THE ------- OF MAN, AMERICA 1933-1973

Mark Greif, The Age of the Crisis of Man: Thought and Fiction in America, 1933-1973 (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2015) ("What purpose is served by delineating the core of the human? Or, in an older nomenclature, the 'nature' or 'condition of Man'? The project recurs in the history of thought. It is not purely continuous. Against a background murmur that may be ceaseless emerge audible moments of conversation and command." Id. at ix. 'An impressive number of books (some famous, many forgotten) that appeard in the United States in the period 1933-1973 carried a particular kind of title ['The ------- of Man']." Id. at ix. "Having dug through this material, I will argue that the discourse it reveals form the midcentury age of the 'crisis of man' is historically indispensable. I will not, however, be arguing that the discourse was wise, or either good or bad. Exhuming history should not require that we venerate it, only understand its constitution and effects. And the discourse was precisely of that peculiar imperative-interrogative type I believe we may often misunderstand or mischaracterize." Id. at x. "The nobility of the Great Books was always synonymous with an idea of liberal education, advancing a simple position: men were the same in all times. Every age could produce great thinkers who examined the same human problems from their own vantage points and recorded the results. Even though the material conditions of life might change, the answers human beings had given would always be relevant. We today, will best learn to be excellent, free men once we consider all the best results from the past as the basis for answering the questions of our own times." Id. at 194. "One of the peculiarities of intellectual history is that the most extreme positions taken after a particular conjunction of surprising events, outliers in this own times, periodically turn out to be lasting or, at least, recurring positions for subsequent years. Perhaps it is a consequence of the willingness by an extreme thinker to break out of commentatators' natural tendency to assimilate events to whatever has been happening already. Perhaps it is simply that extreme ideas have a different kind of salience, marking out peaks (absurd peaks, sometimes, to be sure) against flatter intellectual history, which have a greater usefulness by their newness, their breaking of routine, or the utility to attribute them to single figures rather than the zeitgeist or conventional wisdom." Id. at 73-74.).