Emerging from Under Modernity's Shadow
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken
I have such a backlog of written work to read, edit, and re-write as to beggar the belief of even the most credulous of souls. This time last year I was putting the finishing touches to an introductory philosophical search into the origins of the (post)modern predicament. I was looking to invest my critical studies of Lewis Mumford with some serious moral-anthropological depth. I took living under the shadow of rationalized modernity as my theme. It’s a much travelled road, it has to be said. But not a road that anyone has ever managed to take anywhere. It’s a theme as endless as the nihilism which characterizes the modern world. The world has neither recovered from, nor even apprehended, that which Nietzsche conveyed with incomparable force: the ‘death of God.’ The dissolution of an authoritative moral structure capable of ordering and orienting human existence has compelled human beings to confront their power and responsibility in ‘making history’ as autonomous beings. The effect of uncontrolled and uncomprehended power has been vertiginous, sometimes wondrous, often beneficent, occasionally disastrous, but always ominous. The story of the tyranny and violence of abstraction continues to be told. I shall make no predictions of the catastrophe to come.
I approach this familiar theme in quite an unfamiliar way. I avoid the familiar divisions, instead drawing on a wide range of sources and employing them in a distinctive way. Unless you take the time and trouble to read my work in depth, picking up on its nuances, you won’t quite see the extent to which I have taken the road less travelled. All I can say here, in an attempt to avoid adding yet more thousands of words to the ones I already have to edit, is that I have been left with a mass of writings that need to be edited into shape. The frustration is to see books being published and earning critical praise on themes and subjects I have been writing on for years, without being able to put them into readable and publishable form. I have been reading Eugene McCarraher's new book, The Enchantments of Mammon: How Capitalism Became the Religion of Modernity. The critical reviews claim that McCarraher ‘offers a different rendering of our modern age—one in which the mysteries and sacraments of religion were transferred to the way we perceive market forces and economic development.’
We talk with historian Eugene McCarraher about the myths and rituals of the market, the lost radicalism of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and the rise of neoliberalism.
By Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins
That is not that new and different rendering of the modern age. I have shown the extent to which Marx himself described capitalism as a new religion and idolatry. That said, McCarraher’s thesis has been central to my own work.
It is somewhat frustrating, if not exactly heartbreaking, to read McCarraher's book, because it is precisely on the theme I have been arguing for years. ‘The disenchantment of the world’ through science has rendered the world objectively meaningless and valueless, giving us what Lewis Mumford described as a ‘purposeless materialism.’ Whilst existentialists pursued the doomed and self-defeating enterprise of having individuals project their own meaning upon a meaningless world, that world has been colonised by the new idols of money and power. The world was never truly disenchanted, and could never be truly disenchanted. Human beings are meaning seeking beings with a cosmic longing for the spiritual and the sacred. Scientistic disenchantment made the world available to the monetarist enchantment of capital. That’s a point I have consistently made to people who, in the mistaken belief that they are radicals, have sought a world without religion. Capitalism is your new religion, a cargo cult, demanding human sacrifice daily to the new god of capital. I have made these points in my own work over the years, emphasising them in my work on Marx in 2018. It is also a central theme of this work I produced last year but have yet to issue. So whilst I am encouraged to read this book by McCarraher, I am still a little down at having been beaten to the punch. I had this written last year, but events and circumstances and visits to hospitals for tests as a result of stress and interference thwarted me. Oh well.
Mammon Far from representing rationality and logic, capitalism is modernity’s most beguiling and dangerous form of enchantment
This time last year I was writing on precisely this question. It was a heavyweight undertaking taking in Marx, Nietzsche, Weber, Tonnies, Simmel, Heidegger, the unmooring of morality in modernity, the naturalism, rationalism, and individualism of the eighteenth century, the loss of community, meaning, identity, and belonging and much more besides. The work was undertaken to locate the work of Lewis Mumford in a profound philosophical problematic. Between September and early December I wrote some 200,000 words on this, to be blended with the 50,000 words I had already written on Lewis Mumford. Being constantly harangued and hassled whilst trying to write caused me a great deal of stress, with the result that I was rushed to hospital by ambulance with a suspected heart attack. I was cleared, eventually. But the examinations and tests over the coming months set the project back, and finally off. I don’t need the stress. But now that I examine the work I have completed on this, I really feel like putting it in order and issuing it, with no extra writing.
Putting it in order, though, will be a major effort. Because there are scraps and pieces and sections scattered all over the place.
I don’t know about the road less travelled, but I do very much understand the sentiment behind another Robert Frost poem, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
I have millions of words to edit before I sleep. And millions more to write. None shall sleep.
Here is the synopsis of the main text referred to above, similar to McCarraher’s The Enchantments of Modernity. I have called it Morality and Modernity: The Quest for Community, Meaning, and Belonging
I had intended to edit the Lewis Mumford references and passages out. I note that if McCarraher has a hero, then it is Lewis Mumford. Indeed. Mumford should stay in. This was, in part, the book I was working on, and could have completed, had I been left to work. I think I may keep the Mumford sections in and blend this work with the document I have already written on Mumford. I don’t have a title for this piece. Mumford and the Quest for Community, Meaning, Belonging, Health, Sanity, Balance, Proportion, Symmetry, Harmony …
My Mumford outlines, some 50,000 words
Contents
PREPARATORY CONSIDERATIONS ON LEWIS MUMFORD 12
CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION 39
Introduction: the Reason why 43
The ethical commitment 46
Three Paths 51
The Quest for Community 51
A Moral and Social psychology 52
Humanistic Ethics 53
The myth of the machine 55
Politics 56
Chapter Plan 56
CHAPTER TWO – THE PHILOSOPHY OF MAN 59
Humanistic Ethics 65
Humanist Ethics 68
Objections 70
CHAPTER THREE: THE PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE 73
CHAPTER FOUR: THE HOME OF MAN 75
CHAPTER FIVE: PHILOSOPHY IN THE CITY 75
The Moral Dimensions of Urban Space 75
Democracy – the Ecopolis 81
The Critique of existing political institutions 82
Democratic Experimentalism 84
CHAPTER SIX: FREEDOM LOST – THE CRITIQUE OF THE MEGAMACHINE 86
Social Character 87
Authoritarianism 89
Destructiveness 91
Alienation 91
Progress? 91
CHAPTER SEVEN: REGAINING FREEDOM: TOOLS FOR (RE)CONSTRUCTION 93
CHAPTER EIGHT: BIOTECHNIC CIVILISATION 93
One World Civilisation 93
The Conditions for Human Solidarity 94
CHAPTER NINE: THE LIFE ECONOMY 94
Work, Production, Consumption 94
The tyranny of the clock and the reality of cog work 96
The humanization of work 97
Humanistic Planning and Design 98
Reclaiming Life in Work 99
Consumption 99
Consumption and the Loss of Self 99
Sane Consumption 99
CHAPTER TEN CONCLUSIONS 100
Mumford Materials 103
Proposed Chapter Structure
1/ Introduction – the integral view
the reintegration of life and faculties – humanity as worthy of saving
2/ Philosophy of Man – organic humanism
Comments on conduct of life – anthropocentric theme – symbols – mind in the making – literary criticism/literary ecology/American Letters – normative essentialism (Who we are)
3/ Philosophy of Life
Geddes and the insurgency of life, nature’s patterns and systems and collaborative structures – the biocentric and ecocentric theme – sources of life (Where we are)
4/ Home for Man
Art, Architecture and morality – sources of meaning (What we build, housing the psyche)
5/ Philosophy in the City – urban civilisation – historical examples of ideal form (the human story)
6/ The Critique of the Megamachine
(incarceration)
7/ Tools for (Re)construction
Technics, polytechnics, transitions, design, planning, (bio)regionalism (transition)
8/ Biotechnic Civilisation – the green republic or ecopolis
9/ The Life Economy
(freedom)
10/ Conclusions
I shall now reproduce below a scattered fragment I have just found in my vast Mumford folder, to indicate the extent to which I have work of the highest quality stored away on this, currently going to waste. It seems that my work will never be done. The world outside is ‘lovely, dark and deep …
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
MUMFORD FOREWORD
For those who consider liberalism’s conflict pluralism, the collapse of all overarching moral frames into a terrain of competing goods, Mumford’s writings on the Megamachine come with the warning that ‘totalitarianism’ possesses a different, far more benign face, one that speaks the language of efficiency and rationality, growing within the terrain of the modern world itself. It is therefore far more dangerous and insidious a force than notions of communism as something alien and external. The totalitarianism of which Mumford warned does not always, or even mainly, present itself as a brutal, irrational, and alien, an obvious evil that can be identified and fought against, but is deeply rooted in—and draws its strength from — the common interests, indeed the psyches, of those subject to its rule. The totalitarianism of Megamachine control springs from the satisfaction, in external form, of the essential needs of human beings for a clear sense of membership, identity, meaning, continuity between past and future, and purpose. The essence of totalitarianism, as the single most impressive fact of the modern age, is the fateful combination of the collapse of overarching moral frameworks, the fragmentation of society, the intensified quest for community and the expansion of centralized apparatuses of institutional and systemic power (political and economic).
Mumford’s historical analyses are concerned to elaborate upon the fact that humankind has satisfied the longing for meaning, membership, identity, and belonging through small, proximal communities of personal experience — communities such as the family, the neighbourhood, the church, and various fraternal, voluntary associations mediating between the isolated individual and the larger political and economic power. The modern age, however, has unleashed forces bringing about their decline. As Marx showed, the concentration and centralisation of economic power in the form of capital proceeds hand-in-hand with the centralization and concentration of political power in the hands of ‘the abstraction of the political state.’ These, he states, are the products of modernity (Marx CHDS EW 1975). Hegel before him had shown social atomism below to be the counterpart of political centralization above. The powerful need of human beings for commonality is frustrated and denied below and hence is projected upwards and outwards to the artificial collectivities of the state and capital, which Mumford brought together in the concept of the Megamachine. Propelled by the abstracting forces of capital, and rationalized by the universalising, centralizing political theories of the modern age, the state proceeded to consolidate power by displacing and absorbing the functions and authority of all other communal bodies and associations, divesting them of political and governmental significance. The result was a disempowerment of civil society and a concentration of force at the centre.
Mumford shows how these associations served to perform functions that are vital in the lives of social individuals, figuring symbolically and materially in the central dramas of each and every life from the cradle to the grave, in the provision of jobs, roles, occupations and obligations that invest lives with meaning, in the communion and exchange with others. In the modern world, these warm, affective ties, bonds and the proximal communities that support and sustain them started to unravel, leaving the individual potentially standing alone in isolation. Such a condition represents the ideal to liberal thinkers who premised liberty upon the discrete individual, looking forward to a society of self-sufficient individuals strong enough to have thrown off the constraints and inhibitions of those collective bodies, associations and commitments considered oppressive of individual liberty. As the twentieth century proceeded, however, it started to become clear that the sense of community and belonging was very much an essential and enduring human need. Far from delivering freedom, individualism had served only to produce isolation, loneliness, disconnectedness, displacement and despair below and an attempt to reconstitute universality and commonality artificially above in the form of the state and other surrogate collectivities.
This provided fertile ground for the expansion of the Megamachine. Not only could it supplant traditional, smaller communities by absorbing their social functions and responsibilities, it could do so by claiming to perform more efficiently and rationally, overcoming the isolation and of the individual in the process, satisfying the need for a sense of meaning and belonging. The breakdown in the overarching moral framework leaving the individual alone and isolated, in search of community and meaning, was thus countered with the vision of an all-encompassing political community within which individuals could once more acquire clearly defined status and purpose and a sense of comradeship and belonging through the achievement of oneness with fellow citizens. The appeal and authority of totalitarian forms of collective control, then, lie in the promise to fulfil the unity, commonality and belonging denied in the proximal relations of society. In his historical analysis of the Megamachine, Mumford shows the range of symbolic, cultural, and rhetorical devices as well as material practices that would be employed by the Megamachine to induce the individual into this vast new institutional matrix as it entered every recess of society and appropriated every practical, symbolic and ritualistic communitarian function formerly performed by intermediate bodies in the associational space of society.
