Synopses & Reviews
Rare is the person who has never known the feelings of apathy, sorrow, and uselessness that characterize the affliction known as melancholy. In this book, one of Europe's leading intellectuals shows that melancholy is not only a psychological condition that affects individuals but also a social and cultural phenomenon that can be of considerable help in understanding the modern middle class. His larger topic is, in fact, modernity in general.
Lepenies focuses not on what melancholy is but on what it means when people claim to be melancholy. His aim is to examine the origin and spread of the phenomenon with relation to particular social milieux, and thus he looks at a variety of historical manifestations: the fictional utopian societies of the Renaissance, the ennui of the French aristocracy in the seventeenth century, the cult of inwardness and escapism among the middle class in eighteenth-century Germany. In each case he shows that the human condition is shaped by historical and societal forces--that apathy, boredom, utopian idealism, melancholy, inaction, and excessive reflection are the correlates of class-wide powerlessness and the failure of purposeful efforts.
Lepenies makes inventive use of an extraordinary range of sociological, philosophical, and literary sources, from Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholyto the ideas of contemporary theorists such as Robert K. Merton and Arnold Gehlen. His study gains added richness from its examination of writers whose works express the melancholy of entire social classes--writers such as La Rochefoucauld, Goethe, and Proust. In his masterly analysis of these diverse ideas and texts, he illuminates the plight of people who have been cast aside by historical change and shows us the ways in which they have coped with their distress. Historians, sociologists, psychologists, students of modern literature, indeed anyone interested in the problems of modernity will want to read this daring and original book.
Description
Includes bibliographical references (p. [199]-243) and index.
About the Author
Judith Shklarwas, before her death, John Cowles Professor of Government, <>Harvard University, and a MacArthur Fellow.
Table of Contents
Foreword by Judith N. Shklar
1. Introduction
2. Order and Melancholy
Melancholy as Disorder in the Work of R. K. Merton
Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy
Utopia as a Projected Order
3. Surplus Order, Boredom, and the Emergence of Resignative Behavior
On the Use of Literary Sources
Melancholy and Rulership
The Mechanism of Kingship
The Court and the Salon
Loss of World and Proximity of World
4. On the Origins of Bourgeois Melancholy:Germany in the Eighteenth Century
Bourgeois Escapism
Retreat from the World
Society and Solitude
On the Court Jester
Flight into Nature and Introversion
Boredom and Melancholy in Philosophy
5. Spaces of Boredom and Melancholy
The Intandeacute;rieur
Maine de Biran: Homme Intandeacute;rieurand Homme Extandeacute;rieur
Marcel Proust
Paul Valandeacute;ry and Monsieur Teste
The Transformation of Boredom: "Camp"
The Problem of Space in Psychiatric and Psychopathological Discussions of Melancholy
6. Arbitrariness and Bindingness
7. Reflection and the Inhibition of Action
Inhibition of Action as the Cause of Utopian Thought
La Rochefoucauld: Man of Action and Man of Thought
Melancholic Renunciation of Power: The German Bourgeoisie
The Transformation of the Concept of Labor
Reflection and the Inhibition of Action in Psychology, Psychiatry, and Psychopathology
8. Melancholy and the Search for Legitimation
Renaissance Melancholy: Ficino or Tradition as the Pressure to be Binding
Melancholy and Mysticism: Sabbatai Zevi, Nathan of Ghaza, and the Reduction of Cognitive Dissonance
Anthropological Reduction
9. The Climate of Melancholy and Anthropological
Reduction: The Philosophy of Arnold Gehlen
Notes
Index