The Superfluous Men: Critics of American Culture, 1900-1945

The Superfluous Men: Critics of American Culture, 1900-1945

Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
The roots of modern conservatism as an intellectual and political movement have been explored extensively by a variety of writers, but almost all attention has been focused on ideas and events following the Second World War. Editor Robert M. Crunden seeks to go deeper, in this anthology of prewar material. He brings together a group of authors bound by what one of them calls a concern over "the spiritual disorder of modern life--its destruction of human integrity and its lack of purpose." Contributors include academics, polemicists, and journalists: Irving Babbit, Walter Lippmann, H.L. Mencken, Albert Jay Nock, John Crowe Ransom, George Santayana, Allen Tate, and others. These "superfluous men" (the odd term is derived from Nock's influential book Memoirs of a Superfluous Man) did not consider themselves part of an inchoate conservatism, although a number of them were allied in the New Humanist and Southern agrarian movements. And although they write from decades long past, their voices rarely seem distant. Here is Donald Davidson with an antimaterialist critique of industrial progress (as personified by Henry Ford) that could apply to the roaring economy at the turn of the 21st century:

[The masses] must spend and spend unceasingly, in order to consume the never-ending stream of new products that industry hurls upon them. They will be encouraged to make a necessity of every luxury that the clever industrialists may devise. For the industry of the Ford type has not regard for actual or fundamental needs! It seeks to create two or even twenty demands where none at all existed before.

Serious students of conservatism will surely want to have a copy of The Superfluous Men on their shelves, near Russell Kirk's The Conservative Mind and George M. Nash's The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America. --John J. Miller

From the Back Cover
"You can't understand the history of American thought without this critically important volume."--John Podhoretz "Here is the first generation of American conservative intellectuals, in all their uncomfortable glory: prickly, quirky, unclubbably aristocratic and as individual as the idiosyncratic philosophies they espoused. Compassionate conservatives they most definitely weren't, and their angry anti-modernism has not yet lost its power to startle and provoke. For those short-sighted youngsters who think conservatism started with Ronald Reagan or Barry Goldwater--or even Bill Buckley--this admirably edited collection will supply a swift kick in the preconceptions."--Terry Teachout

The Superfluous Men: Critics of American Culture, 1900-1945

The Superfluous Men: Critics of American Culture, 1900-1945,Robert Crunden,George Santayana,Ralph Adams Cram,Albert Jay Nock,H.L. Mencken,Irving Babbitt,Paul Elmer More,Allen Tate,John Crowe Ransom,Donald Davisdon,Walter Lippmann,Intercollegiate Studies Institute,1882926307,20th century,Conservatism,Government - U.S. Government,History,History - General History,Intellectual life,Political History,Political Process - General,Popular Culture - General,Social Science,Sociology,United States

Music Books

The Superfluous Men: Critics of American Culture, 1900-1945

Books:

Books

books

Books