Periodization of Technological History

Mumford's Periodization of Technological History: Eotechnic, Paleotechnic, and Neotechnic

Excerpt from the chapter on Decentralized Production Technologies, in the forthcoming book of Kevin Carson of mutualist.org.

Introduction

The idea of resurrecting old technologies in a modern context is also suggested by Mumford's periodization of technological history in Technics and Civilization. Mumford divided late medieval and modern technological development into three considerably overlapping periods: the eotechnic, the paleotechnic, and the neotechnic.

Eotechnic

The original technological revolution of the late Middle Ages, the eotechnic, was associated with the skilled craftsmen of the free towns, and eventually incorporated the fruits of investigation by the early scientists. It began with agricultural innovations like the horse collar and horseshoe, and crop rotation. In mechanics, its greatest achievements were the invention of clockwork machinery, and the intensive development of water and wind power. It achieved great advances in the use of wood and glass, masonry, and paper (the latter including the printing press). The agricultural advances of the early second millennium were further built on by the innovations of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, like raised bed horticulture and greenhouses.

Paleotechnic

The eotechnic revolution largely stagnated in the early modern period, being supplanted or crowded out by the paleotechnic revolution. Paleotechnic was associated with the new centralized state and its privileged economic clients, and centered on mining, iron, coal, and steam power. It culminated in the "dark satanic mills" of the nineteenth century and the giant corporations of the late nineteenth and early twentieth. Although the paleotechnic incorporated some contributions from the eotechnic period, it was a fundamental departure in direction, and involved the abandonment of a rival path of development. To a large extent, technology was developed in the interests of the new royal absolutists, mercantilist industry and the factory system that grew out of it, and the new capitalist agriculturists (especially the Whig oligarchy of England); it incorporated only those eotechnic contributions that were compatible with the new tyrannies, and abandoned the rest.

Neotechnic

The beginning of the neotechnic period was associated, among other things, with the invention of the prerequisites for electrical power--the dynamo, the alternator, the storage cell, the electric motor--along with the development of small-scale electric production machinery suitable for the small shop and power tools suitable for household production. Electricity made possible the use of virtually any form of energy, indirectly, as a prime mover for production: combustibles of all kinds, sun, wind, water, even temperature differentials. As Ralph Borsodi showed, with electricity most goods could be produced in small shops and households with an efficiency at least competitive with that of the great factories, once the greatly reduced distribution costs of small-scale production were taken into account. The modest increases in unit cost of production are offset not only by greatly reduced distribution costs, but by the possibility of timing production to need instead of attempting to engineer mass-consumption to the needs of production:

if the domestic grain grinder is less efficient, from a purely mechanical standpoint, than the huge flour mills of Minneapolis, it permits a nicer timing of production to need, so that it is no longer necessary to consume bolted white flours because whole wheat flours deteriorate more quickly and spoil if they are ground too long before they are sold and used.

To put it another way, if the object is to have the highest quality flour with bran and germ intact, at a reasonable cost, as opposed to nutritionally dead wallpaper paste, the small mill is the most efficient means available. The larger mills are only more "efficient" if the consumer is subordinated to the needs of large-scale production.

The lost promise of the Eotechnic could be resurrected

It was primarily the decentralizing potential of electricity that inspired Kropotkin's vision of the merging of village and town in Fields, Factories and Workshops. As Colin Ward commented, in his edition of that work:

The very technological developments which, in the hands of people with statist, centralising, authoritarian habits of mind, as well as in the hands of mere exploiters, demand greater concentration of industry, are also those which could make possible a local, intimate, decentralised society. When tractors were first made, they were giants, suitable only for prairie-farming. Now you can get them scaled down to a Rotivator for a small-holding. Power tools, which were going to make all industry one big Dagenham, are commonplace for every do-it-yourself enthusiast.

Paul Goodman, likewise:

Think of the present proliferation of machine-tools. It could once be said that the sewing machine was the only widely distributed productive machine; but now... the idea of thousands of small machine shops, powered by electricty, has become familiar; and small power-tools are a best-selling commodity. In general, the change from coal and steam to electricity and oil has relaxed one of the greatest causes for concentration of machinery around a single driving-shaft.

The neotechnic, in a sense, is a resumption of the lines of development of the original eotechnic revolution, after the paleotechnic interlude. The neotechnic

differs from the paleotechnic phase almost as white differs from black. But on the other hand, it bears the same relation to the eotechnic phase as the adult form does to the baby.