One of the most compelling devices in forging the totalizing political community was war. Mumford examines at length the foundations of the Megamachine as a war state fostering the moral and social cohesion pulling the atomized, disorganized masses together in common endeavour, and infusing them with a sense of purpose. The Megamachine thus emerges as the all-encompassing, totalizing political community appropriating for itself all the practical material and symbolic attributes of proximal human communities in the associational space of the everyday lifeworld, binding isolated individuals together by the invigorating spirit of collective purpose, war at home and abroad, war against others. The true horror of the Megamachine, however, was not that it manifested itself in outright physical war, brutal repression or outright terror but in the benign terms of a total community that was the benevolent, efficient and humanitarian provider of the material and moral/metaphysical needs of its citizens, overcoming their unbearable sense of isolation. Mumford’s analysis of the rise of the Megamachine needs to be set in the context of the analyses of the pioneers of sociology and social theory. Thus Alexis de Tocqueville in Democracy in America sought ‘to trace the novel features under which despotism may appear in the world.’ The ‘first thing’ he noted here was the ‘innumerable multitude of men, all equal and alike, incessantly endeavoring to procure the petty and paltry pleasures with which they glut their lives.’ He noted the loss of close, proximal ties as a form of displacement:
Each of them, living apart, is as a stranger to the fate of all the rest; his children and his private friends constitute to him the whole of mankind. As for the rest of his fellow citizens, he is close to them, but he does not see them; he touches them, but he does not feel them; he exists only in himself and for himself alone; and if his kindred still remain to him, he may be said at any rate to have lost his country.
Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ch 6 What sort of Despotism Democratic Nations have to fear
Tocqueville proceeded to describe the emergent national political community of his day as a result of the trend to democratic government in modern atomistic society:
Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness; it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances: what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living?
Thus it every day renders the exercise of the free agency of man less useful and less frequent; it circumscribes the will within a narrower range and gradually robs a man of all the uses of himself. The principle of equality has prepared men for these things; it has predisposed men to endure them and often to look on them as benefits.
Tocqueville DA ch 6
Precisely on account of its good intentions, rather than in spite of them, this newly emerging political community obtained an all-encompassing reach that threatened to subject all subjects indiscriminately to ‘strict uniformity of regulation,’ coming in time ‘personally to tutor and direct every member of the community.’ It therefore constituted the most profound threat to individual freedom in human history.
At which point there is a need to identify clearly and precisely the forces at work in the rise of the Megamachine, lest such a critique be read as a rejection of democracy and equality as collective political purposes, leaving unchecked the very forces of social and economic individualism that, far more than rationalistic political philosophies, serve to destroy communities and leave the individual alone in an atomised civil society. Any viable critique has to identify and uproot the forces driving social atomism below and political centralisation above, rather than merely focus on merely the one term in a diremptive whole.
I intend to examine the extent to which Mumford does this, enabling us to see that the seemingly inexorable historical expansion of megamechanical order is neither inevitable nor eternal, something written into modernization and industrialization as inherently progressive, but instead is a result of a creative human agency that comes equipped with the capacity for making alternate choices and taking new directions when it comes to satisfying the powerful, deep-rooted needs for community, unity, belonging, identity and meaning. Mumford offers an alternative way to build a sense of unity, solidarity, shared values, common sacrifice, and mutual belonging among people. Lippmann argued that ‘the war [World War One] has given Americans a new instinct for order, purpose, and discipline’ that has served to ‘draw Americans out of their local, group, and ethnic loyalties into a greater American citizenship.’ Mumford sought to constitute this order, purpose and discipline on the basis of proximal community and small-scale practical reasoning, accenting the community-forging properties of everyday solidary exchange in communities grounded in a moral sense of place. In achieving a common purpose this way, he found a moral alternative to an artificial unity impelled by war and division.
Behind the steady expansion of the centralized power of the Megamachine, then, lay deeply rooted sociological and psychic forces that Mumford was concerned to identify and counteract. Whilst many have proclaimed the ideal of national unity in terms of people bound together by common ties of interest, value, loyalty and affection, Mumford saw clearly that such ties required the existence of strong structures and institutions of stability and support orienting common aspirations toward duty by way of mutual obligation and common purpose. Where these do not exist, the path was clear for the artificial reconstitution of unity and commonality at the abstract level of the centralizing Megamachine. Mumford’s view was that this unity and commonality needs to be properly rooted and structured according to function, authority and purpose.
Throughout the twentieth century, the dominant, political, voice of conservatism in the Western democracies all but ceased to be conservative, sharing instead liberalism’s premises of the moral and ontological primacy of the discrete individual. Such conservatism could not comprehend how the inescapable human yearning for community could not but come to be repressed, or diverted into artificial forms, as a result of a liberal ontology that falsely separated the individual and the social. Ironically, the common loyalties and solidarities basic to traditional conservativism could easily come to be disparaged as a socialism or communism inimical to individual liberty. As MacIntyre would come to comment, whatever label applies to those within the conventional political sphere - conservative, radical, democrat, republican, socialist – we are all liberal now. Mumford wasn’t. Unlike the dominant political traditions, he eschewed the individualism that could only see each, any and every form of community and common purpose as an interference upon individual liberty. He thus challenged the dominant view of a society of isolated individuals solitarily pursuing self-interest through the impersonal, anonymous mechanisms of the free market, bound only by the neutral sphere of government and law. Combining conservative and radical themes, whilst staking out a position that remained irreducible to labels and influences, Mumford taught that the powerful human need for community, belonging, meaning, identity and authenticity could not be denied but had to find an appropriate form or forms of expression. Without that, there is a danger of that need being diverted and perverted through abstraction.
Mumford thus sought to identify the sources and conditions of personality and community, as distinct from the individualism that served only to fragment society below and foster an abstract commonality above. In modern society, individualism has taken the form of a self-sufficiency that has engendered isolation, loneliness, and meaninglessness – fertile ground for the creation of surrogate communities. In the name of individual freedom, such individualism has served to enlarge, rather than circumscribe, the centralizing power of the Megamachine, causing a displacement and disconnectedness that has driven isolated, powerless individuals into the arms of the artificial political community. Far from being a counterweight to the totalizing political community, such individualism is its social basis. From the 1940s onwards, Mumford’s was a relatively lonely voice speaking against the increasing dominance of abstract communities as a result of a dominant individualist culture. His work, frequently dismissed as moralistic and doom-mongering, was, however, very far from being all jeremiad. I will be concerned to show how Mumford established the conditions of satisfying the powerful human need for community, belonging, identity and meaning without having recourse to abstract surrogates inimical to genuine individuality and authenticity (what Mumford defined in terms of ‘personality.’) If the Megamachine expanded as a result of the erosion of communal reciprocity and proximal associations, then, Mumford indicates, friends of personality and community should concern themselves with the creation, preservation and propagation of these appropriately scaled institutions. By restoring social function and authority to local and regional communities, in the form of family, neighbourhood, occupational group, union, church, and local association, individuals would come to develop the sense of belonging, identity and meaning that they required, without the need for recourse to abstract, centralized surrogates. In turn, the multiplicity of vital, independent associations would serve to create a multi-layered social fabric based on the division of function and authority to establish a many-centred, genuinely plural society as the condition of a true freedom.
The New Vision
Mumford’s organizing concept of the Megamachine, therefore, establishes the critical intellectual framework for analysing and counteracting the key facts of social and political development in the modern age – the abstraction of power and control from real communities, the loss of the political and ethical as well as the physical commons – as well as laying the groundwork for a future communitarian politics that would restore the proper sense of freedom as a social endeavour achieved through solidaristic associations that were capable of satisfying the twin yearnings for personality and community. As the political world engaged in shadow-boxing over the false dichotomies arising from the abstraction of individuality and society, Mumford ploughed a lonely furrow to develop a new way of satisfying the human need for community through a revaluation of the old ways. He therefore placed the accent on intimate, voluntary groups like the family, neighbourhood, and ethnic and voluntary associations, seeking an extension of participatory structures through communities reinvigorated on these bases.
The times are becoming more appreciative of Mumford’s rather lonely quest to rediscover the bases of personality and community to achieve a genuine solidarity. The view that Mumford was too radical for the conservatives and too conservative for the radicals can now be seen in its true light the the insights of Alasdair MacIntyre into the dominant liberalism of the modern age. Mumford stood apart from the liberalism of the left, with its emphasis on the centralizing, top-down bureaucratic politics of the state, and in latter days with its emphasis on cultural and moral libertarianism free from common constraints, and the liberalism of the right, with its emphasis on free markets and free trade. Mumford was against both economism and collectivism as both forces for abstraction and alienation. He is well positioned to expose the hollowness of a dominant liberal culture that, in the hour of its triumph, can look around and see only the emptiness of a society of discrete individuals hungering for meaning, purpose and community. Those profound human needs, we have found, are not to be satisfied in the central state which, however much it may succeed in achieving certain public goods neglected by the private sphere, seems no less remote, alienating and impersonal than the market mechanism itself. Mumford, that is, sought to develop an alternative to the machine-like institutions and structures of a rationalized modernity, springing the traps that the likes of Max Weber saw socialism falling into. Rather than an alternative to rationalising capitalism, Weber saw socialism as its epitome, generalising a bureaucratic rational control over the whole of society as a ‘housing for the new serfdom.’ Against this, Mumford sought the devolution of social function and authority to small, tightly-knit proximal, participatory communities which would serve to bring individuals out of isolation and draw them together in community. In fine, Mumford revalued the old loyalties and solidarities with respect to family, church, neighbourhood, and local community and sought to constitute new forms of association to recover authority and function from the centralizing surrogate communities of the Megamechanical age. In doing this, he sought the critical recovery on the (post)modern terrain of the traditional, neighbourly values and commitments of township democracy. In this, he affirmed the view that the only way to ensure effective government was by restoring communal associations to their proper places in the common affairs of individuals. And that requires a concerted attempt to uproot the abstracting forces of the modern mechanical age which Weber identified as rational, constitutive of the iron cage and untranscendable. In other words, the recovery of community was not for the asking and, if not done properly, risked merely projecting fantastical surrogates which lead straight into the realm of the Megamachine.
If Mumford’s message was somewhat out of kilter with the political and intellectual climate of the times in which he lived, leaving him an increasingly isolated voice, then it has become essential for comprehending the crisis-torn climate of the contemporary world. The old politics which pits individual and government against each other now stands revealed as a politics mired in false and abstract dichotomies. Mumford has been criticized for being evasive with respect to politics. I shall identify those instances where that charge is valid. But I shall also indicate those occasions when Mumford did intervene in politics and show how he worked with an express political intent in mind. More than this, I shall explain Mumford’s approach as less an evasion of politics as an attempt to reconfigure ‘the political.’ The world is now more amenable to Mumford’s insights here. There is a new politics in the air, one more in tune with Mumford’s sense of the political in being characterized by a rejection of both the abstract community in the form of the remote and intrusive state and the self-interested individualism on the part of the equally abstract individual in favour of a revaluation of local communities and associations. Here, Mumford’s view as a communitarian regionalism can be developed in full, identifying place-based associations as the prime sources of belonging, meaning and identity, and, as such, and the principal agents of personality and community. And, as Mumford sought to advise us, it is precisely the diversity, autonomy, and vitality of these local communities and associations that enables them to resist incorporation into the totalizing abstract community, thus forestalling the rise to dominance of the Megamachine. They serve, then, as the indispensable breakwaters of true freedom, democracy and community.
The role of local communities and associations in resolving the problems of modern society ought also to be emphasized. Many of our most pressing social problems have proven resistant to decades of governmental action, making it clear that ambitious projects of social reform can only hope to succeed to the extent that they are grounded in the resurrection of such institutions as the family, neighborhood, church, and local community and the small-scale practical reasoning such institutions enable and encourage. We see, for instance, that the problem of poverty has social and structural causes that cannot be remedied merely by the public provision of welfare. Far from overcoming poverty, a public provision that does nothing to alter the social and structural causes of poverty merely serves to create a permanent underclass of welfare dependents. The cycle of poverty can therefore only be broken only by a combination of social and structural actions allied to a renewed emphasis on character, fostering a culture of self-control and discipline and expressing a belief in the virtues of hard work within the individual. These virtues are taught chiefly by strong and vibrant families, churches, and neighbourhoods which, in turn, thrive only within a viable economic life that distributes opportunities equitably and in sufficient number. This is not the same thing as ‘economic growth’. The economy has to be set within a moral and institutional matrix. These same virtues, and hence those same institutions, are indispensable in the fight against myriad social ills caused by an individualism that emphasises subjective choice on the part of each individual but fails to give those individuals the means of stability, security and support that inform that choice, give it content and invest it with meaning. In becoming free from social and moral constraints, the modern individual is confronted by freedom as an onerous burden at least as much as a liberation. The modern individual, that is, is in possession of his or her own person, but is increasingly finding that, given the ineradicable social dimension of the human personality, such freedom is incomplete, desolate and oppressive. The modern individual has acquired the freedom to live in accordance with personal choice but, without the institutions of stability, security and support that cultivate the virtues, lacks the inner motives and resources to make those choices meaningful and fulfilling.
