REVIEWS

...Likewise, having so elegantly "explained" Freud as having chosen a dirty Jewish science instead of nobleness, we are waiting for Mr...

...Nor are the accumulated vices to be lightly condemned, since their weight also falls on the conservative side...

...That Jews are what antiSemites say they are: money-grubbing, ostentatious, and clannish...

...belong to churches, trade unions, bowling leagues, parent-teacher associations, and informal work groups...

...Each knows the other side is doing the best he or she can...

...To be, like Freud, a thoroughgoing revolutionary and a thoroughgoing bourgeois was by no means a rarity...

...A student can readily earn a doctorate without reading a line of The Theory of Business Enterprise...

...Peter Gay here makes two points: Jews were neither better nor worse, neither smarter nor stupider than Germans (his call for a research project on stupid Jews is to be warmly supported...

...They rejected this portrait of working-class life...

...A few years before his death in 1929, he rejected nomination for president of the American Economic Association on the ground that the recognition came insultingly late...

...Here is a vintage passage from The Theory of Business Enterprise on the armed services: With the complement of archaic virtues that invests these adepts there is also associated a fair complement of those more elemental vices that are growing obsolete in the peaceable civilized communities...

...and especially Jewish rebels...

...Such comments may seem harsh...

...Gay's charge that Jews could not become university professors is not supported by his own statistics: Jews, who constituted 1 percent of the population, occupied 3 percent of all university chairs...

...Kids cocking snooks at civilization, they are all trying to "break the shields of decorum," they are waging a Kulturkampf against civility: "The civil surface of the bargerliche Gesellschaft bugs and infuriates each generation of shtetl Jewry emancipated into the West...

...Who of us at some solemn faculty or corporate conclave has not yearned to cry Fraud, or Stuffed Shirt...

...The early years of marriage, for the people she writes about, are not filled with the joys of emotional and sexual discovery...

...True, one Privatdozent out of eight was a Jew waiting for an appointment...

...Hoffman, so that the various chapters appear to have been written as one book...

...Veblen will endure, I suspect, because he appeals to the deep vein of subversion buried in the souls of all but the most solemn...

...Whereas Cuddihy states flatly at the end of his book: "Our third conclusion is: the modernization process is `objectively anti-Semitic,'" Gay agrees with all others who have studied the question that "anti-Semitism was, in short, an irrational protest against the modern world...

...Diggins's uncertainty as a biographer is exemplified by a paragraph in which he both terms Veblen a philanderer and concedes that he was the passive party in the many affairs with women that scandalized contemporaries in colleges where smoking was ground for expulsion and professors of mathematics opened classes with prayer...

...But in the Wilhelminian class structure this disreputable expression of social malaise could hardly be taken seriously...

...But then all modernism was "problematic," and Jewish intellectuals were floating in a general movement that only "professional anti-Semites" could identify as "Jewish...

...Cuddihy is not a Jew, but he shares with many eminent Jews the monotheistic vice of system-thinking: of extrapolating a comparatively minor discovery (such as infant sexuality, the special theory of relativity, or the marketing behavior of individuals in bourgeois society) into an all-encompassing world view...

...He has been answered indirectly but effectively by Peter Gay in a polemic with Ernst Nolte, a German metahistorian who has written about "fascism as a world phenomenon" (Der Faschismus in seiner Epoche...

...imperialists and pacifists...

...For the vast majority of economists immersed in unhistorical mechanistic analysis of the rules of equilibrium in competitive markets, Veblen's unique blend of anthropology, sociology, instinct psychology, social criticism, and polysyllabic irony seemed less infuriating than simply irrelevant...

...it focuses only on one dimension of its subjects' lives...

...PETER GAY has written extensively on the Enlightenment, and, as these essays show, he is still its disciple...

...His book on Weimar Culture has the subtitle The Outsider as Insider...

...The man, for one thing, was so delightfully nasty...

...L illan Rubin's World of Pain is a moving study of working-class families, written from socialist and feminist perspectives...

...11.95...

...Nevertheless, to avoid attacking their capitalistic mishpocheh in public, Marx and Trotsky attacked all capitalists...

...Most would not give up their jobs if they did not need to work...

...Komarovsky, Sennett and Cobb, and many other scholars who have studied working-class people end up strongly impressed with their "injuries," their lack of individuation, of self-confidence, of expressiveness, of ambition...

...Moreover, they are not isolated...