....[T]he conceptions, the anticipations, the imperious visions of Roger Bacon, Leonardo, Lord Verulam, Porta, Glanvil, and the other philosophers and technicians of the day at last found a local habitation. The first hasty sketches of the fifteenth century were now turned into working drawings: the first guesses were now re-enforced with a technique of verification: the first crude machines were at last carried to perfection in the exquisite mechanical technology of the new age, which gave to motors and turbines properties that had but a century earlier belonged almost exclusively to the clock. The superb animal audacity of Cellini, about to cast his difficult Perseus, or the scarcely less daring work of Michelangelo, constructing the dome of St. Peter's, was replaced by a patient co-operative experimentalism: a whole society was now prepared to do what had heretofore been the burden of solitary individuals.

It would be "poetic justice," as Borsodi put it, "if electricity drawn from the myriads of long neglected small streams of the country should provide the power for an industrial counter-revolution."

Mumford suggested that, absent the dislocations imposed from above by the new states and their clients, the eotechnic might have evolved directly into the neotechnic without any disruption. A full-scale modern industrial revolution would likely have come about through such decentralized technology, as Mumford put it, "had not a ton of coal been dug in England, and had not a new iron mine been opened."

The amount of actual work actually accomplished by wind and water power compared quite favorably with that of the steam-powered industrial revolution. Indeed, the great advances in textile output of the eighteenth century were made with water-powered factories; steam power was adopted only later. The Fourneyron water-turbine, perfected in 1832, was the first prime-mover to exceed the poor 5% or 10% efficiencies of the early steam engine, and was a logical development of earlier water-power technology that would likely have followed much earlier in due course, had not the evolution of water-power been interrupted by the paleotechnic revolution.

Had the spoonwheel of the seventeenth century developed more rapidly into Fourneyron's efficient water-turbine, water might have remained the backbone of the power system until electricity had developed sufficiently to give it a wider area of use.

In The City in History, Mumford mentions abortive applications of eotechnic means to decentralized organization, unfortunately forestalled by the paleotechnic revolution, and speculates at greater length on the Kropotkinian direction social evolution might have taken had the eotechnic passed directly into the neotechnic. Of the seventeenth century villages of New England and New Netherlands, he writes:

This eotechnic culture was incorporated in a multitude of small towns and villages, connected by a network of canals and dirt roads, supplemented after the middle of the nineteenth century by short line railroads, not yet connected up into a few trunk systems meant only to augment the power of the big cities. With wind and water power for local production needs, this was a balanced economy; and had its balance been maintained, had balance indeed been consciously sought, a new general pattern of urban development might have emerged. But this possibility was blocked by the prevailing ideology, which favored intensive specialization and the centralization of economic power in a few big centers, to which small urban units would be subservient.

In 'Technics and Civilization' I pointed out how the earlier invention of more efficient prime movers, Fourneyron's water turbine and the turbine windmill, could perhaps have provided the coal mine and the iron mine with serious technical competitors that might have kept this decentralized regime long enough in existence to take advantage of the discovery of electricity and the production of the light metals. With the coordinate development of science, this might have led directly into the more humane integration of 'Fields, Factories, and Workshops' that Peter Kropotkin was to outline, once more, in the eighteen-nineties.

It's important to remember that there is no such thing as generic "superiority" of one technology over another. One technology can only be said to be superior to another with reference to some purpose. The transition to the paleotechnics, instead of further development of eotechnics, reflected a given set of interests. The paleotechnic was more "efficient" at serving the interests of the absolute state and its privileged clients, the great landowners and mercantilists.

Ralph Borsodi speculated, along lines similar to Mumford's, on the different direction things might have taken:

It is impossible to form a sound conclusion as to the value to mankind of this institution which the Arkwrights, the Watts, and the Stephensons had brought into being if we confine ourselves to a comparison of the efficiency of the factory system of production with the efficiency of the processes of production which prevailed before the factory appeared.

A very different comparison must be made.

We must suppose that the inventive and scientific discoveries of the past two centuries had not been used to destroy the methods of production which prevailed before the factory.

We must suppose that an amount of thought and ingenuity precisely equal to that used in developing the factory had been devoted to the development of domestic, custom, and guild protection.

We must suppose that the primitive domestic spinning wheel had been gradually developed into more and more efficient domestic machines; that primitive looms, churns, cheese presses, candle molds, and primitive productive apparatus of all kinds had been perfected step by step without sacrifice of the characteristic "domesticity" which they possessed.

