The Age of the Crisis of Man is nothing if not a quixotic project. Mark Greif's study takes as its object an oft-overlooked mid-century discourse in America, with its roots in the question “what is man?” and its branches extending into concerns about the shape of history, the nature of faith, and the promise or threat of technology. Greif calls this a “maieutic” discourse, one that serves as a midwife to more familiar, often mutually opposed, movements in the history of ideas. Yet what is most striking today about this discourse, Greif acknowledges, “is how unreadable it is, how tedious, how unhelpful” (11). It is and was a deliberately empty discourse, full of redundancies and tautologies, yet driven by the pathos of a single insight that stood against the degradations of war and the concentration camps: “there must be something that must be protected” (12). “Man” was the most common name for this “something.” But the absence of scholarly recognition for this discourse, its dismissal as no more than bluster or ideology, is also part of Greif's object of study. Synthesizing the mid-century period and its later historiography, Greif presents the “man” debates as both a serious endeavour and an intellectual curio, as both significant in their legacy and lacking in identifiable repercussions for our time. His book outlines a history that is neither wholly monumental nor wholly sceptical, but rather a complex and fascinating convergence of the two.

One of the keys to this history is the central role Greif gives to literary fiction as a specific form of engagement with the broader crisis. Where the philosophical discourse on man was primarily oriented toward abstract universalism, novelists explored historical experience marked by concrete forms of difference. But the novel did not thereby become simply the territory where ideology could be tested through experience (a picture that emerges, for instance, from Irving Howe's mid-century classic Politics and the Novel (1957), strangely unmentioned by Greif). It was rather the ground where the value of unmarked universality itself was questioned. Fiction by Bellow, Ellison, O'Connor and Pynchon therefore pushed the debate forward in ways that were simply unavailable to other kinds of thought. And these writers themselves proceeded from the “dead end” embodied by the contributions of older literary grandees of the time. One of the highlights of The Age of the Crisis of Man is Greif's account of the reputational reconfiguration of Hemingway and Faulkner in the postwar era as novelists of “man,” and how they themselves wrote novels that responded to that very reconfiguration. Indeed, Greif presents one origin of the book as lying in his initial bemusement at how Faulkner's Nobel Prize speech, with its grandiose encomiums to “man” and “will” and “soul,” could be received so seriously in its time when its terms ring so empty and even meaningless to contemporary ears.

If Greif's emphasis on the literary is refreshing, so too is his commitment to the very commitedness of the thinkers and writers he studies. This is a strikingly un-Bourdieuian book, refusing to present its key figures as disenchanted opportunists, workers of the system of cultural capital, nor simply as ideological vessels for the institutions at which they work or in which they publish. It is not that institutional forces are absent: Robert Maynard Hutchins's Great Books project at the University of Chicago, for instance, is shown to resonate throughout the work of a variety of thinkers who came into contact with it, from its original inspiration, Mortimer Adler, to its official novelist, Saul Bellow, to that avatar of “the new sensibility,” Susan Sontag. But with each of these figures there is no sense of toeing any institutional line, but rather of honestly working through problems using the intellectual resources available to them. Moreover, Greif sometimes seems deliberately dismissive of the kinds of sociological suspicion that typify contemporary scholarship. Writing of a forgotten journal from the late 1940s called Perspectives USA, a Ford Foundation-sponsored publication that reprinted American literary and critical works for export to Europe, Greif acknowledges the propagandistic context but nonetheless comments, “You can view this as a troubling warning of how reputations are made by power or take it as a sunnier lesson on propaganda: sometimes propaganda need only be art” (120). There is a considered naivety at play here: Greif wants to draw a line between the animating convictions of thinkers and writers and the way their work would be mobilized on behalf of American nationalism abroad. While open to challenge, this move enables Greif to trace, via his committed intellectuals, the fault line (simply referred to as “the Sixties”) when “man” discourse shifted from a defence of American cultural superiority abroad to an attack on its repression of freedoms at home.