We know, too, that stronger communal ties and associations are the best means for checking the problems caused by an untrammelled individualism, indeed, for preventing these problems from emerging in the first place. We know that government and law are only truly effective when they are anchored in strong, closely-knit community organizations, fostering further communitarian effort. Truly effective government is, in large part, self-government. A viable polity, then, is one that is capable of generating, sustaining and being sustained by a strong sense of local community, suppressing crime, halting and reversing physical deterioration, encouraging business, and transforming slums characterised by despair and drug addiction into thriving urban neighbourhoods hopeful for the future. We know, too, that educating the young best proceeds not in a value-free, loosely structured environment but within a community of learning based on firm, shared standards of conduct, high and enforced expectations, and instruction in moral values, all with the cooperation and involvement of families and neighbourhood. In fine, the area of social policy has much to gain from the renewal of community through the reinvigoration of the associational space of society. The social practice of local and regional communities and associations thus comes to buttress a commitment to the common good as a political practice, investing it with social content and thereby avoiding the tendency for claims of commonality to assume an abstract form. The dualism between the social and the political is thus overcome. The problem of the common good in the context of this dualism is its unavailability in anything but abstract form. Thus, no matter the strength of commitment to intermediate communities and associations, action in pursuit of the common good in the context of the separation of the political from the social sphere ensures that the top-down bureaucratic mechanisms of the state come to be mobilized in what proves to be yet another counter-productive attempt by government to solve by political means problems that are social in origin and which require social solution. That means a social transformation which empowers those local communities and associations closest to the problems to be addressed. The problem is one of remote control as a result of forces for abstraction removing power and competence from communities and investing the power of decision in external bodies as well as in systemic imperatives. The result is that government is charged with the impossible task of ensuring a modicum of order and control in face of forces that are outside their scope. Unsurprisingly, government actions turn out to be worse than futile, further discrediting the public realm as an arena to which citizens look to secure their common purposes, diminishing public expectations and the public imagination in the process. Not only do the problems go without resolution, they are reinforced. All that has been achieved is that there has been a continuation of the process of abstraction in which the state absorbs social functions and authority properly exercised by associations within the communal body, thereby further eroding the most natural and effective mechanisms for addressing social problems. The result is to reinforce the sway of the private forces responsible for diremption and atomization in the first place. Here, we need to ponder the lessons of Marx’s critique of Hegel’s Sittlichkeit. There are powerful social dynamics within the capitalist economy that subvert and destroy the associational space of civil society. Without social control of the economy, the quest for community will have to be projected upwards to the state.
The lessons of Mumford’s reconfiguration of ‘the political’ lie in the need to translate the politics of the appropriately-scaled community into a viable polity, effectively to create the regional city as a new polis democracy or city-state. In this reading, the governmental apparatus serves to support and reinforce local communities and associations rather than to supplant them. This, I would suggest, is a reconfiguration of ‘the political’ around the associational space of society and the associational activity of social individuals. In other words, the intention is to effect a shift from the disembedded conditions within which individuals are free to choose the good and act on their desires as they see fit, constrained only by the external force of the law, to those embedded conditions within which an associative freedom and democracy could flourish, constrained, oriented and coordinated by the internal force of a social, communal and moral purpose. There is more to be said here with respect to the role of the state apparatus in sustaining and extending local communities and associations, being careful to guard against that apparatus extending itself in the process by absorbing social function and authority instead of assisting it. The task of revitalising mediating institutions within the associational space of a transformed civil society is the fundamental task of the age, and is one on which Lewis Mumford offers a unique perspective well worthy of recovery. Mumford’s lifelong quest for community offers rich resources for comprehending the political and social developments that have led humanity into the all-encompassing embrace of the Megamachine, for resisting its bribes and the threats, and lighting the path that leads us in the direction of an alternative future. More than this, Mumford’s work possesses a timeless quality and an enduring significance in being an eloquent and profoundly insightful investigation into the human condition as lived in all its depths in history. In his voluminous writings Mumford returns to certain key themes to make it clear that the profound human need for authenticity, meaning, belonging, identity and community is the grand, orienting, motivating political fact of the existence of human beings as social beings, qualities with which all human beings struggle in their everyday lives, wherever and whenever they live. For all of his tragic vision of life, Mumford’s is a profoundly human view, containing a wealth of political and social truth and wisdom to live by. In this respect, perhaps the most valuable and abiding lesson of Mumford’s work lies in the way in which it enjoins us to reflect upon the wealth of human experience, and see our own personal longings as a cosmic longing for meaning and belonging shared by the human species as a whole, charging us only to satisfy these profound human needs personally through our own choices and actions in time and place. Mumford’s work, then, is not only a profoundly prescient work of political sociology and a remarkably revealing mirror held up to our own souls.
Lewis Mumford exhibits a consistent distrust of abstraction in his critical concerns, and it would be no exaggeration to claim that his writing is concerned to guard against tendencies to abstraction at every point.
The issue of Mumford as a ‘non-academic’ thinker concerns much more than the fact that he held no college degree or university position. More importantly, Mumford was sceptical of abstraction from the processes of life and from movement, the systematisation and freezing of creativity and vitality. Mumford upheld what he called ‘the insurgency of life,’ shedding the old metaphysical commitments whilst eschewing the reductionist and mechanicist commitments of the new science. Instead, he emphasised movement as lived experience, with a purpose and direction, certainly, but no fixed end point in time and place. To Mumford, ‘life’ and its relational dynamics is beyond theory, the systematisation of ‘academic’ philosophy, in the sense that movement is a ceaseless creativity, surplus and excess that continuously transcends any finite theory. And any theory is finite. The word ‘theory’ derives from the word theorein, meaning to watch, hence the ocular metaphor that Rorty sought to deconstruct. Rorty’s goal was to postulate a non-metaphorical, ‘pragmatic’ way to grasp truth without any extraneous metaphysical commitments. The result was a conception of relative truth premised on ‘what's best for us.’ The problem, however, is that on his own premises, Rorty was not in a position to identify which ‘best’ and which ‘us.’
I read Marx in my PhD researches in a remarkably similar way, with this crucial difference – I retained an essentialist philosophical anthropology which made it possible to answer the questions ‘which best’ and ‘which us’ in terms of human flourishing. I argued against the ‘academicization’ of knowledge and emphasized that Marx did not write theory but, instead, engaged in a critique that focused on the contradictory, relational dynamics of society as a field of materialist immanence in process and movement. Marx held an activist conception of knowledge that came from inside the movement of history, as against a passive-contemplative approach which sees the world as an objective external datum (to be watched contemplatively, mirrored and reflected upon). The key difference with Rorty is that I distinguished Marx's praxis from a visionless, arbitrary pragmatism in being infused by an essentialist philosophical anthropology, giving an inherent purpose and direction that saves us from relativism without imposing a finite end point or closure in history.
Rorty was on the right lines, but lacked the normative essentialism that would have ensured that his ‘theory’ remained in tune with what he clearly considered to be the right – that is, something more than pragmatic - direction. It is easy to go through Rorty and find instances where he argues for what is ‘best’ for human beings, drawing upon a philosophical anthropology which in truth he lacks. Rorty thus ends in a self-contradictory position, which isn’t necessarily fatal to his position on what is ‘best’ for human beings, just requires a little less deconstruction and a little more reconstruction with respect to recovering a normative philosophical anthropology.
The clash between the ‘academic’ and ‘non-academic’ here in Mumford, then, concerns much more than professional status and certified credentials. It concerns Mumford’s position as a generalist who drew on specialist knowledge, whilst transcending disciplinary boundaries. More, even, than Mumford’s interdisciplinary approach, however, is the refusal to systematize and thereby freeze life and movement. Mumford referred to this in terms of the mechanization of mind, matter and man, the intellectual and psychological preparation for the Megamachine. His position was not, therefore, anti-academic or anti-intellectual but made a point of some sophistication. With a passive-contemplative approach to the world as an objective, external datum, philosophers have sought to squeeze and freeze everything into a finite, observable picture. Mumford’s ‘living philosophy’ has been criticized as ‘contentless’ and empty, but such criticism makes the mistake of judging Mumford’s affirmation of the insurgency of life as a philosophy, that is, as something adhering to the theoretical approach to the world and knowledge about it. That is precisely what Mumford’s ‘life philosophy’ isn’t. Mumford understands the world through relation and relational dynamics, through a continuous, creative movement that is in essence infinite, though purposeful and directional. Understanding the true import of Mumford’s criticism of the modern machine age in terms of the ‘purposeless materialism’ inflicted by the mechanization of matter is key in this respect. Mumford’s histories and analyses are precisely focused upon the multi-directional relations between all beings and things and the ways in which these form in themselves a directional cloud. There are transcendent standards outside of time and place, but Mumford is clear that such standards are incarnated in time and place. He doesn’t, therefore, elaborate theoretically sophisticated systems of thought and codes of ethics. The ‘standards’ he affirms exist in and achieve vital force in the flow of that directional cloud, aiming at eudaimonistic betterment and optimal fluidity. (Including the human betterment that Rorty argued for, but lacked the premises to support). Philosophers such as Aristotle conceive that movement to be circular. He sees humans as geocentric beings, but a movement that is free from gravity would go from circular to linear. But it is movement rather than circularity that is the ‘answer.’ It is movement, ‘the insurgency of life,’ everywhere, that makes it possible for all the forces life’s relational field of materialist immanence to combine and oppose and balance. The beautiful cloud, eventually, moves forward and we do have a eudaimonistic duty as human beings to participate in that forward movement. There is no equilibrium or Garden of Eden to go back to. Instead, there is a general direction that we must encompass and surrender to. The way to surrender is given in that normative essentialist anthropology. This identifies movement as what Mumford called ‘the insurgency of life.’ This ‘living philosophy’ has been criticized as ‘contentless’ by certain philosophers. Such critics don't see much further than their own categories - or just plain don't see when there are no categories to see. Instead of watching the world in terms of the old ocular metaphor of philosophy, we are to look into our own being, inhabited as we are by movement, direction, intuition, momentum toward otherness, people, places, projects, economic systems. Mumford called it ‘life,’ and it is far from contentless. Mumford intuit that equality and solidarity favour ‘life’ as movement, whereas the mechanical order of the rationalized world of the capital system freezes movement, prevents fluidity, scleroses society into classes of fixed price laborers and goods. Hence Mumford’s distrust of ‘the state,’ as a mechanical entity that halts the fluidity of the forward march. What Marx criticizes as the ‘abstraction of the political state,’ the state as a ‘modern product,’ indicates the extent to which the state has been sclerosed. The true state, as a genuine public community, needs to be fluid. Here, Mumford’s recovery of the polis tradition in affirming the organic against the mechanical is central to his systematic critique of abstraction.
Mumford is concerned to identify and uproot such totalizing representations as critical components of power. Setting Mumford’s critique of the Megamachine in relation to the work of Marx, Nietzsche and Weber (along with other pioneer thinkers in the sociological tradition, embracing the later Frankfurt School of critical theory, Heidegger, Merleu-Ponty), it becomes clear that such representations evince an ‘academic’ theoretical approach to life; they are integral to a totalizing rationalization that is characteristic of modern sociality, and which constitute a violence and tyranny of abstraction that is the greatest threat to human life. This violence and tyranny is rooted in, but goes far beyond, the capitalism which is modernity’s progenitor. Hence Mumford explores the psychic and intellectual roots of the extension of the mechanical over the organic. The true locus of mechanical force and abstraction is in the forms that society and subjectivity come to take in the modern rationalized world.
The dialectics of hope and despair
According to Vaclav Havel, whilst ‘it is a long time since there were so many grounds for hoping that everything will turn out well,’ ‘there have never been so many reasons for us to fear that, if everything went wrong, the catastrophe would be final.’ Havel recites a dismal litany, ‘from atomic war and ecological disaster to social and civilizational catastrophe – by which I mean the widening gulf between rich and poor individuals and nations.’ Mumford repeated such, ever lengthening, lists in his lifetime, and earned a reputation as a prophet of doom for his troubles. Such is the fate of those who speak in the prophetic mode. This is unfair. Mumford continued to give grounds for hope, something which is apt to be missed, and which is worthy of greater stress.
The crises we face are too many and too clear to require emphasis. They stand in need of proper diagnosis rather than publicity. We know the problems. What we are less clear about is their psychic, institutional and intellectual causes. Mumford does good work here.
There is good reason, then, to identify and ponder the central sociological critiques of modernity – which I consider to be those of Marx, Nietzsche, and Weber. The ‘death of God’ has not led to the death of religion and an affirmation of life, as Nietzsche hoped. Instead, modern society lives under the sway of modern deities, and these demand human sacrifices in their millions. I will therefore seek to explicate Mumford’s importance in relation to what remains profound in in the critical concerns of Marx, Nietzsche and Weber.