...It appears at once that Professor Gay's analysis of Wilhelminian culture is both more subtle and more down to earth than Cuddihy's...

...vainly do they try to hide under the umbrella of universal reason...

...In his On Native Grounds, the young Alfred Kazin in 1942 included an admiring portrait of Veblen...

...Professor Gay shows that literary rebels often were "bourgeois" in their private lives and, on the other hand, that conservatives often were innovators...

...428 Trapped in economic circumstances beyond their control, Rubin's subjects survive stoically...

...Gay, by contrast, is pained when he finds an antiSemitic letter by Theodor Fontane, one of Germany's finest novelists who had publicly preached assimilation and had as many Jewish as gentile friends...

...But these less handsome concomitants of the service should scarcely be made a point of reproach to those brave men whose devotion to the flag and the business interests has led them by the paths of disease and depravity...

...Universalism has one additional advantage: it affords the Jews a "code language" in which they may call "our crowd" to order without giving themselves away to the gentiles...

...Cuddihy quotes Gandhi and Kemal Pasha as well as African leaders and U.S...

...inevitably he gave offense...

...In the nature of the case they are inseparable from the service...

...Although some economists still label themselves institutionalists and the Association for Evolutionary Economics has for more than a decade published The Journal of Economic Issues, faintly Veblenian in tone, Veblen occupies no place in graduate-school curricula...

...In this case he has taken an old complaint of the anti-Semites—that Jews are always forward— and expanded it into a theory of culture...

...in short, they are human beings...

...Peter Gay frankly admits that only the unity of his own thoughts justifies the chutzpah of throwing Sigmund Freud and Johannes Brahms together in one volume...

...NOW JOHN DIGGINS has written a useful but seriously flawed assessment of Veblen's life and work...

...But culture—the subject of Rubin's book—is a collective response to material conditions...

...But the very forwardness of his style, his ability to "put the whole dimension of modernization in a formula" (a phrase to delight Ed Newman) makes fascinating reading...

...Of course, material deprivation and insecurity do inflict heavy costs...

...Gay says, is not their misconception but the fact that it did turn out to be a misconception...

...promoters of Expressionism, and disciples of Stefan George...

...it even made them angry...

...In sympathetic prose, Rubin conveys the frustration and anxiety that pervade the lives of the 100 men and women from Northern California whom she interviewed...

...Barrington Moore cites Veblen in the course of his continued meditation upon the origins of injustice...

...On the other hand, rummaging through old concert reviews, Gay shows that a "conservative" composer such as Brahms was so modern in his time that he was not understood, and he finds a strain of modernity even in Eduard Hanslick, the ill-starred critic who paid for his derogation of Wagner's music by being immortalized as Beckmesser...

...Come on . . . In his psycho-sociological lingo, Cuddihy writes: Marxism and other ideologies do appeal . . . to subcultures . . . undergoing the excruciation of delayed modernization . . . Progressivism for Midwestern "Bible Belt" Protestantism, Coughlinism and McCarthyism for Irish Catholics, and StalinismMarxism-Trotskyism for Eastern European Jews, all perform the same latent function: They appeal to the premodern Gemeinschafts-type past of these subcultures...

...Gay answers: "By likening the two events Nolte . . . either employs Auschwitz and Vietnam as metaphors for modern wickedness, or they stand in his mind as real events...

...it includes the civilizing process of "modernization" as well as the literary "modernism" that is both its ideological proclamation and the protest against it...

...For all his name seems to tell, Mr...

...The Jewish passion for the universal is unmasked as a clever protective mimicry: if there is no French, German, Negro, or Jewish mathematics, then there is no need to confess one's Jewishness...

...426 Second, he warns that Jews were found on both sides of all issues of modernity: Not all modernists were Jews nor all Jews modernists, and many Jews who were modernists were so not because they were Jews...

...for them, the sexual revolution merely means they must carry an added burden...

...272 pp...

...As a humanitarian and a rationalist, he is happy to find that "the old, controversial love affair between Jews and Germans [should it not rather read: Germany?] had not been wholly one-sided and pathetic...

...Thou shalt not reveal in-group secrets to the goyim," reads the "Eleventh Commandment...

...His most gifted student, Arthur F. Burns, turned into a Republican functionary and apologist for the status quo...

...working back from his hindsight, Mr...

...q 431...

...I do not mean to reintroduce proletarian chauvinism...

...if not, why would one strive to abolish them...

...He will discard the most brilliant apercu if its content is at odds with stubborn facts...

