| Description |
xiv, 402 pages ; 25 cm |
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references (pages 353-383) and index. |
| Contents |
Part One. Introduction. 1. Modernity in Question. |
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Part Two. Modernity. 2. Machiavelli's Mandragola and the Protean Self -- 3. The Exemplary Life of René Descartes -- 4. Was Hobbes a Christian? -- 5. What Kind of Jew was Spinoza? -- 6. Benjamin Franklin's American Enlightenment -- 7. Kant's Liberal Internationalism -- 8. Hegel and the "Bourgeois-Christian World". |
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Part Three. Our Discontents. 9. Rousseau's Counter-Enlightenment: Letter to d'Alembert on the Theater -- 10. Tocqueville's America -- 11. Flaubert and the Aesthetics of the Antibourgeois -- 12. The Apocalyptic Imagination: Nietzsche, Sorel, Schmitt -- 13. The Tragic Liberalism of Isaiah Berlin -- 14. Leo Strauss on Philosophy as a Way of Life -- 15. The political Teaching of Lampedusa's The Leopard -- 16. Mr. Sammler's Redemption. |
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Part Four. Conclusion. 17. Modernity and its Doubles. |
| 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. |
| Subject(S) |
Modernism (Literature) -- History and criticism.
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Civilization, Modern -- Philosophy.
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| Added Title |
Making and unmaking the bourgeois from Machiavelli to Bellow |
| ISBN |
9780300198393 (cloth ; alkaline paper) |
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0300198396 (cloth ; alkaline paper) |
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