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One of my favourite books is Marshall Berman's All that is Solid Melts into Air, an attempt to examine the whirlwind experience of modernity, through a deliriou
by Emma_Goldman 8y ago
One of my favourite books is Marshall Berman's All that is Solid Melts into Air, an attempt to examine the whirlwind experience of modernity, through a delirious blend of philosophy, history, literature, architecture and autobiography. It is a deeply personal and intensely felt book, and completely unlike anything else I've ever read.
The humanities and social sciences have become leaden under professionalisation. There is a paucity of vision and imagination, a reluctance to look beyond the horizon of one's own subdiscipline, and a failure to ask big and novel questions. Yet those are everyone's favourite books, that mean most to them, and change not just their arguments but their worldview.
- jboynyc 8y agoRussell Jacoby's The Last Intellectuals (1987) is a book about how the humanities and social sciences professionalized and lost their grander vision. Essentially Jacoby claims that gentrification and the expansion of academia killed the figure of the independent "public" intellectual. Some of the books he holds up as examples of intellectual (rather than academic) engagement are Jane Jacob's Death and Life of Great American Cities, William Whyte's Organization Man, C. Wright Mills' White Collar, Murray Bookchin's The Limits of the City, and Lewis Mumford's The City in History. I think most of these would be good candidates for "undead" status. A few years ago there was an interesting symposium revisiting the argument in light of changes in the public sphere: https://www.chronicle.com/specialreport/After-The-Last/16 https://www.chronicle.com/specialreport/After-The-Last/16