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?

If these questions seem vague and portentous today – not to mention sexist, of which more below – it is partly because over decades the term itself became so generalised as to be almost invisible. Deployed by academics, journalists and creative writers, it functioned simply as a value to be defended, its centrality assumed.

Greif argues that man – alongside his more ambiguous relative, humanity – furrowed brows both middle and high from the early 1930s, when émigré German writers imported to the US their anxiety over “technics”: an administrative rationale that governed not only the machine age but modern society in general. Thinkers as politically diverse as the liberal Karl Jaspers and conservative Leo Strauss found common cause with a contemporary turn towards medieval scholasticism and in particular the writings of Thomas Aquinas.

It was briefly possible to read such works as Eliot’s Notes Towards a Definition of Culture and Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment in the same spirit, and conclude they addressed an identical emergency: the wholesale failure of Enlightenment values, and consequent necessity to fix what was meant by “man” or “human” after two great wars, the Holocaust and the seemingly stark opposition of American individualism to Soviet collectivisation.

It was not only a matter of political or metaphysical controversy; after the second world war the terms of this apparent crisis were accepted in the arts, but also tested. In 1955 the photographer Edward Steichen curated “The Family of Man”: an exhibition of 500 photographs that bruited the idea of a common humanity, expressed as much in pictures of children at play as in the atomic sublime and attendant angst. The show, Steichen wrote, was “a mirror of the essential oneness of mankind throughout the world”. When it travelled to France, Roland Barthes wondered: “Why not ask the parents of Emmett Till, the young Negro assassinated by the Whites, what they think of the Great Family of Man?” The imagery and language of global unity, which had begun to dominate everywhere from the pages of Time magazine to the General Assembly of the United Nations, was already being questioned, and revealed as a set of consoling cliches.

But it was in American fiction, so Greif contends, that the idea of the crisis was aired with most complexity: “The novel was briefly a space in which the new authority of unmasked, universal man could be borrowed and spread, and yet where its contradictions and gaps could come into life.” It was common in the 40s to speak of the death of the American novel, to lament there were no robust successors to the mid-19th century and the modernist 1920s. Faulkner and Hemingway, both routinely written off in this period, returned just in time to inaugurate a new novelistic treatment of man: Faulkner in his Nobel prize speech entitled “I Decline to Accept the End of Man”, and Hemingway in The Old Man and the Sea – written in part as a response to Faulkner’s somewhat hackneyed rhetoric in that speech.

Greif’s argument concerning the novel is persuasively put, though his actual analyses tend a little too much towards plot summary. This is also the one section of The Age of the Crisis of Man that seems – aside from a caveat about the influence of Kafka – excessively local in its focus on the United States.

All that said, Greif is a good reader of the tensions in works such as Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man: novels where assumptions about universal human experience in the middle of the century run up more or less dramatically against race and religious or cultural identity. But the most intriguing of these chapters is on Flannery O’Connor, whose southern gothic was schooled, Greif shows, on certain staples of the crisis-of-man debate: the “great books” programme at the University of Chicago, the new centrality of Catholic and Protestant theology in arguments about post-war civilisation.

“One of the peculiarities of intellectual history,” Greif notes, “is that the most extreme positions taken after a particular conjunction of surprising events, outliers in their own times, periodically turn out to be lasting or, at least, recurring positions for subsequent years.” What had been a daring, if maybe hubristic, pair of ambitions either side of the war – ambitions to define and possibly alter the course taken by humanity as such – became by the 60s just the stuff of feel-good bromides. In fact some writers, such as Arendt, had already pointed out that grand talk of universal humanity seemed to have little effect on real historical conditions: “The world found nothing sacred in the abstract nakedness of being human.” The most thorough critique came, however, from feminism: rejecting the not-so-neutral term “man” was more than a matter of usage – what was being refused was a historical era in much of western thought that pretended to universalism and progress and had no place for women.

If you studied the humanities in the 80s or even 90s you might still have been educated by generations formed by the discourse of the crisis of man: the “theory wars” then coming to a close had been fought not between radical new anti-humanists and some timeless conception of man, but between representatives of the middle and the close of the 20th century. The protagonists were closer to each other than they imagined.

Greif, however, is of an age to have first encountered the crisis of man only as a historical artefact, when it had definitively vanished over the horizon of intellectual fashion. And so he is well placed to read its literary and philosophical remains coldly but with some sympathy for the historical urges involved, which is also how he reads the later era of theoretical anti-humanists, Foucault and Derrida in particular. Greif concludes with a warning for contemporary thinkers, and their readers, who easily fall into the language of crisis and its effect on some vaporous collective humanity. “Important investigations of ‘who we are’ can exist and are conceivable, but you can be sure that they transpire somewhere else than here in our sermonising about responsibility, urgency, and hapless prescription.”

Brian Dillon’s The Great Explosion is published by Penguin. He is working on a book about the essay as form.

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