Crisis of Man

Mark Greif’s The Age of the Crisis of Man exhumes a neglected thread of American intellectual history, a period from the early 30s to the early 70s when the “crisis of man” was on everyone’s mind. Though an intellectual history, Greif attends as much to novelists as to philosophers, arguing plausibly that ideas are often transmitted to popular consciousness by artistic media.

Every term of that phrase is important to Greif. The notion that there was a crisis – not only political or economic, but anthropological, a crisis in the very identity and meaning of being human. And the gendered naming of the crisis is also significant – it was summed up as a crisis of man, without much thought to the possibility that it might entail also a crisis for woman.

Politically, the crisis was a response to the rise of totalitarian regimes that attempts to redefine human nature; in both its Nazi and Communist guise, totalitarianism was an ideology of “the new man.” Enlightenment and quasi-Christian conceptions of human beings as bearers of rights or as dignified images of God were being forgotten, and according to many writers, man was being forgotten in the process. Most broadly, “the ‘crisis of man’ itself could become a name for the existence of people without religion or values, or individuals made lonely by the individualism and anonymity of cities in alienation; in short, a new name for solvent features of the modern, which had been better diagnosed by Durkheim, Weber, or many a sociologist from the turn of the century to its middle.” 

One of the interesting results of the study is the way he fits the Sixties into his history. When one focuses on the “discourse” of the crisis of man, the Sixties look less like a new departure than like a “separate and distinct level of vernacular transformations of the discourse of man.” This doesn’t mean the Sixties weren’t disruptive, but that “When the sixties intervened, it wrote out in political actions and activism some of the contradictions we will have seen that the novelists had intuited or foundered on, synthesized, or papered over. . . . when you approach the individual pieces rocketing apart in the sixties, and sample them, you can see that they are often surprisingly made of the same stuff. Through recovery of the crisis of man, I can offer the prehistory that helps us trace back the trajectories of what now seem different intellectual galaxies, in hopes that others will compass them in a more various future.”