Customer Reviews

Escape from the 19th Century and Other Essays

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These four essays are loosely linked, at best, and stylistically they range widely, too. There's an affectionate evocation/discussion of that great madman, Charles Fourier; an insightful and novel analysis of Marx's quarrel with Proudhon that is probably as close to an academic essay as PLW is likely to publish; a wide-ranging piece on the traces of anti-authoritarian and anti-hierarchical sentiment in various cultures; and a straighforward and perhaps slightly over-extended chronicle of a bizarre piece of Rumanian history, a story which reads like fiction. They all share a concern with alternatives to the dreadful repetitions of the teethgrinding insanity of capitalism, but with Wilson that more or less goes without saying.

So what? The diversity of topics is refreshing, and they all benefit from Wilson's generosity, his keen intelligence and genuine depth, and his serious though totally un-academic scholarship. And the two central essays, "Marx and Proudhon Escape the Nineteenth Century" and "The Shamanic Trace," raise key issues about the chances that we may yet find a way out of the self-devouring cycles of the world laid down in the European nineteenth century, that age red in tooth and claw. Very highly recommended.