Modernity and its Discontents is a book that was many years in the making. As I say in the introduction, like Molière's M. Jourdain who at the age of forty discovers that he has been speaking in prose his whole life, it was not until considerably later that I realized my theme has been modernity. It is a great honor and a privilege to have my work discussed by five such acute readers.

The central thought of my book is that modernity has become a problem. Its problematic status stems from the unique character type that modernity has produced, namely, the bourgeois. In a number of sketches, I trace the outlines of this new type of human being—protean, independent, responsible, and brave—in the works of those who have endorsed this ideal and those who have rebelled against it. My view is that both modernity and its discontents express our various degrees of satisfaction and dissatisfaction with the bourgeois society that we inhabit.

The bourgeois is first and foremost a character type. I have been asked a number of times why there is no chapter on Marx in my book—although I give him numerous citations—given that he is most widely associated with the critique of bourgeois society. Actually, I find Marx had surprisingly little of interest to say about the bourgeois. Most of his best insights come from Rousseau, and his contemporaries Tocqueville and Flaubert explored the type with much greater psychological depth. It is less the sociology than the moral psychology of bourgeois life that is of interest to me.

Joshua Cherniss puts the theme of youth and age at the center of his comments (his youth and my age or maybe the other way around). He notes that while I stress the youthful and comic character of Machiavelli at the outset of modernity, I underscore the “tragic” quality of Isaiah Berlin's moral pluralism toward the end of the book. Does this transition from comic optimism to tragic pessimism represent a gain in wisdom or a loss of confidence and even impending cultural senescence? Are there resources that liberal modernity can draw upon that can resist both the complacency of its beneficiaries and the radicalism of its critics?

Cherniss reproaches me for seeking an answer to this question by appealing to some ground for order and permanence in a world of flux and instability. “The invocation of an ideal of ‘order, permanence, and stability’ sounds a note of Platonism,” Cherniss writes. If so, I plead guilty as charged. Modernity is a composite of both the permanent and the transitory. It consists of basic values—what Berlin called “concepts and categories”—that change scarcely or not at all and those of a more ephemeral or fleeting nature that may come in and out of season. If moral pluralism rejects as “Platonic nostalgia” all values that do not already embrace moral pluralism, then this is not real pluralism at all. This is what distinguishes pluralism, as I understand it, from the faux varieties of historicism and relativism. Any true pluralism must remain open-minded to its alternatives and cannot base its commitment to pluralism on an equally baseless moral absolutism.

Teresa Bejan graciously describes my method as “one of character-based philosophical portraiture.” Philosophy, I have increasingly come to believe, is inseparable from biography. If philosophy is a way of life, as I believe it is, then it is part and parcel of the lives of the unique and highly individual people who write it. There is no single model for the philosophical life, no one-size-fits-all. I find myself increasingly impatient with those who speak about The Philosopher as if this represents a single form that persists throughout history. From Machiavelli, Spinoza, and Franklin to Rousseau, Tocqueville, and Strauss, if there is a single model of the philosophic life, I simply do not see it.

Bejan's best sentence and the one that rings increasingly true is “the price of commitment to moral universalism is a lack of interest or care for those closest to us.” Modernity has been in many respects a process of alienation—to use an old Marxist term—from the things that are closest to us, family, friends, community. This is in many respects a liberation from what can seem the suffocating ties of familiarity. What else is college than a chance to create ourselves over again? But there is no gain that does not bring corresponding loss. One of these losses is the sense of inhabiting a common ethos, a particular way of life, that provides some sort of moral grounding. This remains a problem that modern-day cosmopolitans have never adequately confronted and today we are seeing the blowback.

The question of ethos is central to Samuel Goldman's remarks. At the core of philosophy is not so much the question of “what should I do?” but “what kind of person do I want to be?” Goldman finds this question at the center of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, but the problem is that Aristotle only conceived three possible answers to this question—the lives of pleasure, honor, and philosophy—while today we are confronted with a far greater range of choices. One way of answering the question would be to put it in the negative: what do I not want to be? One answer agreed upon by numerous Counter-Enlightenment thinkers is clear: the bourgeois.

