The Myth of the Machine: Technics and Human Development

This book is an attempt to explain the forces that have shaped technology from prehistoric times on, and have increasingly been shaping modern man. Instead of beginning with the problems of our own generation, Lewis Mumford goes back to the origins of human culture; but so far from accepting man's rise as due mainly to his command of tools and his conquest of nature, he finds solid grounds for rejecting this view. He demonstrates how tools themselves did not and could not develop far without a much more significant series of inventions in ritual, language, and social organization.