Modernity and its discontents : making and unmaking the bourgeois from Machiavelli to Bellow / Steven B. Smith.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Smith, Steven B.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Modernism (Literature)--History and criticism.

Modernism (Literature).

Civilization, Modern--Philosophy.

Civilization, Modern.

Genre:

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Physical Description:

xiv, 402 p. ; 25 cm.

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

New Haven : Yale University Press, 2016.

Summary:

Steven B. Smith examines the concept of modernity, not as the end product of historical developments but as a state of mind. He explores modernism as a source of both pride and anxiety, suggesting that its most distinctive characteristics are the self-criticisms and doubts that accompany social and political progress. Providing profiles of the modern project’s most powerful defenders and critics—from Machiavelli and Spinoza to Saul Bellow and Isaiah Berlin—this provocative work of philosophy and political science offers a novel perspective on what it means to be modern and why discontent and sometimes radical rejection are its inevitable by-products.

Contents:

Introduction. Modernity in Question

Modernity. Machiavelli's Mandragola and the Protean Self ; The exemplary Life of Rene Descartes ; Was Hobbes a Christian? ; What Kind of Jew Was Spinoza? ; Benjamin Franklin's American Enlightenment ; Kant's Liberal Internationalism ; Hegel and the "Bourgeois-Christian World"

Our Discontents. Rousseau's Counter-Enlightenment: Letter to d'Alembert on the Theater ; Tocqueville's America ; Flaubert and the Aesthetics of the Antibourgeois ; The Apocalyptic Imagination: Nietzsche, Sorel, Schmitt ; The Tragic Liberalism of Isaiah Berlin ; Leo Strauss on Philosophy as a Way of Life ; The Political Teaching of Lampedusa's The Leopard ; Mr. Sammler's Redemption

Conclusion. Modernity and Its Doubles.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (p. 353-383) and index.

ISBN:

9780300198393 (hbk.) :

0300198396 (hbk.)

0-300-19839-6

OCLC:

954285282