The conviction that he allows to others likewise animates Greif's own writing, and in the impressive panorama of thinkers and writers he covers, certain heroes emerge. Greif's enthusiasm is particularly notable in his treatments of Hannah Arendt (author, with The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), of “the one true masterpiece and culminating work of the early period of the discourse of man” (90)), Lionel Trilling, Ralph Ellison (whose Invisible Man (1952) “answered all the demands of the novel that then existed” (166, original emphasis)), and Thomas Pynchon. Even those figures whose ideas Greif describes with more neutrality or equanimity are always made interesting. Only in one section of the book – the treatment of postwar Anglo-American analytic philosophy and its central figure, W. V. O. Quine – does Greif show anything like tangible disdain for the subject of his writing. This one anomaly is not all that surprising, however, since Greif's temperamental preference for the drama of ideas runs directly counter to the deliberately deflationary and anti-metaphysical scientism of the analytic method. While my sympathies are all with Greif here, it seems important to acknowledge aspects of postwar intellectual culture that became tired of questions about the nature of man and looked to the concrete answers that science seemed capable of providing. Arguably, it is the scientistic currents of this era, and particularly their dovetailing with Chicago-style economic modelling (barely mentioned here, but a developing presence through the period), that did most to shape the neoliberal culture which was beginning to emerge as Greif's period came to a close and which dominates today.

Works with the scope and ambition of The Age of the Crisis of Man can always be questioned for who and what they leave out, and the list of omissions from Greif's cornucopia is no doubt as long as his list of inclusions (for what it's worth, I felt that Freudian psychoanalysis might have played a larger role, as might Nietzsche, as might considerations of man deriving from Marxist humanism). But its impressive breadth should not conceal the fact that this is also a deeply personal book, and all the better for that. Greif reads works of literature as animated by particular intellectual questions, and while reading this book one constantly senses Greif's own intellectual pleasure, almost novelistic in quality, in finding answers to questions that have long perplexed him. One hopes that his example can encourage readers to undertake their own grandest quests, whatever they may be, in a similar spirit.

The power of Mark Greif's The Age of the Crisis of Man lies in its ability to synthesize a broad range of discursive currents from mid-century within a coherent intellectual frame. Seen from the perspective of this book, the political theory of Hannah Arendt, the fiction of Ralph Ellison and the anthropology of Claude Lévi-Strauss, to choose just three examples, have something important in common. Each provides a response to the set of fundamental questions that, Greif argues, animated mid-century thought in the United States, about the nature of man, the shape of his history, the nature of his beliefs and his relation to technology. The broad sweep of his critical narrative looks something like this: during the late 1930s and the 1940s, intellectual discourse in the United States turned self-consciously towards a crisis in the abstract conception of humanity, driven in part by the advent of Nazism and Stalinism in Europe, and reified by the discovery of the death camps and the first use of nuclear weapons. During the succeeding period in the late 1940s and the 1950s, the burden of exploring and elucidating the crisis of man fell to the novel, which was able to bring something to the debate that had been absent in more abstract intellectual discourse, an ability to mediate between the universal and the particular through narrating experience in concreto. The characteristic features of intellectual life in the 1960s and 1970s can then be understood as a reaction against the humanism of the preceding decades, an attempt to fragment the figure of universal man, to displace and ultimately to evacuate him altogether from accounts of society and culture. The orthodox readings of the canonical figures that Greif addresses in the study are not radically revised, but the accumulative effect of their participation in a common discourse is to reorient our view on the period and its logic. While recent intellectual histories of the postwar period such as Daniel T. Rodgers's Age of Fracture (2011) have been obliged to thematize fragmentation itself as a paradoxical common ground for thinkers, Greif's work confidently places the crisis of man at the centre of intellectual culture in the United States, a problem around which the most accomplished thinkers of mid-century orbited, whether using the tools of fiction, philosophy or theory.

The book is unapologetically concerned with centres, and its centripetal tendencies follow those of the culture it addresses. As Arthur Schlesinger Jr. made clear in his 1949 book The Vital Centre, the spatial imagination of the cultural establishment in the postwar United States was driven by an explicit desire to claim the centre ground. Greif to some extent reproduces this world where the United States, New York and Partisan Review are the dominant institutions for conceiving culture, and by reference to which he navigates the period. It is significant, then, that the pairing of Ralph Ellison and Saul Bellow are placed at the heart of the book, receiving two chapters dedicated exclusively to them, while discussion on either side moves swiftly through prodigious and weighty figures such as Herbert Marcuse and Jacques Derrida in the space of a few pages. Greif is particularly good in his treatment of Ellison's Invisible Man, launching close readings of the novel that justify not only its existing place at the centre of the US canon, but also, through critical practice, the bold claims made for the intellectual work done by fiction at this time. The Ellison that emerges from these chapters is a supple thinker who was able to see in the form of the novel a way of intervening effectively in the discourse of the day, and of revealing race as the blind spot for universalist thinking about man. The same, however, does not hold for the treatment of Bellow, whose intellectual heritage in the Chicago Great Books tradition serves to accentuate further Ellison's sophistication by comparison, and although the contrast with Ellison is neatly laid out, it's not entirely clear why The Adventures of Augie March should be privileged as a route into understanding the crisis of man. As centre, Bellow doesn't hold, but Ellison's dialectical habits are the force that holds Greif's book together.