Capitalism and its impact upon the social and moral order has been the central preoccupation of social theory and ethics since the eighteenth century. As Robert Nisbet argues, the unit ideas of the emerging discipline of sociology were defined in direct response to the impact of capitalist development upon traditional society and its bonds, cultures and affinities. (Nisbet 1966).
I have chosen to interrogate the writings of Lewis Mumford in light of the emergence of modernity, with all that that implies with respect to social and moral dislocation, as a thinker who was concerned to analyse the human path towards the Megamachine in order to chart a course out of it, And I propose to do this against the testing bench of the three critical figures who are, by common consent, the most perceptive, challenging and exacting thinkers of the problematic that lies at the heart of modernity – Marx, Nietzsche, and Weber. There have, of course, been other key thinkers, above all, Tocqueville, Durkheim, Tonnies, Simmel, as well as the man who influenced Geddes and Mumford so much, the deeply conservative Frederick Le Play and the communitarian anarchist Peter Kropotkin. The contributions of these thinkers receive some attention here, too, though much less than they deserve. To reduce Mumford to his influence is to unravel the interweaving that constitutes his original vision. So I shall eschew the temptations of identifying the sources of Mumford’s vision – many and varied as they are – and instead distil the essence of Mumford’s critical and emancipatory vision and test it against what Marx, Nietzsche, and Weber reveal to be the central problematic of modernity. I also try to connect, where relevant, Mumford’s insights with the concerns of later writers and philosophers, Heidegger, the Critical Theorists, Merleu-Ponty, Foucault and post-structuralism, Habermas, Arendt, MacIntyre and many more. I can do no more than sketch in this respect. The focus remains firmly upon Mumford and his key concerns. Much that Mumford writes overlaps with the key themes of modern social theory. I am not, however, writing a history of social theory. My concern is to set the key insights of Lewis Mumford in a theoretical and philosophical context in order to strengthen his case against the Megamachine and clarify the path he indicated lay out of it.
My main aim in this book, then, is to provide a clear and critical account of Lewis Mumford’s critique of and alternative to the Megamachine, defining this with greater explanatory power and precision with respect to the mentalities and modalities of capitalist modernity. This means setting Mumford’s key themes against the social theory of capitalism and modernity developed by Marx, Nietzsche and Weber. The work of these three thinkers remain, in my view, the most substantial and most pertinent when it comes to understanding the world in which we live. The test of any thinker is how s/he measures up against the work of these key three. That is the test Mumford must meet, if his prescriptions are to be taken seriously as a vision of an alternative society.
For Marx and Weber, capitalism is ‘the most fateful force’ (Weber) shaping the modern world, the ‘general light’ (Marx) in which it is bathed. Mumford, in line with Weber, expresses a critical view of what is perceived to be an economic determinism on Marx’s part. In truth, it is a dominant conception of Marxism that committed such an error. Mumford’s view is closer to Marx than maybe he realized. None of these three thinkers argue that it is capitalism as an economic form that causes modernity to be as it is, although they do agree that capital’s colonization of global economic life constitutes a crucial agency of modernization. Each of these thinkers comprehend capitalist modernity as what Marx calls a ‘mode of life,’ and all three are concerned with the appropriate regimen for human flourishing.
It is therefore instructive to read Mumford’s writings on character and conduct in light of the key themes of social theory, what Nisbet identifies as the ‘unit-ideas’ of the sociological tradition as it emerged in response to the problems of modern capitalist society. Like Weber, Mumford pays due attention to the importance of ideas and culture in social change, eschewing any notion of economic determinism as an irrevocable methodological principle. Like Weber, Mumford considered that a point made against Marx, but both are closer to Marx on questions of freedom and determinism than maybe either man realized. Marxist historian E.P. Thompson expresses Marx’s true meaning well in locating capitalism at the centre of a ‘nexus of relationships’, describing it as a societal tapestry in which ‘social and cultural phenomena do not trail after the economic at some remote remove’ but are constitutive of what ‘the economic’ is (Thompson 1965: 84). Those words, emphasising the relational dynamics in play, could be applied to Mumford’s views on the creative importance of ideas and culture in the making of history. The point applies against certain forms of Marxism, not Marx.
Both Marx and Weber are concerned to analyse the novel and distinctive forms of sociation, and the new forms of subjectivity embedded in these, bounded within modern capitalist society. These forms include what is, for the first time in history, conceivable as ‘the economy’ and ‘the state’ as differentiated spheres, essential counterparts in the abstraction of social power from the common life. The abstractions of ‘the state’ and ‘the economy’ rest on a profound transformation of the character of social relationships and the nature of social power, signifying a transition from what Marx called relations of personal dependency to relations which are ‘impersonal’ and mediated by ‘things’: money, bureaucracy. Marx in the Grundrisse thus writes of the ‘objective dependency’ of all ostensibly ‘free’ individuals upon the external systemic force of capital (Marx 1973). Weber likewise describes the organisations and institutions of capitalist modernity as proceeding ‘without regard to persons,’ constituting an ‘untranscendable’ force. Marx was concerned with the dehumanisation associated with the capital system, Weber with its depersonalisation. The loss of personality in a mechanized social order and the conditions and forms of its recovery emerges as a key concern in the writings of Lewis Mumford.
Class, in contradistinction to the old status, is the epitome of the modern social relationship, and Marx and Weber are agreed on its essential modernity. The estrangement involved here constitutes the basis for that rationalization which Weber lamented as the ‘iron cage’ of modernity. It is within the context of this fundamental transformation of sociality and subjectivity that much else in modernity takes on its salient quality – the domination of science and technology, the rule of impersonal systems in government, law, and bureaucracy, the pre-eminence of subjective choice, the instrumentalization of the world, and the reordering of the private sphere as a privileged site of individual being. The transformation of sociality and subjectivity is thus a dual process in which the modern figure of ‘the individual,’ both private and public, emerges as socially represented and empowered. Whilst personality and its appropriate regimen is an underplayed or neglected issue in much commentary, it is a central concern in the work of Lewis Mumford and, accordingly, a central concern of this book. The ‘abstract individual’ so severely unpicked and unravelled by Marx is precisely the same figure that Weber diagnosed as suffering from a condition of existential isolation and moral Angst. Both thinkers make clear the extent to which rational calculation as an orientation to conduct are fundamental to capitalism’s ‘mode of life.’ And both make clear the roots of this abstraction in the liberal ontology which falsely separates the individual and the social, with the result that ‘society’ – and common bonds, ties, and purposes - becomes an abstraction to the individual, the mere external environment in which individual action proceeds, an environment in which all that exists outside of the discrete individual is merely a means to personal ends. The old forms of self-control and self-discipline come to be replaced by new forms of conduct both empower and constrain the modern individual in novel ways, extending into the most intimate reaches of their humanity, regulating the self in ways that correspond to the external order. It is this very antinomy of the abstract categories of ‘individual’ and ‘society’ which is the locus of so many methodological debates, social problems and political problems in the modern world. This antinomy lies at the core of the liberal ontology, and is expressed as a uniquely modern perception. Hence the importance of establishing the conservative character of the core themes of the emerging discipline of sociology, in terms of a critical relation to the new forms of sociality and subjectivity constitutive of modern society.
This book is keenly concerned to indicate Mumford’s distinctive response to the sociology of capitalism, particularly in the impact of the new forms of sociation and subjectivity upon personality and community. I proceed by noting where the critical analyses of Marx, Nietzsche, and Weber converge, as well as diverge, in defining the problematic of modernity, providing a basis for responding to the key issues identified and, perhaps, for going beyond the modernity that gives rise to them.
As time passes, and the psychological and institutional ossification of capitalist modernity becomes more apparent, it seems there is more to unite Marx, Nietzsche and Weber than divides them. There remain, of course, substantial differences, particularly with respect to Marx. But, apart from philosophical differences, there is also a generational aspect to the question. Marx lived through an expanding industrial capitalism proceeding hand in hand with an expanding political democracy, promising further future democratic inroads into the power of capital. Marx died in 1883, when it could be possible to observe the increasing socialisation of the mode of production and be confident that the capital system was in the process of being superseded by a more cooperative and socialized form. Nietzsche and Weber were from the following generation, and had lived to see the rise of surrogate collectivisms taking the place of Marx’s democratic socialisation. Nietzsche was leery of the new idols of state, bureaucracy and nationalism, all of which he saw as attempts to fill the gap left by God. He died in 1900. Weber lived to witness a triumphal capitalism, its institutions firmly established, exploding in the organized barbarism of World War One. The promises of universal peace through free markets and free trade rang hollow. Weber looked at Marx’s anticipations of socialism and saw only the ‘housing of the new serfdom.’ Not that Weber thought that the capitalism of his day constituted the free society. On the contrary, he described it by the metaphor of the ‘steel hard cage,’ embracing not only the physical body but also the very subjectivity of the individual. In the Manifesto of the Communist Party, Marx argued that capitalism forces us to confront reality with ‘sober senses.’ Weber was forcing Marxists to confront the recalcitrant reality of a seemingly untranscendable modernity with ‘sober senses.’
‘Not summer’s bloom lies ahead of us, but rather a polar night of icy darkness and hardness, no matter which group may triumph externally now.’
Weber, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology 128
Note Weber’s reference to the irrelevance of external triumph – the world which both sides in class struggle are aiming to win is actually unwinnable in being outside of human comprehension and control. That brings us back to the question of the forms of sociation and subjectivity within the mode of life, the internal (self-)mastery that Lewis Mumford was keenly concerned to emphasize.
Born nearly half a century after Marx, Weber lived through a rapidly maturing capitalist order and had much less grounds for optimism for future transitions than Marx had. Weber experienced the capitalist order not as a staging-post on the road to the flourishing of each and all but as an accomplished institutional fact that proceeded ‘without regard to persons.’ Weber’s own view of capitalism was deeply ambivalent, if not completely gloomy, then certainly not celebratory (although it did have apologetic features in rendering capitalist social forms ‘rational.’) He knew well that the capitalism he defended was in the process of transcending itself, overwhelming humanity with the pathos of means enlarged to replace ends, and extending autonomy-impairing and denying structures throughout society. He analysed those processes extensively. Whilst Weber is considered to have presented the bourgeois response to Marx, in an important respect his critique of capitalism as a life-denying force confirms Marx’s critique of the capital system as a determinism and a dehumanisation. In the final pages of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism Weber denounces capitalism as an economy that determines the lives of each and all with ‘irresistible force.’ Weber goes further on capital’s inhumanism:
In fact, the summum bonum of this ethic, the earning of more and more money, combined with the strict avoidance of all spontaneous enjoyment of life, is above all completely devoid of any eudaemonistic, not to say hedonistic, admixture. It is thought of so purely as an end in itself, that from the point of view of the happiness of, or utility to, the single individual, it appears entirely transcendental and entirely irrational. Man is dominated by the making of money, by acquisition as the ultimate purpose of his life. Economic acquisition is no longer subordinated to man as the means for the satisfaction of his material needs. This reversal of what we should call the natural relationship, so irrational from a naive point of view, is evidently as definitely a leading principle of capitalism as it is foreign to all peoples not under capitalistic influence.
Weber 1974:53
Indeed, Weber’s criticism of capitalism is even more total than Marx’s, in that Weber lived to see what to Marx was only beginning to take form. Where Marx saw the potential for the socialised cooperative mode of production, Weber saw the enormous, seemingly intractable, power of capitalism and its institutions and structures. Weber died in 1920, with a deep pessimism for the future. He greeted the Russian Revolution with foreboding, seeing his prediction that Marx’s ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ would take form only as the ‘dictatorship of the officials’ coming true, much to his consternation. Living more than four decades longer than Marx, Weber could extend the critique of modernity beyond capitalism to encompass socialism as well, both as thoroughly rationalized forms.
Marshall Berman described Marx as ‘perhaps the first and greatest of modernists,’ and his Communist Manifesto as ‘the archetype of a century of modernist manifestos and movements to come.’ (1982: 129 89). ‘All that is solid melts into air,’ wrote Marx in the Manifesto. The question is precisely to specify the social forms and conditions of any resolidification. That is precisely Mumford’s concern. But it is a concern that has to address the key features of capitalist modernity as a rationalistic desolidarisation, as revealed most clearly by Marx and Weber.
