Conservative intellectuals have rightly come to despair about the academy. But amidst the darkness, there are flashes of light. One is provided by the Yale political science professor Steven B. Smith. He has made his name as an expert on Spinoza, authoring several contrarian takes on the philosopher’s role in the development of liberalism and of his view of Judaism. But, it seems, those books were merely warm-ups for a broader consideration of the rise of secular society; now, with this wonderfully erudite opus, Smith expands his focus, offering readers nothing less than a short history and analysis of modernity itself.
His main argument is that the anxiety and self-criticism that accompanied modernity—and the development of the bourgeoisie—were crucial to the creation of modern Europe’s (and Amer-ica’s) identity and its ability to produce the social, political, and economic progress that made it the most advanced and desirable part of the world to live in.
In Smith’s view, that began with Machiavelli. The Florentine was but the first of the modern writers and philosophers who slowly transformed society from a class-based, hierarchical system ruled by all-powerful monarchs and clerics. This is the old “darkness,” the one that the Enlightenment reacted against, finding still greater strength in Descartes’s declaration cogito ergo sum, with everything that this implied for the development of the emancipated thinking individual. That was augmented by the progress of Galilean science and Cartesian geometry and the social contract whose finer points were debated by Locke and Rousseau.
These critical ideas freed humanity from medieval intellectual bondage into a future of greater possibility and self-fulfillment. The notion of the self-made man and the attendant American Dream, Smith suggests, embody what many thinkers envisioned modernity should entail: By dint of self-reflection and hard work, anyone could become the person he was meant to be—or more crucially, wanted to be.
What replaced the antiquated European aristocracy from the French Revolution onwards however has been infinitely more problematic than was anticipated by the philosophes. Chopping off Marie Antoinette’s head was relatively easy—but what then? Among the unintended results of civil and individual emancipation has been widespread alienation.
Moreover, equality has meant a leveling of onetime virtues such as personal honor and tradition; meantime, scientific progress has given us administrative bureaucracy. Not all have been led to adultery and suicide, as Emma Bovary was, but all within the burgher class have been challenged by the surfeit of freedom open in both action and thought. And as Smith cogently argues, modern life for many has become mechanized and dull. Conversation has become a series of meaningless sound bites. Traditional family structures were stifling to many, yet we have not found anything better to replace them. Instead of original thinking, we get the platitudes of technocratic existence: The cowboy has been replaced by the computer geek.
The left has accepted the basic ideas of the Enlightenment, but Smith notes that the movement never went beyond the stage of critiquing inequality and hierarchy. In this fashion, it has created still more anxiety, alienation, and inequality—obsessions with the much-touted top 1 percent at the expense of awareness of how much the bottom 99 percent has benefited from modernity. Smith presents Nietzsche, de Maistre, Heidegger, Sorel, and Foucault as examples of thinkers who have produced a Counter-Enlightenment, one which challenged people’s belief in the rational and scientific foundations of society. The rule of the individual did, after all, also lead to fascism, and the belief in equality to communism.
Smith’s favorite Counter-Enlightenment thinkers include Tocqueville and Isaiah Berlin—for whom “modernity is not a problem to be overcome but a challenge to be met.” He wisely argues that we must reject the notion of infinite progress while asking how we should best measure “progress” in the first place—as well as when we have had enough of it. But following some 400 pages of one dispiriting critique after another, Smith ends on a positive note, observing that modernity’s ills are a symptom of its success. People live longer, better, and with more freedom and equality than our ancestors would ever have dreamed.
Smith sums up his assessment not with philosophers but with two essays on modern literature. The first examines Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s The Leopard, which was turned into an equally brilliant film by Luchino Visconti in the early 1960s. The second takes a fresh look at Saul Bellow’s Mr. Sammler’s Planet (1970). The heroes in both these novels face bewildering worlds. Don Fabrizio in The Leopard belongs to the decaying Sicilian aristocracy that sees its traditions and nobility upended by an emerging commercial class—and he and his fellow aristocrats are powerless to stop it. But, ultimately, the merger of the aristocracy and the merchant class—embodied in the successful marriage of his nephew Tancredi to the beautiful and ambitious merchant’s daughter Angelica—mirrors Cavour and Garibaldi’s successful unification of Italy, which transformed its former warring principalities into a modern, progressive state.
Bellow’s Sammler survives a death camp during the Holocaust, but he may not emerge alive from 1970s New York, a dangerous and decrepit urban empire of vice. Sammler is consistently deceived, mistreated, and finally physically assaulted and humiliated by a petty street thief. Yet this aged figure finds redemption in his nephew Elya Gruner, an honest man who embodies human decency itself: As he recites Kaddish over his kinsman’s body, he realizes that one honest soul can redeem many. Along with the daily dreariness that Sammler witnesses on the Upper West Side, he sees the undeniable light of those who overcome their anxieties and troubles to the betterment of all.
Steven Smith sees the bourgeoisie as the most thoughtful and benevolent party in modern life. He does not romanticize the noble savage; rather, he sees the commercial classes as those most able to move society forward by successfully overcoming their discontents. And coming from the academy, the comprehensive and robust awareness of modernity’s accomplishments on display in this remarkable work is a welcome perspective.
Christopher Atamian is a New York-based writer and critic who contributes to the Huffington Post and New York Times Book Review.