As such, it is surprising that Hegel and Marx do not play more important roles in a book that takes the relationship between the singular and the universal, and debate over the teleology of history, as its two biggest topics of inquiry. Greif shows dexterously how influential Ellison's reading of Hegel had been on Invisible Man, but goes little further. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment, which is arguably the fullest deployment of Marxist-Hegelian thinking in addressing the crisis of man, is given relatively short shrift. The Trinidadian émigré intellectual C. L. R. James, who was deeply committed to a revitalized Marxist humanism for mid-century America, is nowhere mentioned. The breadth and erudition of Greif's book are evident and impressive, but its understanding of the cultural establishment as the centre of gravity for the crisis of man means that such brilliant thinkers, whose relevance to New York intellectuals was peripheral at best, remain untapped as resources. The larger questions begged by this reservation are whether the crisis of man is to be understood as a US phenomenon or a global one, and whether US intellectuals are indeed best placed to grasp it. How would the book look different if Frantz Fanon's Marxist-humanist critique of American imperialism, rather than Saul Bellow's novel, stood with Ellison at its centre? Greif's consistent attention to émigré and transatlantic figures offers opportunities for the kind of transnational critical purchase I am thinking of, but it seems that for the purpose of the book their importance to the crisis of man is dependent on their importance to the US intellectual culture. Consequently, the imperial logic that made (and continues to make) universal man a particular kind of historical problem for the United States after World War II is never fully elucidated, even if it is glimpsed in the commentaries on the work of Hannah Arendt and Thomas Pynchon.

At the end of the book, the author himself adopts the rhetoric of a frustrated mid-century intellectual, describing himself “enmeshed in the stupidity and mediocrity of our own time” (330). There are echoes here of Adorno's lament in Minima Moralia, that “every visit to the cinema leaves me feeling stupider and worse,”Footnote ¹ but while Adorno advocated hostile estrangement and austerity as the only response to mid-century American barbarism, Greif's recommendation is that we face our “confused and ignorant moment” in the twenty-first century (330). This leaves us with a choice, of whether to “live in the moment and let it be” or “accept Ahab's madness to see what is at the back of it” (330). Even this turn to Moby-Dick has its own mid-century flavor, but it rehearses not so much Matthiessen's celebrated criticism, as C. L. R. James's 1953 book on Melville, Mariners, Renegades and Castaways, which reads the novel as a parable of the alienated mid-century intellectual in crisis. In the context both of the novel and of James's reading of it, the choice between intellectual withdrawal and some form of apocalyptic violence (Ahab: “If man will strike, strike through the mask!”) strikes me as a false one. It articulates the limits of an argument that does not excavate the deep roots of the crisis of man in imperialism and global capital, but it should not detract from the significant achievements of this book in providing a rich new map of mid-century US thought.

Near the end of his ambitious and provocative The Age of the Crisis of Man, Mark Greif confesses that he has come to dread any mention of the question “What is man?” (328). Why? For starters, books on the topic are frequently full of bombast and self-importance. They sound deep, but aren't. In postwar American writing, where the novel was seen as the great genre of human self-awareness, Greif notes that Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea (1951) and William Faulkner's A Fable (1954), along with his Nobel Prize address, succumbed too easily to the temptations of profundity. In fact, Dwight Macdonald nailed the middlebrow nature of Hemingway's short book very early and most critics soon grew weary of Faulkner's endure-and-prevail rhetoric.

According to Greif, preoccupation with the status of “Man” was a transatlantic phenomenon beginning in the 1930s and accelerating in importance after the war. For instance, Martin Heidegger and the Frankfurt school offered powerful critiques of technological thinking (die Technik) and the Enlightenment, but, as Greif notes, Lewis Mumford proposed a similar critique ahead of them both. Another type of “crisis-of-man” writing was represented in the post-1945 revival of thinking in terms of human rights and natural law, while existentialism, including the Kafka cult in postwar America, was also concerned to rethink human nature. While Greif also spends time with Reinhold Niebuhr's works, he names Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism the genre's “one true masterpiece” (90) for the way it captured the frightening logic of the challenge to human status represented by National Socialism and Stalinism. (She had also helped translate some of Kafka's texts into English in the 1940s.) In fact, Arendt's reintroductions of the concept of evil in Origins and then in Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963) were landmarks in the formulation of a philosophical anthropology.