In short, we must suppose that science and invention had devoted itself to making domestic and handicraft production efficient and economical, instead of devoting itself almost exclusively to the development of factory machines and factory production.

The factory-dominated civilization of today would never have developed. Factories would not have invaded those fields of manufacture where other methods of production could be utilized. Only the essential factory would have been developed. Instead of great cities, lined with factories and tenements, we should have innumerable small towns filled with the homes and workshops of neighborhood craftsmen. Cities would be political, commercial, educational, and entertainment centers. The homestead would have developed in countless directions and would have continued the economic center of the family. Efficient domestic implements and machines developed by centuries of scientific improvement would have eliminated drudgery from the home and the farm....

We must, in short, make a comparison between the factory economy which we have today and a hypothetical economy which I believe should have been developed.

Likewise, as P. M. Lawrence has pointed out, the proper comparison is not between agribusiness and subsistence farming as they exist, but between agribusiness and subsistence farming as it would exist had it been free to develop without enclosures, without rack-rents, and without the state's diversion of all resources for innovation into the channel of large-scale cash crop agriculture (about which more below).

Conventional histories--written by the victors, of course--give the paleotechnic phase credit for many advances of the eotechnic: schoolchildren are taught a received version of the industrial revolution in which "gentleman farmers" and inventors like Watt, Whitney, Fulton et al are elevated into demigods, while the civilization of the free towns of the late Middle Ages is telescoped back into the "Dark Ages."

For a whole century the second industrial revolution… has received credit for many of the advances that were made during the centuries that preceded it. In contrast to the supposedly sudden and inexplicable outburst of inventions after 1760 the previous seven hundred years have often been treated as a stagnant period of small-scale petty handicraft production, feeble in power resources and barren of any significant accomplishments.

One reason for this, Mumford suggests, is that the history of the paleotechnic industrial revolution is filtered largely through an English lens. England had been a backwater of the earlier eotechnic civilization compared to the great towns of the continent, and served mainly to supply raw materials for Dutch, north German and Italian industry. To English observers, the paleotechnic revolution was therefore perceived to be arising in a vacuum.

But it was in equal part arrogant, willful blindness: the temporal provincialism of Nietzsche's Last Man, who smugly proclaimed that "we have invented happiness."

At the very height of England's industrial squalor, when the houses for the working classes were frequently built beside open sewers and when rows of them were being built back to back--at that very moment complacent scholars writing in middle-class libraries could dwell upon the "filth" and "dirt" and "ignorance" of the Middle Ages, as compared with the enlightenment and cleanliness of their own.

How was that belief possible?....

The mechanism that produced the conceit and the self-complacence of the paleotechnic period was in fact beautifully simple. In the eighteenth century the notion of Progress had been elevated into a cardinal doctrine of the educated classes. Man... was climbing steadily out of the mire of superstition, ignorance, savagery, into a world that was to become ever more polished, humane, and rational....

....Assuming that progress was a reality, if the cities of the nineteenth century were dirty, the cities of the thirteenth century must have been six centuries dirtier.... If the hospitals of the early nineteenth century were overcrowded pest-houses, then those of the fifteenth century must have been even more deadly. If the workers of the new factory towns were ignorant and superstitious, then the workers who produced Chartres and Bamberg must have been more stupid and unenlightened. If the greater part of the population were still destitute despite the prosperity of the textile trades and the hardware trades, then the workers of the handicraft period must have been more impoverished.

In short, we’re presented with a Monty Python parody of the Middle Ages in which a King is identified by the fact that “he’s the only one who doesn’t have shit all over him.”

The fact that the cities of the thirteenth century were far brighter and cleaner and better ordered than the new Victorian towns: the fact that medieval hospitals were more spacious and sanitary than their Victorian successors: the fact that in many parts of Europe the medieval worker had demonstrably a far higher standard of living than the paleotechnic drudge...--these facts did not even occur to the exponents of Progress as possibilities for investigation."

Sources

Citations are from:

George McRobie, Small is Possible, pp. 39-71.

Lewis Mumford. The Myth of the Machine: The Pentagon of Power, p. 144.

Lewis Mumford. Technics and Civilization, pp. 214, 221, p. 225, p. 212, p. 118, p. 143.

Colin Ward, in Fields, Factories and Workshops Tomorrow p. 164.

Paul Goodman. Communitas p. 156.

Ralph Borsodi. This Ugly Civilization, p. 65.