...Aside from John Kenneth Galbraith and a few other dissident souls, few living economists of note echo Veblen's concern with aspects of human behavior, less superficial than the latest data from the Department of Commerce and the Bureau of Labor Statistics...

...Since this cannot be done without considerable acrobatics, he has to be brilliant, provocative, challenging, controversial, and whatever those blurb words are, whereas in reality he is merely skimpy, swaggering, and superficial...

...He regrets that the path Moses Mendelssohn and his gentile friend Gotthold Ephraim Lessing had opened was blocked by nationalism a hundred years later—a development that Cuddihy registers, if not with jubilant rejoicing then with the deep satisfaction of being right about the incompatibility of Jewish and gentile culture...

...The service commonly leaves the veterans physical, intellectual, and moral invalids...

...But there is a danger here...

...being archaic and authenticated, their cultural bearing is, on the whole, salutary...

...Chapters of Professor Gay's book were published long before Cuddihy appeared in print, but every word seems to have been written to refute Cuddihy...

...Let them be conventional and assimilatory, let them try to catch up with "modernism"—they invariably fail, for their pathetic efforts only reveal their lack of authenticity...

...Brilliant...

...Sympathetic as Rubin is with her subjects' plight, she seems blind to the positive side of their lives...

...instead, the husband's frequent joblessness and the wife's hasty withdrawal from the labor force before childbirth bring on anxieties that the marriage partners often transform into resentment of each other...

...Witty indeed, but can an apercu be flattened out into a book...

...But whether they were in the mainstream or in opposition, Jews were sharing the rewards and the anxieties of the Empire, and "they had good reason to feel themselves, or to aspire to feel themselves, to be Jewish Germans...

...q 429 THE BARD OF SAVAGERY: THORSTEIN VEBLEN AND MODERN SOCIAL THEORY, by John P. Diggins...

...And what is this secret...

...The point is as irrelevant as Diggins's labored effort to connect Veblen's academic vicissitudes at Chicago, Stanford, and Missouri with his corrosive analysis of the conduct of universities by businessmen...

...Having looked through Marx's deception, we need to explain only one more small thing: what hidden secret caused the conversion to socialism of Norman Thomas, Fidel Castro, Elizabeth Gurney Flynn, Jean Jaures, Vladimir Lenin, Wilhelm Liebknecht...

...I only realized how serious Rubin's bias is when I discussed this book with my students, most of them black women who work for the City of New York in clerical capacities...

...The salon, the masonic lodge, the liberal state did the same for the educated Jew...

...Even Einstein's well-known indifference to formal attire is recruited to show Jews in the role of existential nonconformists, and in all seriousness this informality is asserted to be "not unrelated" to the unconventionality of his scientific concepts—as though the anti-Semitic Professor Roethe at Berlin University had not been known for his dirty vests...

...THE ORDEAL OF CIVILITY: FREUD, MARX, LEVI-STRAUSS, AND THE JEWISH STRUGGLE WITH MODERNITY, by John Murray Cuddihy...

...14.95...

...He would have been well-advised to excise speculation about the connections between Veblen's personality and his opinions...

...425 So far we are still in the wake of Weber's, Tawney's, or Talcott Parson's interpretation of modernity...

...257 pp...

...On the whole, Diggins's account of Veblen's leading notions is both judicious and accurate...

...Here, Rubin notes that the extended family, the married couple's parents, brothers, sisters, and cousins, have an important place in their emotional world...

...But Rubin gives her findings a twist...

...They try not to complain or to protest their fate...

...His chapter on women similarly distinguishes Veblen's anthropological interpretation of the "barbarian" status of the female sex from John Stuart Mill's explanation of The Subjection of Women as one more prime example of oppression, and Engels's assimilation of sexual relations to his categories of property and ownership...

...AS THE READER may have gathered, Worlds of Pain is a biased book...

...An important example of Rubin's bias comes in the last chapter, on the world of "leisure...

...I have waited to discuss his provocative book until I could review it together with its antidote...

...Cuddihy has no problems showing us Karl Marx telling the gentiles: But is not everybody interested in money?—and Sigmund Freud: But is not everybody interested in sex?—and Levi-Strauss: But is not everybody using tribal archetypes...

...Cuddihy's chutzpah is more subtle (provided that noun can take that adjective): he forces a unity of thought on a group of individuals as diverse as Freud and Abbie (who was he...

