Tuesday, April 15, 2003

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George Scialabba on Paul Berman: http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml%3Fi 030428&s=scialabba Two persistent strains of nineteenth-century European culture expressed a "violent loathing of progress and liberalism." There was an aesthetic strain: "the old Romantic literary fashion for murder and suicide, the dandy's fondness for the irrational and the irresponsible, the little nihilist groups of left-wing desperadoes with their dreams of poetic death." And there was a philosophical strain: German idealism and antirationalism in its extremer versions, anti-Semitism, racial theory. At the end of the nineteenth century these two strains fused to create movements "of a new type," in Lenin's words, devoted (according to Berman) "to a single, all-consuming obsession, which was a hatred of liberal civilization." 12:54:16 PM    comment []