In this book, Steven Smith examines modernity as the site of a unique type of human being entirely unknown to the ancient and medieval worlds that is called the bourgeois. The characteristics and qualities attributed to this new kind of individual by writers like Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Franklin, and Kant included the desire for autonomy, to live independently of custom, habit, and tradition, and to be the ultimate locus of moral responsibility. This kind of bourgeois culture that has become most fully associated with America and the American way of life was accompanied by doubts and fears ... More

In this book, Steven Smith examines modernity as the site of a unique type of human being entirely unknown to the ancient and medieval worlds that is called the bourgeois. The characteristics and qualities attributed to this new kind of individual by writers like Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Franklin, and Kant included the desire for autonomy, to live independently of custom, habit, and tradition, and to be the ultimate locus of moral responsibility. This kind of bourgeois culture that has become most fully associated with America and the American way of life was accompanied by doubts and fears. Bourgeois society was rejected by some of its leading critics as domineering and tyrannical (Marx), as tepid and cowardly (Nietzsche), and as lacking in taste and culture (Flaubert). The concept of the bourgeois slowly became the locus of scorn and as the cause of our manifold discontents. How did modernity that was once considered the locus of the free and responsible individual become associated with low-minded materialism, moral cowardice, and philistinism? This provocative book explores some of reasons for these anxieties in the works of Rousseau, Tocqueville, Flaubert, Leo Strauss, Isaiah Berlin, and Saul Bellow. The work offers a novel perspective of what it means to be modern by showing what is most characteristic of modernity are the self-criticisms and doubts that have accompanied political progress and why some of these discontents have produced movements of radical rejection.