For Goldman, it is the multiplicity of lives and life choices that is the defining feature of modernity. He finds this best articulated in my chapter on Saul Bellow's Mr. Sammler's Planet, which he writes “is not exactly a rehabilitation of the bourgeois whose flaws [Bellow] knows well,” but “a rejection of the demand for a consistent choice” (my emphasis). I agree. There may be something heroic in the decision to single-mindedly dedicate oneself to one idea of the good—this was Plato's idea—but there also seems something inhumane about it. As Goldman says, “Real life is always a bit of a muddle,” or, to cite the final line of Woody Allen's recent film Café Society, “Socrates said, ‘The unexamined life is not worth living,’ but the examined one is no bargain.” In short, life is complicated.

Susan Shell masterfully connects the centrality of my chapter on Rousseau's Letter to d'Alembert to the philosophies of Kant and Hegel. How did Rousseau's radical protest against the Enlightenment end up producing the German philosophy of freedom? Allan Bloom once mischievously wrote that it was Rousseau—a Swiss—who taught the French how to make love. I would argue that it was Rousseau who taught the Germans how to philosophize. How embarrassing!

Shell gently reproves my reading of Kant's Perpetual Peace as “the high-water mark of Enlightenment optimism.” Kant, she writes, is “less optimistic” than he first appears, values the nation-state in its “cultural particularity,” and attributes greater importance to national character and civic education than I allow. Who am I to argue with Susan Shell on Kant? She has done more than anyone I know to draw attention to Kant's self-professed reservations about the demand for autonomy. My own reading of Kant is drawn from a pronounced Tendenz in his thought to view history as a pendant to moral philosophy, a prophylactic against despair. Living, as I suggest, at the “golden moment” when reason, history, and the rights of man all seemed to be converging in his own age, Kant did not live to see—as Leo Strauss once said of Hermann Cohen—horrors and catastrophes hitherto unknown and largely unintelligible in terms of the philosophy of progress.

Ryan Hanley provides a sensitive reading of my chapters on Franklin's Autobiography and Tocqueville's Democracy in America as expressing the two sides of bourgeois modernity, with Franklin serving as a champion and Tocqueville a critic of its American incarnation. Hanley writes that he is “entirely persuaded” by the need to maintain a healthy balance between the optimism and enthusiasm of modernity's champions and the skepticism and doubts shared by its critics. Yet he wonders whether the cultural needle has not swung too far in the antibourgeois direction. “We need to rededicate ourselves to the project of rehabilitating bourgeois virtues,” Hanley maintains.

One need not be a M. Homais to believe that the counterculture of the 1960s and other antinomian movements have done irreparable damage to the cultural ethos of American democracy. This kind of antibourgeois posturing borrowed from the Frankfurt School used to be a staple of the New Left that regarded America—often spelled with a k—as a source of every modern pathology from racism and homophobia to the despoliation of the planet. Today this form of German Kulturpessimismus has gravitated to the alt-right that regards America as a cultural wasteland of nihilism and “carnage” (to use our new president's favorite term). Under these conditions, isn't the most scandalous position precisely an épater l'anti-bourgeois, a vigorous defense of the humble bourgeois virtues of work, self-reliance, and moral progress, to say nothing of a little more humor?

This is a profound challenge to which I wish I had an answer. I agree with Hanley that we have become overburdened with our discontents. But these, as I say at the end of my book, have become a part of who we are. A nation as resolutely committed as ours to the pursuit of happiness is likely to find itself beset by all kinds of worries, doubts, and anxieties. Happiness remain an elusive object of desire. “One is at first astonished to contemplate the singular agitation displayed by so many happy men in the very midst of their abundance,” was Tocqueville's observation on this phenomenon and it has never been improved upon, except I doubt that anyone today would find this astonishing. If the needle has moved too far toward the antibourgeois, we have no one to blame but ourselves.

I want to return to the beginning where Joshua Cherniss gives a beautiful characterization of my book. He draws on an earlier work of mine where I quoted Iris Murdoch to the effect that it is important to ask of any philosopher what he or she most fears. Cherniss generously answers the question on my behalf: “What [Smith] fears is simplification, certainty, and even satisfaction—where the last leads to a cessation of questioning and debate.”

The philosophers who come out most favorably in my book—Leo Strauss, Tocqueville, and Isaiah Berlin—are those who maintain an open-ended and open-minded skepticism about ultimate matters, who are more adept at posing questions than propounding answers, and who see themselves more as teachers than professors. They approached their craft not with a doctrine or a system and certainly with nothing so crude as a “method,” but with a set of questions drawn from a deep appreciation of the history of political and philosophic thought. If I have a great intellectual fear, I suppose it is that this kind of thinking will be lost among the wrangling dogmatisms of the present.