar23