Culture, technics, and power. Harcourt, Brace & World, 1967/1970. How the first Megamachine was invented five thousand years ago in the building of the pyramids — and how the second Fall of the seventeenth century made possible its modern resurrection.
Lewis Mumford, born 1895 in Flushing on Long Island, died 1990 in Amenia, New York, was one of the most important American critics of culture and technology in the twentieth century. He studied social sciences in New York and later taught at Columbia University, at Stanford, and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; honorary doctorates from the universities of Edinburgh and Rome. He never pursued a formal academic career. He wrote as a freelance author about architecture, urban development, the history of technology, and the conditio humana. His work comprises more than twenty books over fifty years, among them The Story of Utopias (1922), Technics and Civilization (1934), The Culture of Cities (1938), The Condition of Man (1944), Art and Technics (1952), The Transformations of Man (1956), and The City in History (1961). The Myth of the Machine is his two-volume late work, in which he deepens, corrects, and radicalises after thirty further years of observation the diagnosis sketched in Technics and Civilization.
The work appeared in two volumes — Volume I: Technics and Human Development (1967) and Volume II: The Pentagon of Power (1970), both Harcourt, Brace & World, New York. The German edition unites both volumes in an unabridged version. It first appeared in 1974 with Europa Verlags-AG in Vienna and came onto the German market in 1977 as a Fischer paperback in the series fischer alternativ — characteristically, Fischer published the book in the same series as critical writings on atomic energy, ecology, and Western industrialisation. Mumford belonged, for the German readership of the late 1970s, to the circle of critics of civilisation who questioned the growth paradigm.
Mumford's central thesis is at first glance disconcerting: The human being is not primarily a toolmaker. The claim that homo faber is the specifically human, Mumford holds, is an error that has distorted the entire Western self-understanding. What is specific about the human being is not the tool; it is the mind, language, symbolic culture, ritual, the capacity to construct meaning. Tools are secondary inventions of a species whose primary achievement was inner-psychic organisation.
From this anthropological opposition follows the key concept of the book: the Megamachine.
A Megamachine, for Mumford, is a machine that does not consist of mechanical parts but of human beings — human beings organised as interchangeable components of a superhuman apparatus.
The first Megamachine arose not in the Industrial Revolution but around 3000 BCE in the early kingdoms of Mesopotamia and Egypt. It becomes visible in the pyramids, in the irrigation works, in the royal palaces — works that would have been impossible to erect with the technical tools then available had one not organised, commanded, drilled, and transformed tens of thousands of human beings into a productive apparatus.
This, for Mumford, is the first Fall of human civilisation: the invention of a form in which the specifically human — mind, language, culture — is placed in the service of an apparatus that itself no longer pursues human ends, but reproduces itself.
The second Fall, to which the second volume is devoted, occurs in the seventeenth century. With Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, and Newton, a new worldview emerges — the mechanistic — in which the world itself is thought of as a machine. On this worldview the modern large-scale technology is built. The Megamachine is now no longer built only out of human beings, but out of machines that supplement, replace, and finally dominate human beings as well.
The thesis that carries the book is thus a double one: Modern industrial society is not a specifically modern invention, but the resurrection of a five-thousand-year-old form. What in the twentieth century is called the Pentagon of Power — the military-industrial-scientific complex — is the most recent incarnation of a Megamachine that has a continuous history from the pyramids to the atom bomb.
The first volume develops the anthropological line of argument that carries the thesis. Mumford goes back into prehistory and traces the emergence of what constitutes the human being as a species.
Prologue and The mind of the human being. The book begins with a methodological preliminary remark on the necessity of disciplined speculation in a field where the archaeological sources are full of gaps. Mumford defends the right to large-scale hypotheses — against the limitations of specialised disciplines that reconstruct the image of the human being from his biological and technical traces without grasping the mind that left those traces in the first place. He is concerned with the unbound creativity of the human being, with the speciality of non-specialisation — that is, with the capacity for open adaptation that the human being has developed in contrast to highly specialised animals.
