Abstract

In Time of Hesitation

In one of the many encirclements of ideas contrived within the comparatively short space of his new book, "Men Must Act," Lewis Mumford speaks of the intellectual culture at present as too remote from the masses to serve them satisfactorily. It is the special triumph of the program which he sets forth that it meets and uses deeply rooted popular forces, and that its terms can be promptly understood. With immediacy and restrained eloquence, indeed with the effect of the spoken word, the book belongs in the great pamphleteering tradition. In a chapter called "Civilization's Gordian Knot," Mumford reverses the habitual use of the metaphor, and makes the altered symbol a point of departure for interpreting essential differences between democracy and fascism.