Lewis Mumford and the Organicist Concept in Social Thought
1992; University of Pennsylvania Press; Volume: 53; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/2709912
ISSN1086-3222
Autores Tópico(s)Organic Food and Agriculture
ResumoOne of the best-known twentieth-century exponents of social organicism, Lewis Mumford has woven many of the sturdiest strands of organicist thought-classical, medieval, and modem-into a complex whole. Throughout his career he has emphasized the importance of the family and neighborhood as indispensable components of a genuinely social life. At the same time his vision of the ideal society embraces a balanced or organic relationship not only with its natural environment but also with its material and apparatus. To speak in broader terms, Mumford has sought to define a version of social organicism which-by allowing for individual, local, and regional autonomy, a diversity of competing interests, and the possibility of historical developmentescapes the charge often levelled by both leftists and liberals against social organicist thinking: that is, that it assumes the priority of the collective over the individual and thus leads inevitably to a falsely normative totality characterized by a centralized authoritarian government and a static, hierarchical organization-in short, conservative or fascist reaction. Generally, Mumford has avoided the familiar pitfalls of social organicist thought, in large part by subjecting his own theories to criticism and revision. If anything, the greatest challenge to his social theory came in the 1950s and 1960s, with the unparalleled explosion of the chaotic megalopolis and above all with the emergence of what Jacques Ellul has termed the dominance of technique or the technological society. Technique threatens at once to replace the environment and to sacrifice the last vestiges of individual and local autonomy to the imperatives of adaptation. Under such conditions the very terms
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