Technics and Civilization was published by Harcourt, Brace and Company in 1934, the first volume of Mumford’s “Renewal of Life” series. It established his reputation as one of the most important technology critics of the twentieth century and introduced ideas that remain central to contemporary debates about technology’s role in human life.
Mumford divides the history of technology into three overlapping phases: the “eotechnic” (water and wood, roughly 1000–1750, technology in harmony with organic rhythms), the “paleotechnic” (coal and iron, roughly 1700–1900, the brutal phase of early industrialization that Mumford calls “carboniferous capitalism”), and the “neotechnic” (electricity and alloys, from 1850 onward, offering the possibility — not yet realized — of technology reintegrated with human values).
His central argument is that technology is not autonomous — it does not develop by its own internal logic — but is shaped by the values, desires, and social organization of the civilizations that create it. The machine does not determine society; society determines which machines are invented, which are deployed, and how they are used. This means that technology’s destructiveness is not inevitable but chosen — and can be unchosen.
The book’s analysis of the clock as the key machine of modern civilization (rather than the steam engine) remains influential: Mumford argues that mechanical time-keeping — which separated time from natural rhythms and made it abstractly measurable — was the prerequisite for all subsequent mechanization.
Collecting Technics and Civilization
First edition (Harcourt, Brace and Company, New York, 1934): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $100–$350
- Without jacket: $25–$60
- Signed copies: $200–$500