In the Long-Gone Dreamtime and The capacity for speech. What Mumford calls the dreamtime is the archaic phase in which the human being constructs his inner worlds — the art of make-believe, ritual, taboo. These inner worlds precede external tool production. From them grows language, whose birth Mumford describes as cultivation — as a cultural achievement, not a biological fact. The thesis that myth might be a linguistic disease (Max Müller's famous formula) is here reversed by Mumford: Myth is no defect of language, but the form in which language unfolds its creative power.
Finders and Makers and Prerequisites of sedentariness. Mumford turns to tool production, which he classifies as a secondary achievement. The human being is no primary toolmaker; he is a symbol-processor who at some point also builds tools. The agricultural revolution is seen not as liberation, but as the beginning of a ritualised drudgery — the daily labour on the soil that orders life, but also narrows it.
Garden, House, and Mother and Kings as Driving Force. Here comes the turn. The domestic, garden-near, maternally shaped phase of the neolithic synthesis is for Mumford a humane high form — and it is displaced as soon as kingship arises. The cult of kingship, the technique of divine rule, the fusion of political authority and cosmic order — that is the ground on which the first Megamachine can grow. Mumford distinguishes sharply here between civilisation (in the value-neutral sense) and civilisation in quotation marks — as a designation for the form shaped by kingship, bureaucracy, and the Megamachine.
The Construction of the Megamachine. The key chapter of the first volume. Mumford describes the Megamachine as an invisible machine — invisible because its components are human beings, who as such are not immediately recognisable as machine parts. Mechanical performance norms are introduced; the personality of the king is elevated beyond the human measure; the monopoly of power becomes concentrated. The age of the builders begins — the pyramids, the irrigation works, the temple complexes as works of a machine that manages without mechanical parts.
The Burden of "Civilisation." The chapter with which the first volume closes describes the reverse side of the achievement. The construction of the Megamachine buys its accomplishments at the price of a fundamental change in the human being: He becomes the interchangeable element of a superhuman apparatus whose purposes he no longer determines himself. The first volume ends with the indication that this model, after the collapse of the ancient empires, recedes but does not disappear — it slumbers, ready to return in new form.
The second volume begins in the sixteenth century and carries the story up to the moment of writing — the late 1960s, the age of the Apollo missions, the Vietnam War, the nuclear armament.
The line of argument is: In the seventeenth century a new Megamachine arises that differs from the old Egyptian-Mesopotamian one in one decisive respect. The old Megamachine consisted of human beings organised mechanically. The new Megamachine builds on a mechanistic worldview that at first shapes the natural sciences but then steers the practice of dominating nature. The machines step into the place of human beings, supplement them, replace them, and finally surpass them — but the principle of the invisible machine remains: A superhuman order organises the human components.
The Scientific Revolution as Fall. The astronomical and mechanistic turn of the seventeenth century is not — as usual — celebrated as the liberation of the mind from theological tutelage, but described as impoverishment. The qualitative world of the Aristotelians is replaced by a quantitative one; everything that cannot be measured falls out of the domain of the real. Subjectivity, values, aesthetic qualities become secondary qualities that have nothing to do with the actual, mechanical reality.
The Mechanisation of Life. Mumford describes how the mechanistic model spreads out from astronomy into physics, from physics into biology, from biology into human society itself. The clock becomes the model of time organisation; the factory the model of labour organisation; the barracks the model of political organisation. The human body itself comes to be thought mechanistically — as a system of pumps, levers, and conduits.
The Carbon Era and Imperialism. With the Industrial Revolution the Megamachine gains an energy form — coal — that expands its scale by orders of magnitude. Capitalist accumulation, colonialism, the mass production of industrial goods are aspects of the same movement. Mumford describes them not as the triumph of reason, but as the second incarnation of the Megamachine.