...Second, the anxiety that accompanied modernization was reflected in some regressive traits of modernism (in Weimar Culture Gay called it "the craving for wholeness") and also, among the most vulgar, in anti-Semitism...

...The author supports her findings with none of the moving quotations that are scattered through the more negative chapters...

...What good would it do...

...blacks, though no Irish— but Jews...

...New York: Basic Books...

...i.e., those who had been the opposition under the Empire were culturally at the center of the Republic...

...They engage in oral intercourse and the women frequently have orgasms...

...Most of the women interviewed do not enjoy sexual activity much more than their mothers did...

...Quod licet Jovi . . . when James Baldwin says such things one understands that a man who lives without a protective skin has reached for a strong metaphor...

...Nolte tries, according to Gay, "while acknowledging the Nazi crimes to humanize them" by a method Gay calls "comparative trivialization...

...Wagnerians and anti-Wagnerians...

...His most gifted student, Wesley Clair Mitchell, drifted away from social speculation into heavily statistical analysis of businesscycle phenomena...

...Matters are not helped by an inordinate number of typographical lapses and occasional inaccuracies like the use of "strata" as a singular noun...

...Marriage partners learn not to ask too much of each other...

...The Jews, moreover, were distributed over the entire spectrum of political and cultural opinions: the Conservative Stahl, the Liberal Lasker, the Social Democrat Bernstein...

...Without making such distinctions, one will never catch the human ambiguities in history...

...From this position Gay can strike out at both those Germans who try to forget and be forgiven, and at those non-Germans who try to perpetuate the race war...

...Cuddihy denies, is very much alive in Mr...

...New York: Basic Books...

...instead, they view that as another demand imposed on them...

...Even more clearly than Komarovsky's BlueCollar Marriage, World of Pain demonstrates how economic hardship and insecurity lie at the heart of much of working-class life...

...Among fellow economists, Veblen's reputation over the years has ranged from low to ambiguous...

...The "Eleventh Commandment" notwithstanding, Cuddihy is able to quote many Jewish "confessions" of guilt and shame...

...He does not solve the riddle of German history but remains in the stance of ambiguity...

...The two works have a superficial resemblance in that they are loose assemblages of essays circling around the two themes, "modernity" and "Jews...

...q WORLD OF PAIN: LIFE IN THE WORKING CLASS FAMILY, by Lillian B. Rubin...

...Nearly 60 percent of the wives in Rubin's sample are working, and enjoy doing so, despite the fact that they continue to bear the burden of housekeeping...

...The defects are partly stylistic...

...Then the Jewish intellectual rose to the "money Jew's" defense: he built the fence of "objective science" that enclosed a neutral space where people from various cultures could meet...

...If they do not do so, who does she think will do it for them...

...Jewish emancipation, it says, brought the culturally backward, tribalist Jew up against a culture that had become genteel...

...Sociologically, the quest of the Jewish intellectual for value-neutral social sciences and the quest of the Jewish bourgeois for valueneutral social places are one event...

...He sees a broad, many-faceted movement toward modernism, which obviously was concentrated in the urban middle class, and especially among the professions in which there existed a strong contingent of Jews...

...but there the similarity ends...

...Working people do not only suffer...

...their inability to become acculturated becomes alienation...

...In his interpretation of modern Germany, Ralf Dahrendorf has drawn substantially upon the Veblen of Imperial Germany and the Industrial Revolution...

...why burden your spouse with your own dissatisfaction...

...they can also be, and sometimes are, content, passionate, or joyful...

...If Rubin does not see her subjects as strong people, how does she expect them to struggle to improve their conditions...

...In this new book Gay considers Jewish intellectuals and other outsiders at the turn of the century...

...the title under which the book has been published in English, Three Faces of Fascism, is misleading), and more recently on Germany and the Cold War...

...Or did Charles Darwin, too, "choose Yiddishkeit over nobleness...

...But modernism itself is a complex phenomenon...

...At the hands of sociologists and literary types, Veblen has fared considerably better...

...Some, like Wagner's conductor Hermann Levi, submitted to humiliating conditions in order to be allowed to participate in the triumph of German culture...

...Obviously, the Judeo-Christian tradition, whose existence Mr...

...when an IrishAmerican professor at the City University of New York dismisses a rejoinder to that hyperbole as a mere "status struggle between two subcultures," one wonders about both his qualification to write about minority affairs and his intention in selecting his subject...

...others, like Simmel, standing aloof in dignity, nevertheless contributed their share to the development of that culture...