Marx’s critical analysis of capitalism is characterised by two central themes. In the first instance, Marx draws attention to the profoundly revolutionary character of capitalism. Marx makes clear the extent to which the world ushered in by capital is fundamentally different from all that has gone before. The fundamental transformation effected by capital without precedence in terms of its speed and comprehensiveness. ‘All that is holy is profaned,’ writes Marx, in a refrain that was repeated in various ways by other pioneer social theorists (hence Nisbet’s claim that the emerging discipline of sociology established in more scientific form key conservative themes, an important point when it comes to establishing precisely the nature of Lewis Mumford’s own response to the problems of modernity). Capitalism creates a form of society – and personality – that is qualitatively distinct from any of those societies which came before it. ‘Only the capitalist production of commodities,’ Marx writes in Capital, ‘revolutionizes .. the entire economic structure of society in a manner eclipsing all previous epochs.’ (Marx 1878: 37). It does so, moreover, continually, ‘the bourgeoisie – for the first time in human history – makes its revolution permanent.’ (1848: 487).
The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.
Marx MCP Rev1848 1973: 70
This sense of the fundamental revolutionary newness of the world replacing the old order is present in all the ‘classical’ works of the pioneer sociologies. The discipline of sociology was forged out of the convulsions unleashed by the French and Industrial Revolutions. Capitalist modernity is the object of enquiry around which sociology as an academic discipline came to be organized. This is apparent in the sharp contrasts which constitute the very essence of all the important sociological theories of the nineteenth and early twentieth-century. To mention just a few here, there is Maine’s contrast between status and contract, Spencer’s military and industrial societies, Durkheim’s mechanical and organic solidarity, Tonnies’ Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, Weber’s traditionalism and rationalization, Simmel’s monetized and non-monetized economies. Robert Nisbet’s view that sociology as a discipline emerged as a giving of systematic scientific form to key conservative themes with respect to community, status, authority and the sacred gains strength when one comes to see these contrasts in terms of ‘past and present.’ Typologies and theories which assert the radical distinctiveness of modernity from the world that preceded it are the stock-in-trade of sociological thought, and Mumford’s own opposition of the organic and the mechanical is a variant of that very theme. But with this crucial difference – Mumford locates the rationalization of the modern world in historical processes that reach back much further than capitalist relations. That’s an important point that gives Mumford a distinctiveness with respect to the pioneer sociologists. For Anthony Giddens, ‘the world in which we live today certainly differs more from that in which human beings have lived for the vast bulk of their history than whatever differences have separated human societies at any previous period’ (Giddens 1981: 165; Sayer 1990). Mumford resists such stupendous statements of modern hubris by emphasizing continuities over a longer time period, as well as the radical discontinuities of the modern world. A crucial aspect of Mumford’s response to the problematic of modernity established by Marx, Nietzsche, and Weber lies in the way he draws upon resources older than modernity.
At this moment in history, the future of modernity – of human civilization and even the existence of the human species itself – is looking very precarious indeed. The question we need to ask is whether modernity is an irrevocable process. Marx places the focus upon specific social relations unfolding in history. His critical concern is with an alienated system of product and the way that this divorced society from the sources of life. For Mumford, human beings are also story-telling beings. By rendering the social forms that Marx condemned as alien ‘rational,’ Weber renders our predicament permanent. In effect, we are trapped by narratives of our own making. Except that is not the nature of narratives. We have it within us, Mumford argues, to create new stories to live by. Against the assertion of such cultural creativity, Marx and Weber would point to institutional and structural constraints which are not modified and altered merely by the power of the word. But Mumford is important in other respects. His historical focus affords him norms and standards which exist outside of modernity. He examines the past with an eye for discerning those forms and practices which could serve as models for reconstruction.
What is distinctive about Marx is the way he insists upon capital as the demiurge of the modern world – it is capital that makes modernity modern. Capitalism is ‘the general light tingeing all other colours and modifying them in its special quality,’ a ‘special ether determining the specific gravity of everything found in it,’ ‘the economic power that dominates everything in modern society’ (Marx 1857: 43-4). For Marx, capitalism is modernity and modernity capitalism. ‘It is only capital which creates bourgeois society,’ Marx writes in the Grundrisse, and it is bourgeois society which makes ‘all previous stages [of society] seem merely local developments of humanity and idolatry of nature.’ In Capital, Marx writes that the ‘world’s history’ is comprised in the meeting in the market place of the free labourer and the capitalist (Marx 1867: 170). Indeed, capitalism has ‘produced world history for the first time.’ (Marx and Engels GI 1846: 73; cf 49-51).
Marx identified all the grand themes of modern sociology – industrialization, urbanization, individualization, state formation, secularization, rationalization. Marx highlighted the high road of modernity, pointing to the future communist society. In the first instance, though, he exposed modernity’s darker face: the insecurity of modern life, the transitory and ephemeral nature of monetarist ties, the disintegration of community, the anomic condition isolated, rootless individuals, the susceptibility of such individuals to the ideological surrogates of the ‘illusory community.’ Nietzsche would warn of the new idols coming to fill the gap left by God, Weber of the ‘disenchantment’ of the world, ‘mechanized petrification,’ and the ‘iron cage’ of an enveloping rationality, and an instrumentalism in which means become enlarged to take the place of true ends.
Mumford addresses all of these themes in his writings, and he does so in a way that is unique. As a non-academic, Mumford is in the subversive position of being both in and against the sociological tradition. He may make claims and advance statements that to experts in the various fields are unwarranted, and his histories may lack the explanatory power of those with more precise and carefully honed conceptual tools. At the same time, Mumford the artist-ethicist-essayist has the insight, vision and imagination to see those things which those more impressed with what can’t be said are inclined to miss. He takes in a much broader scope and, in examining past forms, is disinclined to see modernity as a done deal.
Nostalgia
With a focus on the radical novelty of capitalist modernity, it is perhaps inevitable that the contrast between ‘past and present’ should give the impression of a modern nostalgia for what Peter Laslett described as ‘the world we have lost.’ (1973) I don’t think this is quite the nostalgia that modernists may take it to be. After all, the contrast between the natural society revealed by the discoveries of the eighteenth centuries and contemporary civilisation was established to shed critical light on the institutions and practices of existing culture, not as a serious attempt to return to a primitive society. The loss of community and of the warm, affective ties and intimate authority of traditional society was, however, keenly felt, even by a revolutionary such as Marx. Marx thus writes of ‘the originally not despotic … but rather satisfying and agreeable bonds of the group, of the primitive community’ (Marx 1881a 39). Even in projecting potentialities for new communal forms in the future society, Marx could envision humanity’s salvation as lying in ‘the return of modern societies to the “archaic” type of communal property,’ even adding that ‘we should not, then, be too frightened by the word “archaic”’ (Marx 1881b: 107). Whether we consider this an example of the nostalgic frame in Marx’s attempt to outline the contours of communism, or of what Nisbet describes as the centrality of conservative themes in the formulation of modern sociology, Marx was not alone in contrasting the disruption of modern society with the seeming Arcadia of past society: Emile Durkheim’s proposals for resurrecting the medieval guilds may be considered in this light (1984, Pref to 2nd edition; 1957), as well as the work of William Morris, flourishing later in the form of Guild Socialism. If much of this work sounds like Hegel’s Sittlichkeit, we should remember Marx’s criticism of Hegel here for having offered a medieval solution to a modern problem. Whether or not we consider Marx’s criticism of Hegel here to be fair – I think not – it is clear that Marx is very much looking forwards. Indeed, if anything, Marx is too dismissive of pre-modern social forms, little realising their potential to be revalued as new communal forms. That said, Marx is a substantial figure, anticipating pretty much every key theme in the fin de siècle sociological analyses of modernity and its multiple interconnected ills. Any thinker who expects to be taken seriously has to come to terms with Marx.
In like manner, nostalgia is not a term that can adequately be applied to Lewis Mumford. Mumford expressed his affinities for the Neolithic village, for the medieval city, and for the Golden Day of New England township democracy. He also sought what he called a ‘usable past.’ That is, Mumford was not engaged in any reactionary attempts to return to an irrevocable past, but to discern in that past elements that could be reappropriate and reconfigured on the terrain of the present. This is not nostalgia, but an attempt to release time from its ossification in an eternal present. In reclaiming the past as a vital tradition, human beings could recover a sense of the future as something more than the present enlarged.
The key question concerns the extent to which so wide-ranging an analysis of all that is new and airy in modern society can be grounded in an understanding of the capital relation. Marx offers by far the most ambitious and sophisticated attempt to do this, and thus forms an appropriate starting point for an enquiry such as this.
Following Marx is Nietzsche and ‘the death of God,’ by which is meant the collapse of an overarching moral framework, a framework by which the social existence of human beings had been oriented for centuries. Marx, arguably, took this framework for granted, as did most others. There was a presumption that the ideas and principles of morality could retain the force they once had, even without their grounding in a belief in God. Nietzsche was concerned to expose this as a delusion: he thus declared the emptiness of modern morality – the moral terms that people were using lacked content and critical purchase. For Nietzsche, the death of God changed everything, with cherished liberal values losing their metaphysical grounds and supports, rendering modern moral theory empty and hypocritical in practice. For Nietzsche, liberals, socialists and democrats were advancing moral arguments in support of equality and justice that could not survive the death of the God upon which those principles depended. For Nietzsche, the modern world was characterised by nihilism, a world without objective and transcendent truths and standards, only perspectives beyond good and evil.
Weber put the insights of Marx and Nietzsche together to give us what remains the classic definition of modernity.
It is not too much of an exaggeration to claim that all later sociological reflections on the condition of (post)modernity amount to an extended debate with the ghosts of Marx, Nietzsche and Weber.
What makes Mumford so interesting a subject is that his analyses are so wide-ranging as to take in the broad sweep of human history. Of course, an explanation so general risks achieving breadth at the expense of depth, telling a story that is richly detailed in delivering certain lessons, but which, when tested at key points, lacks real explanatory force. Marx focused specifically upon social relations in history. Mumford is less precise, but takes in a rich array of forces in reaching back further than modern capitalism.
There is more at stake here than a critique of capitalism. The critical concerns of Nietzsche and Weber indicate a deeper disenchantment with the rationalising processes of modernity itself. Where Marx located the ills of the new world in an alienated system of production, Weber identified such alien forms as ‘rational,’ untranscendable. Far from being a coherent alternative to the capital system, socialism would amount to a generalisation of an instrumental and bureaucratic rationality over the whole of society through the agency of the state. Marx, following Hegel, identified lines of development which led to socialism through the high road of modernity (Dallmayr 1994). Weber thought such lines closed off. An acute analyst of modernity and modernization, Weber was, in David Frisby’s words, ‘a determined anti-modernist’ (Frisby 1985: 2). Weber has been described as an agonistic liberal, but his agony is such as to make clear the extent to which liberal values and principles are increasingly contradicted by liberal institutions. That contradiction lies at the heart of the liberal ontology. In many respects, Weber barely counts as liberal at all, succumbing even, in his power politics, to the temptation of community and God substitutes that both he and Nietzsche warned of. It should come as no surprise that in 'Science as a vocation,' a wrenching cry from the heart in face of the uncertainties of the modern condition, Weber recalls both Nietzsche and Baudelaire. Weber delivered this address at Munich University in 1918, the final year of a world war that had given full savage expression to the unreason lurking in the dark core of modern rationalization. Those seeking comfort in the true, the good and the beautiful will find no comfort in Weber; he had absorbed Nietzsche’s lessons well. 'Since Nietzsche', Weber comments, 'we realize that something can be beautiful, not only in spite of the aspect in which it is not good, but rather in that very aspect.’ (Weber 1970: 148). Marx, of course, had identified the contradictory dynamics of the capital system so as to point a path beyond present crises to future resolution. Weber, however, is here forcing us to confront the intractable nature of modernity’s paradoxes, contradictions not amenable to dialectical reasoning; there is no choice here between either/or, merely a blunt insistence that we have no option but to accept both/and. Such is the nature of modern life, forever the best of times and worst of times, only on an ever increasing – and unsustainable – scale. Weber saw the deep ambivalence built into modernity from the first, and saw it as permanent. The ‘disenchantment of the world’ through scientific advance, intellectualisation and rationalization involves not merely an emancipation from magic and superstition issuing in freedom, but also an irretrievable loss that leaves the individual alone in a meaningless, valueless universe. It is for this reason that I single out Nietzsche and Weber as thinkers who understood the true depth of modernity’s psychic, moral and intellectual as well as socio-economic transformation. Both thinkers are involved in something much more profound than a nostalgia for and conservative revaluation of a lost, idealized, and irretrievable past. Both knew that past to have gone. Both were worried about what could replace that past. Both feared that human beings, in their desperate craving for meaning and community, would come to succumb to the totalitarian temptation of ersatz collectivist fantasies and surrogate communities. I will, therefore, be concerned to examine the conditions – social, intellectual, psychic and moral - for the recovery of personality and of community established by Lewis Mumford.
