This is the third volume in Lewis Mumford's superb "Renewal of Life" series, which also contains Technics and Civilazation, The Culture of Cities, and The Conduct of Life. The present book explores the historic development of the personality and the community. Ranging from ancient Greece to our own century, the author takes Western man over the ground of his past, singles out events that have done him injury, and reveals his latent sources of creative action, too long thrust aside in an age that depends for salvation on the machine.
Since the original publication of this book, Lewis Mumford observes in his new Preface, his analysis of the weaknesses of modern civilization has been confirmed: the condition of man has worsened; "What were once only local demoralizations or disasters now threaten to turn into planetary calamities." Despite this bleak prospect, the author shuns the philosophies of anti-life made fashionable by the nihilists, the existentialists, and the "brutalists, " and, as in all his work, stresses instead an essentially hopeful view of man's nature and the possibilities for human development.

Lewis Mumford (1895-1990) was a world-renowned historian, sociologist, philosopher, and critic who refused to be defined by any of those titles. He is perhaps best known for his studies of the city in history and for his writing on, and criticism of, technological society, and was the architectural critic and also art critic at the New Yorker for forty years. His thinking on ecological planning and design had considerable influence on the international green movement. Mumford was born in New York City and educated at Stuyvesant High School and the City College of New York, but never received a degree. He later taught at the University of Pennsylvania (which now holds his archives), Stanford, and MIT. Mumford and his wife Sophia were prominent in efforts to bring the United States into the fight against Hitler and after the war campaigned against nuclear weapons. Later, he was an early and vocal critic of the Vietnam War. His honors include the Presidential Medal of Freedom, National Award for Literature, National Medal for the Arts, Prix Mondial Cino Del Duca, Gold Medal of the Royal Institute of British Architects, and a KBE from Queen Elizabeth II. His 1961 book, The City in History, received the National Book Award.