New Book – Modernity and Its Discontents: Making and Unmaking the Bourgeois from Machiavelli to Bellow
In this book, Steven B. Smith examines the concept of modernity, not as the end product of historical developments but as a state of mind. He explores modernism as a source of both pride and anxiety, suggesting that its most distinctive characteristics are the self-criticisms and doubts that accompany social and political progress. Providing profiles of the modern project’s most powerful defenders and critics — from Machiavelli and Spinoza to Saul Bellow and Isaiah Berlin — this work of philosophy and political science offers a perspective on what it means to be modern and why discontent and sometimes radical rejection are its inevitable by-products.
Steven B. Smith is the Alfred Cowles Professor of Political Science, professor of philosophy, and Codirector of the Center for the Study of Representative Institutions at the MacMillan Center.