24
" In the change-over from the village to the city, there is some further confirmation of this reading of communal ways: for the land and all it brought forth became the property of the temple and the god; even the peasants who worked it belonged to the temple, and all the other members of the community belonged to the land, too, and were obliged to give part of their labor to the common tasks of digging and embanking and building. These posessions, with the extension of the secular powers of kingship, would become the royal estate; and identification of the common domain with the sovereign power sank so deep that even in modern states most sharply conscious of the rights of private property, the state itself is the ultimate owner and residuary legatee, with that power to commandeer and to tax which is ultimately the power to possess or destroy. "
― Lewis Mumford , The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects
28
" Private property begins, not as Prodhoun thought with robbery, but with the treatment of all common property as the private possession of the king, whose life and welfare were identified with that of the community. Property was an extension and enlargement of his own personality, as the unique representative of the collective whole. But once this claim was accepted, property could for the first time be alienated, that is, removed from the community by the individual gift of the king.
This conception of the royal possessions remained in its original form well past the time of Louis XIV. That Sun King, a little uneasy over the heavy taxes he desired to impose, called together the learned Doctors of Paris to decide if his exactions were morally justifiable. Their theology was equal to the occassion. They explained that the entire realm was his by divine right: hence in laying on these new taxes he was only taxing himself. This prerogative was passed on, undefiled, to the 'sovereign state, ' which in emergencies falls back, without scruple, on ancient magic and myth. "
― Lewis Mumford , The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects
30
" In early communities, labor itself is a part-time activity, impossible to segregate completely from other functions of life, like religion, play, communal intercourse, even sexuality. In the city specialized work became for the first time an all-day, year-round occupation. As a result, the specialized worker, a magnified hand, or arm, or eye, achieved exellence and efficiency in the part, to a degree impossible to reach except by such specialization; but he lost his grip on life as a whole. This sacrifice was one of the chronic miscarriages of civilization: so universal that it has become 'second nature' to urban man. The blessing of a varied, fully humanized life, released from occupational constraints, was monopolized by the ruling classes. The nobles recognized this; and in more than one culture reserved the title 'true men' for themselves. "
― Lewis Mumford , The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects
31
" As the city developed, the democratic habits of the village would be often carried into its heretofore specialized activities, with a constant rotation of human functions and civic duties, and with a full participation by each citizen in every aspect of the common life. This sparse material culture, in many places little better than a subsistence regimen, gave rise to a new kind of economy of abundance, for it opened up virgin territories of mind and spirit that had hardly been explored, let alone cultivated. The result was not merely a torrential outpouring of ideas and images in drama, poetry, sculpture, painting, logic, mathematics, and philosophy; but a collective life more highly energized, more heightened in its capacity for esthetic expression and rational evaluation, than had ever been achieved before. Within a couple of centuries the Greeks discovered more about the nature and potentialities of man than the Egyptians or the Sumerians seem to have discovered in as many millenia. All these achievements were concentrated in the Greek polis, and in particular, in the greatest of these cities, Athens. "
― Lewis Mumford , The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects
33
" Supreme in every department except colonization, Athens was the embodiment of all these fresh promises. But while Athens created a cultural legacy to which every succeeding age has been indebted, it sought to pre-empt for its own vainglory the goods that every other city had contributed to, and had a right to equally share in. Though conserving, indeed cultivating, the benefits of internal democracy, Athens chose to act the king among lesser cities, demanding homage and tribute, in tyrannous fashion, in return for protection. The excrement of early civilization-war, exploitation, enslavement, mass extermination-backed up on Athens, as from an ancient sewer. In the end these forces overcame a movement toward a wider fellowship, with more humane goals, that was already visible in the seventh century. Had Greece's intellectual leaders fully grasped the implications of this universalism, they might have liberated urban culture from its chronic involvement in the practice of human sacrifice for perverse and irrational ends. "
― Lewis Mumford , The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects
36
" Both vocations call forth leadership and responsibility above, and demand docile compliance below. But that of the hunter elevated the will-to-power and eventually transferred his skill in slaughtering game to the more highly organized vocation of regimenting or slaughtering other men; while that of the shepherd moved toward the curbing of force and violence and the institution of some measure of justice, through which even the weakest member of the flock might be protected and nurtured. Certainly coercion and persuasion, aggression and protection, war and law, power and love, were alike solidified in the stones of the earliest urban communities, when they finally take form. When kingship appeared, the war lord and the law lord became land lord too. "
― Lewis Mumford , The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects
37
" The Greek poleis in their best days had no great surplus of goods: what they had was a surplus of time, that is, leisure, free and untrammeled, not commited-as in America today-to excessive materialistic consumption, but available for conversation, sexual passion, intellectual reflection, and esthetic delight. "
― Lewis Mumford , The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects
