Superfluous Men: Conservative Critics of American Culture, 1900-1945 [Hardcover]

Robert M. Crunden (Editor)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

The roots of modern conservatism as an intellectual and political movement have been explored extensively by a variety of writers, but almost all attention has been focused on ideas and events following the Second World War. Editor Robert M. Crunden seeks to go deeper, in this anthology of prewar material. He brings together a group of authors bound by what one of them calls a concern over "the spiritual disorder of modern life--its destruction of human integrity and its lack of purpose." Contributors include academics, polemicists, and journalists: Irving Babbit, Walter Lippmann, H.L. Mencken, Albert Jay Nock, John Crowe Ransom, George Santayana, Allen Tate, and others. These "superfluous men" (the odd term is derived from Nock's influential book Memoirs of a Superfluous Man) did not consider themselves part of an inchoate conservatism, although a number of them were allied in the New Humanist and Southern agrarian movements. And although they write from decades long past, their voices rarely seem distant. Here is Donald Davidson with an antimaterialist critique of industrial progress (as personified by Henry Ford) that could apply to the roaring economy at the turn of the 21st century:

[The masses] must spend and spend unceasingly, in order to consume the never-ending stream of new products that industry hurls upon them. They will be encouraged to make a necessity of every luxury that the clever industrialists may devise. For the industry of the Ford type has not regard for actual or fundamental needs! It seeks to create two or even twenty demands where none at all existed before.

Serious students of conservatism will surely want to have a copy of The Superfluous Men on their shelves, near Russell Kirk's The Conservative Mind and George M. Nash's The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America. --John J. Miller

From the Back Cover

"You can't understand the history of American thought without this critically important volume."--John Podhoretz "Here is the first generation of American conservative intellectuals, in all their uncomfortable glory: prickly, quirky, unclubbably aristocratic and as individual as the idiosyncratic philosophies they espoused. Compassionate conservatives they most definitely weren't, and their angry anti-modernism has not yet lost its power to startle and provoke. For those short-sighted youngsters who think conservatism started with Ronald Reagan or Barry Goldwater--or even Bill Buckley--this admirably edited collection will supply a swift kick in the preconceptions."--Terry Teachout

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 453 pages
• Publisher: Intercollegiate Studies Institute; 2 edition (November 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1882926307
• ISBN-13: 978-1882926305
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.6 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,335,643 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Marked down for the editor's annoying attitude, December 14, 2009

By 

James J. Omeara (Long Island City, NY USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

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This review is from: Superfluous Men: Conservative Critics of American Culture, 1900-1945 (Hardcover)

I admit that I bought this book by mistake; I hit the key based on the publisher [ISI] and the price {$1.99!) thinking it was a history of the Superfluous Men, not a selection of their works. But actually, I was lucky; I can't imagine how awful a whole book by this editor would be.

The collection itself -- essays, book excerpts, even book reviews and letters -- is great; a welcome reminder that there was a time, not too distant, when PC, po-mo and do-good liberalism didn't dominate the intellectual world, and anti-liberal, anti-modernist, voices (and no, I don't mean Sarah Palin!) could actually be heard.

What's irritating is the editor's own contributions. After a flimsy introduction that tries to absolve himself of any attempt to articulate a criterion of selection, he prefaces each selection with a few paragraphs that range from indifferent to condescending.

For example, one selection is an "example of emotional extremism masquerading as cultural analysis" (actually, one of America's greatest architects questioning the pseudo-scientific pretensions of Social Darwinism); H. L. Mencken's work "hardly rates as good political science" (oh, to hear Mencken's response to that bromide!), and so on. With such contempt for his subject, why did he bother to disinter these dusty, yellowed pages?

Of course, that's his problem (or would be, if he were still alive). But is his attitude even justified? Here's Donald Davidson [the agrarian, not the analytic philosopher] on the world of Ford:

"The result of all this, almost inevitably, will not only be a terrifying expansion of the abstract money economy, now already puzzling in its weird ramifications. It will be to corrupt the public life, throughout its entire body, by persuading people to believe that life is made up of material satisfactions only, and that there are no satisfactions that cannot be purchased. On the one hand we shall have financial chaos; on the other, a degraded citizenry, who have been taught under the inhumane principles of Fordism always to spend more than they have, and to want more than they get."

To the editor, Davidson's "writings now often seem derivative and repetitious, and he made no permanent professional contribution" while being capable of producing a "small gem" from time to time.

A chillingly prescient description of American society, circa 2010; a "small gem" indeed! As for our editor, his contributions here show him to be incapable of producing gems of any size.