James Livingston

  • culture March 09, 2015

    The Age of the Crisis of Man by Mark Greif

    Long before Feminism, or Theory, or the Great Recession, the category of “Man” was a problem. In fact, the creation of the category in the late eighteenth century already signified an ideological crisis. So what's new about the twentieth-century moment Mark Greif names as The Age of the Crisis of Man? Above all, the profound sense of an ending—of History, Progress, Society, and even of the “objective correlative” of those Enlightenment categories, the Novel itself.

    Long before Feminism, or Theory, or the Great Recession, the category of “Man” was a problem. In fact, the creation of the category in the late eighteenth century already signified an ideological crisis, because to assert the “Rights of Man” as such was to justify rebellion against all existing forms of rule, including slavery. Every generation since that age of revolution has known its own time as yet another age of the crisis of man, for the word itself is both infinitely plural and narrowly singular, and the idea it conjures is at once universal and particular.

    So what could be new or