I will also be interested in examining Mumford’s views on religion. Given that, in the final stages of his thought, he was arguing openly for a conversion that was modelled on great religious transformations past, Mumford’s specific understanding of religion merits extensive treatment. The consideration of religion needs to be set in the context of Nietzsche’s announcement of ‘the death of God.’ By this, Nietzsche wasn’t merely declaring the non-existence of God, but was exposing the emptiness of modern moral theories. The overarching moral framework by which human beings had formerly oriented and organised their existence had dissolved. Any conversion in these conditions was charged with the task of reconstituting that framework. ‘Only a god can still save us,’ declared Heidegger in one of his last interviews in 1976. By that god, Heidegger meant not a recovery of the old transcendent God but a metaphysical reconstruction or, more accurately, deconstruction, finding that place beyond metaphysics from which a genuine humanism could be recovered. Mumford’s work on the idolum, on the reconstruction of a worldview, falls very much into this category. Mumford’s affirmation of life also stands in line of descent from Nietzsche’s joyous science. The question is – is such ground strong enough to support a new religious commitment and conversion? Weber sets the key tests here and demands an answer that is clear, coherent and cogent.
Here, we may compare and contrast Marx and Weber again. Early in his career, in 1843, Marx declared that the ‘criticism of religion is the beginning of all criticism.’ Marx is not dismissive of religion, declaring it to be ‘the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world ... the spirit of spiritless conditions.’ In identifying religion to be ‘the opium of the people,’ Marx makes it clear that if religion is indeed a drug, then it is one that is self-administered, not a ruling class invention and trick to dupe the masses. The existence of religion points to an inner need and craving that existing society frustrates and diverts. Marx, then, can well understand that any abolition of God and religion that does nothing to change the inhumanism and oppression of prevailing society cannot but lead humans to search for fantastical surrogates. Marx thus demands a profound social transformation in order to abolish the inverted conditions that generate the need for illusions: ‘to abolish religion as the illusory happiness of the people is to demand their real happiness.’ Marx, then, has a positive conception of disillusionment through not merely reason – he is beyond Enlightenment education of passive minds - but active social transformation. For Marx, theory and practice, reason and action, are allied. But his view of rationalization as positive is clear all the same: the criticism of religion thus 'disillusions man to make him think and act and shape his reality like a man who has been disillusioned and has come to reason, so that he will revolve around himself’ (Marx 1843d: 175-6). In a world without God, human beings are charged with the task of taking morality into their own hands and living creatively as gods. This was essentially Nietzsche’s argument, too, one which avoids debates between theism and atheism to emphasise the affirmation of life. It is the view which, I argue, Mumford also adopted.
Weber’s understanding – influenced by Nietzsche – is much darker than Marx’s. Marx’s disillusionment leading to the rational society was what Weber called ‘disenchantment,’ involving a much more problematical notion of reason. For Weber, the disenchantment of the world through scientific and intellectual advance involved the stripping of the world of any sense of it possessing an inherent value, meaning and purpose. What Mumford came later to condemn as a ‘purposeless materialism’ has its source here. And 'reason,’ far from being necessarily emancipatory, lay at the root of the problem.
Weber would have been hugely sceptical – frankly fearful - of notions of a mass conversion coming to rescue modern society from its internal intractable paradoxes. Even if couched in the non-religious terms of ‘life,’ Weber would have considered such a commitment as deeply religious, and all the more dangerous and delusional in being in denial of its religious nature. No less than Marx, Weber would have considered the espousal of religion – or any surrogate for religion - to be inadmissible in a world suffused with the rationality of science. Science, claims Weber, reveals that we are alone in a universe without meaning, purpose, value, direction, and end. Such a claim, of course, is one that Mumford is concerned to contest, but his concern to establish an alternative to reductionist, mechanistic science was one that was very much ahead of its time, and out of kilter with the dominant conceptions of science in his day.
Weber expressed a certain condescending sympathy for those who, unable ‘to bear the fate of the times,’ fled the existential isolation that is the inescapable condition of the individual in modern time to return to or remain within the church. He nevertheless considered such an escape as an affront to reason, an 'intellectual sacrifice,' tantamount to moral cowardice. (Weber 1970: 155). As he frankly put it, ‘redemption from the rationalism and intellectualism of science is the fundamental presupposition of living in unity with the divine' (Weber 1970: 142). Science is inescapably acidic in this respect. Any social world established in accordance with the principles of scientific rationality is necessarily corrosive of religion as anything other than a vehicle of mystical escape from rationalism. Weber predicted that human beings, unable to meet the challenge and assume the responsibility for living in accordance with values they set themselves, would attempt such an escape. Weber, like Nietzsche before him, feared the impotent masses being inclined to join together and indulge in myriad collectivist fantasies – political as well as social. ‘Man ought not to know more of a thing than he can creatively live up to,’ wrote Nietzsche. Human beings should only have such power that they can creatively live up to. ‘All men desire to know,’ wrote Aristotle in the opening to the Metaphysics. Creatively living up to our essential power implies a philosophical anthropology based on the Aristotelian distinction between what man is and what he has the potential to be. In Nietzsche’s hands, the affirmation of such potentiality is a call to the individual to eschew collectivist illusions and communities, throw off not merely God but also the theological assumptions and practices attendant upon God, and refuse all surrogates, and live life as a self-affirming, creative, joyous being. In Aristotle’s hands, there is much less emphasis on the individual and a greater recognition of the fact that human beings are social beings, requiring constitutive ties to others and to moral commitments if they are to individuate themselves.
Weber was tough-minded enough to refuse to sacrifice his intellect. The same with Nietzsche. Weber suffered a nervous breakdown that left him unable to work for long periods. Nietzsche went insane. The strain of living alone in a meaningless world is one that even the toughest find intolerable. Maybe Nietzsche and Weber set the benchmark far too high. I will be interested to recover Mumford’s far more human and sympathetic approach to religion and reason in this respect, an approach that is more in tune with the psychic truth, therapy and healing of religion. Mumford rejected the reductionist conception of science, too. Weber gives us a set of false, and impossible, choices.
Weber endorses the value of science ‘from precisely the standpoint that hates intellectualism as the worst devil.’ Weber thus seeks ‘to settle with this devil... to see the devil's ways to the end in order to realize his power and his limitations' and 'not take to flight before him as so many do nowadays' (Weber 1970: 152). Weber thus eschews surrogate communities and substitute religions and mass conversions to endorse the value of science, a science, moreover, which is ‘ethically neutral.’ Mumford would see in such claims an apology for the technocratic neutrality that is the intellectual and psychic preparation for entry into the Megamachine. In truth, Weber was seeking precisely to avoid that very thing by preserving the sphere of value judgement free from the encroachment of scientific imperialism. ‘An attitude of moral indifference,’ Weber expresses forthrightly, ‘has no connection with scientific "objectivity"' (Weber 1949: 60). Weber considers scientific rationality to be the most efficient technical means of understanding the world, including the ‘devil’ of rationalization itself, but as no more than that. He says this in full awareness of the exacting nature of having to live in such a society.
Science, Weber makes clear, concerns 'the purely practical and technical’ and has no transcendent meaning beyond these things Science is a means of establishing the facts of a case, and nothing more than that. Those who seek to ground a deeper meaning or good on the basis of science and what it reveals of the world are delusional – there is no substitute for God and religion here. The 'former illusions' that science might be the ‘way to true being’ (the ancient Greeks), the ‘way to true art’ and thereby the 'way to true nature' (the Renaissance), the 'way to true God' (Protestantism) or the ‘way to true happiness,’ a peculiarly modernist fallacy, believed in only by ‘a few big children in university chairs,’ have all been dispelled (Weber 1970: 139-43). There is, further, a ‘logical gulf’ between the realm of facts and the realm of values, a division full of the most profound existential implications with respect to finding meaning and value in an objectively meaningless and valueless world (Weber 1949: 51-63). Interestingly, Weber quotes the Christian anarchist Tolstoy here, for whom science ‘is meaningless because it gives no answer to our question, the only question important for us: "What shall we do and how shall we live?'" (1970:143). At the most, science may provide the empirical knowledge that individuals can take into account when determining the practical means of attaining certain ends or assessing the consequences of striving for those ends. Science may therefore serve those who eschew an 'absolute ethic' of ultimate ends as intellectually unworthy to come to choose to live by an 'ethic of responsibility’ (1970:118f.). But science is neutral on ends, and can saying nothing about the content of such an ethic. Eichmann took his stand on the efficiency of his railway timetables. Science can serve any end but cannot establish or evaluate these ends themselves. We cannot ‘"refute scientifically" the ethic of the Sermon on the Mount,' declares Weber (1970: 148). Science, in fine, can say nothing on questions of value, significance, and meaning, which means that it is silent on precisely those things which, in the view of Weber, gives all those things constituting human life and action their meaning.
Weber is well aware of the irony, not to mention the tragedy, of his position. That position would seem to leave us with the realm of values, from within which it is possible to invest the world with meaning. But even here, Weber reveals a narrowing of possibilities. The problem is that science, in the corrosive nature of its very rationality, undermines precisely those ethical standpoints from which value is capable of being derived. This applies above all to religious ethics, but it isn’t limited to religion – morality dissolves into a series of irreducible value judgements, with no objective standard available to differentiate between completing claims. Each is free to choose their own god, or their own demon. Empirically, science and technology demonstrate that 'there are no mysterious incalculable forces that come into play ... one can, in principle, master all things by calculation' (1970: 139). Logically, reason shows the foundations of all values to be arbitrary. It is the isolated individual alone who is charged with the responsibility 'to decide which is God for him and which is the devil' (1970: 148). This choice is not an easy one; without transcendental bases of objective value, there are no criteria available that make it possible to choose rationally between ultimate ends. The ultimate irony is that this applies to science too. Given the split between the realms of fact and the realms of value, the value of science and scientific reason is left in the paradoxical position of being dependent on a non-rational, subjective, and ultimately arbitrary realm. In fine, in a thoroughly rationalized world, all that gives meaning, point and purpose to human life becomes irremediably contingent, transitory, and fugitive.
The disenchanted world is a world without objectively ascertainable ground for one’s personal conviction. To call for conversion in these circumstances is tantamount to a call for re-enchantment – something which Weber rules impossible. In disenchanted conditions, Weber argues, the individual will tend to act only on his or her own aesthetic impulse and arbitrary convictions, convictions that cannot be communicated in the eventuality; those unable even to act on their own convictions, in Nietzsche’s view the great majority, or the ‘last men who invented happiness’ à la Nietzsche, lead the life of a ‘cog in a machine.’ For Weber, these two images of the permeation of the world by an instrumental rationality and of the purposeless agitation of subjective values constituted the single problem of modernity, impelling the inertia of modern individuals who fail in their responsibility to take principled moral action. The ‘sensualists without heart’ and the ‘specialists without spirit’ show two sides of the same problem of the disempowered modern self.
The recovery of personality and community and the challenge of ethical conversion bringing about a mass behavioural and civilizational change is confronted by immense institutional and psychic obstacles. Rational disenchantment serves to subvert merely the possibility of the old religious framework which once bestowed transcendental meaning on everyday actions, but also the possibility of establishing any kind of substitute for it, religious or non-religious. This was Nietzsche’s point about the death of God entailing the collapse of an overarching and common framework capable of binding all individuals through notions of transcendent or objective standards. To Nietzsche and Weber, this dissolution of a shared moral framework was an irretrievable loss – the modern condition is defined by a contingency that makes the subjective choice that the basis of all moral action in the disenchanted world arbitrary.
And yet, human beings must still live with meaning, if that life is to count as truly human. Weber puts the stark question first put by the ancients: ‘Which of the warring gods shall we serve?’ (Weber 1970: 155). For all that the absence of rational criteria renders it impossible to answer that question other than arbitrarily, that question assumes a new urgency in modern conditions. 'Our civilization destines us to realize more clearly these struggles again, after our eyes have been blinded for a thousand years' by 'the grandiose moral fervour of Christian ethics.’ Today, Weber continues, 'many old gods ascend from their graves; they are disenchanted and hence take the form of impersonal forces. They strive to gain power over our lives and again they resume their eternal struggle with one another'. What is so 'hard for modern man,' Weber claims, is meeting the challenge of 'how to measure up to workaday existence' in the disenchanted world (Weber 1970: 149). Weber’s own way of measuring up to this challenge is the ethic of responsibility, which he sets out in 'Politics as a vocation.’ The essence of this ethic is that 'one has to give an account of the foreseeable results of one's action' (Weber 1970: 120). But Weber is under no illusions that such an ethic will actually lead to a happy, meaningful and fulfilled life:
'Not summer's bloom lies ahead of us, but rather a polar night of icy darkness and hardness, no matter which group may triumph externally now. Where there is nothing, not only the Kaiser but the proletarian has lost his rights.'
