Modernity and Its Discontents

Making and Unmaking the Bourgeois from Machiavelli to Bellow

Bibliographic Data

ID20009892
AuthorsSteven B Smith (corresponding author)
Year2016
Pages402
Publication date2016-08-09
Open AccessNo
TypeBOOK
VenueModernity and its discontents (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherYale University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.12987/yale/9780300198393.001.0001
OpenAlexW4253383279
Open LibraryOL27218808M
ISBN9780300198393
LanguageEN
Citations received12

In this book, Steven Smith examines modernity as the site of a unique type of human being entirely unknown to the ancient and medieval worlds that is called the bourgeois. The characteristics and qualities attributed to this new kind of individual by writers like Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Franklin, and Kant included the desire for autonomy, to live independently of custom, habit, and tradition, and to be the ultimate locus of moral responsibility. This kind of bourgeois culture that has become most fully associated with America and the American way of life was accompanied by doubts and fears. Bourgeois society was rejected by some of its leading critics as domineering and tyrannical (Marx), as tepid and cowardly (Nietzsche), and as lacking in taste and culture (Flaubert). The concept of the bourgeois slowly became the locus of scorn and as the cause of our manifold discontents. How did modernity that was once considered the locus of the free and responsible individual become associated with low-minded materialism, moral cowardice, and philistinism? This provocative book explores some of reasons for these anxieties in the works of Rousseau, Tocqueville, Flaubert, Leo Strauss, Isaiah Berlin, and Saul Bellow. The work offers a novel perspective of what it means to be modern by showing what is most characteristic of modernity are the self-criticisms and doubts that have accompanied political progress and why some of these discontents have produced movements of radical rejection

Aesthetics · Art · Bourgeoisie · Cowardice · Epistemology · Literature · Materialism · Modernity · Political science · Politics · Law · Philosophy · Political Economy and Marxism · civilization · History and criticism · modern · Modern Civilization · Modernism (Literature) · New York Times reviewed

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