In Parts II and III Greif shifts to literary criticism and then to the various literary representations of the crisis of man. Along the way, he makes us see American literature from new angles. For example, what is almost a throwaway observation – that there are two American literary canons, the American Renaissance and the modern(ist) American novel of the interwar years – is worth a roundtable discussion all its own. He also explores the fictional attempts to take the abstraction of man apart, reexamine it, and then put it back together. For this, he analyses the way Saul Bellow and Ralph Ellison deploy particular ethnically and racially specific characters to explore the human condition (Augie March, the unnamed protagonist of Invisible Man), while Flannery O'Connor offers a hard-nosed Catholic challenge to secular humanism and the early Thomas Pynchon explores the technologization of human existence, especially the re-recycling of the human body (240). Greif is also well aware of the racial and gender dimensions lurking in writing about the crisis of man. In fact, he succeeds very well in integrating race, as it were, into the American discussion of humanism. By the end of the 1960s (and the end of his chapter on that decade), Greif has dismantled the universality of man until it reemerges as “The Man.” Where humanism once was seen as engaged with human wholeness, it increasingly stood for hegemonic “white-ism” and male dominance.

All this sets the stage for Greif's analysis of the reception of French antihumanism in what I think is his best chapter, “Universal Philosophy and Antihumanist Theory.” He begins not with fashionable thinkers such as Derrida and Foucault (though he gets to them), but with Claude Lévi-Strauss. Most refreshingly, Greif demonstrates none of the frightened dismissiveness that anglophone humanists often adopt when discussing Continental antihumanism. Where normative humanism had stood for universal equality, Greif asserts that “the relevant universality in structuralism is difference” (303). Derrida's deconstruction does not propose a new version of nihilism. Rather, it is aimed at claims for the absolute, the homogeneous, and the monolithic. In Greif's account, then, 1970s theoretical life in America was a battleground where existentialists gave way to structuralists who in turn were overthrown by post-structuralists, who themselves owed much to late Heideggerian antihumanism. In all this, “post” and “anti” proliferated. Still, the precariously positioned humanist vision of the Frankfurt school was reenforced by a new figure on the transatlantic scene: Jürgen Habermas. By this point a transatlantic figure, Arendt remained in the humanist camp, but her emphasis too fell on pluralism and difference.

But I'm not sure whether Greif has convincingly explained why American thought, especially literary criticism, was so welcoming of – some would say vulnerable to – French theory, or German thought, for that matter. William James had made a career out of defences of pluralism, yet apparently American intellectuals needed Derrida to say differance was OK. Where was pragmatism, America's signal contribution to modern thought, in all this? There was Richard Rorty, but beyond him … Greif traces the way Susan Sontag's personal and intellectual itinerary took her to philosophy departments at Chicago, Harvard and Oxford until she chucked it all for Paris in the early 1960s. Why was anglophone philosophy so narrow and analytically obsessed, while American literature was so fearless and assertive – and read – overseas? By the time we get to the mid-1970s, figures such as Thomas Kuhn, Stanley Cavell and Fredric Jameson, along with Rorty and Sontag, were incorporating and challenging the Europeans, though none of them gets much attention from Greif. In ethics and political thought, the areas where Continental theory was weakest, the emergence of figures such as John Rawls and Ronald Dworkin, among others, betokened a revival of liberalism.

Finally, not only does Greif fully incorporate thinking about race in his critique of the crisis-of-man writing, his work also helps us see the problematic of race and ethnicity as the central philosophical anthropological challenge of the period he explores. At bottom, discussions of race and anti-Semitism were about what it meant to be fully human. This would help explain why African American and Jewish writers (Bellow, Roth, Malamud, Wright, Ellison, Baldwin) and thinkers (Arendt, Sontag, Derrida, and Lévi-Strauss) played such seminal roles in the complex story Greif tells. But there is one figure missing from Greif's book who should be there: W. E. B. Du Bois. Indeed, his famous 1903 assertion – “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line” – was a salvo announcing “the age of the crisis of man.”