The Pentagon of Power. The title diagnosis. The Pentagon, that pentagonal building of the American Department of Defense, is for Mumford the centre of a Megamachine whose five vertices he identifies: power, productivity, profit, prestige, publicity. The military-industrial-scientific complex of the United States of the 1960s — with its atomic weapons, its Apollo programme, its unstoppable growth — is the most recent form of the Megamachine.
The Myth of the Machine. The argument that gives the work its name. The Megamachine is not maintained primarily through force, but through a myth: the belief that technical progress automatically means human progress, that machines are autonomous beings, that growth is good, that quantity converts into quality, that no purpose can be imputed to the Megamachine because it governs itself. This ideology is, for Mumford, the actual power of the Megamachine — and its fragility is the only point of departure for an alternative.
Alternatives and Resistance. In the last part of the volume Mumford sketches a counter-position. It is not antimodern or hostile to technology. It distinguishes rather between polytechnics and monotechnics, between democratic and authoritarian technics, between organic and mechanistic ways of life. Polytechnics is diversity, scale, local adaptation, human controllability; monotechnics is uniformity, mass scale, global validity, human disempowerment. Mumford does not plead for a return to the Middle Ages, but for a different form of modernity — one in which technology serves human self-determination rather than overwhelming it.
Mumford does not write in the style of specialist historians. He draws on a wide range of sources from anthropology, archaeology, the history of ideas, the natural sciences, literature, and personal observation, and binds them into a panoramic picture. Whoever expects a specialised line of proof will find gaps in individual pieces of evidence; whoever seeks a synthesis will rarely encounter one of this density.
His style is polemical, prophetic, sometimes grandiose. He is a moral critic with aesthetic sensitivity, not a neutral observer. The book is tragic in basic tone — Mumford believes that the Megamachine has won or is on the verge of winning, and his task is to keep awake the consciousness of the situation, even if intervention should already come too late.
The weaknesses of the book lie in the same quality as its strengths. Mumford selects his examples so that they carry the thesis; counter-examples are occasionally passed over. The archaeological and anthropological conclusions he draws from the finds of his time have on some points been revised by later research. But the structural thesis — that there is a Megamachine that consists of human beings organised in the service of a superhuman apparatus, and that this apparatus has a five-thousand-year history — has not been rejected by later research, but has found its continuation in the works of Fabian Scheidler, David Graeber, Immanuel Wallerstein, and others.
The Myth of the Machine has, in the second half of the twentieth century, found a broad readership that reaches beyond the academic world. Mumford is a reference figure for the appropriate-technology movement, the American ecology movement, urban criticism (Jane Jacobs owes him categories), and civilisation criticism in the wider sense. Christopher Lasch grounded his diagnosis of narcissism in American life on Mumford's observations; Wendell Berry and Ivan Illich schooled themselves on his concepts; in more recent times Fabian Scheidler took the Mumfordian concept of the Megamachine as the title of his 2015 book.
For all their kinship, Mumford and Scheidler are not identical. Mumford operates on the anthropological depth level — the Megamachine is for him a five-thousand-year-old form that recurs in two main incarnations. Scheidler operates on historical concreteness — the Megamachine is for him a specific product of the early modern period that has formed itself over the last five hundred years. Both are in different ways true: Whoever has read both sees how Mumford's deep-anthropological argument and Scheidler's historical-concrete argument support each other.
For the readers of this book series Mumford is important in a third respect. The diagnosis of the Megamachine that we presuppose in the three volumes of The Metamorphosis of the Leviathan — the machine that promises protection and security and delivers destruction; the hegemonic power that no longer sees its own constitution as conditional; the Pentagon of Power that works through the German peace crisis — is Mumford's diagnosis, carried forward into a present that stands fifty-five years after his second volume. What Mumford described in 1970 as the Pentagon of Power has not become smaller since, but larger — cybernetically expanded, equipped with new tools, permeated with an AI that is itself part of the machine and cannot evade this fact.
Whoever has read the three volumes of this series and Scheidler will discover in Mumford the source from which most of the critical concepts come that are today available for describing the global situation. Whoever has read Mumford will understand today's situation as the completion of what he already saw in outline half a century earlier.