“Modern industrial design is based on the principle of conspicuous economy [but] the bourgeois culture which dominates the Western World is founded… on the principle of conspicuous waste.”

— Lewis Mumford

Lewis Mumford (1930) Modern American design. R.L. Leonard, & ‎C.A. Glassgold (eds.), ‎American Union of Decorative Artists and Craftsmen. p. 9; As cited in: V.T. Clayton et al. Drawing on America's Past, p. 28

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Modern industrial design is based on the principle of conspicuous economy [but] the bourgeois culture which dominates t…" by Lewis Mumford?

Lewis Mumford75

American historian, sociologist, philosopher of technology,… 1895–1990

Related quotes

“The need of conspicuous waste… stands ready to absorb any increase in the community's industrial efficiency or output of goods.”

Thorstein Veblen book The Theory of the Leisure Class

Source: The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), p. 110

“The requirement of conspicuous wastefulness is… present as a constraining norm selectively shaping and sustaining our sense of what is beautiful.”

Thorstein Veblen book The Theory of the Leisure Class

Source: The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), p. 126

“For forty years or so this was the world headquarters of conspicuous consumption.”

Bill Bryson (1951) American author

about Newport, Rhode Island (RI)
The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America (1989)

“The Methods of Industrial Management. — A committee of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers made an extensive canvass in the fall of 1912 to determine what were the new elements in modern management as well as what the committee designated as the regulative principles of industrial management. The committee confirmed Adam Smith's statement made in 1776 in his Wealth of Nations, in which he held that the application of the principle of division of labor was the basis of manufacture. The committee also agreed with Charles Babbage, who in his work entitled Economy of Machinery and Manufacture written in 1832, added another principle, namely the transference of skill.”

Hugo Diemer (1870–1937) American mechanical engineer

(1921, p. 10)
Factory organization and administration, 1910

“A civilization which is dominated by this matter-of-fact insight must prevail against any cultural scheme that lacks this element. This characteristic of western civilization comes to a head in modern science, and finds its highest material expression in the technology of the machine industry.”

Thorstein Veblen (1857–1929) American academic

Source: "The Place of Science in Modern Civilization", 1906, p. 355

Frank Knight (1885–1972) American economist

Source: "The Place of Science in Modern Civilization", 1906, p. 355

“Unless we realize that the essence of Nazism is also an attempt to solve a universal problem of Western civilization - that of the industrial society - and that the basic principles on which the Nazis base this attempt are also in no way confined to Germany, we do not know what we fight for or what we fight against… The war is being fought for the structure of industrial society--its basic principles, its purposes, and its institutions.”

Peter F. Drucker (1909–2005) American business consultant

Source: 1930s- 1950s, The Future of Industrial Man (1942), p. 107-108

“An Afro who gets dragged into Helsinki from an African savannah pollutes no less with his conspicuous consumption than an ethnic Finn. He will probably pollute more because moving from the stone age directly into the modern world deprives him of ecological conscience typical of a western human being.”

Jussi Halla-aho (1971) Finnish Slavic linguist, blogger and a politician

Jussi Halla-aho (2007), published in the blog Scripta Hyvää kesää! http://web.archive.org/web/20070626154617/http://halla-aho.com/scripta/hyvaa_kesaa.html, June 21, 2007 <br class="br">2005-09

“To increase desires to an unbearable level whilst making the fulfillment of them more and more inaccessible: this was the single principle upon which Western society was based.”

Michel Houellebecq book The Possibility of an Island

Source: The Possibility of an Island

“We have for a long time hesitated to adopt and carry out the only principle which can solve that difficulty and give peace, strength and security to the republic, and that is the principle of absolute equality. We are a country of all extremes, ends and opposites. The most conspicuous example of composite nationality in the world. Our people defy all the ethnological and logical classifications. In races we range all the way from black to white, with intermediate shades which, as in the apocalyptic vision, no man can name or number.”

Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman

1860s, Our Composite Nationality (1869)

“Modern industrial design is based on the principle of conspicuous economy [but] the bourgeois culture which dominates the Western World is founded… on the principle of conspicuous waste.”

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Lewis Mumford75

Related quotes

Related topics