The Age of the Crisis of Man: Thought and Fiction in America, 1933 – 1973 by Mark Greif – review

After the horrors of the early 20th century, a generation of writers and thinkers questioned the purpose of humanity as never before

Sometimes a work of cultural history surprises and enlightens simply by naming what we had not thought required a name. Reading Mark Greif’s revelatory study of mid-20th-century humanism, I thought often of the bookcase in which my father – a devout, left-leaning Irish Catholic – crammed and later ignored his student reading of the 1960s. When I began pulling those books off the shelves as a teenager, they seemed intellectually antique but admirably eclectic. Here was a historical juncture when a mature student in humanities might be just as exercised by medieval theology as new critiques of consumerism, the moral and aesthetic certainties of FR Leavis or TS Eliot as the existentialism of Sartre and Camus. As I recall, the run of books on the shelves (and maybe also my dad’s philosophical adventures) came to a stop with the svelte red spine of Herbert Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man.

What I had not realised, but Greif’s closely argued book makes clear, was that this constellation of reference points – we can add writers as disparate as Hannah Arendt, Vance Packard and Jacques Maritain – described a historically precise philosophical problem, and also a fashion: a craze that had travelled from Europe at mid century to postwar America and thence even to conservative Ireland. By the middle of the century, in light of genocides, vastly destructive or transformative technologies and the seeming decline of religion, it was unclear to many intellectuals exactly what we humans were for any more. Was man the spiritual guardian and rational proprietor of our planet — or its malign, reckless tenant?

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