Few academics have had the courage to end their books with a cliffhanger, that plot device of early nineteenth-century serialized fiction that gave us the contemporary novel. Mark Greif has done precisely that in his provocative new book, The Age of the Crisis of Man. Greif spends three hundred pages detailing arguments made by mid-twentieth-century American intellectuals and European émigrés about the supposed “crisis of man”; that is, the belief that the Enlightenment, which bequeathed doctrines about inevitable historical progress and an inviolable human nature, had also produced unimaginable suffering. According to most mid-century intellectuals, mass political movements in the modern age had turned human beings into marionettes, global conflicts had erased faith in any just political order, and modern technology, once a means to master nature, had morphed into a means to master humankind. Greif presents a wide range of intellectuals – from Hannah Arendt to Reinhold Niebuhr, Dwight Macdonald, and Theodor Adorno – who fretted over this apparent crisis, and he details their anxieties and traces the legacy of their discourse through the turmoil of the 1960s. Greif's goal, however, is not to resuscitate these thinkers or to offer a usable intellectual tradition but to make us recognize the limitations of this discourse and to dispense with it. “Stop!” he implores us, “Anytime your inquiries lead you to say, ‘At this moment we must ask and decide who we fundamentally are …’ – just stop” (328, original emphasis).

Greif wants to show how trapped we still are in this discourse and begs us to change the conversation. He barely hints, however, at the direction of this new conversation, arguing that he had to write this first book to clear the ground. In a way, though, this new conversation might be found where Greif begins his narrative. He argues that this discourse about the crisis of man heralded an intellectual revolution because it overturned the dominance in America of the pragmatic philosophy of John Dewey. Pragmatism, according to many, reflected the instrumental rationality of an age that had produced the atomic bomb and German death camps. Existentialism, humanism, and Christian realism, instead, filled the intellectual gap until novelists, according to Greif, took up this discourse of the crisis of man and revealed its limitations. Saul Bellow and Flannery O'Connor, for example, played out this discourse in their novels, discovering, not surprisingly, that abstract notions of man, when placed in modern conditions, had little to say about the daily experience of race and ethnicity. By the 1960s, consequently, humanism seemed outdated. The result was a split in intellectual life, embodied in the divide between analytic and Continental philosophy. Activists in the 1960s responded to the exclusionary nature of this discourse and to its ineffectual politics. The “system,” not man, needed analysis, which led to the introduction of antihumanism, first in the writings of Susan Sontag and then in the works of French intellectuals. In philosophy departments, however, this discourse led to an analytic tradition that sought to purge irrationality from all legal and ethical thinking. According to Greif, this divide, which still plagues us today, has blocked out alternative conversations.

Consequently, Greif argues that the specific answers offered by intellectuals to this crisis do not matter, only their determination to invoke a sense of worry. Oddly enough, though, he does spend quite a bit of time detailing their arguments and, by relying on the usual suspects, actually misses the breadth of this discourse. For instance, Greif has little to say about the history of psychology in the postwar period, including, most importantly, psychoanalysis. There is an important intellectual shift from neo-Freudian psychology to the radical theories of Norman Brown and Jacques Lacan that drove this discourse. He also ignores the origins of antihumanism in the work of John Cage, William Burroughs, and others, whose arguments prefigured the introduction of post-structuralism in America by two decades, and skirts over the importance of cybernetics and information theory to the rise of posthumanism and transhumanism. Even modern conservatism, beginning with Whittaker Chambers and others, was built upon this discourse. Uninterested in their specific answers to this crisis, Greif consequently ignores the political differences between, say, Dwight Macdonald and Reinhold Niebuhr or between the aesthetic projects of Theodor Adorno and Lionel Trilling. As he well knows, the path laid out by Ayn Rand or Irving Kristol is quite different from the one laid out by Tom Hayden or Shulamith Firestone, all of whom used this discourse too. People have lived or have been forced to live through these specific answers in one way or another. The world of thought is not separate from the world of fact, as John Dewey explained.

