Volume 22, Number 21 & 22 · January 22, 1976
A Cosmic and Practical Man
By Robert M. Adams
Findings and Keepings: Analects for an Autobiography
by Lewis Mumford
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 394 pp., $15.00
When a man has been before the public, as Lewis Mumford has been, for fifty years, producing twenty-five books and countless articles, the character of his mind and the direction of his interests are bound to be well known. Mr. Mumford is a lay preacher with a doctrine of vitalism deriving ultimately from Comte and Bergson. Though he has written more on city planning than on anything else, that field for him has been chiefly an approach to the larger work of reforming society; and the reform of society he defines not simply as a change of institutions, but as a revaluation of values, a moral revival or reversal. For many decades critics have been complaining that this positive program of his is ill defined and ill compounded, consisting of miscellaneous overlapping platitudes; again and again they have pointed out that he has never really approached the practical problem of putting his ideals into effect on the requisite scale. And yet very few of his critics have failed to recognize in Mr. Mumford a generous and sensitive commentator on our institutions. Like many lay preachers, he's long on faith and short on doctrine; but there are goods and bads attached to both sides.
Review, 2231 words
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