Weber 1970: 128
‘Where there is nothing,’ by which Weber means there is no God, no transcendent standards, no objective framework. Where none of these things exist, the external triumph of individuals, classes and social and political movement is empty, a mere power play with no overall meaning. There is no possibility of bringing the internal ordering of the person and external ordering of the world in tune, since the world is objectively valueless and meaningless. And since the world is without any immanent objective good or purpose, individual moral choices are arbitrary and without content.
And here we see that the very thing which Nietzsche and Weber feared the most – the rise and rule of new idols and their worship in surrogate religions and collective fantasies – becomes all but inevitable. Humanity and humaneness are forced into retreat in a world under the sway of the impersonal deities of modernity – state, bureaucracy, capital, commodities, money, nationalism, war, between them, Marx, Nietzsche, and Weber showed how modernity had the full house when it came to totalizing representations, collectivising fantasies and surrogate communities. For Weber, 'the ultimate and most sublime values have retreated from public life either into the transcendental realm of mystic life or into the brotherliness of direct and personal human relations.’ To repeat, all that gives meaning, point and purpose to human life becomes irremediably contingent, transitory, and fugitive in a thoroughly rationalized world. Today, Weber argues, it is 'only within the smallest and intimate circles, in personal human situations, in pianissimo, that something is pulsating that corresponds to the prophetic pneuma, which in former times swept through the great communities like a firebrand, welding them together.’ Humane values are increasingly confined and suffocated. The wider rationalized society is a mechanism without a soul. Mumford would later say some such thing. But he held out hope for an alternative through cultural change and ethical conversion. Weber would be sceptical, noting how individuals within such a society would be prone in their desperation to the temptations of ersatz religion and 'academic prophecies' of a sort capable of producing 'fanatical sects but never a genuine community' (Weber 1970: 155).
And therein lies Weber’s challenge to us – to establish the psychic, social and ethical conditions of a genuine personality and a genuine community, restoring the unity of the individual and the social in a society that has falsely abstracted each from the other, and human beings from their own selves. I say that Mumford can meet this challenge, but that it is an exacting one all the same, for the reasons that Weber gives. Modernity dissolves all social and moral ties connecting each with all, and with common purposes and moral commitments greater than the self, to leave us with the unprecedented and unbearable loneliness of the discrete individual. Where once, with the Protestant reformation, there was the bleak vision of the individual alone before God, now the individual stands completely alone, facing no god at all. It is 'a godless and prophetless time,' declares Weber, and one that is perilous to the self, let alone the soul (Weber 1970: 153). Marx saw human emancipation in general as a result of disillusionment through critical reason. Weber sees religion illusion as being swept away not by such emancipatory 'criticism' but by a thoroughgoing rationalization of life that leaves us alone in a meaningless, purposeless, valueless world. The 'man' that Marx exalted as revolving around his own sun can now do no other. Marx had always presumed the social nature of human beings to give us an intersubjectivity rather than a world dissolved into pure subjectivity. But in a world in which each individual is charged with choosing their own gods or devils, the shared common language and commitment to common ends is impossible. There is nothing but a self that revolves around itself. Novelist Milan Kundera draws on Nietzsche to emphasize the ‘unbearable lightness of being’ at the core of that self. Kundera’s words are challenging:
‘This reconciliation with Hitler reveals the profound moral perversity of a world that rests essentially on the nonexistence of return, for in this world everything is pardoned in advance and therefore everything cynically permitted.’
Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
What this means is that in a world where all values become equivalent, through the absence of an objective or transcendent standard enabling evaluation, then 'everything is pardoned in advance and therefore everything cynically permitted.’ Mumford would not be surprised that it took a figure from literature to break through the impasse of academic theorising. Kundera’s view seems a response to Nietzsche’s amor fati, the view that we should choose to live our lives as we would want to live through all eternity, the eternal recurrence. For Kundera, however, if everything in the world occurs only the once, then we cannot pass judgement on if. Everything that we experience in the one life we have would thus have a certain lightness of being. Only if everything were to recur would life attain weight and importance, and only then should we feel it possible to assume responsibility for our actions. And with this distinctively modern disenchantment, Weber takes his leave of us, deciding the issue clearly in favour of Nietzsche against Marx, but without much hope by way of Nietzsche’s joyous affirmation of life:
for civilized man death has no meaning. It has none because the individual life of civilized man, placed into an infinite 'progress', according to its own imminent meaning should never come to an end; for there is always a further step ahead of one who stands in the march of progress. And no man who comes to die stands upon the peak which lies in infinity. Abraham, or some peasant of the past, died 'old and satiated with life' because he stood in the organic cycle of life; because his life, in terms of its meaning and on the eve of his days, had given to him what life had to offer; because for him there remained no puzzles he might wish to solve; and therefore he could have had enough of life. Whereas civilized man, placed in the midst of the continuous enrichment of culture by ideas, knowledge, and problems, may become 'tired of life' but not 'satiated with life'. He catches only the most minute part of what the life of the spirit brings forth ever anew, and what he seizes is always something provisional and not definitive, and therefore death for him is a meaningless occurrence. And because death is meaningless, civilized life as such is meaningless; by its very 'progressiveness' it gives death the imprint of meaninglessness.
Weber 1970: 139-40
And that leaves us in a world where, as Weber puts it, there is ‘nothing,’ a world of the transitory, the contingent, and the fugitive. The ethic of responsibility is thus as empty as the world with which it seeks to deal.
The sea of faith withdraws, leaving us alone and isolated, having to choose between which confused alarms of struggle and flight to respond to, which of the ignorant armies to join:
The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
Matthew Arnold, Dover Beach
Where there is nothing, then there is nothing to know and conform to, no objective standards to meet, no creative power or hope to live up to. There is merely a power play between subjective choosers whose choices are entirely arbitrary. ‘Where there is nothing,’ says Weber, then ‘not only the Kaiser but the proletarian has lost his rights.' In an objectively valueless and meaningless world, it makes no difference which group may triumph externally’ (Weber 1970: 128). The death of God and the disenchantment of the world thus engender a collective normative void that demands an existentialist commitment and individual responsibility on our part. (L. Embree ed., Schutzian Social Science (1999) p. 110-1). The problem is that the external devaluation of the objective world cannot but, in time, lead to an internal incoherence. In a ‘godless and prophetless time’ the individual is alone, charged with the responsibility for finding meaning as a matter of existential choice. The problem is that such choices are empty and cannot but be arbitrary. The result is a world of objective and subjective nihilism, a moral relativism that degenerates into a moral indifference.
The promise of a world without God and religion may seem emancipatory. It is a promise of a world in which individuals revel in the joy of being alive. That’s the call to a future state of being that I read in Marx, in Nietzsche and, indeed, in Mumford. So why the bleakness and desolation as the sea of faith retreats? Because that emancipatory vision is one which, in large part, has already been realized. We live in a world in which liberalism is the dominant culture, pervading government, law and the institutional fabric as well as the social and moral infrastructure. It is a world which asserts the moral and ontological ultimacy of the individual, a world in which the individual is considered a self-possessing being free from the encroachment of all manner of collective restraints and codes. Mumford makes his views plain in Values for Survival, where he argues that emancipation from the old inhibitions would make sense only in a sense of fulfilled, self-determining, autonomous human beings (which I take to be his end, as well as that of Nietzsche with his Overman, and Weber with his notion of the Herrenvolk, and Marx too). We do not live in such a condition of fulfilment, meaning that the dissolution of such inhibitions could issue only in a society of egoistic self-assertion in which individual succumb to immediate desire and inclination. Mumford’s view is profoundly conservative on this point, and severely critical of liberalism to its very philosophical and ontological core.
Human beings are in the process of losing the world based upon God and are struggling with the problem of assuming morality into their own hands, discovering that a self-legislating, self-referential reason lacks the binding force of the old transcendent standards. Marx and Nietzsche (and Mumford with them) thought we could move forward and embrace an ethic of an affirmative, sensuous materialism, a truly purposive materialism beyond the objectively valueless, meaningless wasteland of reductionist science. Weber sees us trapped in a godless and prophetless time. Mumford saw the possibilities for fall and collapse. At the end of After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre drew an analogy with the Fall of Rome, only this time the barbarians are not at the gate but are inside the walls and ruling us. He ends with a call to create local communities of virtue, keeping the virtues alive for a time when it will be possible to regenerate civilisation from the base upwards. The view savours a great deal of Mumford’s case for abstention, withdrawal and conversion in face of the Megamachine. That critics think MacIntyre’s view inadequate and implausible in face of the institutional and systemic power ranged against it should give some indication of the scale of the task before Mumford and all who would seek to recover his thought. We live under the shadow of a modernity revealed by Nietzsche and Weber.
It is a bleak vision, but one which is impossible to dismiss with a century of world war, civilised barbarism, genocide and mass murder behind us and a future of catastrophic climate change in front of us. The complacent faith in progress through individual liberty, free trade, free markets, human rights and economic growth has utterly dissolved everywhere other than in a liberalism grown sterile, abstract and decadent. Patrick Deneen’s book Why Liberalism Failed makes it plain that liberalism is not a plucky outsider seeking to further emancipation against the old authorities, but actually is the dominant ideology. Liberalism won, and the liberalism of the right, in the form of economic deregulation, has given us financial and economic crisis and social injustice and inequality, whilst the liberalism of the left has given us an ethical and cultural relativism along with top-down bureaucratic government that has unmoored individuals socially and morally whilst entrenching and extending existing divisions at the expense of increasingly unsustainable levels of expenditure. The result is a phoney war between a ‘small government’ liberalism of the right and a ‘big government’ liberalism of the left. Neither side is able to ever claim victory in this war, precisely because the parameters of the ‘debate’ – liberal institutions and values - remain unchallenged and changed.
Mumford’s broad and ambitious analysis of the emergence of the Megamachine gains a more specific sociological focus in the work of Marx and Weber, who narrow the problem down to the contradictory dynamics of capitalism, modernity and liberalism. Marx saw such dynamics as transcendable through a dialectical sleight-of-hand, the old Hegelian ruse of history; Weber seemed to think them intractable. The clash arises from the way in which the realm of fact and the realm of value have become separated, with an ‘unbridgeable gulf’ between them keeping them apart. No longer is it possible to locate the ideal in the real and its unfolding, as in Aristotle’s purposeful materialist immanence or Hegel’s dialectics. Here is the key battleground in the recovery of the future from Weber’s purportedly untranscendable present. And it is a matter of great significance that Lewis Mumford paid close attention to the separation of facts and values and sought ways to close that gap. Impossible, says Weber. Necessary, I say, if we are to escape the tyranny and violence of megamechanical violence analysed by both Weber and Mumford.
Weber is painfully aware of the ironies of his position, extolling the virtues of science and the advance of scientific rationality, whilst noting the dissolution of all that he held gave human life meaning and value. Weber thus noted the tragic clash between those qualities we prize most in scientific discourse - objectivity, universality, logic, consistency, simplicity, systematicity, quantifiability, precision, unambiguity and a certain aesthetic elegance - and the way in which the institutional and systemic imperatives upon which the machines of modernity operate as new impersonal deities, confining the ‘free’ and freely choosing individual within the ‘iron cage’ and suppressing the most cherished values of autonomy, creativity, and spontaneity. On both sides of this divide, the personal, the particular, and the concrete is eliminated, expelled to the ‘irrational’ realm of ‘private life’ and rendered fugitive and contingent. The modern era, Marx noted, is ruled by abstractions. The early conservative critics of modernity made some such claim, as did Mumford in a later age. In Marx’s words are clear traces of that conservatism, (if not, for that reason, nostalgia). Marx analysed the emergence of the modern problematic in terms of a series of emancipations through which the abstract individual of bourgeois liberal thought emerged. In a manner entirely consonant with conservative voices, Marx noted that this freedom from communal, customary and personal ties served to implicate the ‘free’ individual in an objective dependency upon external social powers – capital, money, commodities:
These external relations are very far from being an abolition of “relations of dependence;” they are, rather, the dissolution of these dependency relations into a general form; they are merely the elaboration and emergence of the general foundation of the relations of personal dependence. Here also individuals come into connection with one another only in determined ways. These objective dependency relations appear in antithesis to the relations of personal dependence in such a way that “individuals are now ruled by abstractions, whereas earlier they depended on one another.”
