Transformations of Man

8vo (22 cm), 192 pp. Publisher's cloth and dust jacket, top edge painted blue (dj slightly dusted and rubbed). First edition. The book, published as part of the World Perspectives series, is a sweeping cultural history arguing that humanity stands at the threshold of another great transformation comparable to the one that carried it from primitive life into the first civilized communities. Mumford grounds this argument in a panoramic survey of the successive stages through which human personality and consciousness have been reshaped across history, tracing nine phases in nine chapters: the original transition from animal into human, archaic man, civilised man, axial man (the great religious and philosophical breakthroughs of the first millennium BC), old world man, new world man, post-historic man, the emergence of world culture, and finally human prospects. His central concern is that modern over-reliance on machines and mechanization threatens to produce a barbarism more elemental than anything previously encountered, but that humanity still possesses the spiritual, personal, and technological means to create a future oriented toward the fullest development of human potential--not through scientific dictatorship but through the enlargement of freedom and individuality for all.…