Biotechnics : the practice of synthesis in the work of Patrick Geddes
the paradoxical generalisation that production, though fundamentally for maintenance, is mainly for art.’
In “Co-operation versus Socialism’ (1888), where he stays near this theme but is of course primarily concerned with the political question of how to organise this aspect of life, he says:
‘No theory of consumption exists at all’ and recommends that we
‘begin with the study of the consumption of wealth’.
He has this to say about a problem which is very much upon us today:
‘So long as the workman who strikes so readily for a rise or against a fall of wages submits patiently to the increasing unwholesomeness of his material surroundings or resents all outlay on their amelioration, it cannot be said that the realities of wealth have as yet been really discerned behind their symbols
by either capitalist or labourer.’
Indeed this is not just one of our current problems, but two: strikes and pollution. Geddes’ concern about the end-products of life, what we do with our earnings and our opportunities shows in the third of these early pamphlets, “Every Man his own Art Critic’, also of 1888. In the course of this very comprehensive essay, in which he writes of the clash between the Hellenic and the Hebraic ideals, Geddes says:
‘The strife had still to fall to its present level in the “hardly human abjection” of our modern city...’
Thirty-four years later, in another very rare pamphlet—this one a more substantial publication reprinted from “The Indian Journal of Economics—we find him, under the title ‘Essentials of Sociology in relation to Economics’, showing how the facts of Place, Work, and Folk—Environment, Function, and Organism —are studied through their sciences of Geography, Economics, and Anthropology. This threefold analysis and synthesis is to be found in the work of Frédéric Le Play as ‘lieu, travail, famille’; but, as we shall see, Geddes did not leave Le Play’s work where he found it. In this same document we find Geddes’ statement of
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