In this sense, the new conversation that Greif wants to inaugurate might begin by returning to the pragmatism of Dewey. Pragmatism did not disappear in American intellectual life, as Greif suggests, but was filtered through the work of a number of postwar intellectuals including Paul Goodman, C. Wright Mills, Erving Goffman, Arnold Kaufman, Allan Kaprow, Richard Poirier, Morton White, Richard Rorty, and, yes, W. V. O. Quine (whom Greif misreads). There is a usable past here if Greif had chosen to connect the dots. Take, for example, Ralph Ellison, who emerges as the closest thing to a hero in Greif's book. Greif argues that Ellison's ruminations on identity in Invisible Man were filtered through his reading of Hegel, but the more immediate inspiration was the literary theory of Kenneth Burke, another mid-century intellectual steeped in pragmatism. Burke taught Ellison that all discourse, literary or otherwise, is a form of rhetoric; that is, an effort to persuade readers that a particular schema for categorizing or organizing the world was better than another. As such, any piece of rhetoric, including the well-crafted Jamesian novel, is incomplete, covering over other ways of seeing the world. The trick, then, for solving what Ellison called the puzzle of the one-and-the-many is to acknowledge the provisional nature of all truth claims and to enter the field of rhetoric – that space between the political world and private life where cultural meanings and symbols are exchanged and debated. To do so is to acknowledge that the individual is not some abstraction but a lived, historical being situated in a plethora of traditions and narratives that serve as points of both unity and difference. Questions of moral standing, which Greif says he will consider in his next book, are a part that field of rhetoric too.

In 1987 Russell Jacoby published The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe, in which he lamented the disappearance of nonacademic intellectuals and the way professors had tried, unsuccessfully, to take their place. In the process, Jacoby argued, they denigrated American intellectual life, their impact more or less hermetically sealed within ivy towers. Ten years later, Mark Greif handed in his undergraduate Harvard History and Literature thesis, titled “The American Transformation of the Holocaust, 1945–1965.” In exploring the reaction of writers to what the Nazis did, Greif, in his counter to what Peter Novick was writing, prefigured the scholarship of Kirsten Fermgalich and Hasia Diner.

Beginning with his 1997 thesis, Greif's scholarship has focussed on the role of the public intellectuals in American life. As have his actions. Defying Jacoby's distinction between writers inside and outside the academy, Greif both earned his PhD in American studies from Yale and successfully pursued a career as public intellectual. He wrote for American Prospect and then in 2004, with colleagues, founded and began to write for literary journal n + 1, in part to prove that American intellectual life did not end with the demise of Partisan Review, which had disappeared the year before.

“I had been something of a sucker for those calls for revived public intellectualism,” Greif wrote in a recent article, “What's Wrong with Public Intellectuals?”, published in the 20 February 2015 issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education. There he made clear that he envisioned robust and demanding roles for public intellectuals in the twenty-first century. He lamented that when newly minted PhDs submitted essays to n + 1, too often it “seemed they merrily left difficulty at home, leapt into colloquial language with both feet, added unnatural (and frankly unfunny) jokes, talked about TV, took on a tone chummy and unctuous.” Instead, he asserted that public intellectuals of his generation should aim at “restoring the highest estimation of the public” by “making ‘the public’ more brilliant, more skeptical, more disobedient, more capable of self-defense, and more dangerous again.” Intellectuals, whether writing from within or outside the academy, should “face off against the pseudo-public culture of insipid media and dumbed-down ‘big ideas.’”Footnote ¹ That is a tall order, but it states clearly Greif's capacious ambitions for public intellectuals in the twenty-first century, in light of which we can read The Age of the Crisis of Man.

Capacious itself, as well as brilliant, provocative, and expansively learned, Greif's book reveals his high aspirations for the intelligence and dedication of both the people he writes about and the readers he hopes to reach. This helps explain a number of the book's characteristics: what some have found its occasionally opaque style but others might see as its demanding inventiveness; his search for writers who pondered major philosophical issues, and his movements between appreciation and disappointment as he considers how convincingly writers from 1933 to 1973 grappled with their reactions both to the ideas of others and to external events. His inclusion of religion, race, gender, and technology reminds us of the challenges we face in writing about philosophy and high culture. His weaving together of what novelists and critics offered provides a model for how public intellectuals should, like the best writers for Partisan Review, roam widely for relevant texts. Roaming widely also characterizes what he does geographically, for his book provides a model for what it means to think transnationally. Thus he helps us understand how the delayed reaction to Franz Kafka shaped Americans' literary aspirations, how the émigrés from Nazi Germany challenged and enriched native-born writers, the way Susan Sontag tried to put Humpty Dumpty of the human condition back together again by drawing on French writers, and the implications of the writings of French structuralists and British analytic philosophers for American thought beginning in the 1960s.

With his book and more generally in his career, Greif has set ambitious goals for himself and for us. He ends his book where others might begin theirs, with a powerful discussion of what drove him to research and write the book. In his undergraduate thesis, Greif emphasized what he called the “moral imagination” and remarked that the “deeper aim” of his early work was “to make a first step toward some historical theory of moral commitment.” The Age of the Crisis of Man is another important step.