“Features pugnacious prose, expository skillfulness, transgressive wisdom, and mental verve.”
—The Weekly Standard
“A passionate, imaginative, richly detailed interpretation of the spiritual history of the modern West.”
—BookForum
Australian sociologist John Carroll turns received wisdom on its head in this brilliant, provocative, and sweeping book. Humanism is commonly credited with building Western civilization as we know it—bringing about democracy, universal rights, and prosperity. But Carroll argues that “the great five-hundred year Humanist experiment to found an entirely secular culture on earth” has been an abject failure.
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John Carroll is a professor of sociology at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia, and a fellow of the Center for Cultural Sociology at Yale University.
"Carroll is a different kind of sociologist. Not only does he not make a fetish of data and method, he eschews them altogether. The Wreck of Western Culture is nothing so pedestrian as social theory; it is a (sometimes) inspired vaticination, a dramatic and portentous reading of the entrails of Western culture from Homer to Hollywood. . . . To produce--in fewer than three hundred pages--a passionate, imaginative, richly detailed interpretation of the spiritual history of the modern West is not a small achievement, even if that interpretation is, as I believe, profoundly wrong. At a time when cutting-edge cultural criticism devotes itself to ephemera, it apparently takes a maverick Aussie sociologist to don the prophet’s mantle. Let him be praised, if only for forcing us to look once again at our cultural monuments, this time as harbingers of life or death."
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Book Description Paperback. Condition: new. Paperback. Humanism built Western civilization as we know it today. Its achievements include the liberation of the individual, democracy, universal rights, and widespread prosperity and comfort. Its ambassadors are the heroes of modern cultureErasmus, Holbein, Shakespeare, Velazquez, Descartes, Kant, Freud. Those who sought to contain humanisms pride within a frame of higher truthLuther, Calvin, Poussin, Kierkegaardcould barely interrupt its torrential progress. Those who sought to reform humanisms tenets from withinMarx, Darwin, and Nietzschewere tested by the success of their own prophecies.So runs the approved view. It is not shared by John Carroll.Instead, Carroll articulates a disruptive and compelling alternative narrative of the course of Western civilization since the Renaissance and the Reformation contrived to unleash reason, will, and a superhuman man on the world. The Wests five-hundred-year experiment with humanism has failed, he maintains in this bracing study of humanisms rise to preeminence and its headlong tumble into contradiction, because humans ultimately need some kind of contact with a higher, or metaphysical, order beyond the confines of their time-bound, mundane selves. And if this wasnt entirely clear before September 11, 2001, Carroll concludes, it surely is now. His provocative and brilliant arguments will challenge received wisdom on every side. "Features pugnacious prose, expository skillfulness, transgressive wisdom, and mental verve." —"The Weekly Standard" "A passionate, imaginative, richly detailed interpretation of the spiritual history of the modern West." —"BookForum" Australian sociologist John Carroll turns received wisdom on its head in this brilliant, provocative, and sweeping book. Humanism is commonly credited with building Western civilization as we know it—bringing about democracy, universal rights, and prosperity. But Carroll argues that "the great five-hundred year Humanist experiment to found an entirely secular culture on earth" has been an abject failure. Shipping may be from our Sydney, NSW warehouse or from our UK or US warehouse, depending on stock availability. Seller Inventory # 9781935191827