Marx Gr 1973: 163/4
This objective dependency relation refers to the reification of social relations in becoming independent of, and entering into opposition to, the seemingly ‘free’ and independent individuals of the modern liberal order. Marx analysed this in terms of the reciprocal relations of production becoming separated from and autonomous of individuals, thus appearing as an externalised natural force independent of individuals. He located this process of abstraction in the accumulative dynamic of the capital system, something which systematically removed government and politics, society, custom, and culture, ethics, religion and nature from economic considerations and calculations on the premise that these things were interferences in the natural order.
It may well be that the capital relation is the foundation upon which this tyranny and violence of abstraction is first erected; Marx and Weber provide cogent reasons for thinking this to be true. But Weber’s point, one that Mumford also developed, is that this abstraction extends far beyond the institutions of capitalism itself, and that its rule is not ended merely by changing the title deeds on property, still less by socializing the means of production in the hands of the state power. (I have argued at length elsewhere that Marx said precisely this himself). The enduring importance of Weber’s analysis of rationalization and the bureaucratization which is its attendant feature lies in the emphasis he places on abstracting forces and tendencies which evade easy institutional capture and control. It is for this reason that Weber warned that Marx’s dictatorship of the proletariat would come to be realized as the ‘dictatorship of the officials.’ It is also for this reason that Lewis Mumford was sceptical of the state power as a vehicle of social reformation and transformation. For all the reasons that Marx gave, when disembodied and disembedded, the very forms of our sociality and subjectivity turn against us as abstract forces and institutions, within which there is no place for the values that make us human and give life meaning. This was also, of course, the message of the early conservative critics of modernity. These critics placed much more emphasis on the ties of church, faith and religion. Marx, and Nietzsche following him, continued the process of emancipation from older ties and solidarities. But here we are in Weber’s rationalized world. Whether the forward march to freedom has been arrested or merely exhausted itself is a question that decides where one lies on the spectrum that embraces the traditionalist, the conservative, the liberal, and the radical.
The point is that Weber, extends Marx’s critical analysis concerning alienation and separation, although I would make this sharp qualification – Marx always emphasised the centrality of the capital relation, capital as a relation and a process and not as a ‘thing’ to be captured and used. The same with respect to the state power. Marx insisted upon the transformation of capitalist social relations, distinguishing the capital system and the logic of capital as an altogether different order from merely the institutions of capitalism. Weber, rightly, criticised those Marxists who focused merely on the socialisation of the latter under the control of the state and noted that the result would be a generalised abstraction and bureaucratisation. Marx could have said exactly the same.
An awareness of the depths of abstraction renders any notion of an emancipatory politics deeply problematic. We are long past the age of the liberal emancipation of the individual from social, governmental and moral ties and constraints. The world we live in is a liberal world, with the forces standing in the way of individual freedom being largely generated from within the liberal institutional order. Hence Patrick Deneen’s demand that liberals come to own the problems that confront the world – for they are problems generated by a libertarian disembedding that frees the individual from collective constraints and commitments. (Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed 2018).
The political history of the past century has confirmed Weber’s deepest forebodings, with progressives in politics all too willing to strike Faustian bargains with the impersonal modern deities/devils that he and Nietzsche feared so much, notably the machines of the economic system and the state. To the extent that the very forms in which modern politics are conducted – the states, parties, ideologies, and forums of the conventional public realm - partake of the same nexus of estrangement, Faustian pacts seem unavoidable. Not for no reason was Mumford sceptical of politics. He was accused of being politically evasive. He was politically active and always worked and wrote with a specific political intent. But he was leery of existing political institutions and advocated the disempowerment of the Megamachine by way of withdrawal: he refused the Faustian bargains, and this makes him a live figure as we seek to address the modern predicament.
The conclusion to be drawn is not that human betterment is impossible. Here, Weber’s view of the untranscendability of the institutions of the modern world cease to be critical and take the form of an apologetics (MacIntyre 1981). That said, Weber’s insistence that the problems of liberal modernity run deeper than capitalism to extend to the monstrously abstracted forms and forces it has engendered. And it is in this sense that the radical novelty of the modern world is thrown into the sharpest relief of all: given its totalizing character, the crisis of modernity imperils the future of civilisation, even of the human species as such. We lack the psychic capacity to gain a true measure of the overwhelming power and violence of unbound abstraction in a disembodied and disembedded ‘free’ world. The human mind cannot handle large numbers, writes psychologist Daniel Kahneman. All we can do is stand in stunned awe at the countless millions of corpses, named and unnamed, which this age of civilized barbarism has left as its memorial, all of them human sacrifices, witting and unwitting, to one or another of those impersonal deities that Nietzsche and Weber saw as filling the gap left by the absent God. There is nothing new about war and violence, but modernity’s singular achievement here is to have wreaked destruction through the application of efficient technique and organisation, and with thoroughgoing psychological and political preparation under the sign of myriad totalizing representations by which to name and claim the lives of each and all. It is here that the ‘lightness’ of the modern autonomous subject’s being becomes only too tragically palpable, and the parlous condition of what Marx called the ‘real individual social being’ (Marx MECW 3 29) as the ‘plaything of alien forces’ is expressed in bloodshed. We gather in remembrance of the sacrifice, whereas we need most of all to throw off the power of unfettered abstraction and the way it is incarnated in the machine order. The capital system is central to this rule of abstraction, for the reasons Marx gave (Critchley 2018). The rule of the capital form is the ground upon which the other forms of estrangement arose in the modern world, establishing the template for the ‘severance’ which Weber saw as a general condition within modernity. It is this generalised separation of real human subjects from the various means of their existence that give modernity’s machines their seemingly inexorable, and actually awful, force. However, it is in his awareness of the wider mechanization of human social existence and its abstraction from the sources of life that Mumford takes the issue beyond the realm of the economic domain where capital rules. Weber’s ‘iron cage’ is, of course, merely a metaphor. Understanding this point allows us to retain hope that there is indeed a way out of the Megamachine. By emphasising culture, human beings as culturally creative beings immersed in culture, Mumford revealed the notion of the all-powerful Megamachine immune to challenge and change to be a myth. The power of initiative and creation remains with human beings as cultural beings. We are, then, dealing with our own forms of sociality and subjectivity, how these come to be encased in alien mechanical form, and how we may reclaim them as vital organic forces making for a healthy, flourishing mode of life.
I write at length on Weber not because I agree with his gloomy prognosis, but because he establishes the benchmark with respect to modernity and its problems and possibilities. I believe Weber’s theorisation of modern social forms as ‘rational’ and untranscendable to be ideological, rendering historically and socially specific forms eternal and permanent (Critchley 2018). But Weber does make clear the weight of institutional and psychological force and inertia that stands in the way of social change. Weber, we should remember, did hold out the possibility that, maybe, out of this ‘mechanical petrification ... new prophets will arise, or there will be a great rebirth of old ideas and ideals' (Weber 1974: 182). It is clear he didn’t hold out much hope in this regard, and actually feared collectivist fantasies and delusions as much more likely instead. Weber’s warnings need to be heeded, and his analyses taken seriously, not least by those with visions of an alternative social order.
Weber’s problematic remains one that the most sophisticated of contemporary thinkers feel the need to wrestle with. Jurgen Habermas, for one, has sought to discern a positive foundation for modernity in the face of its disenchantment of the world, all the while appreciating Weber's recognition of how far secular society was created from, and is still ‘haunted by the ghosts of dead religious beliefs.’ (Murray E. G. Smith, Early Modern Social Theory (1998) p. 274). Interestingly, in recent times, Habermas, the prophet of the rational society, has begun to show more interest in religion. We are still standing poised somewhere between the rise of new prophets and the great rebirth of old ideas and ideals. There has been no shortage of challenges to Weber’s gloomy assessment on the part of those seeking the reenchantment of the world. Such people indicate that there is a process of ‘reenchantment’ running concurrently as a subterranean stream alongside the disenchantment spread by the dominant institutions of the modern world. (Joshua Landy and Michael Saler, eds., The Re-Enchantment of the World: Secular Magic in a Rational Age, Stanford University Press, 2009; James William Gibson, A Reenchanted World The Quest for a New Kinship with Nature 2009 Holt; Morris Berman, The Reenchantment of the World 1981).
I will be keenly concerned with Mumford’s particular take on re-enchantment, in his repudiation of Cartesian dualism and scientific reductionism as well as in his appreciation of human beings as culture rich symbol-making beings. Mumford has been criticised for being anti-science, anti-technology and anti-civilisation. None of these criticisms are true. Mumford takes a critical view of science, technology and civilisation whilst being committed to putting them on a sane and healthy base. He is concerned to create a civilisation that is in balance. He criticises an imbalanced scientific rationality, not scientific rationality as such. I shall emphasize that Mumford launched his critique of the Megamachine from a position which affirmed science. His case is against a reductionist science that instrumentalizes and mechanizes the world and everything in it. The world, he makes clear, is not a machine, and he gives sound scientific reasons for saying so. He is not, in other words, overthrowing scientific rationality for some ill-defined ‘life’ mysticism. Mumford affirms life and its creative unfolding, expressing scepticism of ‘narratives’ that purport to tell us exactly how the world is. At the same time, he recognizes the need for a picture, arguing that even half a picture is better than no picture at all – so long as we don’t mistake the picture for the reality. His principal concern is to unify the arts and the sciences in a worldview in which human communities come to be more integrated with the natural world. Mumford correctly identifies the essential problem as lying in the dysfunctionality of the scientistic and reductionist approach to the world, and argues for the re-enchantment of the world through the integration of all our faculties in relating to each other and to the world. The interest that Mumford took in symbols, dream, the psyche and instinct is significant in this regard. He paid close attention to C.G. Jung, who considered symbols to provide a means by which the numinous could return from the unconscious to the desacralized world. (C. G. Jung, Man and his Symbols (1978) p. 83-94; Ann Casement, Who Owns Jung? (2007) p. 20). Hence Mumford’s rejection of the ‘myth of the machine’ was not a rejection of the myth as such. He was interested in the recovery of myth, and the sense of wholeness it once provided, putting mythos and logos back together to take us out of a disenchanted modern terrain.
Ernest Gellner agreed with Weber that disenchantment was the inevitable product of modernity. Like Weber, he also understood that many people would find life in a disenchanted world unbearable and thus be tempted by a variety of ‘re-enchantment creeds.’ Gellner refers to psychoanalysis, Marxism, Wittgensteinianism, phenomenology and ethnomethodology in this regard. Nietzsche and Weber would identify socialism as some such creed, and undoubtedly the ‘green’ movement falls into this category. It is difficult to see how the one world civilisation at home in its environment that Mumford proposed could not but fall under the designation of a ‘re-enchantment creed.’ Arguably, a Nietzschean affirmation of life is also a form of re-enchantment. Gellner drew attention to a common feature of these re-enchantment creeds as lying in their naturalism, in their refusal to draw upon supernatural forces. (John A. Hall, Ernest Gellner: An Intellectual Biography, Verso, 2010.) In Mumford’s case, this becomes most interesting because, arguably, he has an appreciation of the psychic reality and truth of religion and of the importance of religion in motivating the actions and orienting the conduct of large numbers of people. In later years, he was openly arguing for a mass withdrawal and conversion modelled on great religious movements past. He did so, however, without drawing on a supernatural ethic or metaphysics. Like Nietzsche, Mumford’s emphasis was upon life and its unfolding. The problem, however, is that Mumford made explicitly moral arguments with respect to character, conduct and virtue that, to Nietzsche, rested upon a religious ethic and belief in God that is inadmissible in any strict naturalism. I will be interested to test whether Mumford can make good his claims without reference to transcendent standards that are clearly of religious character and content. Or whether a naturalistic re-enchantment through the integration of human and natural communities is entirely possible. Leo Ruickbie argues for the possibility of re-enchantment through the magical practices of Neopagan community. Employing both qualitative participant research and quantitative survey analysis, he demonstrated a range of re-enchanted characteristics conforming to those extrapolated from Weber's theories. (Leo Ruickbie, 'The Re-Enchanters: Theorising Re-Enchantment and Testing for its Presence in Modern Witchcraft', unpublished PhD thesis, King's College, London, 2005; Leo Ruickbie, 'Weber and the Witches: Sociological Theory and Modern Witchcraft', Journal of Alternative Spiritualities and New Age Studies, 2006, 116-130). That sounds nothing like Mumford, who had an ill-disguised contempt for New Age mysticism, calling it a new barbarism that arose in reaction to the organized barbarism of the Megamachine.
In terms of the two directions that Weber put in front of us, Nietzsche and Mumford look to the rise of ‘new prophets.’ To that extent, Mumford remains forward looking. But he very much draws on an older ethical tradition, and is concerned to give these traditional themes new forms of expression. Conservatives may well be more inclined to look to the rebirth of old ideas and ideals through the affirmation of a God that is still very much alive and always will be.