...Young middle-class students would undoubtedly gain much from reading it...

...As the couples mature, they find that their earnings never quite equal their dreams, their jobs do not become careers, and the tightness of the family budget limits their ability to find enjoyment in leisure-time activities...

...Of course, we who know the outcome are apt to smile incredulously...

...It might be worth pondering the differential effectiveness of the autoworkers' union and the college professors...

...That reaction seems healthy to me...

...but that proves rising expectations as much as discrimination...

...That some populations indeed resist acculturation need hardly be documented...

...John Dos Passos's trilogy USA: The Big Money was inspired by Veblen...

...From the publication of The Theory of the Leisure Class in 1899, Veblen has teased literary imaginations...

...Sex is another area of change...

...The whole thrust of "modernity" is the separation of home from job, of politics from economics, of culture from social system, of fact from value, of theory from practice...

...This distinction inspired at least two social critics of major stature, Lewis Mumford and Clarence Ayres...

...It has at least touched the work of David Riesman, Daniel Bell, and John Kenneth Galbraith...

...Rubin's is a common error...

...these people did not count...

...Nevertheless, used with discretion, The Bard of Savagery has its points...

...From time to time, Veblen is rediscovered, occasionally by economists as a business-cycle theorist, anticipator of Galbraith's technostructure, or critic of both classical and Marxist economics, rather more frequently by noneconomists as an early student of fascism, moral critic of business enterprise, feminist unjustly neglected by the women's movement, biting critic of universities, and prophet of a higher quality of human experience than capitalism is capable of offering...

...Indeed, raising one's hopes too highly only makes for disappointment...

...12.95 cloth, $4.95 paper...

...But they will do so under the guise of "objective" science...

...Isolated by their concern for each other, husband and wife nurse their injuries...

...Having learned from newspapers, magazines and movies that women are supposed to enjoy sex, these married couples behave quite differently from those Kinsey studied...

...Working-class culture, as William Kornblum documented in Blue Collar Community, provides its bearers with means to cope with and sometimes overcomes their burdens...

...They live in families, often quite extended ones...

...I made them with reservations, for I believe, Worlds of Pain is, in many respects, a fine book...

...PETER GAY is also concerned with the psychology of the outsider...

...For in Wilhelminian Germany Jews were among the pioneers and supporters of modernity...

...What needs to be explained, Mr...

...If limited opportunities mean ambition, and individuality must be attenuated, at least there is mutual consideration and sharing...

...Cuddihy seems unable to see the difference between Auschwitz (where people were murdered summarily without even a charge of guilt) and the trial of Angela Davis (who after all was acquitted...

...For every anarchist Herbert Marcuse, Jews have produced five conservative Nathan Glazers, for Einstein a hundred Rabbi Korffs...

...looking at their situation from their own vantage point, they had to interpret its few inconveniences as either remnants of a passing age or as "infantile disorders" of the new age.* They were looking back on a hundred years of emancipation and forward to full integration...

...she wishing they could share their feelings more, he wondering why he can not satisfy her, and his own, standards of manliness...

...No matter how sympathetic the scholars may be, they seem invariably to find their subjects inferior to upper-middle-class people...

...William Dean Howells's glowing review in the Atlantic Monthly guaranteed a wide public for Veblen's mordant dissection of the social mores of the Guilded Age, even though Howells failed to identify the deeply subversive nature of Veblen's demonstration of the impermanence of business society...

...The expressionist Carl Sternheim is quoted: "The trouble with German Jews is not that they are Jews but that they are Germans...

...Even in 430 hands more adroit than Diggins's, psychohistory is a tricky genre...

...Such debaucheries, extravagances of cruelty, and general superfluity of naughtiness as are nameless or impossible in civil life are blameless matters of course in the service...

...Yet, once read, Veblen is unlikely to be permanently forgotten...

...For all his idol-smashing discoveries and for all his struggle against bourgeois hypocrisy, Freud was, after all, deeply indebted to middleclass values...

...their social malaise then becomes a medical symptom common to all mankind...

...Possibly the book's most substantial contribution is the opportunity it offers to readers to sort out for themselves the still relevant aspects of Veblen...

...he makes short shrift of pretty myths like "the unpolitical German" or of scapegoats like the authoritarian father, of onedimensional images like the archetypal Jew or the archetypal German anti-Semite...

...Diggins carefully, alas even laboriously, compares Veblen as analyst of capitalism with Marx and Weber and in so doing identifies some of the limitations of all three modes of analysis...

