Mumford is the American Ruskin, a romantic critic of capitalism who, though more affirming of modern technics, denounced the religion of productivity and professed that there is no wealth but life. Indeed, “life”—richness of experience, variety of action, fertility of body and imagination—lay at the heart of Mumford’s Romantic humanism, a way of being in the world as, in his words, “holiness, beatitude, and beauty.”