...When middle-class people plead for the working-class, no matter how eloquently, there lurks a danger that sympathy will turn to contempt, that advocacy will turn to manipulation...

...As an example, Nolte calls the war in Vietnam "nothing less than a crueller version of Auschwitz" (Germany and the Cold War...

...But that is all...

...But now comes Cuddihy's interesting turn: hitherto we had believed that Jews may become rebels (or literary avant-gardists) when they find that progress of gentile society along the path of Enlightenment has not been far or fast enough...

...Although it is a pity that Diggins is too humorless a chap to derive entertainment from his subject, his book is a sufficient reason to look again into Veblen...

...Gay also finds "the problematic" (in Goethe's sense: lacking ability to cope with reality) in many of the Jews who contributed to the development of German culture...

...The shoddiness of his scholarship stands in stark contrast to the weighty and deliberate, though graceful, prose of Peter Gay...

...But with Cuddihy on the lookout, the Jews cannot win...

...Who have all too often been accused of running ahead of every fashion, of being pioneers of capitalism...

...No doubt, as David Riesman speculated in his psychiatriC reinterpretation of Veblen, the master's friends were he and they alive would urge him to consult a psychoanalyst...

...During his professional career, neoclassical economics of the variety exemplified by Veblen's Carleton College teacher John Bates Clark dominated departments of economics in reputable institutions of higher learning...

...He considers the Nazi episode as one of the possible alternatives to which *Jews could not become officers in the Kaiser's army— but they also were the most irreverent (Cuddihy might say uncivil) critics of that feudal institution...

...Enlivening Worlds of Pain is the author's awareness of how family life has changed during the postwar era...

...Cuddihy's psychoanalysis of sex researchers Havelock Ellis, Alfred Kinsey, Aldous Huxley...

...For the rest Veblen's anthropology, his inordinate affection for instinct psychology, his confidence in engineers as revolutionaries, and his uncritical Darwinism are either outmoded or misplaced...

...Ingenious...

...The women do not appreciate their husbands' concern that they achieve orgasm...

...Moreover, Diggins is an inaccurate guide to Marx, Keynes, and the marginalists...

...New York: Seabury Press...

...By all criteria, they were as well entitled to call themselves German as any Catholic or Christian Scientist...

...Though their employment is mostly part-time, pays poorly, and requires little skill or creativity, the women enjoy the opportunity that working gives them to socialize with other adults, to get out of the house, to enhance their sense of power vis-a-vis their husbands...

...427 German history could turn, not as the foreordained awakening after an idle daydream...

...their kvetches become hysterical complaints, tsuris become basic anxiety, social shame becomes moral guilt...

...Diggins reminds me that Veblen's distinction between pecuniary employment and biologically serviceable activities, which reflect the parental bent, and the instincts of workmanship and idle curiosity remains as powerful a mode of organizing economic experience as the market models preferred in standard economics...

...changed behavior does not always bring changed feeling...

...If the first, he demonstrates the damage metaphors can do...

...Such sharing not only makes it possible to endure severe hardships, it also sometimes makes it possible for working people to gain power collectively...

...If the second . . . there is a world of difference between a calculated policy of mass extermination and the ill-conceived, persistent, often callous prosecution of a foreign war...

...Wrong, says Professor Cuddihy: Jews who are conscious of their tribal heritage, and do not quite succeed in acquiring the "civility" of modern society, will talk back and become rebels...

...Robert Merton has credited Veblen with anticipation of his own crucial distinction between latent and manifest functions...

...Veblen would have appreciated the irony of this monograph by a scholar with a bad ear for language and the linguistic devices in which Veblen gloried...

...268 pp...

...Professor Cuddihy thinks that the tradition of a Judeo-Christian religion is a pious but viciously conceived myth and that the "lachrymose history" of Jewish persecution in the Middle Ages has been invented to conceal the fact that the Jews were not ready to be emancipated and join Western civilization...

...He confesses that "obsessed for years with hatred and thoughts of revenge . . . [I wrested] from my experience a more discriminating attitude, not forgiving and forgetting but of recognizing that there were, and are, several Germanys...

...Gay is not ashamed of it, but he voices the caveat that "modernism" is a very ambiguous term, pointing to both rational and irrationalist explorations, celebrating both intelligence and expression...

...As though the progress of physics through 500 years had not been a chain of unconventional views...

...it would make them experience another America, one that is far too removed from their eye and consciousness...